Australian literature

Peter Temple, Truth

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I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader (Stephen King, On writing)

Peter Temple, Truth

Truth bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

As I was reading Peter Temple‘s Truth I wondered whether I was Temple’s “ideal reader”. Somehow I think not. I am not a crime novel reader, but I did read and greatly like Temple’s previous book, The broken shore, so why did I feel less enthusiastic about Truth?

Part of the reason might be expectations. This novel won the Miles Franklin award this year. I don’t, theoretically, have a problem with a so-called genre novel winning literary awards but I did expect that if such a book won it would be out of the ordinary, and by that I mean that it would break the mould of its genre in some way. Well, I don’t think Truth does that. Of course, the Miles Franklin doesn’t explicitly say the work has to be innovative; it just says the work must be “of the highest literary merit” and present “Australian life in any of its phases”.

Another reason, related to the above, is that I found it to be a little too stereotypical. While I don’t read crime fiction as a matter of course, I do watch a lot of crime television, particularly those based on the writings of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and the like. I didn’t find Temple’s detective here, Steve Villani (who at one point talks of “the full stupidity of his life”), particularly different from many of the other contemporary angst-ridden middle-aged detectives I’ve seen. I didn’t find the plot, which deals with corruption (in the police force, politics and business) to be particularly different either.

So, did I like anything about it? Well, yes. But not for what Val McDermid would expect. She has said that:

As literary fiction became more hermetic, more concerned with literary theory and less concerned with narrative, crime writers assumed the mantle of turning the spotlight on the world we live in and doing it in a form where narrative was still of paramount importance.

Oh dear. I have to say this narrative bored and, at times, confused me. I was not interested in the plot – in remembering who all the characters were and guessing whether this one or that one might have “done it”. I just didn’t care. But, I was interested in Villani and his relationships with people – his father and brothers, his family, his old (now deceased) boss Singo, and his colleagues, particularly the indigenous policeman, Dove, who appeared in The broken shore. It was all a bit typical really – the workaholic cop with the troubled background and failing marriage – but Temple did manage to engage me in this character. He did this largely by telling the story through Villani’s eyes – through a third person limited point of view (or “first person in the third person” as he told Ramona Koval on the Bookshow). We are right there with Villani through one pretty hellish week in his life: horrific murders, bushfire threatening his father’s property, and a runaway daughter, alongside the odd bit of pressure to drop one of the cases because it was “just” a prostitute who’s not worth rocking the boat over.

Peter Temple is well-known for his writing. Ramona Koval describes this book as having “beautifully written ugly scenes”. I suppose they are. There is a lot of staccato dialogue, though Temple does little to explain the language used by the cops. If you don’t know the lingo, you are expected to pick it up as you go. (American readers, however, will apparently get a glossary!). There are a few motifs which run through the book. Smells are important – they convey the corruption and the social disintegration in the city and they play a practical role in solving a crime; and trees are also significant, conveying Villani’s connection with nature and his father, with, that is, something far more healthy than his homicide-driven life:

Below them a forest, wide and deep and dark, big trees more than thirty years old. Planted by hand, every last one, thousands of trees – alpine ash, mountain swamp gum, red stringybark, peppermints, mountain gum, spotted gum, snow gum, southern mahogany, sugar gum, silvertop ash. And the oaks, about four thousand, grown from acorns collected in two autumns from  every russet Avenue of Honour Bob Villani [father] drove down, from every botanical garden he passed.

Lists like this are a feature of the writing and they are effective in building up pictures in the fast moving, rather clipped world of this novel. Rhythm is in fact a significant aspect of the style. As you would expect, the story is mostly grim, but there is the odd bit of humour. I did love this one:

“Say police as caringly as possible. Like a blessing.”
“Jeez, that’s a big ask.”

The title seems to come from a horse which is mentioned only once in the novel:

…the first horse Bob raced, the best horse he ever had had, the lovely little grey horse called Truth who won at her second start, won three from twelve, always game, never gave up. She sickened and died in hours, buckled and lay, her sweet eyes forgave them their stupid inability to save her.

There’s a message in there somewhere – mostly ironic. I kinda like that.

So, my overall reaction? I don’t usually read reviews before I post, but I do when I’m preparing for my bookgroup. One of the reviews I read was Edmund Gordon’s in The Guardian. I like his conclusion that it’s an accomplished book but doesn’t escape the bounds of its genre. I was, I realise, hoping it would – and that means I’m not Peter Temple’s “ideal reader”. You, however, may be.

