Australian literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: National Bookshop Day (Belated)

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Saturday 11 August was National Bookshop Day here down under but I decided to delay writing about it until this week’s Monday Musings as it seems a worthy subject. However, Lisa of ANZLitlovers and Louise of A Strong Belief in Wicker did their posts in a more timely way.

National Bookshop Day is a new concept here. In fact this was its second year, having been inaugurated last year by the Australian Booksellers Association. Its logo is “celebrating bookshops in the community” and its aims are, I think, both celebratory and promotional, regarding bookshops, literature and, more generally, culture. I guess it doesn’t take much thought to work out why they feel the need to have such a day, what with the internet ‘n all?

I like this comment from Bite the Book, the blog of Pages and Pages* bookshop in Mosman, Sydney:

The internet makes it easier for everyone to find what they are looking for but what a boring place the world would be and how uninteresting our lives would be if we only ever found what we were looking for. As much as I enjoy reading the next book from one of my favourite authors there is nothing quite like that feeling of reading a book you found from left field through a recommendation or the serendipity of finding it on a shelf.

I like this because it recognises that there’s no turning back the clock. Technologies change. The three-volume book gave way to the single volume, paperbacks brought book-buying to a new level, and now e-books are on the rise. The point is they are all books and one thing remains the same: People continue to read. A day that celebrates this while also promoting one of the places that we readers love the most can only be a good thing. Browsing an online store, while possible and getting smarter, is nothing like browsing a bookshop surrounded by other booklovers and by books of all shapes, sizes, colours and contents.

I’m embarrassed to say that, unlike Lisa and Louise, I did not get to a bookshop on THE day, but I do go to bookshops regularly. Bookshops have had a tough time in the national capital over that last few years with significant chain stores disappearing view: Collins, Angus and Robertson and Borders. Just two chains survive, Dymocks and QBD. It’s good to see them survive. Chain bookshops** have their place after all, but they are not my bookshops of choice. My favourites tend to be independent stores, particularly:

  • Paperchain – has the best remainder table I know, as well as other great books of course, and many author events
  • Electric Shadows – has a particular focus on film, media and the performing arts as well as a good selection of Aussie lit, and also has author events
  • Smiths Alternative – has books you don’t always find elsewhere including a good selection of translated fiction, and in line with its alternative, socially-conscious vibe, holds a variety of events in fiction, poetry and music
  • National Library of Australia’s Bookshop – is the one I frequent the most. It’s in a beautiful building belonging to our premier literary institution, specialises in Aussie literature,  and offers a generous discount to Friends of the Library. And there’s a gorgeous cafe across the foyer. What’s not to like?

Just for the record, I have recently bought books from a bookshop (the National Library one): Luke Davies‘ Interferon psalms (book of poetry, for me), Robert Newton’s When we were two (YA novel, for my nephew), and one I won’t name because it is a gift that hasn’t been bestowed yet.

Did you, if you’re Australian, attend a bookshop on National Bookshop Day? I’d love to hear about it. And, if you’re not Australian, is there something similar where you are? Are bookshops in your area thriving?

* On National Bookshop Day, Pages and Pages donated $1 for each book sold to the Indigenous Literary Foundation. Many bookshops held events, offered discounts and prizes. Let’s hope, for all their hard work, they attracted some new customers to their fold.

** My favourite chain in Australia has to be Kinokuniya. Its depth of fiction, from many nations, is simply hard to beat – but we don’t have a store in my city.

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Mary Durack on Patrick White

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I am slowly – very slowly – reading True North, Brenda Niall‘s biography of Mary and Elizabeth Durack. Life is rather getting in the way of reading at present so, contrary to my normal practice, I am going to post a Delicious Description from it before, rather than after, my review. For those of you who don’t know, Mary and Elizabeth Durack belonged to the Durack pastoral dynasty which made its name in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Mary wrote the best-selling Kings in grass castles which tells her family’s story starting with her ancestors’ migration from Ireland in mid-19th century and following them through New South Wales and Queensland to their pioneering life in the Kimberleys.

