Australian literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: Two Australian icons

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Donald Horne (1920-2005) and Geoffrey Blainey (b. 1930) are Australian icons, not only for their body of work – which is significant – but for phrases they coined which have become part of our national consciousness. Not all Australians today will know who coined them, but most will have heard the phrases themselves.

The lucky country

The lucky country was written in 1964. The title comes from a sentence in the book:

Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.

An ironic statement, clearly! From Horne’s point of view Australia had a lot going for it – including its natural resources upon which the boom of the 1950s and 60s was primarily based – but was limited by a lack of innovative and “clever” thinking. Over the years, the phrase has been used in may ways – both ironic and literal – but for Horne the intention was clear. It was a wake-up call to Australia to grow up, throw off its colonial shackles, and start thinking for itself.

Rosa Cappiello used the phrase for the title of her book Oh lucky country. It’s still on my TBR pile, but Lisa of ANZLitLovers reviewed it in 2009. It was published in Italian in 1981, with an English translation being published by the University of Queensland Press in 1984. It is about migrant workers in Sydney … and presents an unflattering view of Australians, particularly in their (our) attitude to and acceptance of migrants. (I referred to a similar attitude in my recent review of The women in black.) Cappiello takes up the irony, albeit from a different perspective, and the book was not particularly popular (here) when it was first published! Here is the opening paragraph:

The sky here compensates for solitude. Blue-clouded. Cloudy blue. Intensely blue. It’s not the promised land. Maybe in the distant future it’ll be the last one on earth – the basis is here for the much-vaunted lucky country – but for the moment it’s neither the realisation of one’s dreams nor the land of milk and honey.

Anyhow, back to Horne. He was a prolific writer and commentator but I have only read two of his books – The lucky country (back in the 1970s) and Dying: a memoir, in which he chronicles his death from pulmonary fibrosis and passes on valuable reflections and practical information while doing so. A teacher and sharer to the end.

Mereenie Loop, Central Australia

Mereenie Loop, Central Australia

The tyranny of distance

Geoffrey Blainey’s Tyranny of distance was written two years later, in 1966, and is subtitled “how distance shaped Australia’s history”.

Australia is a big country, with a relatively small population. There’s a reason for this: much of the centre is excessively dry and barren. Consequently, the majority of the population lives on the coast – mostly in the east, but there are urban pockets and major cities in the south (Melbourne, Hobart and Adelaide), the west (Perth) and the north (Darwin). And there are thousands of kilometres between most of these. Our distance challenges are many-fold: they draw from the immense internal distances, and from geographical isolation from the world’s major centres. The latter though is gradually reducing through improved transportation, increased electronic communications, and shifts in the international balance of power (to, say, China and India).

Given the various discussions we’ve had on this blog, I’m not going to talk a lot here about distance and the Australian landscape, and how this plays out in Australian consciousness and thence in our art and literature. From the beginnings of white settlement in the late 18th century, Australians have been conscious of distance in its many forms. For example, physical distance translated into a psychological tyranny, and there is the distance between urban and rural life and culture (something I’ve touched on elsewhere).

Distance results in loneliness and alienation. It was a practical and psychological issue for pioneer women. Katharine Susannah Prichard captured that well in The pioneers (1915), particularly when the young wife is left on her own for several days while her husband goes to town for provisions:

The air was empty without the sound of Donald’s axe …

The day seemed endless …

She glanced at the child every now and then, laughing and telling him that his mother had found the wherewithal to keep her busy and gay, as a bonny baby’s mother ought to be, and that the song she was singing was a song that the women sang over their spinning wheels in the dear country that she had come from far across the sea.

Patrick White‘s Voss is an eloquent exploration of a relationship, a spiritual connection, maintained between Laura in town and Voss exploring remote regions. Its themes are not so much the tyranny of distance, but it’s under the tyranny of distance that the themes are played out. Here is Voss in a letter to Laura:

… but life and dreams of such far-reaching splendour you will surely share them in your quiet room. So we are riding together across the plains, we sit together in this black night, I reach over and touch your cheek (not for the first time). You see that separation has brought us far, far closer. Could we perhaps converse with each other at last, expressing inexpressible ideas with simple words.

In fact, for Voss and Laura distance has a freeing effect … physical absence encourages spiritual presence as it were. Distance in Australia, then, is a complex issue … it informs the foundations of our society from the mundanities of commerce to the “finest” expressions of culture. You’ve seen it already in this blog … and you’ll see it again.

To return to Blainey, he too has a significant oeuvre including, as Gideon Haigh said in that radio program I blogged about, several works of business literature. He is also known for another well-known phrase in Australian culture, the black armband view of history, but that is a story for another day.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The triumvirate

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Flora Eldershaw

Flora Eldershaw, c. 1915 (Presumed Public Domain, from the National Library of Australia, via Wikipedia)

I’ve mentioned Marjorie Barnard in a couple of posts recently, but I suspect few Australians and even fewer readers from overseas (except of course Tony of Tony’s Bookworld) have ever heard of her. Rather than write specifically about her, though, I thought I’d talk a little about the Australian literary scene of the 1920s to 1940s, and about three writers in particular – Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Frank Dalby Davison.

