Australian literature

Australian Women Writers 2012 Challenge completed

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Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 Badge

Australian Women Writers Challenge (Design: Book’dout – Shelleyrae)

I am not a blogger who takes part in challenges, until, that is, this year when Elizabeth Lhuede set up her Australian Women Writers 2012 Challenge. It didn’t take me long to break my non-challenge rule, because this challenge focuses on my two main reading passions: Australian Literature and Women Writers. This was the challenge for me!

And so I signed up for the top level: Franklin-fantastic. This required me to read 10 books and review (at some depth) at least 4 Of them. I decided that I would also attempt the criss-crossing Genre Challenge of Dabbler which required me to read “more than one genre”. I can’t pretend that I actively pursued the “top” Genre Challenge of Devoted Eclectic which required reading “as many genres as you can read”.

This week I posted my 10th review and became the 30th person to complete the challenge (at least, my name is the 30th on the Completed section of the challenge page). I will continue – of course – to read Australian women writers and will add those reviews to the Review section of the challenge page, but in the interests of formal closure, here are my 10 books (with links to the individual reviews):

See! More than one genre, but I’d be cheeky to claim Devoted Eclectic. I hope, however, that Elizabeth (a true devoted eclectic) is happy. I certainly thank her for this great initiative. It’s been fun and has certainly attracted a lot of interest. If you haven’t taken part, there’s time yet: Australian Women Writers 2012 Challenge.

Jeanine Leane, Purple threads (Review for Indigenous Literature Week)

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Jeanine Leane's Purple threads
Bookcover via University of Queensland Press*

What I especially like about Jeanine Leane’s book, Purple threads, is how well she draws the universal out of the particular. That she does this is not unusual in itself. After all, this is what our favourite books tend to do. The interesting thing about Purple threads, though, is that the particular is an Indigenous one. Even as I write this post my mind is flicking back-and-forth between thinking about the Indigenous Australian themes in the book and the more universal ones about family and relationships. More on that anon. First, I want to say a little about the book’s form, because ….

I’m not sure whether to call Purple threads a novel or a book of connected short stories, except I don’t think it matters much. What is significant is that the stories revolve around a mostly female-only Indigenous Australian family living on a small piece of land in the Gundagai area of New South Wales in the 1950s to 1960s. The main characters run through the whole book, and the stories are told pretty much chronologically. There could even be a plot line or two, but they are not strong and are not what drive us to read on. This form had an eerie familiarity as I was reading and I realised it was because it reminded me of another David Unaipon Award winning book I have reviewed here, Marie Munkara’s Every secret thing. Is this a coincidence – after all, there are similar books by non-Indigenous writers – or should I go out on a limb and wonder whether this form reflects an Indigenous Australian way of story-telling? In addition to this similarity in form, these two books share a particular style of humour. Munkara’s is probably more belly-laugh, and is definitely more gut-wrenching, but both have a self-deprecating element, a willingness and ability to laugh at themselves, to see the absurd. It’s a form of humour we also see in Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria. Okay, enough of that, back to the book itself.

The stories are told first person by Sunny (Sunshine) who lives with her sister Star, and her grandmother, Nan, and aunts, Boo (Beulah) and Bubby (Lily). Her mother, father, grandfather, more aunts and uncles, and others in the community, also appear in the book, but these five named characters are the focus. They are well differentiated. Nan is the down-to-earth matriarch of the group who doesn’t know how to read but “sure as hell know[s] how ta think”. Boo is independent and feisty, the one who takes action when action is needed. She loves the ancient Romans, particularly Empress Livia “who knew how to work behind the scenes”. Bubby, on the other hand, is the gentle, romantic one, who loves Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights. The stories chronicle the first two decades of Sunny’s life in this female-dominated household. There are anecdotes about walks with Aunty Boo, about spoilt Petal (Sunny and Star’s mother), and about interactions with neighbours, teachers and others in the community. Most of the stories are light, albeit with a good degree of bite, but some are dark, such as the story of the young white neighbour, Milli, who is regularly beaten by her husband. This story, in fact, forms a minor plot line in part of the book.

