Australian literature

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Alan Gould on the Monaro (and thereabouts)

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments
Tharwa - Angle Crossing, New South Wales
Monaro country after the 2003 fires

While I love reading to escape to other places and times, other cultures and ways of being, I also enjoy reading about the familiar, about places I know and experiences I’ve had. Alan Gould, whose The lakewoman I reviewed recently, is a local writer. The lakewoman, in fact,  is primarily set in England, France and Germany, but  the hero Alec Dearborn does return to Australia towards the end, and before that often thinks or talks about it. His Australia is the country surrounding where I live, an area we call the Monaro, to be exact.

Here are some descriptions from The lakewoman that describe this region;

He went on to describe the Murrumbidgee River that flowed beside The Dad’s place, how it used to run flush after rain, with the brown waters mounting each other like so many panicky sheep in a pen. How it might be a trickle at the end of a summer without rain, like glassy infrequent spillages between rocks.

and

Sometimes he would try to describe his part of Australia, the streaky, silvery, airy, dry spaces of his pastured and lightly timbered country, sheep standing immobile in fog as the crows called mournfully through the whiteness.

and

How, for instance, a Monaro mist would transform a big brittlegum into a delta of pale grey veins against the white. Or how the last hour of sunlight in this airy woodland could angle so searchingly under the foliage to suffuse the planet’s surface with aureolin gold.

This is not verdant country, nor is it particularly welcoming. But, it is spacious, golden and airy – and it lifts my heart whenever I drive through it. Gould captures its particular variety perfectly.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest authors at the Sydney Writers’ Festival

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Regular readers of Monday musings will remember that a recent post in the series was inspired by the Qantas flight magazine, The Australian way. Well, I’ve been in the air again … this time for a longer trip, as Mr Gums and I have again left daughter and dog in charge at home, and are holidaying in Japan. Of course I read The Australian way again, and in the May 2011 issue found an article about guest authors who will be attending this month’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. Now this, I thought, could make for an interesting Monday musings post. It’s not really about Australian literature but it is about some writers who’ll be attending an Australian literary event. The premise of the article is that its author, Paul Robinson, asked the authors to share their “literary discoveries”, and so I thought I could share them with you. I’ll say straight off though that I’m not familiar with all the authors mentioned. Would love to hear if you are, and what you think of them.

  •  Ingrid Betancourt, author of Even silence has an end: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The feast of the goat. Having read this one recently, I can concur with this discovery!
  • Fatima Bhutto, author of Songs of blood and sword: Colombian author Hector Abad’s Oblivion.
  • Philippa Fioretti, author of The fragment of dreams: Gay Talese’s The sons (1992).
  • Emma Forrest, author of Your voice in my head: Tom Rachman‘s The imperfectionists. I’ve seen this one reviewed around the blogs and have my eye on it for my TBR.
  • A A Gill, author of Here & there: Collected travel writing: Simon Sebag Montefiore‘s Jerusalem: A biography, and the complete works of H L Mencken.
  • A C Grayling, author of The good book: Dale Peterson’s The moral life of animals, and Michael Shirmer’s The believing brain.
  • Howard Jacobson, author of last year’s Booker Prize winner, The Finkler question: Milan Kundera‘s essay “The curtain”, and Ian Mackillop’s F R Leavis: A life in criticism.
  • David Mitchell, author of The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet: Simon Lelic’s The facility.
  • Favel Parrett, author of Past the shallows: Chris Wolmersley’s Bereft. (Ah, someone has nominated an Australian book.)

There you have it. Not much about Australian literature, but these are the people who’ll be speaking about books and writing to Australians this month – and that has to be interesting, hasn’t it?

POSTSCRIPT: This was supposed to have been published on Monday, but I made a mistake in the scheduling, so it is now Monday musings on Wednesday. Traveller’s brain!