But, Mary also wrote novels – including children’s books which were illustrated by her sister Elizabeth – and worked as a journalist writing articles, columns and reviews. I loved coming across, in Niall’s book, a discussion of her review of Patrick White‘s The tree of man in Westerly, in 1957. I’m always interested to hear what writers, who are contemporaries, think of each other. I was thrilled to discover that Durack liked and appreciated White, because some literary luminaries of the time, like AD Hope and Florence James, were not impressed with his modernist style. According to Niall, Durack said that “the critic who dismisses [White’s] often broken and unfinished sentences” would also have to dismiss much of Joyce and Faulkner.

Niall also quotes this excerpt from Durack’s review:

I have little doubt that this is a book destined to become an important part of our literary tradition. It probes deep below the surface to the inner lives of men and women, the emotions, the sensations and dreams they cannot express, either through diffidence, or because they lack words in which to embody them … It is full of the beauty and poetry of nature, the turn of the seasons and the passing for the years expressed in words that ring as clear and true as the stockman’s Condamine bell.

And she was right! Not only has White entered our pantheon of writers, but he is the only Australian to date to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The more I read this book, the more I’m liking this woman…

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some favourite Aussie film adaptations (1)

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In support of Australia’s National Year of Reading the National Film and Sound Archive is, later this year, holding an exhibition on film adaptations. And that made me think about my favourite film adaptations, which in turn made me think it might be a good Monday Musings topic. So, here I am. This post will focus on films adapted from novels and short stories. I will write other posts in future on adaptations from plays and adaptations for TV.

The Australian film industry, like most, has drawn from novels, plays and stories since its early days. Some of Australia’s best known silent films are adaptations, including The sentimental bloke (1919) (CJ Dennis), On our selection (1920) (Steele Rudd), and For the term of his natural life (1927) (Marcus Clarke). For this post, however, I’ll be focusing on my favourites from the last few decades.

Are you one of those people who refuses to see a film until you’ve read the book? I’m not really, though if it’s a book I’m keen to read I do prefer to read it first. I take a pretty free and easy (wishy-washy, did I hear you say?) approach to film adaptations. That is, I don’t expect them to replicate the work they are based on and am very happy for artistic licence to be taken. Film and Literature are different media and it’s impossible, in my view, for one to replicate the other. This might sound a bit ingenuous, but I’m just not too fussed about getting my knickers in a knot over the issue. I care more about whether I enjoyed the film (and, of course, whether I enjoyed the book).

I have to admit that some (though my no means all) of my favourite Aussie film adaptations are of books or stories I haven’t read or that I read after seeing the film. However, they are still adaptations and they are films I like, so I’m going to list them here (with the work they are based on). Like all lists it’s going to be hard to limit it, but limit it I must, so here goes, in film date order …

  • Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is credited with kickstarting the renaissance of Australian film in the 1970s. It was based on a novel of the same name, by Joan Lindsay. It was quite controversial at the time – not the film itself – but the question of whether it was based on fact or not. It wasn’t! It’s a great story, beautifully filmed by Peter Weir – and has become pretty much an iconic Aussie film.
  • My Brilliant Career (1979) was based on Miles Franklin‘s novel of the same name. It was made during a period when the Australian film industry was dominated by nostalgia (or period drama). When you’re on a good thing, stick to it, and all that … but this film had something special. It spoke to the second wave of feminism in its story of Sybylla who gives up a man to stay true to her dream of being a writer, and it launched the career of pioneering woman film director, Gillian Armstrong.
  • Three dollars (2005) was based on a novel of the same name by Elliot Perlman whose latest novel, The street sweeper, I’ll be reading and reviewing  later this year. I love this film (and book, which is one of those I did read first) because it’s about a man who sticks by his principles, who won’t let corporate greed or urban apathy get in the way of his humanity despite significant cost to himself. And it starred David Wenham (aka the luscious Diver Dan from a favourite television series).
  • Jindabyne (2006) is a bit of a ring-in here because it was based not on an Australian work but on a short story by the American writer, Raymond Carver. The story is titled “So much water so close to home” and has been transplanted to Australia and overlaid with an indigenous theme, but the essential story about men who, on a fishing trip discover a dead (murdered) girl and, rather than hike out to report the death immediately, continue their trip, remains the same. It’s a taut, tight, visually beautiful film about moral responsibility.
  • The eye of the storm (2011) is based on Patrick White’s novel of the same name. White is often described as “unadaptable” – and later this year I plan to write on the saga behind an attempt to make a film of Voss. We are still waiting – though it was adapted for opera, with David Malouf the librettist. Meanwhile, I reckon The eye of the storm effectively shows that White can indeed be adapted to film. The film had an amazingly long run (in my city anyhow) for not-the-best-known book by an author generally regarded as “hard”.