Peter Temple
Truth
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009
387pp.
ISBN: 9781921520716

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some Australian expat novelists

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Australia is the only country I have come across that divides its writers into residents and those who have dared to live elsewhere. Can one imagine Americans writing of Ernest Hemingway, or the Brits of Auden, thus? (Carmen Callil, Australian-born founder of Virago Press)

That answers one of my questions: that is, whether other nations talk about “expats” the way we do. Apparently they don’t. Is it the oft-quoted Australian cultural cringe? Is it envy? Perhaps I’ll just skirt the issue and say that Australians have a bit of a reputation for wanderlust, so I’m not surprised that we have our share of novelists who have gone overseas and stayed. One of those is Kate Jennings whose “fragmented autobiography”, Trouble, I reviewed last week. Kate Jennings went to New York in 1979, and has not returned (except for regular visits). In her book, she includes interviews with three other expat Aussie writers, Sumner Locke Elliott and Ray Mathew (both now deceased), and Shirley Hazzard. I thought it might be interesting to talk a little about some of our still-living novelists who reside in the USA.

But first, Ray Mathew, the least known of Jennings’ three interviewees. I hadn’t heard of him until a few years ago when he was the subject of one of the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) gorgeous little “A Celebration” books, using funds bequeathed in his name by his American friend and patron, Eva Kollsmann. The Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsmann Trust is a significant bequest which funds a number of initiatives at the NLA. One of these is the annual Ray Mathew Lecture which is to be given by “an Australian living abroad”. The first lecture was given in 2009 by Geraldine Brooks, and the second, this year, by Kate Jennings.

Shirley Hazzard

Hazzard, 2007 (Courtesy: Christopher Peterson, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

For brevity’s sake – and because I’ve read each of these writers – I’ll just focus in this post on five Australian expat novelists based in the USA. Some of them are very well known internationally, moreso than many of our home-based writers. This is not surprising I guess: if you live in the USA and get published there your market potential is far greater than it would be at home. That said, the lure of increased fame and fortune is not the reason these writers moved overseas:

  • Geraldine Brooks: moved to New York in 1983 to study, met and married American journalist (Tony Horwitz), and now splits her time between Australia and the USA. Geraldine Brooks titled her Ray Mathew lecture, “The opportunity of distance”. She’s the youngest of these five and, perhaps, has the most uncomplicated view of her relationship with home. She has travelled widely and discussed in that lecture all the benefits that have resulted, but her final point is:

For all its opportunities, distance can still feel like a tyrant, sometimes, when a partner’s work or a kid’s schooling means we must spend more time there than here. The oscillation stalls, the roots start to dry out. It’s like a high stakes game of musical chairs. Round the world you go, and then the music stops and you have to sit down somewhere, but it’s not quite the chair you were aiming for.

  • Peter Carey: moved in 1990/91 to New York with his wife to work in their respective careers, and has remained there. Peter Carey, not surprisingly given his status, is often asked about his expat status. Here is what he said in an interview for the Paris Review:

Of course, there is a specially reserved position in Australian culture for the expatriate. The prime expatriates—people like Clive James, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes—belong to an earlier generation than mine. When these people return to Australia, they are asked, What do you think of us? How are we doing? The expatriate is occasionally lauded and occasionally fiercely criticized for daring to come back and judge. I try to stay away from that as much as humanly possible. I don’t feel at all like an expatriate….

  • Shirley Hazzard: moved to Hong Kong with her parents in 1947 when she was 16 years old, ending up in New York in 1951 where she has been mostly based since, though does spend time regularly in Capri, Italy. A webpage on Shirley Hazzard summarises her expat status in this way:

Hazzard does not reject her designation as an Australian writer but insists her temperament is not national. She only took out United States citizenship twenty-five years after she began living in New York, on the resignation of Richard Nixon. Eschewing nationalistic identifications, she does not consider herself as an expatriate, and emphasized that “to be at home in more than one place” (Gordan and Pasca). However, her novels are full of displaced Anglos in Hong Kong and Italy, or displaced Australians in London and New York.

  • Janette Turner Hospital: moved to Boston in the mid 1960s with her husband, and has lived in Canada and the USA. She now splits her time between these two countries and her home state of Queensland. In an early Griffith Review, Hospital commented on the impact of modern technology on being physically displaced, and wrote:

Place is unequivocal. But virtual communities and diaspora organizations suggest that you don’t always need to be somewhere to be a part of something. You can check the surf report, vote, play scrabble, watch the evening news, buy a car or be connected to country from the other side of the world. This new reality reflects an age-old truth: that home is where the heart is. It offers a new kind of citizenship. One we’re defining as we go.