Talking with Alan Gould

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments
Joseph Conrad
Conrad, 1904, a favourite writer for Gould (Photo: George Charles Beresford, Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

I didn’t say in my recent review of Alan Gould‘s The lakewoman that Gould attended my reading group’s discussion of his book. I had so much to say – so many thoughts – about the book, that I thought I’d save a report on his comments for another post, so here goes … but first …

Becky of PageTurners wrote a post recently on the impact of having an author attend a reading group discussion of his/her book. She suggested that it can be hard for group members to be honest when the author is present. That’s true of course. Few of us are willing to “attack” an author face to face, particularly when we see what heart (not to mention sheer sweat) has gone into writing the book under discussion. Fortunately, being honest didn’t seem to be a big issue in my reading group’s discussion with Alan Gould. Some found it slow at the start, and some asked him about the resolution, but all seemed to have enjoyed the book and his writing as a whole. For me, having an author present can add benefits that outweigh this honesty concern. See what you think from this report of our meeting with an author, because Gould, like Halligan when she joined us for her book, was articulate and generous in sharing his ideas with us.

Gould on his influences

  • Joseph Conrad (and, before him, Emily Bronte), who taught him about timing, something Gould plays particular attention to in his writing. I particularly liked the timing and pacing in The lakewoman, but I wrote a little about that in my review so won’t go on about it here.
  • Thomas Hardy, who uses coincidence, arguing that it’s coincidence that makes a story a story, if you know what I mean. Gould did say though that Hardy tended to use coincidence in a realist setting, whereas for him coincidence helped create the sense of magic or enchantment. He said his aim was to use coincidence in a way that would be psychologically or practically plausible but that also added a sense of mystery. One of the things I enjoyed about the novel was its somewhat mystical tone – the sense that things were occurring on a slightly “higher” plane than pure logic.
  • Shakespeare, who taught him that the key to writing a novel is to quickly establish “the calibre of the character’s intelligence”, that is what makes that character tick, what his/her mind is like. He gave Iago as an example and explained how Shakespeare establishes early on “who” Iago is. This is certainly what Gould does with Alec Dearborn in the novel. We get into his head quite early and gain a clear understanding of what sort of person he is and why he might be open to Viva’s influence.
  • Roger McDonald, an Australian novelist, who encouraged him to try writing a novel (instead of poetry) by saying that “a novel begins with a sentence”. Gould then talked about a few of his books and how this idea works for him. This first sentence, he said, does not always end up being the first sentence of the book but it is the kernel that gets him going.

Gould on writing novels versus poetry

Gould started as a poet and now writes both. He told us that he writes them alternately, that he can’t write poetry and a novel concurrently, because it’s like “changing from an art form tilted to music to one tilted to history”. He further explained this as being related to “time”. Poetry is a case of “and now and now and now” while novels are more “and then and then and then”. I’d love to hear what you think of this. I found it an interesting concept, though my first reaction was to think “but…” And yet I think I see his point, at least in general terms because of course there are always exceptions. Poetry is, I suppose, often about capturing a moment, while a novel does usually cover a period of time with at least some elements of cause-and-effect (even those novels, like Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs Dalloway or McEwan’s Saturday that take place in a day).

Gould on The lakewoman

And of course, he talked about the book, in particular. It was inspired he said by the poet David Campbell, though Alec Dearborn is not Campbell. Rather, it is Campbell’s combination of physicality (he, like Dearborn, was a rugby player) and “a lyric sensibility” that Gould tried (successfully I think) to capture.

He also wanted to write a “romance” in the old sense of the word. He defines this as being about a hero on a quest, who thinks he knows what he’s about until he meets someone who shakes up this idea. Viva is this catalyst for Alec. She is an utterly practical woman – something we see played out through the novel from the way she saves Alec from drowning at the beginning to how she plans to conceive a child towards the end – and yet she has an aura of enchantment, starting from that first moment when she appears by the lake as he lands from the sky!

