Australian literature

Canberra Readers’ Festival 2012: For the love of reading

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Floriade 2011

Small corner of Floriade 2011: tulips among the gum trees

You could all be looking at tulips …

said Kate Grenville, the first speaker at today’s Canberra Readers’ Festival. She was referring to Floriade, Canberra‘s popular, crowd-drawing annual spring festival, and the fact that today was a glorious day. Just right, in fact, for tiptoeing through the festival’s stunning tulip beds. But instead, we keen readers were in the Playhouse listening to our favourite authors talk about writing and  reading. After all, like Scarlett O’Hara, we all knew that “tomorrow is another day”!

Session 1: Kate Grenville: “Family Stories”

After a generous welcome to country by the local representative of Australia’s original story-tellers, Ngunnawal elder Aunty Agnes Shea, Kate Grenville took the floor – and presented a passionate argument for the importance of capturing and keeping stories. She blessed her mother for insisting on repeating the family stories that eventually inspired her to research and write The secret river – and thence The lieutenant and Sarah Thornhill. She read excerpts from stories written by the 97-year-old John Mackie, and argued that “you can’t make up” the experiences of people from the past, that only by reading what they felt and experienced can you manage to turn them into convincing fiction. Sure, you can do research, she said, but you don’t know what to research if you don’t have the stories to guide you. She wouldn’t have known, for example, to research “a scuffler” if Mackie hadn’t written about one.

Grenville concluded by quoting Australian poet Dame Mary Gilmore who argued for preserving the things of the past. Gilmore wanted to write about people, not events; she wanted to show “not the miles walked but the feet that walked them”.

Session 2a: Anita Heiss: Writing Aboriginal Australia into the literary landscape

What an inspiring and entertaining speaker. Heiss commenced by describing what inspired her to write: she was on an international plane flight and overhead a passenger, whose neighbour had said he’d met “a fourth generation Australian”, responding with “you can’t get any more Australian than that!” This interchange showed Heiss that Aboriginal Australians did not appear on “Australia’s identity radar” and she set about correcting that gap in our awareness. Being tertiary educated, Heiss says she’s in the top 1% of the bottom 2.5% of Australians and consequently believes she has a responsibility to “voice our truths”, to show the commonalities as well as the differences in the lives of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. She clearly takes this responsibility seriously and has published a significant body of work, encompassing children’s and adult fiction and non-fiction.

Heiss was very clear about wanting to provide a resource for people to understand indigenous experience and identity in Australia. What’s good about fiction she said, is “you can create the world you want to live in”. Having not yet read Heiss, I bought one of her books!

Session 2b: Melina Marchetta: The role of travel in establishing setting

Marchetta’s talk was a more practical one about how she needs to visualise a place before she can describe it. I found this intriguing, particularly as she was talking about her Lumatere fantasy series. She needs to travel to see real places that she’ll describe in fantasy? You can tell I’m not a fantasy reader! It all made sense though when she showed photographs from her travels in France, Turkey, and so on, and read excerpts from her books to show how she used her knowledge of places like the rock villages in France to create her fantasy mediaeval world. She, a little sheepishly, read one excerpt which contained quite a bit of geological data, telling us that the general rule is that your reader should not see your research, but in this case she felt it was justified.

Session 3a: Hazel Edwards: Non-boring anecdultery

Self-described author-preneur (and hippopotamus lady*), Hazel Edwards took us on a lively ride through her writing life, which spans multiple forms and approaches from children’s picture-books to adult non-fiction, from writing on her own to collaborative writing. She loosely structured her talk using the letters from ANECDULTERY – as in A for Anecdote, E for e-Books, N for Non-boring, L for Literary Terrorism, and so on, ending in Y for Why! Her talk was full of the wisdom of an experienced writer, delivered with warmth, confidence and humour. She had some great turns of phrase. For example, she told us that her initial reaction to one research subject was that he’d suffered “a charisma bypass” but she grew to love him. She defined history as “high gossip not boring facts”. Edwards believes research is critical, stating that if “you don’t get something right, your reader is no longer going to trust you”.

She said her most significant book is the coming-of-age novel, f2m: the boy within, about a young woman who transitions to being a man. She co-wrote this, using email and skype, with the New Zealand-based ftm writer, Ryan Kennedy.

Session 3b: Kel Robertson: In defence of (trying desperately to be) popular fiction

Kel Robertson? Who is Kel Robertson? Well, I’m embarrassed to say that he’s a local writer who shared the 2009 Ned Kelly Award for Best (Crime) Fiction with Peter Corris for his latest novel, Smoke and mirrors. This same book also won the ACT section of the National Year of Reading competition which is why, he said, it was he addressing us and not one of Canberra’s other writers.

Robertson was in turn entertaining, realistic and provocative about the role of so-called popular, or accessible, fiction – what he calls “entertainments” – in the reading firmament. He told us that it is the popular writers – the Matthew Reillys, for example – who make it possible for publishers to take a risk on new writers, who pay the bills of literary fiction. Having made this point, he then went on to argue that a good reading diet needs its fast food as well as muesli in order to “feed the intellect and satisfy the hunger for diversion”. Many readers, he believes, move to and fro between simple and complex reads. He said that when he is feeling down he grabs “something that is accessible to nourish my psyche” and that he’d like to see a correlation done between “light recreational reading” and “the happiness index”. I’d like to think he has a point … wouldn’t it be good if books could take the place of prozac! I bought Smoke and mirrors for Mr Gums and may, you never know, dip into it myself.