  • Kate Jennings: as described above. She bookends Brooks nicely: not only because they gave the first two Ray Mathew lectures but because they both value travel highly but offer almost opposing conclusions. Here is Jennings from her lecture:

I have lived now in New York nearly as long as I lived in Australia. Heretical as it might seem, Australia is neither my country nor my home, as it is for Geraldine. It’s the place I started from, to paraphrase TS Eliot slightly. It shaped me, but so have my 30 years in New York city. I have, as Robert Dixon put it, ‘overlapping allegiances and multiple affiliations’.

Well, that lot provides enough to think about I reckon. I was going to talk a little about these writers’ works but I’ve taken up enough of your time for this Monday. More anon… Meanwhile, if you’ve lived away from “home” for any period of time, what do you think about all this?

Kate Jennings, Trouble: Evolution of a radical

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Kate Jennings, Trouble, bookcover

Bookcover (Courtesy: Black Inc)

I’m not going to beat about the bush but tell it like it is: I absolutely gobbled up Kate Jennings’ Trouble: Evolution of a radical: Selected writings 1970-2010. It took me a fortnight to read it, partly because I’ve been pretty busy but also because there was so much to savour and take in that I did a lot of stopping and thinking. That said, I do have one whinge, so I’ll get it over with now: it has no index. The book is described as an “unconventional” or “fragmented” autobiography and it is chock full of content. She mentions people, she discusses books and genres, she talks about politics, economics and feminism, not to mention all sorts of enthusiasms including, would you believe, swimming pools and shopping! I can see myself wanting to refer to it again and again but each time I’ll have to flip through it to find the idea or topic that I want to explore. Just as well I’m a marginalia person is all I can say!

So, who is Kate Jennings (b. 1948)? She is an Australian-born writer (poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist) and feminist, who stunned Australia with her Front Lawn speech in 1970, confronting progressive men, in particular, with their sexism. She moved to New York at the end of the 1970s and, in one of her iterations, worked as a speechwriter for a couple of large Wall Street firms in the 1990s. Somehow, she seems to have managed to do that without losing her critical eye. I have not yet read her novels, but will (finally, and rather coincidentally) be reading Snake in the next month or so.

Why did I like the book? This is how Jennings describes it in her preface:

This book, then, is a stand-in memoir. I’ve assembled pieces  – essays, speeches and poems, along with short stories and passages from my novels that actually happened – so that a reader might have a narrative of sorts.

On reading this you could be forgiven for fearing a mish-mash but fortunately that’s not what you get. The book is divided into 9 parts, each introduced by Jennings with a current reflection on the aspect of her life and career covered by that part. These parts move more or less chronologically through her life, though the readings themselves jump around a bit. This is because, like most of us really, she revisits some parts of her life many years after they occur, while others are documented at the time of their occurrence. The press release which came with my copy describes it in the following terms: “no-holds-barred” and “pull-no-punches”. What’s that, you say? They’re clichés! They are, but they describe the book perfectly, because this is a fiercely honest book written by a rather formidable woman. How else to describe someone who defiantly affirms, in almost one breath, her commitment to feminism and Jimmy Choo shoes, who calls herself a pragmatist but also argues passionately that “these are times of moral poverty”.

I think at this point I will just dot-point the parts to give you a sense of what she covers, because I fully intend to explore many of her ideas in more detail in the coming weeks/months.

  • Presumption: the making of her intellect, covering the years from 1970 to the late 1980s.
  • A child of grace, a landscape of progress: her childhood in the Riverina area of New South Wales, told mainly through excerpts from her novels and poems.
  • Cause and not symptom: her youth, focusing particularly on her introduction to alcohol (and subsequent joining of AA).
  • You don’t understand! What do you know! You don’t live here!: the life of an Australian expat in the USA explored mostly through her interviews with three other expat writers: Sumner Locke Elliott, Shirley Hazzard and Ray Mathew.
  • Catching a man, Eating him: her romantic life, which, with some self-mockery, she views through the songs of Dusty Springfield.
  • Crazed, delinquent fabulousness: an eye-opening sampler of her essays from 1990 to 2009 showing what a hard woman she is to pin down!
  • A bright, guilty world: more essays, these ones about her life as a speechwriter on Wall Street during the 1990s, including the full text of her Quarterly Essay 32, titled “American revolution: The fall of Wall Street and the rise of Barack Obama“. She has much to say about the GFC.
  • Irrelevance is deadly: how literature has (or hasn’t) dealt with the issue of business and finance.
  • Cut the shit: two no-holds-barred (yep, bring on the cliché!) essays which, she says, bring us back full circle to her main themes: “The first, a foray into my dusty childhood and Aussie alcoholism and masculinity through the re-release of the movie Wake in Fright, and the second, into poetry and the reasons I forsook it – or it, me – and a pet peeve: closed minds”.