He said a lot more – particularly about some of the images and motifs he used in the novel – but I’ve probably written enough, so I’ll just share his answer to my last question, which was about his favourite contemporary writers. After prevaricating a bit on the definition of contemporary, he named the following Australian writers and books: Inga Clendinnen (not a novelist), Helen Hodgman’s Blue skies, Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, Kate Jennings’ Snake, Christina Stead’s For love alone, Randolph Stow, and Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. No wonder I enjoyed his novel, he has great taste.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Popular Penguins at a Perfect Price

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

Penguin with No. 1 ribbon

Since Penguin never responds to my copyright queries (Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

You all know Penguin Books – and perhaps something about the company’s origin. The story goes that Allen Lane, standing on a train platform in 1935 and not being able to find “something good” to read, decided that there existed “a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price”. He staked all he had, apparently, and a publishing giant was born.

Over time though, prices have climbed and so a few years ago, Penguin decided to introduce plain covered (much like the original orange and white covers) editions of popular titles. The first set was published (here, anyhow) in September 2008. The price, in Australia dollars, $9.95. I like them – their bindings are easy to open, they are light and easy to carry, they look classic, and they are inexpensive. What’s not to like?

Content-wise – and fair enough, since reading should not be not an exclusively nationalistic activity – the majority of the offerings are non-Australian. However, each release of new titles includes a small selection by Australian authors, and it is these that I look out for and buy if I don’t already have them (because some nationalism is good!). Here is a list of what I believe are the currently available Australian titles published as Popular Penguins:

  • Astley, Thea It’s Raining in Mango
  • Carmody, Isobelle Obernewtyn
  • Clarke, Marcus For the Term of His Natural Life
  • Conigrave, Timothy Holding the Man
  • Courtenay, Bryce Power of One
  • Cracknell, Ruth Journey from Venice
  • Drewe, Robert Bodysurfers
  • Drewe, Robert Our Sunshine
  • Garner, Helen Monkey Grip
  • Garner, Helen Postcards from Surfers
  • Hartnett, Sonya Of a Boy
  • Hartnett, Sonya Surrender
  • Horne, Donald Lucky Country
  • Hyland, M.J. How the Light Gets In
  • Jolley, Elizabeth The Well
  • Leunig, Michael Curly Verse: Selected Poems
  • Lindsay, Joan Picnic at Hanging Rock
  • Marshall, Alan I Can Jump Puddles
  • Niland, D’Arcy Shiralee
  • Park, Ruth Playing Beatie Bow
  • Park, Ruth Harp in the South
  • Richardson, Henry Handel Getting of Wisdom
  • Stow, Randolph Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
  • Turner, Ethel Seven Little Australians
  • Winton, Tim In the Winter Dark

That’s twenty-five titles, mostly novels, but some non-fiction as well as poetry and short stories. A couple of the novels are children’s or young adult.

The temptation of course is to quibble with choices like this, to argue for one’s favourites, or on other grounds for why some other title/s may be more worthy … but why bother? The point is that it’s good to see an interesting variety of Australian titles being re-published in an affordable format – and, since the series seems to be popular, we can only expect that more Aussie titles will be published in the future. Meanwhile, non-Australian readers looking for Australian titles to read would not go too far wrong by choosing (according to their own interests) from this list.

A little postscript

I’m (well Whispering Gums, anyhow, is) 2 years old today. I can’t quite believe how quickly these two years have gone. It’s been great fun writing this blog, responding to comments on it, and reading the blogs of those I’ve met through blogging. Thanks a bunch for sharing your thoughts and ideas. And thanks especially to those who helped me get going in my early days. You know who you are and, while I won’t out you here, I want you to know that I greatly appreciate you! Roll on year 3 …

Elizabeth Jolley, Diary of a weekend farmer

/ Whispering Gums / 9 Comments

Elizabeth Jolley's Diary of a weekend farmer

Bookcover (Image courtesy Fremantle Arts Centre Press)

I took 2 valium and went to bed early (Monday 12th October, 1970)

Elizabeth Jolley’s Diary of a weekend farmer is one quirky memoir (if you can call it that). And yet it is, really, exactly what you might expect from a writer who rarely wrote the expected!