Section 4: Frank Moorhouse: Memoir Writing and Ethics

Frank Moorhouse** is one of the grand old men of Australian literature, best known for his Edith trilogy. The third in this series, Cold light, recently won the Queensland Literary Award for fiction, which he described as “now probably the most noble prize to win because it’s the citizens’ prize, not the Premier’s prize”. Moorhouse didn’t fully speak to the announced topic of his talk – Memoir Writing – but ranged over a variety of issues to do with contemporary reading and culture. He argued that diaries, books on how to garden, weave and so on, make important contributions to culture, to documenting how we live and to shaping an Australian aesthetic. Some of these books, he argued, are written with flair and can survive into the future just as have, say, Samuel Pepys‘ Diary and Izaak Walton’s The compleat angler (1653). He spoke of the relatively recent rise of literary (readers’) festivals and author events, suggesting that they demonstrate a recognition of the importance of the arts in contemporary Australia. He teased out some of the implications of the e-revolution in books, saying, perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek, that e-books make lending books a little harder and “that’s good for writers”.

Moorhouse is not, I’m pleased to say, a grumpy old man. He sees the internet as a positive thing which encourages writing.  He is a judge of a major short story competition in Australia and said that the number of entries is increasing as is the quality of the writing. Wow! He concluded with Samuel Johnson’s statement that writing and reading help us endure life***.

While I’d like to think they help us do more than “endure”, this seemed a good note on which the Festival could end, and end at this point it did. I do hope this Festival – beautifully emceed by Louise Maher – becomes a permanent part of Canberra’s cultural calendar.

* Edwards wrote the hugely popular children’s picture book, There’s a hippopotamus on our roof eating cake.
** Bryce Courtenay was the originally listed author for Session 4 but clearly withdrew after his announcement that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
*** The actual quote is, I think, “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” That sounds more like it.

Dorothea Mackellar, Elena Kats-Chernin and the Vienna Boys Choir

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I’m guessing most of you have heard of the Vienna Boys Choir, but you may not, particularly if you’re not Australian, have heard of Dorothea Mackellar and Elena Kats-Chernin. Mackellar (1885-1968)  was an Australian writer, best known for her poem “My country”. Kats-Chernin (b. 1957) is an Australian composer who was born in Tashkent (in what was then the Soviet Union). She has been in Australia since 1975.

You’ve probably guessed now what this post is about. It’s about Elena Kats-Chernin setting Dorothea McKellar’s “My country” to music for the Vienna Boys Choir to perform (on their 2012 tour to Australia). According to the program, producer Andrew McKinnon, who commissioned the piece, wanted a poem that would both resonate with Australian audiences and “promote the beauty of Australia to international audiences on the choir’s future travels”.

And yet, as I sat down to the Choir’s concert on the weekend and looked at the 25 mostly European-born boys ranging in age from 9 to 14, I wondered what they could make of such a poem. For those of you who don’t know the poem, its most famous verse, the second, goes like this:

I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of drought and flooding rains
I love her far horizons
I love her jewel-sea
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me

The program answered my question. After Kats-Chernin had drafted her composition, she went to Austria to workshop it with the boys. What fun that must have been. Kats-Chernin says that while that poem with that choir might seem an odd combination, it also makes sense:

The piece is about a country that’s still really young, but at the same time has been around thousands of years. At the same time they [Vienna Boys Choir] are only young boys, but the tradition they are part of is really old*.

Dorothea Mackellar's My country

Final two verses of Dorothea Mackellar’s My country (Public Domain from the State Library of NSW, via Wikipedia)

And so Kats-Chernin workshopped her ideas with the boys. Here is an excerpt from one of the choristers, Anton (12 yo), as reported in the program:

She read us some of Dorothea Mackellar’s poem. She said Australia is beautiful, and very dangerous. Which key did we think meant danger? Felix suggested B minor, David thought of F sharp. Immediately Ms Kats-Chernin started playing the right chords.

She gave each of us a word to sing, on a sequence of notes, floods, famine, sunburnt country. We were all doing it at the same time, and it was sounding like a fabric of music. That was a total surprise to me, and I could feel myself smiling. It just happened. I think some of this is in the finished piece.

It was a beautiful piece – not schmaltzy or cliched as it so easily could have been. She broke up the words at times, repeated some, left others out (if I remember correctly), all of which gave the poem new power for those of us who know it well. I like Kats-Chernin. She’s able to express a modern sensibility in her music (different or unusual rhythms and harmonic combinations, using my layperson’s language) while retaining lovely melody as well. (Hmm … that statement may imply more about modern music than I really intend, but you know what I mean!). The piece is called “Land of Sweeping Plains” but its most powerful, memorable section focuses on the first line of the 4th and 5th verses, “Core of my heart, my country”. “Core of my heart” was apparently the poem’s first published title. I like that … from “Core of my heart” to “My country” to “Land of Sweeping Plains”. It’s clever – or sensible, at least, I think – to give the piece a more descriptive, less nationalistic/patriotic title, if it is going to become an internationally performed piece. And I hope it does become so.