The universal themes are about the way families comprise different and sometimes conflicting personalities and yet manage to love and support each other to ensure their joint survival. The particularity, though, has to do with being Indigenous, with being lesser, in a rural community. Leane handles this cleverly, using, for example, the Christian symbol of “the black sheep” throughout the book to tease out the ironies and complexities packed into this idea when it is played out in a sheep-farming community. The symbol is explicitly introduced to us in “God’s flock” where Sunny talks about going to church and being taught the story of “the black sheep”:

‘ … But Jesus, if we pray to him [the priest says], will find all the lost sheep and return them to the fold, even the black sheep that no one  else wants or loves.’

At least this bit made sense to us. Apart from Jesus, we didn’t know any other sheep farmer who loved black sheep. Most hated them, in fact. That’s why every year my Aunties always ended up with a few black lambs to raise ….

Leane shows how Nan and the Aunties navigate life in a world where “black was not the ideal colour” and in which “women livin’ by themselves are always easy targets”. They navigate it with dignity, often by pretending to go along with white society’s ways while staying true to their own values, which involve respecting and caring for other people and creatures and for their little bit of land.

Purple threads, apparently drawn from Leane’s life, provides an engaging but uncompromising insight into a life most Australians know little about. I hope I’m not being too pompous when I say that we need more books like this, and they need to be read by more people, if we non-Indigenous Australians are to have a chance of truly comprehending the experience of being Indigenous in our nation.

Read for ANZLitLovers Indigenous Literature Week, for which Lisa has also reviewed it.

Jeanine Leane
Purple threads
St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2011
157pp
ISBN: 9780702238956

(Review copy supplied by University of Queensland Press via ANZLitLovers blog giveaway. Thanks Lisa. Thanks UQP)

* I have assumed copyright permission for this cover on the basis that the book was provided by UQP

Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest post from Christina of Memory and You

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As with most of my guest posters here, I met Christina through blogging and thus discovered not only another Australian litblogger (there aren’t many of us) but one who is also a writer. Her special interest is memoir and her blog is titled Memory and You. I enjoy (a good) memoir but don’t get to read as many as I’d like, partly because it is not always easy to determine which are the “good” memoirs. And here is where Christina comes in. She has a PhD and a Masters degree in life writing, and is writing memoir herself. She also mentors and teaches other writers, and reviews books for a couple of newspapers. She has thought a lot about memoir and so I’m thrilled she agreed to write a guest post on it for my blog. Thanks Christina …

Memoir as an act of healing

Memoir is a multi-faceted art, and has become the people’s voice. There is even an Australian publisher’s prize for an unpublished memoir, The Finch Memoir Prize, awarded annually. For me, there are two sorts of memoir: the ‘good story’ that tells us how it is to experience life events that have shaped, perhaps damaged, a life; and the remarkable memoir, that fuses the personal with the universal, and takes us on a journey that we remember and want to revisit. Of the first type, there are many, and more being published each year. Of the second type, there are a few, bright stars that shine out in a crowded galaxy.

It is the bright stars that I want to focus on here, and share with you some that I think are, like a good wine, worth adding to your library (or cellar). The three Australian memoirs I want to talk about are: The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, by Virginia Lloyd (2008); When it Rains, by Maggie Mackellar (2010) and Reaching One Thousand, by Rachel Robertson (2012). These are all memoirs that deal with loss, grief, disability, and with how the subject, the narrator, has been affected  and has survived. There are also some renowned memoirs by overseas writers on this theme, including Joan Didion’s Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking, and Joyce Carole Oates’ A Widow’s Story.

Some critics say that grief should remain private, unspoken. But memoir can be an act of healing, not only for the writer, but for readers who have suffered and seek stories of others who have survived loss, abuse, betrayal. And even if we have not been so unfortunate, through empathy, we enter another’s pain and are strengthened and illuminated by their sharing. When the personal is fused with the universal, in a memoir that makes us pause, catch our breath, linger and want to return, we share what it means to be human, and finish the book feeling different, more alive.

The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement is, as the sub-title tells us, about love and renovation. The author, Virginia Lloyd, lives in an old inner city 19th century house that is attacked by rising damp. The story opens with the diagnosis, by an expert, that it needs extensive repair. The expert is incredulous that Virginia has let the problem get so bad. Her reason, which she does not tell him, is that when the problem surfaced, her husband was dying. She met John when she was 32 and single. He was 47, divorced, and had been diagnosed with a rare tumour at the base of his spine. She knows this, but he is not defined by his illness, and they fall mutually and deeply in love. She moves in with him, and within months, they are married. 11 months after the wedding, she buries him. Throughout the love story and the final, agonising ending, the theme of repair to the rising damp, and of her steps away from the grave, are woven into the narrative. It is impossible to summarise briefly how artfully and seamlessly this is done, and how, as a young widow, she is released from the self that briefly loved and lost into an undefined future, in a house that is both an ending and a beginning; her life as a wife is ended, and her life as a widow and a person who is not defined by her past is beginning, as she prepares to “take flight” for New York, with John’s blessing and desire that she should live “a rich and full life”.