It is a slim volume – illustrated with warm, shimmery paintings by West Australian artist, Evelyn Kotai. The diary entries were written by Jolley at irregular intervals from 1970 to 1974 (probably), and are accompanied by poems by Jolley, plus the occasional contribution from her husband Leonard and daughter Ruth. Some of the entries are reflective

… being on this piece of land makes me feel very much aware of the shortness of life, I mean our human life in comparison with the land and the big old trees. (from Monday 6th [September, 1971] continued)

while others are factual

Ruth and I tried to plant tomatoes ground too dry and hard. (from 10th November 1970)

As you can see, little care (or perhaps a lot of care – how are we to know?) is taken with punctuation.

Jolley’s trademark wry, or even wicked, comments are in evidence

Next door’s place has been well cleared and conquered I think the word should be … (from 11th November 1970)

There is, in fact, a tiny plot running through the book and it has to do with the “neighbour woman”. She appears regularly as a rather ambiguous presence who doesn’t respect Elizabeth and her city-slicking family, and their farming endeavours, but offers some useful advice at times. Much of this “plot” is carried though a poem (“Neighbour Woman on the Fencing Wire”) which continues in sections throughout the book:

I suppose you didn’t notice last Sunday evening
you left your rake and mattock out …
(from “Continuation from the Fencing Wire”)

This woman is a little thorn in Jolley’s side – always pointing our her failings – and yet at the end, Jolley’s underlying compassion becomes evident as she writes of the “neighbour woman’s death” and her husband’s grief:

… and I understood I was face to face with someone who really loved the neighbour woman and that he would never get over something that is brushed aside in the word bereavement. (from No date required)

But, what this little volume particularly shows is her love of the land – along with her recognition of its challenges. Here’s one example:

Is it an alien place resisting or is it retreating from all our human endeavour. And then the doves fly up glowing in the rising sun and the sound from their wings is like a tiny clapping. (from Monday 25th February, 1973).

There is a very Jolley-esque tension here between an almost mystical beauty and a power that is not always benign.

And here is a reference to gums and their widow-making capability:

The wind moves the trees great branches fall
In the wind or in the stillness
A few feet nearer and I should have been crushed
Into the greater stillness.
(from “Great Branches Fall”)

These diary entries were made before her first book, Five acre virgin, and other stories, was published in 1976, though she’d had individual short  stories published from the 1960s on. When I read memoirs by writers, I look (of course) for references to writing. There is not much here, though. Besides the mention of something her husband said as being “a very good 1st sentence”, the main reference to her writing is this:

I finished the story “Pear Tree Dance” for the BBC, an idyllic ending! The newspaper of Claremont Street contains the grim and sinister side of things. (from 19th August 1971)

She’s right about that. Newspaper is one of my favourites of hers but it is rather grim. It was not published until 1981 … and is about a woman who wanted her own piece of land. I think I’ll leave it here – and let you ponder that idea!

Elizabeth Jolley
Diary of a weekend farmer
South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993
ISBN: 1863680438
95pp

Alan Gould, The lakewoman: A romance

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

Alan Gould, The lakewoman

Book cover (Courtesy: Australian Scholarly Publishing P/L)

I’m a little embarrassed to say that until The lakewoman was shortlisted in the 2010 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, I only knew of Alan Gould as a poet. Turns out, though, that he has written several novels, of which this one is his most recent. It is, ostensibly, a war novel, in that much of it is set in or around World War 2, but it is not in fact about the war.