Meanwhile, if you are interested, you might like to check out this You Tube about Kats-Chernin and the Choir.

* Historians date the choir from 1498!

Monday musings on Australian literature: Aussie Lit and Facebook

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In writing this week’s Monday Musings I will be venturing a little into my discomfort zone. It’s not that I don’t use Facebook because I do, having been a member since 2007, but that I’m not an expert in how to make the most of it. I figure though that this post might encourage some discussion and teach me a few things in the process. Let’s see …

Early in the life of Facebook, cultural organisations and groups saw that it was the place where people – particularly young ones – were congregating, and so they decided they needed a presence there. Most though, it seemed to me, had no idea what to do with that presence, and their pages languished somewhat. But, in the last year or so, things have changed dramatically. Part of the reason is that Facebook’s functionality has improved, particularly in the way pages now “push” information. Previously, I had to GO to an organisation’s page to see what was happening. There was no way I could remember every organisation on Facebook that I was interested in – and if I did remember, I didn’t have the time to GO to them just on the off-chance they had added something new. Now if I “like” an organisation, its communications appear in my feed. A big improvement – except of course the quantity of material being fed to me can be overwhelming (even with my pretty small list of “friends” and “likes”). I’m not sure what systems are out there to help me manage that … but I assume there are some. If you have any hints, please let me (us) know.

Facebook certainly isn’t my prime source of literary news and information, but I’ve noticed that I’m learning more from its feeds now, than I did even a few months ago.

That’s my intro … the rest of the post will simply list a (highly selected) few of my favourite pages that relate to Australian literature. (I’m not sure whether the Facebook links will work for you if you are not on Facebook, but I’m providing them anyhow).

  • 100 Years of Words is special to me because it relates to the production of an anthology of writing to celebrate the centenary of Canberra, Australia’s capital. The anthology, titled The invisible thread, will be published in 2013. I can’t wait to see it … but in the meantime I am enjoying the literary bits and pieces the team shares about literary things of interest to we capital residents!
  • Australian Women Writers was established in response to discussions over the last couple of years about gender bias in Australian publishing and book selling. I have mentioned the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 on my blog (and have a clickable badge to it in my sidebar). The AWW page aims to network authors, reviewers, bloggers and readers – and is very keen to look at all the genres women write and read in. It serves a broad church (within its gender-limited field).
  • Meanjin (which ran last year’s Aussie Tournament of Books) is a good example of a literary magazine Facebook page that keeps me in touch with their magazine, their blog and general literary news.
  • Text Publishing and Allen & Unwin are two publishers whose feeds I find useful, partly because they publish overseas authors as well as Aussie ones. I’m not totally nationalistic, you see!

In addition to the above are pages for writers centres (such as the NSW Writers Centre), literary festivals (such as the Melbourne Writers Festival), blogs (such as my friend Lisa’s ANZLitLovers), and so on. There are also author pages, but I’ve not generally found them to be particularly useful for general literary news. I guess that’s natural. They’re primarily about promoting their own books.

Finally, just to show that I’m not totally rah-rah about new technologies, much as I appreciate the benefits, I’ll close with a quote from a post on Meanjin’s blog. The writer James Douglas discusses Jaron Lanier‘s book, You are not a gadget. Here’s Douglas’ conclusion:

The message is simple: the tools available to us from digital technologies, especially the tools that afford us the opportunity to ‘publish’ ourselves—Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.—may offer us exciting and stimulating opportunities for communication, but they also change us as people. It is our own responsibility to pay attention to what these tools do to us, how they express our individuality, how they value or devalue our work. This, I think, is one way to make sense of DeLillo’s remarks that email encourages ‘a response that I may not be willing to execute.’ The immediacy of email, in DeLillo’s view, interpellates him as an individual marked by ‘availability’; accessible and responsive to contact. Web 2.0 open culture may necessitate open people, which is not always to our benefit.

There’s much to think about here on how we engage with social media. For me it’s not a case of not doing it, but of working out what I’d like to get from it and trying to keep it to that. Easier said than done, and I recognise that some impacts on me may be subliminal, but I plan to keep trying.

I’d love to know if you use Facebook and, if you do, what you like and don’t like about it. Do you primarily use it for communication with friends, or is it also a useful tool for news in your areas of interest?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australia’s pioneer novelists

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David Unaipon

David Unaipon (1924) (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

One of the reasons I started this Monday Musings series was to encourage me to read, think and/or learn about my country’s literature, but in doing so I mostly write about books and authors I know and have read. Occasionally though I explore authors and works that are not so familiar to me. Today’s post is one of these.

A few months ago I wrote posts on two books on Australian literature written by Colin Roderick in the late 1940s. As I researched these posts, I came across a reviewer who wondered how many Australians knew about “the first Australian-made novel”. The unidentified reviewer was writing in The West Australian in 1950. I suspect the same question could be asked now … and so today’s post will name some of our novelistic firsts (as best I’ve been able to identify them) in case there are others like me whose knowledge of our history is a little vague.