These are just five of many that I’ve seen and enjoyed over the years – I might also have mentioned Bliss, Candy, Looking for Alibrandi and Romulus my father, for example – but for all those I’ve seen, I wonder about the ones that haven’t been made. Over the years, we hear books are optioned – like Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River, Thea Astley‘s Drylands, Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, and Tim Winton’s Dirt Music – and we wait, and wait, and wait to see them, but they never appear. Given that adaptations can often guarantee an audience (though perhaps less so of literary fiction), it’s surprising to me that so many of our wonderful novels have not yet been adapted. I can only wait and hope…

Meanwhile, do you enjoy film adaptations, and what are your favourites?

Melissa Lucashenko, The silent majority (Review)

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I have reviewed many individual short stories by Americans (through the Library of America), but not by Australians. Time to rectify that a little, and why not with a short story by Melissa Lucashenko, an Australian writer of European and indigenous Australian heritage. She is an award-winning novelist and an essayist, but I hadn’t read her – until now.

You might be wondering why I chose her and this story? But it’s obvious really. I was pottering around the web and came across this:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, Jo decided, that a bored teenager with a permanent marker is a pain in the bloody neck.

How could I go past it? I had to read it to see what it – and Lucashenko whom I was keen to read – was all about. It’s a short, short story, well suited, I suppose, to publication in a magazine like the Griffith Review. Jo is a single mum of indigenous heritage and during the course of the story is mowing the grounds of the cemetery in the small northeastern NSW town of Mullumbimby. Her teenage daughter Ellen is supposed to be babysitting her young nephew Timbo while Jo does her mowing but, like a teenager, gets bored and “tags” Timbo with slogans such as “Better Conditions or I ring DOCS*” and “Pay me a living wage”. The daughter is needling her mother, but there is of course double meaning for the reader in these slogans, messages about the conditions many indigenous Australians face.

The story mainly comprises Jo’s thoughts as she gets on with her mowing. She reflects on those who lie in the ground beneath her – the Protestants and Catholics, in their separate sections. They are the literal “silent majority” of the title, and she wonders about their stories, now lost with the erasure by time of their details on the gravestones. Jo wonders about

These stories that had once been so important to the town, that had needed carving in granite: where were they now.

Stories, though, are important to Jo – and, in my experience, are an important treasured part of indigenous Australian culture. Jo is a little worn by her “previous life and its discontents” in which an Eeyore-like man Gerry kept dragging her into “his tight white world”. In fact, she appears not to have much time for people, with her “favourite humans living in the pages of books” and her preferred living creatures being horses. She quotes Walt Whitman – I found that interesting – on horses:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
… not one is demented with the mania of owning things.

Hmmm … this certainly conveys to me a sense of cynicism about humans, of all colours. But the real point of the story comes in the third last paragraph, with her pondering on what the land was like before, when it was

not yet doomed by the axes and greed of men who – months and years from anything they thought of as home – had tried to slash and burn their way to freedom here.

So what we have here is a meditation, in a way, on stories and their importance, on animals and land, and on walking a line between white and indigenous culture. It’s not all melancholic, as what I’ve said here might suggest. There are some touches of humour. Overall, I was intrigued by her writing and I liked the story, though it felt a little undeveloped. I understand that Lucashenko’s next novel is set in the Mullumbimby area. I wonder whether this story is part of it – or, at least, whether Jo appears in it. I hope so.