I know it’s a bit of a copout, but I feel I can’t do justice to this book without writing my own Quarterly Essay and so, as I’ve already said above, I will return to it in future posts. In the meantime, the question to ask is: How does it work as an autobiography or “stand-in memoir”. I say very well. It does the things I look for: it tells me the main facts of her life, it shows me her interests, beliefs and values, and it gives me a sense of her personality (which is intelligent, opinionated, fearless and principled). Fragmented it might be in structure, but coherent it is in portraying a life.

In one of the poems she includes in the book, she writes:

… Saying simple things

well or complicated things simply is an art
that is fast disappearing …

Fortunately it is an art that Kate Jennings has not lost.

Kate Jennings
Trouble: Evolution of a radical: Selected writings 1970-2010
Melbourne: Black Inc, 2010
319pp.
ISBN: 9781863954679

(Review copy supplied by Black Inc.)

Ah, sweet synchronicity of life!

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NFSA exterior

Exterior of my previous home-away-from-home (Courtesy: Bidgee, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Ok, I know that “synchronicity” doesn’t really scan with “mystery” but it just felt right.

Last night, wearing one of my hats, I attended the National Film and Sound Archive‘s event, Coo-ee: Sound Day: Sounds of Australia 2010. (Phew, that’s a mouthful isn’t it?). Sounds of Australia is an NFSA initiative aimed at creating a register of recorded sounds that Australians deem significant. These sounds can be songs, speeches, jingles, sporting announcements, and so on. Anyone can nominate, and the final selection for each year’s additions is made by a judging panel.

Well, I was astonished (but pleased) to find that one of this year’s additions is Oodgeroo Noonuccal reading one of her most famous poems, We are going. This poem appeared in her first 1964 anthology as well as in My people which I listed in this week’s Monday Musings post. It was one of the poems that I remembered from my youth and considered using in that post. You can hear her, clear and strong, online at the Sounds of 2010 website – scroll down to 1986. Here are the last lines of the poem:

The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.
The eagle is gone, the emu and kangaroo are gone from this place.
The bora ring is gone.
The corroboree is gone.
And we are going.

See why I like her? Simple but powerful.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Indigenous writers

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Tara June Winch

Tara June Winch (Courtesy: Friend of subject, via Wikipedia, under CC-BY-SA 3.0)

It’s important I think that my third post be on our indigenous writers. Again it’s going to be pretty idiosyncratic as my reading in this area has been scattered, not for lack of interest so much as the old “so many books” issue that we all know only too well. I was first introduced to indigenous writing at high school where I had two inspirational teachers who encouraged us to think seriously about human rights. It was then that I bought Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s (or Kath Walker as she was then) book of poetry, My people.

In my first Monday Musings post, I mentioned David Unaipon who is generally recognised as the first published indigenous Australian author. However, it was Oodgeroo Noonuccal, with her book of poetry, We are going (1964), who heralded contemporary indigenous Australian writing. So let’s start with her.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal My people (1970, poetry)

Noonuccal’s poetry is largely political. She wrote to right the wrongs which indigenous Australians confronted every day: the racism, the white-colonial-slanted history, the lack of land rights, and so on. Much of her poetry is therefore strong but accessible “protest” poetry. My people collects poems from her first two books and includes new works as well. Here are just a few lines to give you a sense of what she was about:

… Do not ask of us
To be deserters, to disown our mother,
To change the unchangeable.
The gum cannot be trained into an oak.
(from “Assimilaton – No!”)

Gumtree in the city street,
Hard bitumen around your feet,
Rather you should be
In the cool world of leafy forest walls
And wild bird calls.
(from “Municipal gum”)

I love the way she uses gums to represent her people – who they are, where they should be. Some of the poems are angry, some are conciliatory, and others celebrate her culture. I loved the book then, and I still value it now.