  • First Australian-made novel: Quintus Servinton, by convict (forger) Henry Savery (1791-1842). It was published in Hobart in 1830. The West Australian reviewer writes that “apart from being the first novel written, printed and published in Australia, [it] has several other noteworthy features. It was the first novel to give a participator’s impressions of life on a prisoner’s transport”. In fact it is a fictionalisation of Savery’s life.  (An etext is available from the University of Sydney’s SETIS project).
  • First Australian-born novelist: John Lang (1816-64), who was apparently born at Parramatta. He went to Cambridge in 1838 where he become a barrister, and returned to Sydney in 1841, before leaving again a few years later to live in India and England. According to The Oxford companion to Australian literature, “the enigma surrounding the life and personality of John Lang has not, even a century later and in spite of considerable literary research, been completely solved”. It is, however, believed he wrote the fiction work, Legends of Australia, which was anonymously published in 1842. The Oxford companion suggests that authorship of this “would entitle Lang to the distinction of being the first Australian-born novelist”. There is a biography of Lang by Victor Crittenden. Its title says a lot: John Lang: Australia’s larrikin writer: barrister, novelist, journalist and gentleman. I was interested to read that he was also a contributor to Charles Dickens’ periodical Household Words.
  • First Australian-born woman novelist to publish a novel in Australia: Louisa Atkinson (1834-1872), who was the subject of a previous Monday Musings. Her novel Gertrude, the emigrant girl: A tale of colonial life was published in 1857. (An etext is available from the University of Sydney’s SETIS project.) I should say that The Oxford companion (mentioned above) is a little less categorical about her place in Australia’s literary history, stating instead that she is “one of the earliest Australian novelists and the first native-born woman to fictionalise Australian domestic, pastoral and bush life”. Did, I wonder, another Australian-born woman fictionalise something else before Atkinson’s work?
  • First indigenous Australian writer to have a book published in Australia: David Unaipon (1872-1967), who was born at a mission in the Tailem Bend area of the Murray River. (His father was our first Aboriginal preacher.) Unaipon’s best-known work, Native Legends, was published in 1929. He wrote, apparently, in a classical style, much like Milton. I should say that Unaipon was not, technically, a novelist, but his pioneering role in Australian literature warrants his inclusion here, I think, particularly since the David Unaipon Award for Unpublished Indigenous Writers is often awarded to a fiction writer.

I wonder if there are Australian (or other) readers of this blog who have read any of these authors or their works? And if you’re not Australian, what do you know about your country’s pioneer novelists?

Toni Jordan, Nine days (Review)

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Jordan's Nine Days

Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Toni Jordan’s latest novel, Nine days, is somewhat of a departure from her first two novels which are more in the chicklit vein, albeit chicklit with a difference. The thing is, I don’t generally read chicklit, but I did enjoy Addition and Fall girl, so I was more than willing to read Jordan’s next offering. I was not disappointed.

Nine days was, according to the Author’s note, inspired by a photograph from the State Library of Victoria’s Argus collection. The photograph forms the cover of the book’s first edition: it depicts an unidentified soldier leaning out of a train window to kiss an also unidentified young woman. Jordan has woven around this photo a multi-generational story that spans six decades or so from the eve of world war 2 to the present. The title refers to the nine days upon which the book’s nine chapters are built – with an added complexity. This is a multiple point of view novel like, say, Christos Tsiolkas‘ The slap and Elliot Perlman‘s Seven types of ambiguity, but while those two novels progressed their narratives in a linear chronology via the changing voices, Jordan’s chronology jumps around in a seemingly chaotic manner. However, there is method to it, because careful reading reveals thematic or structural connections, even if not chronological ones, between each chapter.

That’s the basic structure, but the real interest of course is in what the novel’s about. How, though, to describe the plot of such a novel succinctly? The best way is to simply say that the novel tells the story of three generations of one family, which is, by the way, an impressive thing to attempt in 250 pages. There is a central mystery – for the reader and for the family though they aren’t necessarily aware of it – to do with the two figures in the photograph. Each chapter is named simply for the character in whose first person voice it is told. The first is Kip, a nearly 15-year-old boy in 1939, who has just had to leave school and go to work because of the recent death of his father. Other chapters are told by his twin brother Francis/Frank (who gets to stay at school), his mother Jean, and his much loved big sister Connie. Interspersed with their stories are those told by Kip’s wife, Jack who lives next door, Kip’s twin daughters, and even his grandson. For each person something happens – some choice must be, or is, made – in the particular day they describe, which impacts their life’s direction.

It’s an ambitious structure, but Jordan succeeds, for a few reasons. A big one is her ability to create strong, believable characters who are likable despite their faults. It helps that the first character, Kip, is particularly engaging. He’s easy-going and generous-hearted, but is also endowed with a good dose of wits and common-sense. He plays an important role in the denouement. His daughters, the overweight, rather uptight Stanzi, and the hippy-alternative-eco-warrior Charlotte, are clearly differentiated and provide a touch of humour with their (mostly) good-natured sibling bickering and point-scoring. Most contemporary female readers will see bits of themselves or people they know in these two. And, while I’m speaking of women, I can’t resist quoting Kip’s young, restless sixteen-year old grandson Alec:

I’ve wasted my whole entire existence up to now. I’ve done absolutely nothing with it. I’ve just been counting down the months of my life. Sixteen years, totally useless. I live with three women. A big night at my place is when the ABC runs a Jane Austen marathon. God I hate that Bennet chick. Marry him already, and spare us the drama.