It’s an intriguing book that slides literally and metaphorically between the solidity of the earth and the fluidity of water, between pragmatism and magic (or enchantment). It tells the story of Alec Dearborn, an Australian grazier’s son who was born in 1918. He goes to Cambridge in England and, when the war starts, decides to join up with the British Army rather than return home. The novel starts with his having landed in a lake, after parachuting from a plane for the D-Day Invasion. He is drowning, dragged down by his weapons bag and parachute, but is rescued by – yes – a lady in a lake. Ha! Now you see why it is called a “romance” because, while it contains “a” romance, it also hearkens back to the “romances” of yore, like the Arthurian legend. Here is the set up, pp. 2-3:

As he vomited he also wondered why this sudden young Mamzelle happened to be present at the exact, unlikely spot in France where his foolish body had come to earth. It was a question that would usefully occupy his mind later, when he was behind the wire with the austere leisure to brood on the magic that settled into his life following this, his fluky rescue. Magic? He was not a fellow given to outlandish notions, and would interrogate the dubious word, looking for its sense, not in mumbo jumbo, but as some friable quantity existing within the very crevices of everyday occasions.

In this passage, we see how carefully Gould has laid out his novel. He introduces us to the ideas of coincidence (fluke) and magic versus the everyday business of living, and he uses foreshadowing to distract us from plot issues (what will happen next) towards more interior ones (what is the meaning of what happens). As the novel progresses, this fellow who is not given “to outlandish notions” finds himself drawn, almost telepathically (it seems), to his rescuer. She , Viva, rather like the Arthurian lady-in-the-lake, frames the rest of his life, one way or another.

What happens on the surface of the novel is fairly matter-of-fact. Alec’s life runs its course in a mostly unremarkable way. One of the central questions of the book is that which Alec poses to his sister, Bell, a little while after he returns to Australia:

What I can’t work out is […] Well, how a person knows whether the existence he’s been given has been of value to anyone else.

This is Alec’s conundrum. He does not fulfil the traditional expectations of a grazier’s son (“Dearborn”, after all), despite his “prospects” : he’s intelligent, sensitive, and physically capable (“the dynamism in balance with the dreaminess”). Much of this failure stems from his being “disarmed” on June 6, 1944, by Viva. There are some lovely, appropriate wordplays in the novel, and one of these centres on the idea of disarming/arming, which works beautifully against the novel’s military background:

‘If you think about me, then, when you are gone, I will be arming you still,’ she assured him, mysteriously.

Soon after he leaves her, he ponders what has occurred:

‘I feel distress at having relinquished you,’ he supplied on consideration. For it was distress, he recognised, to be walking away from this sudden new claim on his life. ‘It is this that has disarmed me, I reckon,’ he explained for her.

I will be arming you, she reminded.

It is difficult with this WordPress theme to get the formatting right: this last statement by her is in italics in the novel and suggests either his memory of her words or an actual telepathic communication. Which one it is, is one of the lasting ambiguities of the novel. Italics are used throughout the novel for “communications” like this and for interior monologues/reflections, usually Alec’s, since this is a third person narrative, told mostly from Alec’s point of view.

By now you may be thinking that this novel is a fantasy, even a romantic fantasy, but not so. Neither is it magical realist. It’s simply that there is a sense that slightly mystical things may be happening, things that make sense psychologically but that also convey another plane of human thought and behaviour. It reminded me, at times, of Patrick White‘s Voss, but to suggest more than that would be to do it a disservice because it is not at all derivative. Rather, it is simply that the story focuses on a dimension of experience that can’t always be logically explained but that is nonetheless very real. Gould has, I think, pulled this dichotomy off, by careful manipulation of tone: through language that is poetic but not overdone; a pacing that is meditatively slow at the beginning and pragmatically faster at the end; evocative chapter titles (such as “To Fling the Lovely Foolish Body”, “Had You Down Dead”); the occasional light touch (“‘You are the invasion?’, she asked”); and timing that foreshadows just enough to make sure we stay focused on the ideas and not the facts.

And for me, the main idea (the one that provides an “undercurrent” to all the others) is that of completing the self, which is something Alec struggles  to do. In the end though:

…the joy, the completion was her presence, and the talk was strangely superfluous. Yet by convention they did talk from some region of the mind where the words did not especially matter but the proximity of the person created an entirety of being.

This is a rather melancholic, but by no means sentimental, book – and it moved me deeply.