Melissa Lucashenko
“The silent majority”
Published in the Griffith Review, Edition 26, November 2009
Available: Online at the Griffith Review

*The Department of Community Services which is feared by struggling parents for fear their children will be taken away.

Monday musings on Australian literature: It’s all about sport, or is it?

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I’ve written previous Monday Musings on themes and motifs in Aussie literature – like the lost child, the beach, mountains and even sheep – so, with the Olympics now on, it seemed appropriate to add sport to this list.

Whether we all like it or not, Australia has somewhat of a reputation for being a sports-focused country. We’ve had our moments in the sun as a cricketing nation, a tennis nation, a swimming nation, a golfing nation, and so on. We’ve even won the Tour de France and the America’s Cup! Given all this, I started to wonder last weekend about how sport has been presented in our literature … and I must say I struggled to come up with many examples (from my own reading anyhow). This will be a short post, methinks, but it has to be done!

My first encounter with sport in Aussie literature was in my childhood, through ballads. My two favourite examples are Thomas E Spencer’s “How McDougall topped the score” (1898) and Banjo Paterson‘s “The Geebung Polo Club” (1893). The former is a comic poem about a country cricket match between two towns. It celebrates the triumph of the underdog (a popular Aussie theme) through (bush) cunning. While Spencer’s poem is about one of Australia’s most popular sports, “The Geebung Polo Club” is about a far less widespread sport, polo (of course). Polo works as an effective vehicle for depicting another common theme in Australian culture, the ordinary man versus the toff (which, in this poem, is compounded by the country versus the city conflict). The ballad also celebrates the “never say die” spirit, and is what I’d call a tragicomedy. I can’t resist giving you a flavour:

Here are the Geebungs:

But their style of playing polo was irregular and rash –
They had mighty little science, but a mighty lot of dash:
And they played on mountain ponies that were muscular and strong,
Though their coats were quite unpolished, and their manes and tails were long.

And here is a description of their opponents, the Cuff and Collar team:

For the members were distinguished by exclusiveness and dress.
They had natty little ponies that were nice, and smooth, and sleek,
For their cultivated owners only rode ’em once a week.
So they started up the country in pursuit of sport and fame,
For they meant to show the Geebungs how they ought to play the game;

You get the drift, I’m sure.

The next work dealing with sport that comes to my mind is a play (later made into a film) by Australia’s best known contemporary playwright, David Williamson. Much of his work is satirical and his play The club (1977) is a great example. The sport in question is a particular type of football, Australian Rules, and the play explores the tensions between commercialism and traditional club loyalties, which, reminding me of “The Geebung Polo Club”, also translates into an exploration of class conflict. More broadly, though, it is about the struggle for power, something Williamson explores in other settings besides sport.

Okay, so I’ve discussed a couple of poems (ballads) and a play, but when I turn to literary fiction my mind goes pretty blank. There is Tim Winton‘s Miles Franklin Award winning novel Breath (2009). It’s about surfing, and is primarily about masculinity and risk-taking. Winton’s interest is more psychological than the socio-political explorations of the other works I’ve mentioned. And there’s Gillian Mears‘ recent novel, Foal’s bread, about horse high jumping. As I wrote in my review, I loved the way it, like Breath, introduced me in the most visceral way to a sport I have never experienced. It draws on some of the themes from those 19th century ballads – in particular the hardship of country life – but while they tend to romanticise the lives they depict, Mears’ work, while having an element of the heroic about it, also deals with the struggle to survive, psychologically as well as physically.

There are many novels in which sport appears (like say, Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones) but not many, that I can dredge up, for which sport provides the principal setting. Is this because sportspeople and writers tend to be diametrically opposed? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and whether you have any favourite novels in which sport is centre stage.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2012

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National Library of Australia

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

Last year I attended and reported on the post-announcement panel for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, held at the National Library of Australia. I attended again this year and, since it occurred today, Monday, I’ve decide to devote this week’s Monday musings to it.

