Australian literature

Jessica Anderson, The commandant

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Jessica Anderson, The commandant Book cover

Cover image for The commandant (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

When I first read about Sydney University Press’s Australian Classics Library, the book I really wanted to read was The commandant by Jessica Anderson. It’s her only historical novel, but its subject matter doesn’t stray much from what she told Jennifer Ellison in an interview many years ago, “I was very much, and always have been, preoccupied with people who are strangers in their society” and “I am interested in families… They are interesting – you know, the tangle” (Rooms of their own). This is a clever and thoughtful novel by yet another much overlooked Australian woman writer.

[WARNING: SPOILERS, if you don’t know the history on which this is based]

The plot is pretty simple. It is set in Queensland’s penal settlement of Moreton Bay in 1830. It draws from the real story of the commandant there, Patrick Logan, who was noted for his harsh methods and who was murdered while out on an expedition. In the novel, Logan’s family is joined by his wife’s young sister (“the stranger”), Frances, who, on her way up to the settlement via Sydney, has been introduced to “radical” ideas critical of Logan’s regime. The scene is therefore set for potential conflict either between Patrick and Frances, or within Frances herself, or both.  In the end, it is a bit of both as Patrick finds his practices questioned and Frances confronts the realities of living in a penal settlement.

Except for Frances’s boat trip up to Moreton Bay with some of the settlement’s residents, the novel is set entirely in Moreton Bay. The characters include Logan’s household (family and servants), his wife Letty’s two women friends, officers of the settlement including two medical officers and the man sent to replace Logan, and of course some prisoners. There are also some characters in Sydney – Frances’ would-be beau and the sisters of a newspaper editor jailed for his criticism of the regime and against whom Logan is bringing libel action. The characters are well-drawn, with the significant ones nicely complex. You get a good feel for life in the settlement.

I would love to write about many of the characters as there are some wonderfully meaty ones, but I’ll just focus on Frances, the only character, really, who changes during the course of the novel. At the beginning, she “was seventeen; she was not stupid, but was often absurd”. She is also sympathetic to the idea of reform, which she says she developed through seeing servant life and poverty first-hand in Ireland and which puts her at odds with many in the settlement. She has a lovely ability to question herself, to see her failings, and it is this which enables her to learn from her several painful experiences. By the end, she is wiser in the ways of the world and has learnt to live with “incurable knowledge”, but has not lost her commitment to the cause of humanity.

Much of the story is told in dialogue – in fact, it wouldn’t be hard to turn it into a play/screenplay. Anderson handles this dialogue well, nicely differentiating the characters, from Letty’s lisp to officer Collison’s uneducated speech patterns. Letty’s lisp is an ironic touch – it lulls us into thinking she is one of those superficial flirtatious women but we soon discover that she is more complex than just a pretty little wife. Characters are nuanced by their reactions to each other  as well as by what they say, rather than by a lot of specific authorial comment, though there is that too.

There is also description, including some particularly beautiful ones of the bush during the search expedition for Logan, such as:

…a few clumps of trees, their rough bark the colour of iron, and their foliage a dun green, stood with the junction of trunk and root shrouded (my emphasis) by tall pale grass; and although at his left the river marked out a fissure of brighter greens, none among them were the sappy (again my emphasis) greens of England and Ireland or the dense fleshy greens of the coast … Among and behind this scrub stood big trees with foliage in similar colours, and with trunks of grey, or silvery grey, or of mauve shading to grey or rust, or of the beautiful colour of pink clay. It was as if everything here inclined not to the sun’s bright spectrum, but to those of the mineral earth and the ghostly daytime moon.

This is not an entirely benign landscape she is decribing – but neither does it hang heavily on her tale: her main focus after all is people. Here is an evocative description of Letty:

She fragmented the worry with her laugh, and waved it away with her hands, but it always seemed to reassemble, out there in the air, and float back to resettle on her.

One of the things that intrigued me most about the novel as I was reading it was the narrative form. It is a pretty straight chronology, but with many small flashbacks that help illuminate the characters. Most interesting though are a couple of slight but meaningful foreshadowings which, before the novel’s end, give us a sense of the sisters’ futures. This makes us realise that the novel is not really about them…it is about humanity, about how we treat each other – and, about that special word, mercy. You will have to read it for yourselves to know what I mean.

Jessica Anderson
The commandant
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009
326pp.
ISBN: 9781920898946

(Review copy supplied by the Sydney University Press)

Markus Zusak, The book thief

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In one moment, there was great kindness and great cruelty, and I saw it as the perfect story of our humans are. (Zusak on the Random House website)

Zusak could hardly have chosen, for The book thief, a better setting to explore the best and worst of humanity than Germany during the Holocaust. The book reminds me a little of Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the river which also deals with a small German town during the war and the hiding of Jews, though Hegi’s book has a much wider canvas, covering a few decades.