When it Rains, by Maggie Mackellar, narrates how her life is shattered by the sudden descent of her husband into psychosis and suicide, closely followed by her mother’s diagnosis of aggressive cancer, and death within nine months. She and her husband have a five-year-old daughter, and she is six months pregnant with their son when she becomes a widow. After these terrible losses, which she had no time to prepare for, she struggles on for a year in the city, then moves with her children to the family farm in central western New South Wales. Heat and drought are constant themes, but the simple life, the horses and other livestock, the rhythms of the land and the seasons, slowly restore her and her children to a sense of worth and a reason for living. She takes the scary step of resigning from her academic job, and becomes a country woman and a full-time mother and writer. She struggles with two griefs, the grief for her beloved mother, which is “open and raw and honest”, and the intertwined, ambivalent grief for her husband, whom she had loved unreservedly and feels betrayed and abandoned by. He haunts her dreams, and “the question of why one death is so different from another, one grief so perplexing, so hidden, and another so obvious, so instinctively harrowing, keeps niggling me”. At last, she begins to release him, and when her daughter is nine, and agrees that it is time to let go, they go back to the sea, and the children throw his ashes into the air:

He mixes with salt and wind. He falls on rock and heath. He falls into beauty as the children scatter him like chicken feed. They laugh and chase each other on the high headland in the screaming wind. I say goodbye. At last, I say goodbye.

The epilogue: it’s Christmas Eve back at the farm, and a big rain is forecast, breaking the long and severe drought. She lies in bed, quiet and lonely. Then the rain starts to fall. “Tomorrow, I think, because of the rain, tomorrow will be different.”

Finally, a few words about Rachel Robertson’s memoir of her relationship with her autistic son, Reaching One Thousand. The story of Rachel’s awakening to her son’s difference, and her search for ways of relating to him that respect his difference and allow them to develop trust and intimacy is delicately told, with restraint and honesty. Theories about autism and the mind are lightly woven in and filtered through the narrator’s down-to-earth, ethical, questioning intelligence. Understanding and acceptance bring healing for disappointed expectations, and the joy of sharing a different way of being. One of the delights of this story is that Ben, a story-teller in his own right, has a strong voice, and is given the last word. I wrote a longer review of this memoir in my blog.

If you haven’t read these stories, I recommend them. They are shining examples of memoirs of healing.

Vale Rosemary Dobson (Australian poet)

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Last time I wrote about poet Rosemary Dobson was in my post on Australian literary couples but my post today is a sadder one as Dobson died this week, just a week or so after her 92nd birthday. She had a long career as a poet, starting soon after World War 2. When she first came to recognition, winning awards in the 1940s, she was described as the granddaughter of English poet and essayist, Austin Dobson, who was well-known in his time.

Dobson moved to my city – well, she was here first, in fact – in 1971 when her husband Alec Bolton became the National Library of Australia’s first Director of Publications. I knew Alec, as his office was next to mine for a few years in the late 1970s. He was a charming, lovely man who, first as a hobby and then a retirement project, managed his own small press which printed, among other works, some of his wife’s poetry. It’s nicely fitting that the poem used in our newspaper’s front page article on her death is one she dedicated to him:

The kitchen vessels that sustained
Your printed books, my poems, our life,
Are fallen away. The words remain –
Not all – but those of style and worth.

(from “Divining Colander”)

The poem goes on to use the “colander” as a metaphor for sifting out the bad from the good.