Alan Gould
The lakewoman
North Melbourne: Arcadia, 2009
296pp.
ISBN: 9781921509346

Monday musings on Australian literature: Literary Folk

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

Jason and Chloe Roweth perform

Local folkies Chloe and Jason Roweth, in the Trocadero venue, 2011

As I attended my 13th or 14th (losing count now), National Folk Festival* this Easter weekend, I started to think about the relationship between folk music and literature. Some folk music is purely instrumental – think Celtic fiddling and bluegrass picking, for example – but, as a reader, it’s the storytelling side of folk that most draws me in. From traditional English folk songs to bush ballads, from the love songs of singer-songwriters to protest music, folkies tell stories that are sad, romantic, tragic, funny or angry, so  I thought that for today’s Monday Musings I’d write about a very select few Aussie folk musicians whose stories I’ve enjoyed.

Eric Bogle (b. 1944)

Bogle, though Scottish born, is now one of the grand old men of Australian folk. His most famous song is the antiwar song “And the band played Waltzing Matilda“. Another antiwar song, “No man’s land” (also known as “The green fields of France”) was, he told us at this year’s Festival, described by Tony Blair as his favourite war poem. Here’s the last verse:

And I can’t help but wonder, now Willie McBride
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you ‘The Cause’?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Not all Bogle’s songs, by any means, are about war, but this seemed a particularly appropriate one for today’s Monday Musings which happens to fall on ANZAC Day.

Margret RoadKnight (b. 1943)

If Bogle is one of the grand old men of Australian folk, Margret Roadknight is a grand old dame. Each year I think I won’t go see her this time because I saw her last year and there are no many to see, but I usually find myself gravitating yet again to one of her concerts, and I’m never disappointed. The woman just keeps on keeping on the way folkies – like Bogle, Pete Seeger (with whom she’s performed), Joan Baez and ilk – do. She sings her own compositions and those of others. Like most folkies she tells stories about her songs, about why she wrote them or sings them. She’s a social justice activist, but the lyrics I’ll excerpt today come from her “big” hit of the 1970s, “Girls in our town” (written by Bob Hudson):

Girls in our town get no help from their men
No one can let them be sixteen again
Things might get better but it’s hard to say when
If they only had someone to talk to…

The Fagans

If Eric is the grand … well you get the drift … the Fagans have to be Australia’s royal family of folk. It’s a rare festival that you don’t find them together, and/or subsets thereof, performing. They regularly appear in the Union Concert so you can guess that a major theme for them is justice for workers. But, just to be perverse, I’m going to give you an excerpt from Kate Fagan’s plaintive depression era waltz, “Old station sisters”:

Another year passed, we were sweethearts by then,
The government came and they called up our men
To work in the cities, the factories and mines,
The country had no time for dancing.
With three younger sisters, parents to feed
And land that was broken from drought and disease,
Well he had no choice …

Jason and Chloe Roweth

Husband-and-wife team, Jason and Chloe Roweth are folklorists. They research and present Australian folklore, as well as perform original songs. For this year’s festival, which encompassed ANZAC Day, they reprised their show The riderless horse about the First World War. It is the result of significant research into the letters and diaries, not to mention the music and poems, of the era – and finds a good, if traditional, balance, between humour, tragedy and patriotism. The focus is the humanity of war – rather than the history and the deeds. One of the themes that runs through any stories of Australians at war is their anti-authoritarian/egalitarian stance (which was often at loggerheads with the British way of doing things). Here is an excerpt from “The army song”:

Now they give us chicken, they say it is the best,
But we get the neck and the arsehole.
The officers get the rest…