I’m probably cheating here a little because, while I have read quite a bit about them over the last few years, I have read only a smidgin of their actual works. I’ve read (and re-read) Barnard’s The persimmon tree and other stories (1943) and Davison’s Man-shy (1931). I’ve dipped into Barnard and Eldershaw’s collaborative work A house is built (1929) and some of their other writings.

These three writers were part of a pretty active literary scene in Australia at the time. It included writers such as Vance and Nettie Palmer, Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard (whom I reviewed recently), Eleanor Dark, Xavier Herbert and, yes, even, towards the end of the period, Patrick White. (Another contemporary, Christina Stead left Australia in 1928.) The reason I decided to start with these three is because of their friendship and “political activism”, mainly through the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW), which resulted in their being known for a time as “the triumvirate”. They were liberals who were concerned about the rise of Fascism in Europe – and the potential ramifications at “home”. Through them, in the late 1930s, the FAW engaged in political debate, particularly in relation to the protection of freedoms, such as that of speech. A topic, of course, dear to the heart of writers.

Barnard and Eldershaw wrote three novels, as M. Barnard Eldershaw, but they also wrote literary criticism and history. These days though, they are probably most read (when they are read at all) as early feminists. Neither Barnard nor Eldershaw married, though Barnard had an affair with Davison, and both lived independent lives supporting themselves through whatever work they could find. They were active in professional societies, judged literary competitions and edited anthologies. Eldershaw was a particularly skilled negotiator and worked hard to secure support for writers (via grants, pensions and other mechanisms). Vance Palmer admired Eldershaw for her ability to “neutralise conventional masculine expectations of the threat posed by women in ‘public life'”. At one stage they shared a flat, and held what could only be called a “salon”. It was attended by the literati of the day, including of course Davison.

That’s enough, though, of information you can pretty easily find in Wikipedia and other online sources. My aim here is to whet your appetite (I hope). I’ll finish with a quote from A house is built, which is set in mid-nineteenth century Sydney:

Her life was as full of ‘ifs’ as any woman’s. If she had not been so restricted, if her really considerable powers of mind and character had been given scope, Fanny would not have fallen victim to the first colourful stranger she met.

Barnard, it is reported, once said “Australia is still a man’s world”. I’d love to know what younger Australian readers of this blog think about Australia now – and whether anyone (besides Tony!) has read works by these three authors.

[Note: Some of the information for this post came from writings by Maryanne Dever whose PhD was on M. Barnard Eldershaw.]

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Marjorie Barnard on the sun and heat

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Marjorie Barnard

Marjorie Barnard (Courtesy: State Library of New South Wales, via Wikipedia)

My first Delicious descriptions post was from Barbara Hanrahan on the sun in Adelaide, so I thought we might travel to Sydney for this one. As it’s still in summer in our neck of the woods, here is Marjorie Barnard in The persimmon tree and other stories (1943), also on the sun – and its enervating effect:

In the wealthy suburbs of the North Shore and Vaucluse a change had taken place too. It was as if the earth had been squeezed so that all the fine houses that had nestled so comfortably in the contours and in the greenery, were forced up to the light. They bulged out, exposed, and the sun tore at them. The gardens that had embowered them were perished. Tinder dry, fire had been through many of them, scorching walls and blistering away any paint that remained. Most of these houses were empty or inhabited as if they were caves, by people who had come in from the stricken country. The owners had fled, not so much from present hardship, as from the nebulous threat of the future, the sense of being trapped in a doomed city. The shores of the harbour were lion-coloured or drab grey. Sandhills showed a vivid whiteness. Only the water was alive and brilliant. And it was salt. (from “Dry spell”)

I like her point that nature doesn’t discriminate (even though we know that, in reality, the well-off do often have the wherewithal to avoid its worst effects). And I love the last sentence – the short finality of it.

POSTSCRIPTS:

  1. I have been at the coast this week, and so scheduled my first two Delicious Descriptions for this time. I promise I won’t be bombarding you bi-weekly with these. (The dictionaries are confused! I looked up “bi-weekly” and it can mean both “twice a week”, as I mean here, of course, and “every two weeks”. How silly is that! Anyhow, perhaps “semiweekly” is the preferable term.)
  2. And Sarah (you Devoted Reader you), this one’s for you. May you experience no more such heat in Sydney this summer.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The lost child motif

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Lost

Lost, by Frederick McCubbin (Presumed Public Domain, from National Gallery of Victoria, via Wikipedia)

In his rather notorious review (1955) of Patrick White‘s The tree of man, Australian poet, A.D. Hope, at his caustic best, described the requisite features of the Great Australian novel (GAN). One of these was that it must include a child lost in the bush, a reference to the prevalence of this motif in Australian literature. The tree of man did not have such a plot line … but that wasn’t the reason Hope discarded its claims to be the GAN. Why he discarded these claims though is not the subject of this week’s Monday Musings, so let’s move on. The lost-child-in-the-bush motif can, in fact, be found throughout 19th and 20th century Australian cultural output – in literature, art and film.