Dobson was active in Canberra poetry circles and well-known to our poets, some of whom I’ve written about here, such as Geoff Page and Alan Gould. But, she was known more widely too, having won several significant literary (and other) awards, including:

  • Patrick White Award for Literature (1984)
  • Grace Leven Prize for Poetry (1984)
  • Order of Australia for Services to Literature (1987)
  • Australia Council’s Writers’ Emeritus Award (1996)
  • The Age Book of the Year Award for Untold lives (2001)
  • NSW Premier’s Special Award (2006)

In a review of a recently published collected edition of her work, titled, Collected, Australian writer David Malouf described her as “the last of a generation of Australian poets – Judith Wright, David Campbell, Gwen Harwood – who in the 1940s and ’50s remade Australian poetry, and then, by remaking themselves, helped remake it a second time in the ’70s.” He also refers to a poem of hers which appears in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986) which I like to dip into every now and then. The poem is dedicated to Christina Stead, whom Dobson knew, and is about Stead’s dying:

I sit beside the bed where she lies dreaming
Of Pyrrhic victories and sharp words said

[…]

Suppose her smouldering thoughts break out in flame,
Not to consume bed, nightdress, flesh and hair
But the mind, the working and the making mind

That built these towers the world applauds

(from “The Nightmare”)

I reckon that effectively conveys Stead’s strength and feistiness – and Dobson’s affection and admiration for her. “The Nightmare” is one of five poems of hers, from her mid career I think, included in the anthology. They demonstrate some of Dobson’s variety, her seriousness and her humour, but there’s no way I can do justice to her career here, now. Before I conclude though, I must say that what I found interesting, when I researched her life a little a few years ago, was that she and poet David Campbell, also produced anthologies of Russian poetry that they had translated.

For a lovely, brief summary of her life and contribution to Australian poetry, check out the podcast from ABC Radio’s Books and Arts Daily.

Australian poetry will miss her …

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Elizabeth Harrower on Circular Quay

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When I reviewed Elizabeth Harrower‘s The watch tower the other day I wanted to fill it up with quotes from the book because her writing is so delicious. And that means, of course, that it is perfect for a Delicious Descriptions post. The one I’ve chosen occurs at the end of Part 2 (of three parts). I like it because it, albeit briefly, describes place – central Sydney in the mid 1950s – as well as one of the characters – Clare. It’s quite a long quote but here goes:

… The well-dressed, prosperous crowds pushed off the ferry, slipped coins into the ancient turnstiles and clanged through, out onto the concourse of the Quay.

Even as early as this, the small shops were busy – the bread kiosks, milk-bars, dry-cleaners and delicatessans. And he was at his usual post. He recognised her as she went towards him. Every week he looked smaller in his loose navy-blue uniform, and frailer and dustier; every week she thought he would be missing.

The morning breeze that lifted her hair and flapped the old man’s uniform was seaweedy and salty. Traffic rumbled. People ran. Clare stood before the old man and let some shillings drop into his box. The small Salvation Army soldier watched her and she watched his lips and weak blue eyes, waiting, determined. (Yet she might be rebuffed.)

‘God bless you,’ he said simply, looking at her like a child.

Oh! — Clare relaxed. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured. She was blessed, who was most in need of blessing. Blessed.

Having received what she had paid for, she moved on.

I love what this says about Clare’s desperation … and how Harrower conveys it through such a normally mundane scene. She shows how a typical, simple transaction becomes something way more while busy, purposeful Sydney life goes on around it, unaware, reflecting the world’s oblivion to what Laura and Clare are submitted to, day in and day out. I also like the sense of the giver being desperate to receive. Finally, it shows how Harrower can build up tension. Who is he? Why is she going towards him?

Elizabeth Harrower, The watch tower (Review)

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Elizabeth Harrower The watch tower
Cover for The watch tower (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Elizabeth Harrower’s fourth and final novel, The watch tower, is a rather harrowing (couldn’t resist that) read. It is also an astonishing read, and I wonder why it has had such little recognition over the decades or so since its publication in 1966. Thanks to Text Classics, though, it now has a second chance. It deserves it. In fact, I’d say it is one of the best books I’ve read this year (to date, of course!)

What makes it so is the writing. It has a Patrick White-like intensity – and I can see her influence in writers like Joan London and Shirley Hazzard*. But first, a little about the content. It is set in Sydney and spans roughly the mid-1930s to around 1950. The plot is slim. It concerns two sisters, Laura and Clare, who are abandoned twice – first, albeit inadvertently, by their father (through his death when Laura is about 16 years old, and Clare, 9) and then a few years later by their selfish unloving mother who decides to return to her family in England, without them. What happens to them from this point is Harrower’s subject and it all centres on the ironically named Felix, Laura’s first and only boss, who comes to the rescue, or so it seems, when mother leaves the scene.