First, the winners:

  • Fiction: Gillian Mears‘ Foal’s bread (My review)
  • Poetry: Luke Davies‘ Interferon psalms
  • Young adult fiction: Robert Newton’s When we were two
  • Children’s fiction: writer Frances Watts and illustrator Judy Watson’s (illus.) Goodnight, mice!
  • Non-fiction: Mark McKenna’s An eye for eternity: The life of Manning Clark
  • History: Bill Gammage‘s The biggest estate on earth: How aborigines made Australia

Last year’s four awards were expanded to six this year by rolling the separate Prime Minister’s History Prize into them and, hallelujah, adding in a prize for Poetry. The awards are, I believe, the most generous of Australia’s publicly funded awards, providing $80,000 to each winner and $5,000 to each shortlisted author.

The panel members were Luke, Robert, Mark and Judy. Unfortunately, Bill Gammage is currently overseas, and Gillian Mears who suffers from multiple sclerosis had attended the announcement but needed to rest before her afternoon engagements. I was disappointed not to see her but of course can’t begrudge her putting her health first. The panel was chaired by local ABC radio announcer Louise Maher.

I won’t summarise the whole panel but just cherry pick a few interesting thoughts and ideas that came out of it. During a discussion about the writing process, in which Robert Newton said that he when he starts writing he rarely knows where his story is going to end, Mark McKenna offered a favourite quote from David Malouf:

I don’t write to record what I know. I write to find out what I know.

I like this. It makes me feel that we readers are on a journey with the author rather than being told what to think by the author.

There was, of course, the usual discussion about the impact of technology on books and reading and, while the responses weren’t quite as conservative as I felt they were last year, there still seems to be some resistance to thinking positively about change. I understand that. Livelihoods – of writers, publishers and booksellers – are at stake BUT, whether we like it or not, the change is coming (is here, in fact) and so our best chance is to embrace it.

Louise approached the question from a slightly different angle by asking how reading, which takes effort and time, fits into contemporary culture. Mark believes that the one-on-one aspect of reading is under threat, due I suppose to competition from other stimuli, and said that awards like these are important because they can bring more readers to books. (This point was, in fact, a bit of a mantra for him.) He suggested that the act of reading, the way we read, is changing and that the solitary experience is becoming rare. He noted that in just a few more decades the majority of people around will not have grown up with books the way we in the audience had. Their experience and expectations will be different, and books are likely to be produced in different formats with content and presentation varying between the formats. Mark also made the significant point that much of the change that is occurring is in the culture around the book rather than in reading itself, and I guess he’s right. The way books are sold – and published – is changing. Electronic books can’t be physically browsed in a bookshop. It’s not easy to lend an electronic book. You can’t get your electronic book signed. And so on …

Rob’s response that reading and technology will have to grow together was a pragmatic one. But he also commented, regarding the effort involved in reading, that he likes “the idea of books making kids work a bit”. Judy talked of inculcating a reading habit with children when they are young, and said she limits her (young) children’s time with technology. I liked Luke’s honesty when he said that attention span is the issue and that he can see it in himself, that he finds himself being drawn too often to “fiddly” little things on the Internet, like favourite blogs, and away from concentrated reading. But, he also said that he believes that our “emotional and spiritual” relationship with words will always be there. That makes sense. The forms and formats might change but our love affair with words and the ideas they express surely won’t! As one person said, we need to respect the new forms but recognise that the story, the empathy, will always be the thing.

There was a question from the floor late in the session regarding what difference the monetary prize would make to their lives. The answers weren’t really surprising but were interesting nonetheless:

  • Luke, who admitted to being more broke now than he has been for many decades, said he will pay off his debts and that the remaining money will give him a buffer enabling him to say no to jobs that he “shouldn’t” be doing, that aren’t, he said a little self-consciously, in response to his muse.
  • Rob said he’d buy a new surfboard and a laptop with working shift and caps lock keys, and that he’d consider taking some time off from his job as a firefighter to write full-time.
  • Mark said it would buy a little financial independence and provide some seed money for his new book, which will tell the history of Australia through some selected places that he will need to visit.
  • Judy also said it would take off some of the financial pressure and allow her to work on what she wants to rather than on jobs “for the money”.