Sally Morgan My place (1987, memoir)

The next book in my collection, chronologically speaking, is Sally Morgan’s memoir My place. Sally Morgan is primarily an artist but her memoir became a best seller when it was first published. In it she chronicles how she discovered at the age of 15 years old that her colour did not come from an Indian but  an Aboriginal background, and her subsequent investigations into her family’s rather controversial story. I don’t want to go into the controversy here. Rather, the point I’d like to make is her story-telling: it is warm, funny, and thoroughly engaging.

Women of the centre (1990, short life-stories); Black chicks talking (2002, short life-stories produced in film, book, theatre and art)

Telling stories is an intrinsic part of indigenous Australian culture. It’s how traditions have been passed on for 40,000 years or more. It’s probably simplistic to draw parallels between traditional story-telling and the telling of stories in general. After all, we all love stories. Nonetheless it is certainly clear from the little experience I’ve had and the reading I’ve done, that story-telling is an intrinsic part of indigenous Australian culture and is becoming an important way of sharing their experience with the rest of us. This was powerfully done in Bringing them home: The stolen generation report of 1997 which contained not only the history of the separation of children from their parents and recommendations for the future, but many many first person stories which drove the drier points home.

Two books that I’ve read which contain personal stories by indigenous women are Women of the centre and Black chicks talking. The introduction to the former states that its aim is to help we non-Aboriginal Australian readers to understand lives that are so different from our own and “to provide personal written histories for the descendants of the women involved”. This latter is becoming an urgent issue in indigenous communities today – the capturing of story before more is lost. In Black chicks talking Leah Purcell interviews nine Aboriginal woman – some urban, some rural, some well-known, some not – about their lives. Another wonderful read.

Life stories/memoirs represent, in fact, a significant component of indigenous literature. Another work worth mentioning, though I’ve only seen the film and not read the book (shame on me!), is Doris Pilkington’s “stolen generation” story of her mother’s capture and subsequent escape involving an astonishing trek home, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.

Alexis Wright Carpentaria (2006, fiction); Tara June Winch Swallow the air (2006, fiction); Marie Munkara Every secret thing (2009, novel)

Finally, a brief mention of three recent fictional works, two of which I’m ashamed to say are still in my TBR pile. These are the two David Unaipon Award winners by Tara June Winch and Marie Munkara. If you are interested in the latter, please check Musings of a Literary Dilettante’s review.

I have though read Alexis Wright’s Miles Franklin Award-winning Carpentaria. It’s set in a fictitious place, tellingly called Desperance, in northern Australia. Its focus is colonialism (ie European invasion of the land), and conflict within black communities about how to respond. To explore these, Wright touches on lot of ground, including land rights, deaths in custody, mining rights, boat people, and petrol sniffing to name just a few. She flips between the real and the magical, she uses language that is image-rich and often playful, and she tells some very funny stories. It’s a big, wild and rather complex read that manages in the end to be hopeful despite itself.

This is just a small introduction to the wealth of Australia’s indigenous literature. It won’t be the last time I write about it. I will also in the future post on white Australians who have written about Aboriginal Australians, writers like Thomas Keneally who wrote The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith but who now says he wouldn’t presume to write in the voice of an indigenous Australian. A vexed question really. I believe there should be no “rules” for writers of fiction and yet, sometimes perhaps, it is best not to appropriate voices not your own. But that is a question for another day…

Meanwhile, back to Alexis Wright – and stories:

Old stories circulating around the Pricklebush were full of the utmost intrigues concerning the world. Legends of the sea were told in instalments every time you walked in the door of some old person’s house. Stories lasted months on end, and if you did not visit often, you would never know how the story ended. (Carpentaria, p. 479)

Monday musings on Australian literature: 5 to get you started

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Among the responses to my first Monday Musings post was one from Ingrid of The Blue Bookcase suggesting I post my 5 favourite Australian novels. I had planned something else for this second post but that can wait, as this seems like a great idea. However, rather than post my 5 favourite novels, I’ve decided to nominate 5 novels that might be a good introduction for newbies to Australian literature. Like all lists, it’s very subjective, and as soon as I hit publish I’ll think “why didn’t I choose X?”, but it’s a start and there is some method in its madness. Anyhow, you never know, it may get a bit of discussion going on other worthy “starter” books.

Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

5 Australian novels to get you started

  • My brilliant career (1901), by Miles Franklin. It’s hard to go past this one, not only because Miles Franklin endowed what is our most significant literary award, but because it’s a semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman who is determined to be a writer (rather than marry well). What reader can resist a story about a would-be writer? On top of this, Franklin grew up in the countryside around where I live!
  • The harp in the south (1948), by Ruth Park. Set half a century after My brilliant career in an urban rather than rural setting, and dealing with working class rather than farming people, Parks’ novel is the perfect companion piece. It’s a down-to-earth, realist but warm-hearted, novel about the struggle to live in the slums of post-war Sydney. For a recent review, check out Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers.
  • Fly away Peter (1982), by David Malouf. As well as being a novelist, Malouf is a poet, and it shows in his novels, particularly in this beautiful novella set before and during World War I. Don’t let the “poetry” claim put you off, because this is a very accessible story exploring relationship to land and nature, the class divide, and war. It covers a lot in its 130 or so pages.
  • Cloudstreet (1991), by Tim Winton. This is the only novel of the 5 I’ve listed to be set in the west. It is also the one that in recent times has been most commonly voted as our favourite Australian novel. Like The harp in the south, its characters are “battlers”: the Lambs who believe in hard work, and the Pickles who prefer to chance their luck. Winton puts these two families together in one house and explores their lives over two significant decades, from 1943 to 1963.
  • The secret river (2005), by Kate Grenville. I had to include this one, after mentioning it in last week’s 5 random facts. It is Grenville’s envisioning of what might have happened in the Sydney region when the white settlers – the farmers in this case – came face to face with the indigenous inhabitants in the early years of settlement. Despite official journals and various newspaper reports, there is little documented history of the day-to-day experience of those times. The book won a few awards, but also met its share of controversy, particularly from historians. Some argued that, in her statements on her aims in writing the book, she (unacceptably) blurred the line that separates history from fiction. Others argued that her creation was too 21st century, was not “true” to the times. Partly (wholly?) to answer these critics, Grenville wrote Searching for The secret river in which she detailed the origins of the book and the research she undertook, and then the process by which she changed from writing a non-fiction book to a novel.

What, do I hear you say? No Elizabeth Jolley or Thea Astley or Helen Garner? No Christina Stead or Peter Carey? Not to mention the grand man himself, Patrick White? And no indigenous writers, either? No, not this time. Not because they aren’t wonderful but because this list has a very specific purpose of easing newbies in and at the same time offering a bit of breadth. It’s still pretty narrow though: three of the five were written post 1980 though they cover a wider period, and three are set in New South Wales. But it’s a start. We have plenty of time to explore more.

Meanwhile, if you have books you think work well as an introduction to Australian literature, please share them with us.

Postscript: Before closing this post, I’d like to say a big thanks to all of you who responded to my post last week (and to those of you who read it and didn’t respond. You’re most welcome too!) It was encouraging to receive such interest. I look forward to continuing our conversation through this and future posts – and welcome any ideas for topics you’d like to explore.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Making a start

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Whispering Gums is now 15 months old and I’m still playing with what I am doing here – but one thing I haven’t played with is my desire to help promote Australian literature. And so I’ve decided to formalise this a bit through a weekly post titled “Monday musings on Australian literature”. This is somewhat of an experiment for me. I haven’t fully worked out how I’ll proceed – or where I’ll ramble – but I do hope to entice the occasional guest blogger to share some aspect of their experience of Australian literature. Watch this space.

Dry creek bed, Kata Tjuta

From the dry (creek bed, Kata Tjuta in Central Australia)

How to start things going though? How about this?

5 random, and possibly little-known, facts about Australian literature

  1. Australia has only one Nobel Laureate in Literature: Patrick White in 1973
  2. Melbourne was the world’s second UNESCO City of Literature
  3. The first Australian-born woman to publish a novel in Australia was probably the pioneering botanist and  journalist, Louisa Atkinson, with her Gertrude: the emigrant (1857)
  4. David Unaipon (1872-1967) is generally regarded to be the first indigenous Australian writer and is commemorated on the Australian $50 note and by the the David Unaipon Award for Unpublished Indigenous Writers
  5. The most taught Australian text in 2010 (in Australia), according to the Teaching Australian Literature website, is Kate Grenville’s The secret river.
Thredbo River, Kosciuszko National Park

To the wet (Thredbo River, Kosciuszko National Park)

Well, there’s the start – brief though it is. I hope in future weeks to explore in more depth all sorts of writers, works and issues relating to literature in Australia. It will be rather serendipitous. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear from you about your favourite Aussie writers…

Helen Garner, Cosmo cosmolino

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When I returned to seriously reading Australian writers back in the 1980s, there were four women writers who caught my attention, and I have loved them ever since. They were Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007), Thea Astley (1925-2004), Olga Masters (1919-1986) and Helen Garner (b. 1942). Garner, the youngest by a couple of decades, is the only one still here, still writing novels, short stories, non-fiction and journal articles. I say I love her, but I can’t say I always agree with her. In fact, sometimes she makes me mad – but I admire her honesty and love her writing.