Laura had been a girl of dreams with the ability to achieve them. She aspired to be a doctor, but when tragedy strikes and she is taken from school, she’s not overly concerned. She “had read books” and in all but those with “circumstances ridiculously removed from hers, everything ended happily for young heroines.” And yet she also

had a sensation of having mislaid a vital pleasure that she could not remember, or a piece of herself.

Clare is younger and is less affected by having to leave boarding school, but life with their mother is no picnic. She expects her daughters to “take over”, to, in effect, run the house as well as go to school, for Clare, and business college then work for Laura. And so Laura’s life of servitude to one master or another begins, while Clare takes on the role of helper and watcher. Laura gets on with the job, generously and to her detriment, particularly when the misogynistic power-hungry Felix enters the scene. Clare sees what is going on, and expects more of life, but soon realises she

had really nowhere to go. Caught, not safe, cold – There were no reliable people.

From these premises, Harrower builds a story of psychological and physical entrapment in which both girls become caught in Felix’s malevolent net. Laura, ever the Pollyanna who believes noone would be consciously mean or vicious, becomes complicit in the destruction of her self while Clare, physically caught, maintains a vision of something better and does her darnedest to get Laura to see it too.

Harrower develops all this with a slow drip-drip, through language that is tightly pared to the essentials, through a simple but not even chronology that moves in fits and starts, and through a narrative voice characterised by subtle shifts in point of view. The focus is inwards  – on a small number of characters and their relationships with each other that rarely lets outsiders in. The result is a claustrophobic tone – and a slow build up of tension and suspense. Take this description, for example, of the women upon hearing Felix, drunk, coming down the path:

Breaking their poses like trees snapping branches, the women urgently regarded each other, cleared away all signs of work in an instant, examined their souls for defects, in a sense crossed themselves, and waited.

Acts of violence do occur, but are reported in retrospect. This seems to lessen our focus on the specific event and emphasises instead the response of the two young women. Will they decide to leave this time?

Late in the novel a fourth person, 19 year-old Dutch migrant, Bernard, is thrown into the mix, creating the catalyst for the denouement. For Laura, he provides a diversion for “poor Felix” and hopefully another chance for him to show a decent side. For Clare, he shows her that for all her suffering she can still be a useful person. For Felix, he of the “cold smile” and “deaf look”, well that would be telling… And as for Bernard himself, the question is whether he will survive his Felix experience intact.

And this brings me to my final point. While she doesn’t expressly say it, and in addition to her study of power and control, Harrower seems to be exploring ideas about the soul (a person’s essence) and character. Where does one end and the other begin? How do they act upon each other, and is change possible? This is a book I won’t quickly forget.

POST-SCRIPT, 2025: I wrote here about “power and control”, because the term “coercive control” by which it would now be known, was not in public parlance.

Elizabeth Harrower
The watch tower
(with a new introduction by Joan London)
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
335pp.
ISBN: 9781921922428

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

* Hazzard is only 3 years younger than Harrower but her first novel was published, I believe, in 1966, the year this, Harrower’s last, was published.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Kimberley dreaming

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Waterhole in the Kimberleys

Waterhole in the Kimberleys

The Kimberley region of Australia is a place of dreams. The most enduring and significant of these are, of course, those belonging to its indigenous inhabitants who have been there, it is believed, for around 40,000 years. Jump forward to recent centuries and we find new dreamers – the pearlers, the gold prospectors, the pastoralists,, the farmers (with their ambitious Ord River Scheme), the miners and, most recently, the tourists.

It is a huge region occupying an area that is about three times the size of England and it is beautiful, with its beaches, gorges, waterfalls, rivers, lakes and stunning sandstone and limestone rock formations. It has a long and rich indigenous culture and a fascinating, if not always admirable, colonial history. In other words, it’s a region that is of much interest, historically, culturally, socially and geologically.

The most famous book about the region is, surprisingly, a history,  Mary Durack‘s Kings in grass castles (1959), which chronicles her family’s story from their migration from Ireland in the mid-19th century to their life as Kimberley pastoralists in the mid-20th century. Durack wrote other histories, as well as novels, children’s books, and articles. She wrote sympathetically about the indigenous inhabitants and provided practical help and support to indigenous writers and artists.