My first introduction to “the lost child in the bush” story was through Banjo Paterson‘s tragic poem, “Lost” (1887):

The old man walked to the sliprail, and peered up the dark’ning track
And looked and longed for the rider who would never more come back.
The rider was a boy who had fallen from his horse and was never found, “for the ranges held him precious, and guarded their treasure well”. Oh the pathos! Around the same time that this poem was written, Australian artist Frederick McCubbin painted “Lost” (1886). It was inspired by the disappearance of 12-year-old Clara Crosbie, who was lost in the bush near Lilydale, Victoria, in 1885, but was found alive three weeks later.

One of my favourite representations of the motif is in John Heyer’s award-winning docudrama, Back of beyond (1954). It is about Tom Kruse, the Birsdville Track mailman who, every fortnight or so, made the 325-mile trip from Birdsville to Marree to deliver the mail. Inserted into this chronicle of a “typical” journey (it includes re-enactments to convey Tom Kruse’s “experience” rather than recording one actual trip) is a fictional story about two little girls becoming lost in the desert. The movie was sponsored by the Shell Oil Company with the aim of associating the company with Australia and Australianness! And so myths are made (or entrenched!).

A book I have not read (but have read about) is Charles Rowcroft‘s novel Tales of the Colonies (1843). It “features the tropes of the Aborigine as a flawless tracker or a treacherous murderer, as well as the already well-worn motif of the lost white child who falls into the hands of bushrangers and blacks”. I mention it because this idea – the lost white child and the Aboriginal tracker – is found in the most recent example I’ve experienced of the lost-child-in-the-bush idea, the short film One night the moon (2001) which was directed by indigenous Australian filmmaker, Rachel Perkins, and stars, among others, Australian musicians, Paul Kelly and Ruby Hunter.  This film’s main message is the refusal of white Australia to respect the skills and knowledge of its indigenous inhabitants – with tragic consequences. Rachel Perkins says that she wanted to make a film “about the space between black and white Australians”. How appropriate to use an age-old Australian motif for such a purpose.

Why this motif became particularly common in the Australian cultural landscape is a topic of much discussion, but the most common reasoning relates to the discomfort the early European settlers felt when confronted with a landscape that seemed harsh and alien. The fact that many of those children who actually became lost were those most familiar with the bush is perhaps the truth that spoils the story!

I’d love to hear about the motifs that run through your nation’s cultural representations – and from Australians who would like to add to my discussion here of the “lost child” motif. Do you have other examples to share?

Madeleine St John, The women in black

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The women in black, Madeleine St John, book cover

The women in black bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

One thing mystified me as I started reading Madeleine St John‘s The women in black and that is why she would write a book in 1993 about 1950s? It seemed an odd choice. And then, as I read further, it started to become clear. The time period represents one of those cultural watersheds that nations experience. In this particular case, it was a time of social change: not only were things starting to change for women, but the “reffos” or “Continentals” (as the post-war European refugees were disparagingly called) were beginning to impact Australian culture.

St John chronicles these changes lightly, with warmth and gentle humour, but also with determination. It’s not a coincidence, I think, that St John, born in 1941, would have been around the age of the youngest character, Lisa/Lesley Miles, at the time the book is set.

Hmm … having introduced a character now, I’d better talk briefly about the plot. It centres around the women who work in the Ladies’ Cocktail Frocks and the more exclusive Model Gowns sections of a fictional (but thinly veiled DJs) upper crust department store in Sydney called Goode’s, and takes place over the few weeks before and after Christmas. Model Gowns is staffed by one woman, the Continental or reffo, Magda, while Ladies’ Cocktail is staffed by the middle-aged Miss Jacobs, the 29-year-old almost-on-the-shelf Fay Baines, the 31-year-old married-but-so-far-childless Patty Williams. There is also the buyer Miss Cartwright. Overseeing them all is, of course, a man, Mr Ryder. Into this mix is thrown 17-year-old Lesley (who changes her name to Lisa) Miles, who has just finished her Leaving Certificate.

The story is told in short chapters, each one devoted to one or more of these characters. The tone is (almost conspiratorially) conversational, which invites the reader in. St John draws her characters effectively through brief sections of perfectly caught dialogue and succinct but apt descriptions. The style is witty, with light wordplay and irony. Here are some excerpts from Chapter 2:

Mrs Williams was a little, thin, straw-coloured woman with a worn-out face and a stiff-looking permanent wave. Her husband Frank was a bastard, naturally.  [ …]

At the weekends she visited her mother or one of her sisters; Frank drove her there and fetched her, and while she was ‘jaw, jaw, jawing’ he played golf on the public course at Kingsford or drank in the pub. He was a bastard of the standard-issue variety, neither cruel nor violent, merely insensitive and inarticulate.