Cosmo cosmolino is not her most recent work. It was published in 1992 and has been on my TBR pile since my brother gave it to me in 1995. How embarrassing! But it finally managed to scramble to the top and I’m glad it did. It’s an intriguing book: it looks like two short stories (“Recording angel” and “Vigil”) and a novella (“Cosmo cosmolino”), but nowhere on the cover or the title page does it say “a collection of short stories”. This means, I think, that we are meant to see it as a novel.

So, how does it work as a novel? Each story would, I’m sure, stand perfectly well alone, but the two short stories also work as back stories to the novella. The tricky thing though is that the connections between these three are only obvious if you are an attentive reader – or, if you re-read it. For me it was a bit of both. I got some of the connections first time around, and others when I flicked through it to prepare this review. This is not a big problem but there is more depth if you have “got” the back stories when you read the final story.

And so, what are the three stories?

  • “Recording angel”. A recently separated woman (who is clearly Janet in the final story) visits an old friend and his wife in Sydney. This friend is seriously ill with brain cancer. He has not only been an important support and rescuer for her but the one who has “recorded” her life. And, he is never backward about telling her his view of what that is. She doesn’t always like or agree with this view, but she nonetheless fears the possibility that in sickness he will “forget everything” and that she will thereby lose an important connection with herself. There is a brief mention in this story of Ursula, who is the mother of the girl in the second story.
  • “Vigil”. A young woman, who is clearly “out of it” and waiting for her father to rescue her, has a boyfriend Ray(mond), who appears to be there more for the “good times” than for a mutually supportive relationship. When things go wrong, he’s not there for the count. This, we discover in the final story, is something he’s been trying to rectify ever since.
  • “Cosmo Cosmolino”. Three rather lonely people – the aforementioned Janet and Ray plus the rather fey artist, Maxine – find themselves sharing Janet’s house. It’s an uneasy grouping.  Ray is waiting for his big brother Alby (who once lived in Janet’s house) to arrive and take him away; Maxine would like a baby but is running out of time; and Janet is recovering from a broken marriage and doesn’t really know what she wants.

These are not strongly plot-driven stories. However, quite a bit happens on the emotional front, and this is Garner’s real subject.

Which brings us to the themes

Taken together, these stories are about the muddles people get into, particularly regarding their relationships with each other. Poor decisions, missed opportunities and the never-ending seeking for meaningful connection are the stuff of her fiction. But there is a departure in this book: the introduction of a spiritual (and at times magical) element, often involving some sense of “visitation”.

Angel Wings

Angel wings(Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

In the first story, the distraught woman is visited at the end by “a small, serious, stone-eyed angel of mercy”. In the second story Ray is dragged into a rather ghoulish underworld-like scene, after which he is told “You’ll be right … Things’ll be different now”. And in the final story there are all sorts of hints of spiritual happenings, including the “dark column” that shadows Janet, and Maxine’s “magical realist” flight “into the blinding upper sky” where “nameless souls and sacraments outrageously disport themselves”.

It all feels very un-Garner-like. She is usually firmly grounded in the real world of messy relationships where people struggle to connect and find meaning. But I should have been prepared: the novel’s epigraph from Rilke reads “Every angel is terrible”. “Terrible”, of course, has two meanings, and I suspect Garner is playing on both here – on the fear angels engender and the awe. As this paradox implies, there is no suggestion here of easy answers but more of possibilities. Here is Janet at the end:

Our minds are not hopeful, thought Janet; but our nerves are made of optimistic stuff.

I was intrigued by the use of “nerves” rather than “souls” or “spirits” given what had gone before, but I rather like her use of that word. It’s effectively ambiguous.

Finally, the style

The thing that marks Garner out for me is her expressive language. Her books are rarely long. This isn’t because she doesn’t have much to say but because she doesn’t waste words. Read this:

… The heart of the house was broken. It ought to have been blown up and scraped off the surface of the earth.