You need to have a laugh every now and then, or you’d be crying…

William Barton at the National Folk Festival, 2011

William Barton, in the Budawang, 2011

The Song Company and William Barton

The Song Company (with indigenous musician-didgeridoo player William Barton) is, really, the “odd man out” in this line-up – but they demonstrate what a wonderfully broad church the NFF is. The Song Company is a classically trained a capella group which, as their website describes, “is equally at home in medieval songs and chants, 16th-century polyphony, 20th-century classics and [which] creates innovative programs that cross the old divide between high-art and low-brow and old/new”. I’ve seen them in a few of these guises and enjoy their eclecticism (not to mention the quality of their execution). What they presented at the NFF was, I think, a version of their show Kalkadunga** Man which they toured with Barton a couple of years ago. Their program included an evocative piece, which Barton called a favourite, “Out there on the dry creek bed”, but I can’t find any lyrics online to excerpt for you. They also performed one of the best known (in white Australia) traditional Aboriginal songs, the “Maranoa Lullaby”:

Mumma warrunno
Murra wathunno,
Mumma warrunno
Murra wathunno.

You can hear a clip from a very scratchy 1950 recording sung by Australia’s first recognised classical indigenous singer, Harold Blair. This recording was among the first chosen for Sounds of Australia (the National Registry of Recorded Sound) developed and maintained by the National Film and Sound Archive …

… of course there’s more, but this seems a fitting way to conclude my little intro to the literary aspects of Folk.

*Folk is defined broadly … as I think it should be … by the National Folk Festival.
** Kalkadunga being the indigenous people from the Mt Isa region of NW Queensland.

Stop Press: New writer Gretchen Shirm shortlisted

/ Whispering Gums / 1 Comment

Having cried wolf, book cover

Bookcover (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

I haven’t been reporting all the various Australian literary awards announcements here since Lisa at ANZLitLovers has been doing that so ably, but I have just noticed that Gretchen Shirm’s collection of short stories, Having cried wolf, has been shortlisted for this year’s UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

I reviewed this a few months ago and was mightily impressed. I wish Shirm the best of luck but, whatever happens, it’s a great achievement to have been listed. Meanwhile, I suggest you check it out…

Monday musings on Australian literature: Reverse expats

/ Whispering Gums / 24 Comments

Several months ago I wrote a Monday musings post on Australian expat novelists, so I thought it was only fair to write one on reverse expat novelists, that is, writers from elsewhere who have settled in Australia. Because, yes, some people DO come here as well as leave!

For this post, I’m choosing a few writers who settled (permanently or semi-permanently) in Australia in their adult lives … they are all English or South African born. (I wonder what that says? We are, of course, all Commonwealth countries, which may have some bearing on it all … but after that, I’ll leave it to others to ponder.) And, because I need to choose some order in which to list them, I’ve chosen the order of their arrival in Australia.

Elizabeth Jolley
(born in England in 1923, arrived in Western Australia in 1959, died in Western Australia in 2007)

Regular readers of my blog will know that Jolley is one of my favourite writers. All her novels were published after her arrival in Australia. In fact, like many authors, she was rejected many times before her first books, Miss Peabody’s inheritance and Mr Scobie’s riddle, were published in 1983. All the books of hers that I’ve read, with the exception of the autobiographical novel My father’s moon, are set in Australia though travel elsewhere does occur in some.  Jolley clearly settled well into Australia – and in 1970, when still living in Perth, she and her husband bought a 5 acre rural property outside of Perth. She chronicles this in her delightful “memoir” (if you can quite call it that), Diary of a weekend farmer. It is very much diary-style and starts with the search for land. You might like this one (from 10 October 1970):

Told of another place Mount Helena drove there, like a place in a Patrick White novel 27 acres covered in scrub and burned trees old cars and trucks, washing machines, it was like a dump, several dogs so turned the car as quickly as I could.

A week later, though, they find just the spot. It sounds English by her description (17 October 1970):

Serene. A high verandah, a fig tree, a loquat, honeysuckle, a hedge of rosemary. A gentle slope of bush down to a meadow, stream on land at both bottom corners …

And on 6 November she says “You look across to Tolstoy country. A paddock with horses running …”

It is however Australian – the snakes and bushfires tell us that. And, it is clear, this land, this experience, informed much of her writing, including, specifically, The five acre virgin and other stories, and The newspaper of Clarement Street.