Another reason the book works is that Jordan manages place and time well. Counterbalancing the seemingly erratic chronology is the fact that place is kept simple. The whole novel occurs pretty much in one suburb in working class Melbourne. This helps keep we readers grounded, as do two little motifs – a “lucky” shilling and a purple pendant – which appear on and off throughout the novel. I was initially concerned, after the first couple of chapters, that the shilling was going to be a little heavy-handed or mechanistic – particularly given the shilling graphic commencing each chapter – but it’s not. Like the pendant, it appears in some, but not other, chapters, and in so doing helps keep us focused without irritating us.

In other words, the book is handled very well technically. But, that’s not what makes a book, in the end, is it? What makes a book good is its heart – and the heart of this book is warm but real. Its particular subjects are war, abortion, religious and class difference, social conscience and social mobility, but it is also a universal tale about how love (marital, romantic, sibling, parental, and so on) forms the glue that keeps us going. This might sound corny, but that’s not how it comes across. The novel has its share of grittiness; and relationships have their tensions, conveying the message that love (whether marital, sibling or parental) is not a simple endpoint but something to be worked at.

This may not be the book for readers who like long family sagas they can lose themselves in, but for those like me who enjoy works which tease and leave ties undone, much like life really, Nine days has plenty to offer.

Toni Jordan
Nine days
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
245pp.
ISBN: 9781921922831

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Queensland Literary (Fiction) Awards, 2012: Woo-hoo

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Readers of this blog might remember that earlier this year the new premier of Queensland axed his state’s Premier’s Literary Awards … to a great outcry from literary aficionados around the country. However, with a wonderful can-do attitude and the support of private sponsors, a group of volunteers revived the awards, rebadged as the Queensland Literary Awards, just over 4 months ago. The prize purse was much reduced but the important thing is that the awards went ahead … And the winners were announced this week.

The awards group kept the full raft of awards that had been part of the original awards, a wide range that had made these awards particularly significant, but they are too numerous for me to list here. I will though report on the main ones of interest to me:

  • Fiction Award: Frank Moorehouse’s Cold light, the third in his trilogy, of which I’ve read the first, Grand days. This award rather breaks the stranglehold that women writers, Anna Funder and Gillian Mears, have had on this year’s awards to date.
  • David Unaipon Award for Unpublished Indigenous Writer: Siv Parker’s Story. This is a significant award for giving opportunities to and showcasing indigenous Australian writers. I’ve read some winners and have a couple more on my TBR.
  • Steele Rudd Award for Short Stories: Janette Turner Hospitals’s Forecast: Turbulence, which has been patiently waiting for me on my Kindle for a few months now. I’m a Hospital fan.
  • The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Book of the Year: Simon Cleary’s Closer to stone

A full list of the awards can be viewed here. Reviews of several of the winners listed above can be found at ANZLitLovers.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some favourite Aussie television adaptations

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Today’s Monday Musings is the third in my series on filmed adaptations of Aussie literature, though this time I’m talking television adaptations. The television adaptation of books – mostly into miniseries – has become big business over the last few decades. You only have to look at the BBC and the success it’s had with the so-called bonnet dramas to know that.

A miniseries seems to me to be a more natural form for novel adaptations than movies, if only because the additional length offered by the miniseries caters for more character and plot development. It’s not only for its wet shirt scene that the 1995 adaptation of Pride and prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle is so beloved!

Anyhow, here are some of my favourite Australian television series that were adapted from novels*:

  • A Town Like Alice (1981) was one of my favourite novels of my teen years – that and anything by Jane Austen, not to mention Voss from my late teens. Written by Nevil Shute, it’s a wartime romance on a grand scale about English rose Jean Paget, her experience as a prisoner-of-war in Malaya, her initial not always harmonious meeting with Aussie bloke Joe Harmon, and her post-war life in the Aussie outback. We “colonials” loved the idea of an Englishwoman preferring life with a dinkum Aussie bloke to one with the toffs over the sea! Mythmaking perhaps, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of that every now and then!
  • Harp in the South (1986) was based on the novel of the same name by Ruth Park about whom I’ve written before on this blog. The book was another teen favourite of mine. Published in 1948, it’s a gritty realistic though sympathetic novel set in the slums of Sydney and is one of several books by Park that dealt with “battlers”. It’s some time since I’ve seen the series but I recollect that it effectively conveyed the world of the novel that Park created.
  • My Brother Jack (1965 and 2001) was adapted from the Miles Franklin Award winning novel of the same name by George Johnston. Published in 1964, it is the first of a trilogy, and is regarded as an Australian classic. The 1965 adaptation was written by Johnston’s wife, Charmian Clift, but if I’ve seen it I don’t recollect it. I did however see the 2001 adaptation. I enjoyed its depiction of between the wars Australia, and its exploration of Aussie masculinity through the uneducated, hardworking Jack as seen by his educated, more obviously successful but less happy journalist brother.
  • The Slap (2010) was adapted from Christos Tsiolkas‘ Miles Franklin Award winning novel of the same name. This is a multiple point of view novel with each chapter being  told from a different character’s point of view. It’s not always sensible for adaptations to follow the style and structure of the original but in this case the producers did, and it worked well. It was gripping viewing.
  • Cloudstreet (2011) was also adapted from the Miles Franklin Award winning novel of the same name, but this time by Tim Winton. It’s a big novel in which realism and something more magical are used to tell the story of two families who find themselves sharing a house at no. 1 Cloud Street. The adaptation did a wonderful job of capturing what is a complex novel with a large cast of characters and spanning several decades. The script, the visuals, the music work together to create something accessible but thought-provoking at the same time.