[…]  as she left the surgery, the physician looking idly at her back view thought, she’d clean up quite well with a new hairdo, some paint on her face and a black nightie; but the husband probably wouldn’t notice, the bastard …

By the end of chapter 2 I was hooked. In three and a bit pages we were told all we needed (and probably more than we wanted) to know about poor little Patty Williams and her bastard of a husband. But Patty’s is just one story. There’s also Fay Baines who’s desperate to be married but meets all the wrong men through her well-meaning night club manager friend, Myra; and Lisa Miles who expects to do well in her end-of-school results but whose father thinks women have no business at university. Into this mix are thrown the outgoing, confident (but “god awful” to the women in black) Magda and her also Continental/reffo husband Stefan.

Magda takes an interest in Lisa and invites her home. She also tries a little matchmaking with Fay. Meanwhile, Patty does try that black nightie, with consequences she would never have foreseen. It could all go horribly wrong but, without spoiling anything too much, I’ll simply say that St John’s book follows, loosely and more lightly, the Jane Austen tradition, that is, it’s a comedy of manners. Unlike Austen though, she’s writing in an historical, rather than contemporary, time-frame, and so has a slightly different goal in mind – and that is documenting the social change I mentioned in my opening paragraph.

Two simple examples of this are “kissing” between friends, and food. Here is Lisa on “kissing”:

And she [Magda] kissed her on the cheek. Lisa smiled shyly at her. I’ve heard she thought, that Continentals kiss each other much more than we do: it means nothing. They do it all the time, even the men. The men even kiss each other.  But how strange I feel.

This little paragraph struck me; I realised that my friends and I kiss each other in greeting but it was not, I think, the norm among my parents’ generation. In one or two generations, in fact, the often-maligned (in the book and in reality at the time) Continentals had effected quite a change. And then there’s the food. By the end of the book, Lisa, Fay, and even Lisa’s father had tasted and enjoyed such exotic foods as salami. And again I reflected on the immense change in diet from my parents’ to my generation.

I won’t tell you more of the story. It’s a gentle one, but there is a drama concerning Patty, and some little tensions surrounding Fay and Lisa, that keep the book moving while it observes a society in change. There are some perfect descriptions of Sydney, such as this of the women coming to do their last minute Christmas shopping:

From the wooded slopes of the salubrious North Shore to the stuccoed charm of the Eastern Suburbs, from the passé gentility of the Western ditto to the terra incognita of the Southern had they travelled by train, bus, tram and even taxi cab to this scene of final frantic activity.

It’s a book almost of vignettes than of fully realised stories, and there’s the odd clumsy or heavy-handed bit, but St John has nonetheless managed to convey a convincing picture of Australian society at the time, while also telling an engaging and generous tale. And, just to show she has a sense of humour, St John, who was a libertarian at university, injects near the end her own little in-joke. Here is Lisa’s father on the possibility of her going to university:

But I’ll tell you one thing: if I decide you can go, and you do go, if I ever hear of you being mixed up with any of those libertarians they have there, you’re out of this house like a shot and I never want to see you again, is that understood? Right then. If you go, no libertarians, not even one.

I wonder what St John’s father – the prickly politician Edward St John – said to her!

Lisa at ANZLitLovers has also reviewed the book.

Madeleine St John
The women in black
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010 (orig. 1993)
234pp.
ISBN: 9781921656798

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Monday musings on Australian literature: The beach

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South Coast Beach, NSW

South Coast Beach, NSW

Not only do the majority of Australians live in urban areas but, given that much of Australia is dry, the majority of these urban areas are on the coast. You can guess what’s coming next – yes, the majority of Australians live near the sea. And, if they don’t, they gravitate to it in their holidays. (Australia has, it must be said, one of the highest skin cancer rates in the world.)

The sea and the beach therefore are another significant aspect of Australian cultural identity … and probably the best known contemporary writer about the beach is Tim Winton. Breath is his most recent novel, but most of his works are set in coastal areas and deal in some way with their characters’ relationship to the beach. For Winton, the beach and the surf stand for – not to beat around the bush – the meaning of life. In an interview with surfing writer Tim Baker, he says:

To me, surfing has always been soul-business. It’s the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they’re what keeps life from being meaningless. Catching a wave and turning and dancing and looping in toward the beach is one of the nicest forms of pointlessness I can think of.

That’s not to say that the beach is always positive in his work. The people who populate the stories in The turning, for example, live pretty disappointed lives in their coastal town/s. Nonetheless, when we think of Winton, it’s the love that tends to come through in the end. This love has apparently been explained in his recent memoir Land’s edge (2010), in which, according to the promos, he “records his life-long affair with the sea”. This is a book I must read.