Peter Temple
(born in South Africa in 1946, arrived in Australia in 1980)

Temple is one of Australia’s best regarded crime writers. In fact, his latest novel Truth was, rather controversially, the first genre novel to win our top literary award, the Miles Franklin. As with Jolley, all his novels have been published after his arrival in Australia and they are, at least to the best of my knowledge as I’ve only read two, set in Australia and very much imbued with Australian landscape and culture. His description of the land (in Victoria this time) in The broken shore sounds a bit Patrick White too:

Early settlers planted cypress trees and hedges as windbreaks around their houses. It worked to some extent but the displaced wind took its revenge. Trees, shrubs, hedges, tanks, windmills, dunnies, dog kennels, chickenhouses, old car bodies – everything in its path sloped to leeward.

Nicholas Shakespeare
(born in England in 1957, first visited Tasmania in 1999 and now divides his year between Tasmania and England)

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet read any Shakespeare, but I have Snowleg on my TBR pile and I have been wanting to read The dancer upstairs for some time too. So, I’ll just report on him using an interview with Susan Wyndham in 2007. He said that  “the thing about Tasmania that’s exciting for a writer is how close to the surface history is”. And, guess what, Patrick White rears his head again. Shakespeare tells Wyndham:

In my shed, one of the discoveries I made was Patrick White and The Tree of Man. It is extraordinary the way he took a marriage through all its vicissitude; most writers don’t take on that challenge.

A commenter on Susan Wyndham’s blog described his book Secrets of the sea as “So Australian with a strong thread connecting to Britain”. I must, must, must get to this writer.

Coetzee, Poland, 2006 (Photo: Mariusz Kubik, from Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

JM Coetzee
(born in South Africa in 1940, arrived in Australia in 2002)

Coetzee, of course, had an established literary career before he arrived in Australia, but his rather stellar career has continued unabated since then. Elizabeth Costello concerns an Australian novelist, and Diary of a bad year is set in Australia. These books tend to the intellectual or philosophical, yet they too reflect on Australian culture often counterpointing international concerns. Coetzee is a rather reclusive man, but I have managed to once hear him speak. He briefly introduced and read from Slow man, and then immediately left the podium. There was, in other words, no opportunity for questions and answers. While that was a pity, I bear him no grudges. He is a writer after all and doesn’t have to join the literary promotion juggernaut if he doesn’t want to!

I’ve chosen these four reverse expats because they are of particular interest to me. There are others, such as British comedian and writer Ben Elton, and best-selling South African born author Bryce Courtenay. Having lived overseas on a couple of occasions, I am fascinated by the decision people make to leave their homes permanently for another country. There are many reasons why people might do so – political (of course), economic, personal (such as having a partner from another country), cultural, and so on. Some of you who read my blog have, I know, made the jump. I’d love to hear your perspectives on being an expat.

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Thea Astley on oddballs

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

Thea Astley is one of my favourite writers and so I thought my next Delicious descriptions should be from her. It won’t be the last because her writing is truly delicious. Up till now, my Delicious Descriptions have been of landscape/environment. This one  is about people. It’s from Drylands (1999), her last novel (or, really, a set of connected stories) and fourth Miles Franklin Award win. Its subtitle is “a book for the world’s last reader” and it’s based on protagonist Janet’s belief that “no-one’s reading anymore”,  that “smartarse technology” was invading people’s lives and resulting in alienation and disengagement. (What would she say about the rise of e-books?) Astley exaggerates, of course, but her belief in the social disintegration that inspired the book is palpable.

It is full of evocative quotable writing, but for this post I’ve chosen one that describes the characters of the town, Drylands, that Janet lives in:

What’s great about these godforsaken holes, Janet decided next morning, leaning over her small balcony and watching the place rub its eyes and start to wake up, are the oddballs. They stand out. You meet them. They enrich. No. More. They furbish the day.

Furbish the day! Thea Astley may have passed on to the big library in the sky, but she left behind an astonishing body of work that can’t help but furbish the days I choose to dip into them.