Interestingly, all of the above adaptations used the same title as their original novel. I guess there’s a good reason for that! And the last three were all based on Miles Franklin Award winning novels. Anyhow, these are just a few of the many Aussie novel television adaptations … there are way too many, and many that I’ve enjoyed, to discuss here – such as Nancy Cato‘s All the rivers run, the audiobook of which I am currently listening to.

Do you watch television adaptations of favourite novels? And if so, do you have favourites?

* Some of these books have also been adapted for film, but I am only focussing on the television versions here.

Anna Funder, Stasiland (Review)

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Anna Funder's Stasiland bookcover

Funder’s Stasiland (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Anna Funder‘s Stasiland, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, is one of those books that can be reviewed from multiple angles, and I know that when I get to the end of this review I’m going to be sorry about the angles I didn’t get to discuss. But, I can only do what I can do, eh?

I found it interesting to read this book immediately after another non-fiction book, Brenda Niall‘s biography True north, because the contrast clarified for me why I liked True north but loved Stasiland. To put it simply, True north is a well-written but pretty traditional biography, while Stasiland is what I’d call “literary non-fiction”. In other words, in Stasiland, Funder uses some of the literary techniques – relating to structure, voice and language – more commonly found in fiction to tell her story. It’s not surprising really that this is the case, because when I heard her speak last month, she said that she had initially planned to write Stasiland as a novel but, having done the research and interviews, it “didn’t feel right” to turn those people’s stories to another purpose. She was also aware that there were things in these stories that might not be accepted, that might seem too far-fetched in fiction! Such is the fine line we tread between fact and fiction.

At this point, I should describe the book, though its broad subject is obvious from the title. Funder (b. 1966) has a long-standing interest in things German, from her school days when she chose to learn German, and has visited and/or lived in Germany several times. She writes of travelling through the former German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists, that comprises “tumble-down houses and bewildered people”, and she describes feeling a sense of “horror-romance”:

The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past; from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.

And so she decides to try to understand this dichotomy and places an ad in the paper:

Seeking: former Stasi officers and unofficial collaborators for interview. Publication in English, anonymity* and discretion guaranteed.

This is, depending on how you look at it, either a very brave or naively silly thing to do. Funder, who sees writing as an act of empathy or compassion, interviews several Stasi men who answer her ad, as well as other East Germans who suffered at Stasi hands. It might be coincidental, but essentially all her subjects who suffered were women, while the perpetrators were men. In fact, when she visits the Stasi HQ in Berlin, she’s told it only had toilets for men! All this is not to say, however, that men didn’t suffer (or, even, that there weren’t women perpetrators). Indeed, some of the Stasi men she interviewed were themselves bullied, blackmailed and otherwise stood over to keep them in line.

What makes this book compelling are the stories she gathers, partly because the stories themselves are powerful and partly because of Funder’s own voice. Funder places herself in the book. This is not a third person “objective” recounting of the interviews she conducted but a journey we take together to find some answers. When she interviews Herr von Schnitzler, who hosted the Black Channel, a television program in which he presented a Communist commentary on excerpted programs from the West, we are in the room with her, hearing not only what he says, but getting a sense of his personality alongside her. We see her being fearless in sticking to her questions in the face of a man who frequently shouts. “I recognise”, she writes, “this pattern of unpredictable shouting followed by bouts of quiet reason from other bullies I have known”.

It is particularly in the von Schnitzler section that the GDR paradox becomes most clear. Von Schnitzler was, Funder tells us, molded by the injustices of the Weimar Republic. We see how the drive to create a new society not bedevilled by the iniquities – that is, the inequalities – of capitalism (or imperialism as many of the Stasi men call it) resulted in the creation of an authoritarian society where freedom was minimal (or non-existent) and dissent not allowed. In stark contrast to von Schnitzler and his refusal to see any error in, or critique, the GDR, is Julia, one of the “victims”, who had believed in the GDR but, through having an Italian boyfriend, had become caught in the Stasi net. She discovered that the “state can be so dangerous, so very dangerous, without me having done anything at all” and was completely traumatised by the extent of surveillance and loss of privacy she experienced. And yet, having experienced the East and the West, she can still say

you see the mistakes of one system – the surveillance – and the mistakes of the other – the inequality – but there’s nothing you could have done in the one, and nothing you can do now about the other … and the clearer you see that the worse you feel.

The GDR story is, as Funder tells it, one of grand humanitarian aims but one also riddled by paradox and irony. She asks Herr Bock, a recruiter of informers, what qualities he looked for in an informer:

‘… and above all else,’ he says, looking at me, his eyes distorted and magnified through the glasses, ‘he needed to be honest, faithful and trustworthy.’