Robert Drewe, like Winton, is based in Western Australia and writes regularly about the beach. His memoirs, novels and short story collections include The shark net, The bodysurfers, The drowner, and the The rip. He also edited The Penguin (originally, Picador) book of the beach. He, like Winton, claims to be drawn to the beach, but his books and stories explore the dangers and traps (as is pretty obvious from some of the titles!) of the beach and sea, as well as the beauty. Here is one character in The bodysurfers:

Parnell gave the impression he was king of the beach as well as of the mutton birds. He was what used to be known as a man’s man, meaning that he was a hearty male chauvinist … (from “The silver medallist”)

and, another

The coast is not what I expected. Not only is the pace faster, but there is a careless violent hedonism that astonished me at first. … When I can’t face the beach night-life, the coarse aimless lives, I close my window … (from “Shark logic”)

This mention of hedonism reminds me of the way the beach can draw into sharp relief our Western culture’s obsession with body image. Here is poet Les Murray in “On Home Beaches”:

Back, in my fifties, fatter than I was then,
I  step on the sand, belch down slight horror to walk
a wincing pit edge, waiting for the pistol shot
laughter …

So far this post has been male-dominated but there is one particularly well-known “beach” book (and later film) by women writers, and that is Puberty blues by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette. It’s about two teen girls who want to become part of the cool, in-crowd on the beach, the surfie gangs, and is pretty critical of peer group pressure and male chauvinism. It’s a long time since I’ve read (and seen) it but I still remember the pain of their desperation to belong.

Hmmm … I think I have somehow managed to convey more negatives than positives about the beach and beach culture in Australia, so perhaps I will return to Winton (and Breath) to end on a high note:

I will always remember my first wave that morning … I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light. I remember the solitary figure watching on the beach and the flash of Loonie’s smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated. And though I’ve lived to be an old man with my own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.

Now is the time for me to ‘fess up. I am not really a beach person – but if anyone could convince me, it would probably be Winton.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Outback continent, urban culture?

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I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all

(From “Clancy of the Overflow“, by Banjo Paterson)

Sydney Skyline

Sydney Skyline

In “Clancy of the Overflow”, Banjo Paterson opposes the freedom of Clancy’s droving life to the narrator’s dull life in the city: “For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know”. This poem popped into my mind recently and made me realise that it was time I came clean. You see, I suspect I’ve been misleading my non-Aussie readers with all my posts about our sunburnt (or not) country, our gum trees, bell-birds and the like. You might, just might, have been led to believe that we Aussies are an outback, country-sort of people, but that is far from the truth. We are in fact a highly urban nation: while our population density is around 2.6 people per square kilometre, some 89% of us live in urban areas (capital and regional cities).

So, how is this reflected in our literature? Well, I’m going to look at just five examples, chronologically, starting with the late nineteenth century.

1892: William Lane’s The workingman’s paradise

is set in Sydney, though the two protagonists come from the bush, and one still works primarily on the land. It’s a political novel focusing on improving conditions for the poor in Sydney, and for shearers in the outback. The bulk of it though is about Sydney where “the streets, some wider, some narrower, all told of sordid struggling”, a Sydney that is somewhat similar to that described by Ruth Park half a century later. That is, one in which the poor struggle, in which the beauty so loved by tourists is rarely seen.

1943: Marjorie Barnard‘s The persimmon tree, and other stories

is not her most famous work but is one of that small number of books that I’ve read twice. The themes are universal – love, loss, disappointment – but they are mostly told in an urban setting. A newly widowed woman buys a new hat, a young girl buys a new dress for a special date, people meet in buffets and tea rooms, a woman goes to a party in a

block of flats. The imitation stone stair-case, mock baronial, mock grandeur, and behind the closed doors with their heavy antique knockers the same ordinary little flats … it is shattering to go up to a smug, unknown door and ring the bell, knowing that a party lurks behind it.

1948: Ruth Park‘s Harp in the south

which is set in the slums of Sydney, was controversial when it was published because of its realistic portrayal of urban poverty and the struggles that accompany living in such conditions. There were those who felt she was fostering a “cult of ugliness” and that no good could come of it. Little did they know that 60 years later this book would be regarded as an Australian classic.

1977: Helen Garner‘s Monkey grip

is also now regarded by many as an Australian classic. It’s set in inner city Melbourne, in the “bohemian” home of musicians, students, actors and, yes, drug-takers. Helen Garner’s characters – particularly her women – strive to live independent lives that are not bound by societal constrictions, the sort of lives that are hard to live in the more conservative country or the ‘burbs.