Many Australian writers, including some I’ve mentioned in recent Monday Musings like Ion Idriess and Henrietta Drake-Brockman, have set writings in the area. Novelist Dora Birtles describes the town of Wyndham:

Wyndham lay flat under the moonlight, its main street, its corrugated iron roofs, its mud flats by the mangrove edges, drawn into main relief, in highlight and dark shadow like the strong, rough contrast in a lino-cut, white and black. The salt pans glittered sharp as ice. It was not without beauty in its starkness…

Other writers who have written about the area include Leslie Rees and Randolph Stow, who worked at a mission for several months and used this experience in his novel To the islands.

A more recent Australian writer who has set writing here is Tim Winton, in Dirt Music. In an interview he said:

Lu gets to see something of the endurance and power of Aboriginal wisdom. For someone like him, a southerner if you like, with farming connections, he’s mostly been exposed to indigenes as victims, and being in the remote parts of the Kimberley he sees more power, more confidence, more evident, extant culture that resonates, educates him in an oblique way.

But I’ll conclude with a poet I don’t know, because his description conveys a wonderful sense of the region, some of which reflects my own, admittedly brief, experience:

Fire-red mountains, fissured and caverned,
lilac-hazed ranges, red-purple ravines,
have reared round, receded, and reappeared
all  day through my vision. This is the region
of baobab trees, of monstrous obese
baobabs squatting in chaos of sun-fired,
sun-blackened boulders in the ranges’ ravines.

— Ronald Robinson, “Kimberley Drovers”

Thanks to Peter Pierce’s The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, for the bulk of the literary background in this post.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Literary hoaxes and identity scandals

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Have you ever heard of the Ern Malley affair? Or of Helen Demidenko? Or what about Mudrooroo? These are just three of Australia’s literary controversies involving false identities. Why are Miles Franklin and Henry Handel Richardson perfectly acceptable pseudonyms, while Helen Demidenko, for example, is not? Aye, there’s the rub…

It seems to have something to do with a conscious attempt to defraud, to trick … and yet …

Let’s look at three recent Australian literary scandals. One is white male author Leon Cameron whose supposedly autobiographical novel, My own sweet time, was published in 1994 by indigenous publisher, Magabala Books. He presented himself as Wanda Koolmatrie, a Pitjantjatjara woman of the Stolen Generation, and he won the Dobbie Literary Award. The truth didn’t come out until he tried to sell his sequel and the publisher asked to meet him. And then all hell broke loose.

Another is Norma Khouri‘s Forbidden Love which was published by Random House in 2003 as a non-fiction account of the honour killing of her best friend in Jordan. It was a best-seller, but after being exposed by Sydney Morning Herald literary editor, Malcolm Knox, she admitted – eventually – that she had taken “literary licence”. For a work marketed as non-fiction, this was a bit of an understatement!

Then there’s Helen Demidenko, whom I mentioned in the opening paragraph. Her novel The hand that signed the paper won the Vogel award for unpublished manuscript in 1993 and then the prestigious Miles Franklin award in 1994. Helen Demidenko was a pseudonym for Helen Darville. On its own, that doesn’t seem like a huge crime, but the controversy came about because she presented her novel as being based on the experiences of her Ukrainian family. She said that the events that she wrote about in the book “actually happened”. Well, they may have, but not to her or her family. This book became the subject of a longstanding literary debate*.

What probably made people most angry about these hoaxes is that they involved authors appealing to our sympathies – by masquerading as minority writers (in the case of Cameron and Darville) and/or writing a “true” story about a devastating event (in the case of Khouri). And why did they do this? To get published, to rise above the crowd? Or, to make a point (as had been the case with the Ern Malley affair)?

In general, literary hoaxes tell us something we all know, that it is tough to get published and that prevailing cultural and social sensibilities can get in the way of  who and what gets published. They also suggest that for some people the ends just might justify the means. But, besides these, let’s say, more practical concerns, they raise some fundamental issues for readers and critics about the nature of literature, about what we mean by authenticity and how we define quality. Would Khouri’s book have packed the same punch if it was known to be fiction? Why or why not? We know honour killings occur and Khouri** reached a lot of people with her story. Is the message less valid because she based her story on research rather than telling the true story of a friend? Similarly, are Demidenko’s and Koolmatrie’s stories somehow less “authentic” and of less literary quality because the authors aren’t who they say they are?

The bottom line is, I suppose, is the work the thing? Always? It depends?

What is your experience of literary hoaxes – and what do you feel about them?