A great session. I thank the National Library for again providing the opportunity for members of the public to “meet” the authors this way, and I thank the authors for giving up their precious writing time to talk with us!

Monday musings on Australian literature: The sheep’s back

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As a baby-boomer, I grew up knowing that Australia “rode on the sheep’s back”, that our economy, in other words, was based on the wool trade. It’s not quite so now – though wool is still an important product – but I was reminded of the saying last weekend as we were introducing a young American to a little bit of country Australia. We were, in fact, focused on one of our wine regions, but it was the sheep that she particularly noticed.

Sheep among the vines at Stanton and Killeen

Sheep among the vines at Stanton and Killeen, Rutherglen

This made me think about sheep in Australian literature/culture. How do (did) they feature, given the role that they’ve played in our “wealth for toil”. Rather negatively, in fact. Horses and cattle-droving are romantic, and often feature in Australian outback novels and ballads, with a sense of heroism (as in “The man from Snowy River”). Sheep and shearing don’t quite cut it in the same way. They too can be romanticised, but more in the “rough diamond” category rather than the “heroic” one.

One of the best known Australian songs/ballads to feature sheep is “Click go the shears” which describes the hard work of the shearer, the various roles played in the shearing shed (the “boss”, the “tar-boy”, the “old shearer”, the inexperienced “snagger”) and the drinking at the pub when it’s all done. The other, more famous song featuring sheep is of course “Waltzing Matilda” about the swagman who steals a sheep (the “jolly jumbuck”) to eat. The song, written by Banjo Paterson, was probably inspired by the hardships endured by shearers during and after the Great Shearers’ Strike of 1891. It depicts the class division in Australian society between the “battler” (or working-class man) and the “squatter” (or, landowner).

And this reminds me of a novel I reviewed early in this blog’s history, William Lane’s The workingman’s paradise, a social realist novel which explored both urban poverty  (Sydney) and rural hardship (Queensland shearers). The novel is set in Sydney, but the plight of the shearers is a major theme. Another, much later novel, Jeremy Chambers’ The vintage and the gleaning, is set in the vineyards of northeast Victoria (where this post’s photo was taken) but is narrated by Smithy, who had been a shearer for 47 years before becoming a vineyard worker. Smithy rues his years of hard-drinking (see “Click go the shears” above!) and its impact on his health. A third Australian work to focus on the rough, hard side of the shearer’s lot (alongside its mateship aspects) is the movie Sunday Too Far Away. Hard drinking features here too, in a story about shearers fighting to retain their bonuses against the threat of non-union shearers.

There are other “takes” on sheep, however. One is the film Babe, that was filmed in Australia but based on English writer Dick King-Smith‘s children’s novel, The sheep-dog. It’s a romanticised pastoral story about a pig that herds sheep like a sheep-dog. King-Smith’s (English) sheep are intelligent and manipulative, quite different from the typical description of sheep in Australian literature. Another, more interesting depiction, though, comes from Jeanine Leane’s Purple threads which I reviewed earlier this month. In that review I commented on Leane’s use of sheep symbolism. Her book is set in a sheep farming area. The narrator sees her indigenous family’s practice of adopting the black sheep that are spurned by the farmers as reflecting Jesus’ teachings about charity and inclusiveness. It’s pretty obvious, I suppose, but I liked the way she makes her point by mixing Christian symbolism with something symbolising anglo-Australia’s encroachment on her people’s country.

But I can’t resist returning to Banjo Paterson, my favourite bush poet, to close today’s post. He wrote a piece called “The merino sheep”, which you can read online. He describes the sheep as a “dangerous monomaniac” whose “one idea is to ruin the man who owns him” and concludes with:

The hard, resentful look on the faces of all bushmen comes from a long course of dealing with merino sheep. The merino dominates the bush, and gives to Australian literature its melancholy tinge, its despairing pathos. The poems about dying boundary-riders, and lonely graves under mournful she-oaks, are the direct outcome of the poet’s too close association with that soul-destroying animal. A man who could write anything cheerful after a day in the drafting-yards would be a freak of nature.

Oh dear … and I thought it was caused by heat, aridity and remoteness!