But houses as well as their owners must soldier on …

and this:

… and the architraves had lost their grip on the walls, and slouched this way and that …

and, finally, this:

The room contracted around Ray again, fitting itself tightly to the shape of him, squeezing …

I love the atmosphere and emotion conveyed by language like this.  Garner uses a lot of imagery and symbolism – but never simply. Birds, for example, can augur wonder and hope, or, particularly when “the failure bird” appears, something completely different. There are also biblical allusions, such as when Ray denies three times that he knew his girlfriend. No wonder he’s dragged into the underworld for a bit of shock therapy! From beginning to tend, the language never sways from conveying a sense of things being awry because the characters’ lives are so.

Cosmo Cosmolino is one of those books that is both accessible and challenging – and that is just the sort of book I like to read.

Helen Garner
Cosmo cosmolino
Ringwood, Vic: McPhee Gribble, 1992
221pp.
ISBN: 0869142844

ALS Gold Medal, 2009 (announced 2010)

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

Since many book bloggers are posting the Booker longlist, I don’t think I need to do so here. I don’t expect to read many of them, not so much due to a lack of interest as to the fact that I’ve a pretty full reading schedule in front of me without adding these to it! I have read and reviewed Christos Tsiolkas’s The slap, and expect to read in the next few months Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. There are a couple of others I would like to read, but time will probably defeat me.

David Malouf Ransom
UK edition cover (Used by permission of the Random House Group)

However, I will instead announce – because it gets such little publicity – that David Malouf has won this year’s ALS Gold Medal for Literature with his novel, Ransom. As I wrote in my earlier post on this award, it does not come with a monetary prize and so tends to be overlooked by the media. Nonetheless it is an award well worthwhile watching (how’s that for some alliteration!) because its winners do tend to be among our more notable authors and books.

The other awards made by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature for the year are:

Congratulations to David Malouf – and the rest of the awardees. What a shame there hasn’t been a little more fanfare…

Indigenous Australian stories – and digital technologies

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In my recent on the literary road post, I referred briefly to Indigenous Australian stories. Rather coincidentally, I have just spent three days at a conference titled Information Technology and Indigenous Communities, hosted, primarily, by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) with the aim of exploring “the ever-increasing use of IT to access, create and collate tangible and intangible cultural information and heritage”.  That’s the background – now onto more the interesting stuff!

Nabulwinjbulwinj rock art at Nourlangie Rock

A warning and a story: Narbulwinjbulwinj is a dangerous spirit who eats females after killing them by striking them with a yam

As I said in that literary road post, indigenous Australians have a rich story-telling culture. Theirs was a non-written culture and so stories and traditions were passed on orally and via art, music and dance. All these forms of communication have continued post-contact but, due to breaks in contact with country, many stories and traditions have, tragically, been lost.  It was consequently encouraging to hear, at the conference, about how remote indigenous communities are using modern digital technologies to tell stories – traditional and modern – and thereby re-engage with and reinvigorate their culture.

I hope this doesn’t sound paternalistic because it is not meant to – and I hope it also doesn’t suggest that the real problems don’t exist – but it was exciting to hear positive stories about these communities because most of what we, living in predominantly white urban Australia, hear are the negative – and hopeless sounding – stories of substance abuse, domestic abuse, and the awful health problems that are resulting in unacceptable disparities in life expectancy.

We were given a wonderful taster of what is being produced at the film night held on the first evening of the conference. We saw films by professional artists such as Warwick Thornton and Tracey Moffatt and by makers from various remote community projects. You can see a couple of these on the internet:

If you’d like to see more, here are a couple of sites, both providing access to self-produced and home-grown audiovisual content:

  • Mulka Project from the Yolngu people in northeast Arnhemland – and to see some of the variety of their work, using live action, animation, archival footage, check their YouTube site
  • IndigiTube, which contains media produced by a number of remote indigenous groups. If you click on Watch Videos you will see on the right hand side the variety of topics the videos cover from informational to “creative”, from traditional to modern.

But none of this is easy:

  • resources are minimal, so people spend way too much time writing grant applications – not just to run projects but for their very existence;
  • training is difficult and tends to be organised in-house often by people already stretched too thinly; and
  • access to the Internet is expensive, usually slow, and flakey or non-existent – the digital divide is a fundamental problem. (This was well demonstrated at the conference when they could not get a Skype session to work from a remote community in central Australia but could for a speaker from Montreal).

In other words, the challenges are immense, but the commitment and creativity are inspiring. There’s a long way to go and what culture has been lost is unlikely to be found, but the opportunities digital technologies offer for people to re-engage with each other, their communities and their culture are immense. It was a privilege to be able to there.