I look back at him. I feel my eyes too, getting wider.

How can you resist a writer who tells a story like this, who shows without telling exactly what is going on, who can inject sly touches of wit and humour into the tough stuff?

I can’t possibly relate all the stories – many quite horrendous – in this book. All I can say is that it is a book that manages to show how history writing can be intimate while at the same time conveying facts and hard truths. It is a memorable book, and worth reading if you have any interest at all in politics and human behaviour.

Anna Funder
Stasiland
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2002
ISBN: 9781877008917
282pp.

* I’m intrigued by the promise of anonymity because it seems that in some, if not in all, cases, real names are used. I presume the people involved agreed to this.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Two favourite literary journals

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

I’ve been wanting for some time to write about two of my favourite Australian literary journals (that is, not specifically book review journals). I don’t  read every issue – too much to read, too little time, and all that – but I’d love to. I admire people who manage to subscribe to magazines and journals and read every issue through and through.

Before I talk about the two I’ve chosen I should say that there are others I know I’d love too. I go into bookshops, pick them up, put them down, pick them up again and then realise I just can’t manage any more so I put them down again. For a useful list of  some of Australia’s best literary journals, check out this Australia Council webpage listing the journals* the Council supports.

Anyhow, back to my two current favourites. Both can now be bought in e-versions, including for the Kindle. They can be followed on Twitter and have Facebook pages, and both make some of their content available free online. And, here they are …

Griffith Review

The Griffith Review is a quarterly journal of “new writing and ideas”, and is now 8 years old. It is published by the Griffith University. Unlike most journals, it takes a thematic approach, with each issue being devoted to a theme. For example, the current issue, no. 37, is themed “Small World”, which its website says “broadens the mind with postcards and intelligence from everywhere at a time when the growth of international air travel has shrunk the definition of proximity and the internet has enabled the globalised media industry to bring distant events and places tantalisingly close”. The contributors on this issue include writers I’ve reviewed here: Murray Bail, Melissa Lucashenko and Chris Flynn.

What I love about this journal, besides the overall quality of the writing of course, is the variety of forms it encompasses on a regular basis – Fiction, Poetry, Essays (including photographic essays), Reportage and Memoir. I love that they include memoir as a regular part of the journal. And, in 2009 (at least I think it was then), they commenced an annual fiction edition. These editions contain more short stories than the other issues, and the rest of the content (essays, memoirs, etc) focuses on fiction. Not quite Granta, but perhaps moving in that direction?

Kill Your Darlings

I’m not an expert on the economics of journal publishing, but the Griffith Review does have a pretty major university behind it. Kill Your Darlings (KYD) on the other hand is a much smaller – braver – affair. First published in March 2010, it is now up to issue No. 10 (which, in print, costs $19.95, but at $7.96 from Amazon for the Kindle, it’s a great deal). This current issue has an interview with Aussie writer Andrew McGahan (whom I like but haven’t read since starting this blog) and an article on one of my favourite Aussie writers, Jessica Anderson, so I let my fingers do the walking at Amazon and in seconds I had it on my Kindle. Gotta love this new technology!

Like most literary journal, KYD’s content is diverse, with its regular sections being Commentary, Fiction, Interview, Reviews – and, sometimes, a Cartoon.

Kill Your Darlings is a smaller, somewhat plainer publication than the Griffith Review, but it is gorgeous with a stylish retro look that catches the eye. It’s lovely to hold. Hmm, why did I buy that Kindle version, again?

I’ll conclude on another article in Issue 10, which comes from Gideon Haigh whose discussion on literary reviewing in the first issue I blogged about back in 2010. In Issue 10, he writes on the economics of writing. Early in the article he says:

Here is a disjunction in Australian publishing: the most enthusiastic and imaginative publishers are the ones with no money; caution grows with size.

That seems an appropriate thought to leave you on methinks.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear from you – Aussie or not – whether you have any favourite literary journals, what they are and why you like them.

* I’m not sure how up to date this list is, but it’s a start if you’d like to check others out.

Brenda Niall, True north: The story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack (Review)

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‘Of course we are mad,’ Bet wrote to Mary, ‘but we live in a mad place.’

Brenda Niall's True North
Brenda Niall’s True North (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

The mad place that Bet – Elizabeth Durack – refers to is the Kimberley region of north-west Australia and the book this quote comes from is biographer Brenda Niall‘s True north: The story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack.

Brenda Niall, along with the late Hazel Rowley, is one of Australia’s best regarded biographers. True North, her most recent book, tells the story of writer Mary Durack (1913-1994) and her younger sister, the artist Elizabeth (1915-2000). I must say that it took me a long time to read this book. I was fascinated by the story but it lacked, in the beginning at least, some of the punch that I found in Rowley’s Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage which I reviewed last year. I think this is because Niall’s style here is a little flatter, a little more like reportage, than I found in Rowley’s book. Both books have two people as their subjects and both books have an overriding theme – the Roosevelts’ extraordinary marriage for Rowley and the sisters’ fascination with the remote north for Niall – but, for me, Rowley’s had a stronger narrative drive which resulted in a more cohesive “argument”. However, I did settle into True North and, in the end, enjoyed it for what it did do.