2009: Christos Tsiolkas‘ The slap

is, by contrast, set in the ‘burbs – of Melbourne. It explores a wide range of “issues” typical (more-or-less) of middle-class suburbia. You know what they are:  relationships, employment, education and politics, not to mention aging, drugs and sex. And they are played out in backyards, workplaces, carparks, bars and all sorts of homes ranging from modest bungalows to the mansions of the nouveau riche. The setting is modern Australia – but many of us hope that the people are rather less so!

According to the Australian Government Culture Portal, Australia was well-urbanised by 1910 … and our literature to some degree reflects that. Yet, the idea of “the bush” doesn’t go away – and is still highly visible in our literature. I can think of no better recent example than Murray Bail‘s The pages (2008) in which sophisticated city meets pragmatic country. Paragraph 2 starts with two women setting out from Sydney:

They were city women. Comfortably seated and warm they were hoping to experience the unexpected, an event or person, preferably person, to enter and alter their lives. There is a certain optimism behind all travel. The passenger, who wore a chunky necklace like pebbles made out of beer bottles, had never been over the mountains before. And she was forty-three. Directions had been given in biro, on a page torn out of an exercise book. It would take all day getting there. Over the mountains, into the interior, in the backblocks of western New South Wales, which in the end is towards the sun.

Need I say more?

Monday musings on Australian literature: the Great Australian Novel, or?

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Henry Handel Richardson in 1945, a year before...

Henry Handel Richardson, 1945 (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

First, a confession. I am not one who believes we need to define such a beast as “The Great [name your country] Novel”. However, just to be perverse, I thought that for this week’s Monday musings it would be interesting to look at what might qualify for such a label – and, in doing so, consider what might constitute an Australian canon.

A canon gets us away from having to define the “Great Australian Novel”*, from having to decide whether it must be written by an Australian, must reflect “Australia” in some sort of specific way. In fact, on the latter, Professor Gelder, a literature professor from Melbourne argued in 2009 that globalisation and transnationalism make “the great Australian novel” “almost impossible”. This is because he defines the GAN in terms of being “a nationalist project”. And, perhaps, that’s the only way you can define a GAN. A canon, on the other hand, can be more diverse, can reflect the variety – in space, time, theme, and so on – that makes up our – and, any, really – national literature.

Without getting into the pros and cons, rights and wrongs, of polls, I thought I’d list the top ten Australian books (mostly novels) from  three different and reasonably recent polls to see what they tell us.

Poll 1: The Australian Society of Authors Top 10 as voted by their members in 2003:

  1. Cloudstreet (1991), Tim Winton
  2. The man who loved children (1940), Christina Stead
  3. The fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930), Henry Handel Richardson
  4. Dirt music (2001) Tim Winton
  5. Voss (1957) Patrick White
  6. The tree of man (1955), Patrick White
  7. The magic pudding (1918), Norman Lindsay (children’s)
  8. An imaginary life (1978), David Malouf
  9. Tirra lirra by the river (1978), Jessica Anderson
  10. My brother Jack (1964), George Johnston

Poll 2: The Australian Broadcasting Corporations’s Top 10, as voted by Australians via ABC promotions in 2003:

  1. Cloudstreet (1991), Tim Winton
  2. A fortunate life (1981), AB Facey (memoir)
  3. Dirt music (2001),Tim Winton
  4. My brother Jack (1964), George Johnston
  5. The magic pudding (1918), Norman Lindsay (children’s)
  6. The tree of man (1955), Patrick White
  7. Seven little Australians (1894), Ethel Turner (children’s)
  8. The fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930), Henry Handel Richardson
  9. Tomorrow when the war began (1993), John Marsden (young adult)
  10. My place (1987), Sally Morgan (memoir)

Poll 3: The Australian Book Review’s (ABR) Top 10, as voted by Australians via ABR promotions, 0ver 2009/10 (and reported by me last March)

  1. Cloudstreet (1991), Tim Winton
  2. The fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930), Henry Handel Richardson
  3. Voss (1957), by Patrick White
  4. Breath (2008) Tim Winton
  5. Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Peter Carey
  6. My brother Jack (1964), George Johnston
  7. The secret river (2005), by Kate Grenville
  8. Eucalyptus (1998), by Murray Bail
  9. The man who loved children (1940), by Christina Stead
  10. The tree of man (1955), Patrick White

Hmm … accounting for the fact that the third poll was taken several years after the first two and so includes a couple more recent books, the noticeable thing is the remarkable congruence between the three. You would have to say that, in the early twenty-first century, Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet would get the GAN gong, though Professor Gelder would disagree. He argued that only Patrick White would qualify. He said that

Tim Winton’s ‘Cloudstreet’ got close to being a ‘great Australian novel’, but at a cost. It was nostalgic, homely, remote from reality, and conservative.

Oh dear, maybe these are the very reasons the novel is popular with readers (though authors, too, liked it!)!