* An additional controversy regarding plagiarism came later, though she was I believe acquitted of this latter accusation.
** Khouri’s story is complicated by the discovery of other fakes or frauds in her life.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Twenty Australian novelists in 1947

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

The novelists Roderick chose for this volume are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Johnson, Life in seven mistakes (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 17 Comments

By coincidence, really, my local reading group finally got around to reading Susan Johnson’s Life in seven mistakes just as her next novel, My hundred lovers, is to be published. Johnson has written several novels now, though I’d only read one, The broken book based on the life of Charmian Clift, before this. I loved that book and I liked this one.

Life in seven mistakes is a book targeted squarely at middle-class, middle-aged Australian baby boomers – a bit like, perhaps, Jonathan Franzen‘s The corrections was for Americans. It’s about a family – parents Nance and Bob who have retired to Australia’s answer to Miami, Surfers Paradise, and their three middle-aged children, Elizabeth, Robbo and Nick. They are not a particularly well-functioning family (says she, in an understatement). Johnson sets out to analyse how such families come to be … and how, or if, they can be rectified.

There’s not, as is common in books like this, a strong plot.  The main story is set over a few days encompassing Christmas. Robbo and Elizabeth, with their families, have come up to Surfers Paradise from their respective big southern cities to celebrate Christmas and their parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Nick is absent, being in prison for a minor drug related offence, but his life has been off the rails for some time. The atmosphere is charged with long-unspoken tensions – and a crisis, of course, occurs – but I won’t spoil that main plot point.

Like The corrections, this book chronicles the family’s past while also telling a story about the present gathering. Johnson does this by using alternating the chapters to tell two chronological stories. The present one starts a couple of days before Christmas with the family already gathered, while the past story starts at the time Nancy meets Bobby, and progresses until it pretty much meets the present. This structure works well. It is easy to follow and enhances our understanding of the characters without interrupting the flow of what’s happening now. The chapters have pointed titles like “On top of the mountain” in which Elizabeth sees Australia’s Great Dividing Range in symbolic terms:

As she drives, Elizabeth fancifully pictures the mountain range as forming the backdrop to their lives, and for one fantastical moment she imagines time strung end-to-end along it, her father in his working boots, aged twenty-five, at one end of the mountains, and his son Nick, aged forty-five, at the other. She sees her father at the very top of the mountain, moving trees with his bare hands, and her brother at its very base. Did her father want to remain forever elevated, was that it?

Johnson has a keen eye for family dynamics and most readers (at least from the target group I described) would have moments of recognition here even if, hopefully, the whole is not their experience. It is this, together with Johnson’s sharply observed language, that makes this book somewhat of a page turner. You can’t help wanting to know how this motley crew came to be and what they are going to do next. Will Elizabeth, the successful ceramicist about to have her first one-woman show in New York, grow up and finally stop feeling “infantilised” around her family? Will Nancy relax her drive for perfection and let her family in? Will Bob engage with his family rather than stick to his position as “star of the story”?

I must say I loved the language. Almost every page contains something that makes you stop and think, yes, she’s got it. But – there is a but – somehow the book didn’t work for me quite as well as The broken book did. I’m not quite sure why because, really, it’s the sort of book that is normally right up my alley – and by this I mean the subject matter, the setting (much of which was very familiar to me) and the language.  And yet, it didn’t totally sing for me. One reason may be that the novel is billed as “funny” and “ironic”. Whilst there is humour here, I didn’t find it a funny novel, and I didn’t really see it as ironic. It read more like a serious, straight drama to me. This can’t be my main concern though, because a novel shouldn’t be judged by how it is described by others.

My bigger issue is probably more to do with the “voice”. The novel is told third person – mainly third person, limited.  And this limited point of view is predominantly Elizabeth’s. It’s her pain, her inner conflict, that we are mostly privy to. But the point of view does shift at times. It has to, for example, in the chapters about Bob and Nancy’s marriage because Elizabeth can’t know their story. And so, there are subtle shifts between Elizabeth’s, Bob’s, Nancy’s and sometimes an omniscient viewpoint. This, I think, spreads our engagement a little thin. The book feels like it’s meant to be Elizabeth’s, but it isn’t totally, and so when the resolution comes it feels a little, well, limited.

It was nonetheless a good read … and I would certainly read more Johnson. Can’t say  better than that!

Lisa at ANZLitLovers loved it. Resident Judge enjoyed it too, and like me, saw some similarity to The corrections.

Susan Johnson
Life in seven mistakes
Sydney: Bantam, 2008
346pp
ISBN: 9781741669190