Mary and Elizabeth, for those of you who don’t know, belonged to the pioneer pastoralists, the Duracks, who had  emigrated from Ireland in the 1850s. They farmed in Goulburn (NSW), then moved to Coopers Creek (Queensland) in the late 1860s, before droving their cattle nearly 5,000 kms cross-country to settle in the Kimberleys (WA) in 1882. Mary told this story in her best-selling (now classic) history, Kings in grass castles, and its sequel Sons in the saddles.

Niall’s book, though, is not about that, but about the two sisters and their lives in the 20th century. Mary and Elizabeth spent most of their childhood and youth in Perth, while their father managed the northern properties, returning south each year in the off-season. However, both separately and together spent time on their father’s properties, particularly in their late teens and early twenties. Niall’s title, “true north”, expresses the sisters’ identification with the north. In 1929, for example, Mary said she returned to the north “like a homing pigeon”. Elizabeth described it, a few years later, as “that wild, wonderful country”. The north was, in fact, the inspiration for their creative output.

Niall characterises the two sisters well. Mary was the calmer, more sociable, reliable one who struggled to find time to write between raising children, supporting various family members, and playing a significant role in the literary life of Perth. Elizabeth was more unsettled, more fiery and perhaps more ambitious. She was frequently poor and depended on the family, particularly Mary, for monetary and emotional support throughout much of her life. Theirs was a close relationship, and included several collaborative books for which Mary wrote the text and Elizabeth did the illustrations. Neither made wonderfully successful marriages – and both, despite their challenges, produced significant bodies of work.

Several themes run through the book, but the most interesting one for me concerns the Duracks’ relationship with Aboriginal people. From early on the family employed indigenous people. According to Niall, the sisters’ father, Michael Patsy Durack, “stressed their value as allies”. For the sisters, their early experiences were positive and resulted in a lifelong interest in and awareness of indigenous people and their issues. Elizabeth spoke many years later about “how lovely it was to go walking with them and to learn about the bush” while Mary wrote of being disturbed by “the shadow people in their humpies on the river banks, humbly serving, unknowing, unquestioning”.  Mary wrote a short story, “Old Woman”, about the harsh treatment of an Aboriginal woman by a station wife. It was published in The Bulletin in 1939 and nearly resulted in a libel suit. Elizabeth wrote in a letter, around 1935,

It’s a question of either opening one’s eyes to the situation and grappling with it with whatever instruments lie within one’s reach or shutting one’s eyes to the whole business and getting the hell out of it.

I don’t have time to fully explore it all now, but I was intrigued by this comment on Mary late in her life:

She found the Aborigines surprisingly objective about the past ‘recalling events with no hint of bitterness’, talking about the white people with neither praise nor blame.’

This brought to mind indigenous writer Kim Scott’s That deadman dance, which I reviewed last year and in which he presents (albeit in a novel but borne out by the records, I believe) a similar generosity or openness of spirit. But, back to True north. Niall argues that the Duracks were respectful and sympathetic employers and friends. Big brother Reg in the 1930s was aware of “the social injustice of use of Aboriginal labour”. Mary, in the 1960s, argued persistently for equal pay, and even though, when it came, indigenous station workers were displaced in droves, she still believed in the principle. Ah, that tricky conundrum: principle versus reality, idealism versus pragmatism.  Why are they so often at loggerheads with each other?

Elizabeth, however, did get into hot water later in her life when, going way further than Mary who wrote a poem in the voice of an indigenous woman, she took on the name and persona of an Aboriginal man, Eddie Burrup, as a nom de brush. Niall discusses the issue at some length teasing out artistic and personal issues versus cultural trespass. She is sympathetic in the end to Durack and her somewhat mixed motivations. The situation was certainly complicated and, while some of Durack’s motivations give me pause, I’d rather not pass judgement, except to say that in the late 20th century it was not a wise thing to do.

The insight Niall gives into an albeit specific pastoral family’s experience of and response to their relationship with indigenous people makes this book worth reading. We do of course only get Niall’s presentation of the Duracks’ experience. Besides a few scattered references to indigenous people’s responses, we know little of the indigenous perspective. The sad thing is that we may never know their side, since few people are left to tell it, and not much is likely to have been documented.

Oh dear, I’ve written a lot about one theme and there’s so much more to tell, but I won’t retain you much longer. Two other major themes permeate the book. One revolves around love of and identification with place, with how place can get under the skin and drive one’s life. The other concerns the challenge women creators face in serving their art while juggling families and the need for financial support.

While I didn’t find Niall’s book as compelling as I’d hoped, the more I think about it, the more I appreciate what she has attempted to do. The Duracks’ story is a complex and somewhat contradictory one. Mary, Elizabeth and their brothers were the children of a “cattle king”, and being such their public image was “one of effortless privilege”. The reality was, in fact, rather different – and it resulted in lives that were challenged and challenging. Niall’s book will not, I suspect, be the last we hear of them – but it makes a valuable contribution.

Brenda Niall
True North: The story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
Kindle edition
272pp (Print ed.)
ISBN: 9781921921421 (eBook)