Anyhow, the appealing thing to me is that, despite the to-be-expected inclusion of recent authors, these lists do also take a relatively (given the youth of our country) long view. It’s good to see the inclusion of Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead and George Johnston, alongside the also to-be-expected inclusion of our only literary Nobel Laureate, Patrick White. And, it’s satisfying to see a goodly number of women writers recognised – not only Richardson and Stead, but also Jessica Anderson, Ethel Turner, Kate Grenville and the artist/memoirst Sally Morgan.

You might think that such agreement might be reflected in what is being taught in Australian universities but you’d be wrong, at least according to the Teaching Australian Literature website. Its Top Ten texts (that is, those appearing on most reading lists) are:

  1. The secret river (2005), Kate Grenville
  2. My brilliant career (1901), Miles Franklin
  3. Remembering Babylon (1993), David Malouf
  4. Loaded (1995), Christos Tsiolkas
  5. Carpentaria (2006), Alexis Wright
  6. True history of the Kelly Gang (2000), Peter Carey
  7. Summer of the seventeenth doll (1953), Ray Lawler (play)
  8. The monkey’s mask (1994), Dorothy Porter
  9. My place (1987), Sally Morgan (memoir)
  10. Swallow the air (2006), Tara June Winch
    True country (1993), Kim Scott

A (generally) more “edgy” list and, in its own way, rather encouraging. But, where does that leave the canon? Perhaps as a work-in-progress … to which we might (or might not!) return to in Monday musings.  Meanwhile, talking about works-in-progress, Lisa at ANZLitLovers is working on a somewhat different tack. She is developing a List of Australian/New Zealand Books You Must Read. Go check it out – and if you’d like to make a suggestion, please do …

Do you think there is value to the idea of a canon? Or does it discourage wide and open-minded reading and coincidentally encourage a too narrow view of the culture it refers to?

* the GAN, not to be confused with another GAN, the “Great American Novel”.

Monday musings on Australian literature: A dry or not so dry continent?

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

It’s rather ironic that  in the last week or two when I’ve written a couple of posts about Australia’s image* as a “sunburned land” (Barbara Hanrahan) or “sunburnt country” (Dorothea Mackellar), the image the world has been seeing is somewhat opposite – a raindrenched land. Then again, Dorothea Mackellar did also write that this is a land “of drought and flooding rains”.

So, I thought this week I’d share a few images from current poets – from The best Australian poems 2009 book which I was given a year ago. For most of these poets the imagery might come from the land and the weather, but the subject is not necessarily so …

Sarah Day‘s poem, “A dry winter (Some observations about rain)” is particularly poignant – though no less real – given current events:

… This rain moves on swiftly
leaving sun and silence in its wake …

And the poem ends with

Mostly too little rain falls here.
There is only the silence of the sun.

Even in winter after low skies
and the impression of rain

for days and weeks, the earth is dry as dust
under trees. Cracks refuse to close up

in the cold months. This makes rain exotic.
Something to pay attention to.

John Leonard’s “Rain in March” captures the cleansing effect of rain. His poem ends with:

Chirping crickets and autumn peepers
Trilling with the carolling of magpies
And currawongs, and a brief clamour
Of cockatoos.

In the muted darkness
The front passes, single drops
Spitting from a matt black sky –
Rain has washed through the world,
A faint, cool wind lifts
Branches heavy with wet leaves.

“Fred’s Farm” by Astrid Lorange is about more than the land, but it starts with

yes this is a field of gunmetal glinting like weather
an entire ecology of dead thistles mapping a drought

That imagery rather sets a tone doesn’t it … The poem is not so much about Fred’s farm – a self-consciously neutral title – as the poet’s stream of consciousness reflection on remembering a past. She’s a new young poet and one to watch…

Road to Hermannsburg, Central Australia

Road in Central Australia

For Robyn Rowland too, in “Is the light right?”, landscape and weather are closely related to mood, but there’s no simple polarity to the imagery. The water, for example, is “blood-warming” but “dark”. Her poem ends:

What if tomorrow, light is too big when it comes,
never a shadow to rest in,
no blood-warming pools of dark water to drink from,
sky never again boot-black and anxious,
and I forever driving through burning day
along ten thousand miles of loneliness.

In “The orchardist”, by Petra White, the tough needing-to-be-irrigated land breeds tough farmers. Here is a description of the landscape, with “we” being fruit pickers:

At night we walked the river, following its curves
that wound us out to where a redgum
stood marooned at water’s edge, fossilised in thirst

And then the farmer:

All day the farmer circled on his tractor, mad as a bull-rider,
lurching on thick dry mud-tracks…

Finally, a poem that harks back to the terrible fires in Victoria just two years ago, reminding us again of the extremes wrought by our “drought and flooding rains”. The poem is titled “Kinglake“, a town which bore the brunt of the Black Saturday fires. It’s by Fiona Wright and she concludes her poem about the devastation with:

Your orchard eaten into black dust.
I send you irises,
and try to write
some kind of greening.