Anyhow, if you are Australian, I’d love to hear of other references to sheep in our literary (or cultural) life that have struck you (as my discussion here is brief and limited). And, if you are not Australian, does this post inspire any thoughts about ongoing motifs in your own national literature?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Who is Colin Roderick?

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Regular readers here will know that a couple of recent Monday musings were based on two books written in the late 1940s surveying Australian literature. At the time of writing those posts, I’d never heard of the man behind those books, one Colin Roderick. I soon learnt, though, that he was a somewhat significant figure in 20th century Australian literature. In fact, according to Peter Pierce*, in his obituary for Roderick in 2000, “no other figure has been more influential in giving intellectual rigour and self-belief to Australian literature”. Wow … this is clearly someone I should know at least something about I thought. And so I did a little research and discovered some interesting things.

I didn’t know, for example, that there is a Colin Roderick Award. It was established in 1967 by James Cook University’s Foundation for Australian Literary Studies which Roderick founded. The award is presented annually, and has been won by many writers I’ve reviewed here, such as Deborah Robertson, Peter Temple, Tim Winton, Ruth Park, Peter Carey, Alan Gould and Thea Astley. It is not limited to fiction, so, for example, Don Watson has also won for his book on Paul Keating, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, and Peter Rose for his memoir, Rose boys.

This is great – I’m a believer in literary awards – but, what struck me was the award’s criterion: “the best book published in Australia which deals with any aspect of Australian life”. Now, if you are an Australian literary award watcher, this will ring a bell – and the bell is the criterion for our premier award, the Miles Franklin Award. Its criterion is “the best Australian published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases”. It’s not totally surprising, I suppose, that awards created in Australia be targeted to Australian published books about Australia. But there is something particularly interesting about this case, because …

Colin Roderick was one of the original judges for the Miles Franklin Award. In fact, the terms of Miles Franklin’s will set out the first judging panel for the Award. According to the Miles Franklin Award website, the panel was to include “the then Mitchell Librarian at the State Library of New South Wales; two representatives of Angus & Robertson publishers, Beatrice Davis and Colin Roderick; the poet Ian Mudie and George Williams, Miles’ accountant.” Colin Roderick remained a judge from the first award in 1957 to 1991 when, according to Peter Pierce, “he resigned in acrimonious circumstances over the definition of what constituted a work of Australian fiction”. Ah, awards controversies! Don’t you love them? Patrick Allington wrote an article about the award, including a discussion of this affair, in the Australian Book Reviewof June 2011. I won’t go into details – you can find Allington’s article (a pdf) online – but apparently Roderick felt that Nicholas Jose’s The avenue of eternal peace, that was on the 1990 shortlist, should not have been eligible (though he apparently felt it was a better book than the winner).

This controversy aside, Roderick played a significant role during his life in promoting Australian literature through much of the mid to late 20th century. Allington describes his “career long commitment to Australian literature”, a commitment that can be demonstrated through his:

  • work as an editor (and later director) of Australia’s then premier publisher of Australian literature, Angus & Robertson, for around 20 years
  • role in the movement to establish a chair in Australian literature at Sydney University
  • creation of the Foundation of Australian Literary Studies (and the associated annual Colin Roderick Award and Colin Roderick Lecture) in 1966
  • role as a Miles Franklin judge
  • prolific, wide-ranging writings on Australian literature including critical and biographical works on Rosa Praed, Miles Franklin (whom he knew), and Henry Lawson.

This is not to say he was universally revered. Even Miles Franklin, who chose him for her first judging panel, wrote to Angus & Robertson’s most famous editor, Beatrice Davis:

You can measure how much I miss you when I say that Roderick seems the flower of the flock to me there now, and I’m glad of his friendly welcome till he spoils it by some literary obtusity.

Oh well, we all have our feet of clay. I’ll be returning to Colin Roderick’s books on Australian literature in future – and when I do, at least we’ll all know a bit about him.

* The obituary was published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 17 June 2000.

Australian Women Writers 2012 Challenge completed

/ Whispering Gums / 16 Comments
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