This post is, I know, rather bitsy-piecy. The poems, which vary in theme and style, aren’t necessarily my favourites in the collection, but they show that sun and water still pervade the Australian consciousness even if the purpose to which they are put, poetically speaking, has diversified. I may return to this book in the future … but in the meantime would love to know if there’s particular imagery that represents your nation’s “being”, or, if you’re Australian, whether agree with what I’ve written?

* After all, wasn’t Bill Bryson’s book on Australia published overseas as A suburnt country?

Matt McClelland, Best river and alpine walks around Mt Kosciuszko

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments
Best river and alpine walks around Mt Kosciuszko book cover

Book cover (Courtesy: Matt McClelland, Wildwalks)

For many years now, Mr Gums and I have been going to Thredbo in Kosciuszko National Park for a few days in early January. In other words, instead of heading east to the coast, like many of our city’s residents, we head south to the mountains for a bit of R&R involving bushwalking, dining and reading. Over the years I have picked up various guides to help us – field guides to flora and fauna, general activity guides, and so on. But, until recently, I had not found a good comprehensive book on walks in the Park.

This has not totally deterred us. The Park brochures and the various guides I did find provided us with enough information for us to find and undertake walks. However, I’ve always wanted more and, when I was preparing for last year’s trip, I discovered – via Google – a wonderful website called Wildwalks. They had information on some of our favourite walks, but by no means all. However, I was in luck. Late in 2010, as well us updating and expanding their Southern Kosciuszko walks on their website, they published a book, Best river and alpine walks around Mt Kosciuszko, which details over 40 walks in the very area we like to walk, and so, of course, we bought it.

Along the Rennix Track, Kosciuszko National Park

Mr Gums walking through Derwent Speedwell on the Rennix Trail

The Wildwalks people are a generous bunch though: thorough descriptions, with maps, of each of the walks can be downloaded as pdfs from their website. Of course, unless you travel with a printer*, that means you must decide in advance which walks you plan to do. If you have the book, on the other hand, you can select a walk on a whim – or, on the basis of the weather, on how you feel after the previous day’s walk, on whether you are willing to drive to the starting point (as it is a very large national park), on how much of an appetite you want to work up …

But, enough of that, let’s get to the book. It is nicely produced on quality semi-gloss paper. It includes useful material about the park in general (including weather conditions), and about bushwalking (including safety tips) in particular. It has a map at the front with the walks marked on it, and an excellent table listing the walks so that you can see them all at a glance and check length, difficulty level etc. It has a small but useful index. And it is packed with enticing photographs. The bulk of the book is of course devoted to the walks and is organised (and colour-coded) by region, such as the Alpine Way, Guthega, and so on. There is a section, too, on Snowshoe Walks for those hardy people who go to the mountains in the winter.

For each walk the following information is provided:

  • At a glance inset box providing the Grade (difficulty level); Time; Distance and type of walk (one-way, return, etc); Ascent/descent (in metres); Conditions (amount of shade, water crossings etc); and GPS for beginning and end.
  • Brief description of the walk.
  • Finding the track. In other words, how to find the start!
  • Walk directions. Written directions for the walk, with numbered points which are shown on that walk’s map.
  • Map and relief diagram, on both of which are marked the numbers from the Walk directions.
  • Other information as appropriate, such as, for some walks, variations that can be taken.

Last week, we did four of the walks in the book – three we’d done before and one we hadn’t. We found the guide easy to understand and accurate – right down to timing and assessment of “grade”. We particularly valued the climb information provided – both textually and pictorially – for the ascents and descents involved in each walk. We did find the odd discrepancy – mostly a marker mentioned in the guide that we didn’t see on the ground. Perhaps we missed them or, more likely, they have disappeared (faded, fallen over, whatever!). We also noticed that the pdf descriptions of the walks provided a little more detail – such as distance/time information for each point on a walk – and a contour style map rather than the more schematic one in the book. This difference in maps is due, I presume, to space and page size factors – and is not a critical issue: the walks in general are easy to follow and, anyhow, you can print out the pdf in advance (at no charge) if you wish.

A good quality spiral binding, with an inbuilt book/page marker, would probably make the guide more user-friendly when you are on a walk, but spiral bindings (even good ones) are not as sturdy so the glue (perfect) binding style is probably best.

Overall then, a big thumbs up. This is a well-thought out guide prepared by people who clearly know bushwalking and what bushwalkers (particularly casual, recreational ones like us) want (and need). My sense is that the people at Wildwalks are doing this more for the love than the money – and for that I wave my hiking stick at them. If you walk – or plan to walk – in Australia (specifically, at present, in NSW and the ACT), check them out because they currently have over 900 walks documented on their site.

Matt McClelland and the Wildwalks team
Best river and alpine walks about Mt Kosciuszko
Warriewood: Woodslane Press, 2010
250pp.
ISBN: 9781921606045

* or have downloaded them onto some smartphone device in advance (as you can’t rely on reception once you are out on a walk).