The novel, which is narrated by Death, tells the story of a young girl Liesel (the book thief) who is left with a foster family in a small German town in the lead up to and during World War II. Liesel is treated well by her foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, and makes friends with people in the neighbourhood including Rudy Steiner, a boy her own age. Not long into the novel, the Hubermann household is also joined by Max, a 24 year old Jewish man whom they hide. From here we follow the family and the neighbourhood as they live through the war. The characters – and there are many of them – are well drawn.

It’s a clever, memorable book. The use of Death as a narrator and its structure, which seems both old world (the chapter titles ‘featuring….’) and post-modern (the inclusion of the illustrated stories, the little bold-type assertions like ‘A small threat from Viktor Chemmel to Rudy Steiner’, ‘He survived like this’), give it a fresh tone which impel the reader on. This tone has a veneer of whimsy while at the same time being deadly serious.

There is a bit of foreshadowing but it’s handled well. It tells us our narrator is omnipotent and warns us that bad things are going to happen (and we know they will anyhow). I don’t usually mind foreshadowing – and agree with Death who says:

Of course, I’m being rude. I’m spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don’t have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me.

The star of the book for me is its language. It’s superficially simplistic but is really quite sophisticated. There are some wonderful images – ‘pimples were gathered in peer groups on his face’; ‘they were going to Dachau to concentrate’; ‘rumour of sunshine’; ‘the sky began to charcoal towards light’ – but these are not overdone.

Zusak effectively handles the fact that the characters are German and would be speaking German through the occasional use of German words and phrases. And he lightly translates most of this German for us,  such as ‘”Keine Ahnung’, Rudy said, clinging to the ladder. He had no idea.'” Again, there isn’t too much of this but just enough.

The repetition of the curses – “Saumensch”, “Saukerl”, “Jesus Mary and Joseph” – give it a light touch, as do things like the “Keine Ahnung … He had no idea” above and the gruesome humour of “they were going to Dachau to concentrate”. Again, none of this is overdone. Not too funny, but definite touches of humour. There are those who say you can’t “do” humour and the Holocaust, but I don’t agree: this book is a perfect example of why I don’t.

There is also poetry to the language – with this poetry coming as much through the rhythm, as through imagery:

In the morning he would return to the basement.
A voiceless human.
The Jewish rat, back to his hole.

[and]

She didn’t need an answer.
Everything was good.
But it was awful, too.

[and]

Why him?
Why Hans Huberman and not Alex Steiner.
He had a point.

[and]

Their drivers were Hitlers, and Hubermanns, and Maxes, killers, Dillers and Steiners.

And then there is the frequency of ‘3s’. For example:

  • The Hubermanns lived at 33 Himmel Street (and 33 was the age Jesus Christ was when he died – relevant?);
  • the common curse was ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’;
  • a lot of the rhythms (such as the examples above) come in threes.
  • it is third time unlucky for Hans Hubermann
  • “The Word Shaker” written by Max story starts with “three important details about his life”.

The threes just keep coming. Three is a pretty magical number: the trinity; mind, body and spirit; past, present and future. The concept of “three” is found in most religions and represents, at its simplest, unity.

The novel seems to have two main themes. One is the power of words – to help and to hinder. I loved this, describing Leisel’s surviving the bombing: “the words WHO had saved her life”. The personification of words here, at the end of the novel, is really effective. Words sustain her through most of the book, but there was a point when she nearly gave up on them, as when she tears up a book in the mayor’s house after having seen Max in the Dachau march:

Soon there was nothing but scraps of words littered between her legs and all around her. The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this. Without words, the Führer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or worldly tricks to make us feel better.

What good were the words.

BUT the other theme is the one that ends the book: what it means to be human. Death says:

I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race – that rarely do I ever estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, its words so damning and brilliant … tell her the only truth I truly know … I am haunted by humans.

In other words, Zusak, in this book, encapsulates humanity – its best and its worst – and does it through using ordinary people living in/coping with extraordinary times. His message is simply that humans are capable of wondrous things and of heinous things. No astonishing truth really – we all know it – but he shows how closely these can co-exist and how fine the line often is.

Markus Zusak
The book thief
Sydney: Picador, 2005
584pp.
ISBN:033036426X

The magnificent River Red Gums

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River Red Gum

River Red Gum, Valley of the Winds Walk, Kata-Tjuta

River Red Gums, or Eucalyptus Camaldulensis, are among our most ubiquitous of gum trees, but that doesn’t mean they’re a boring tree. As their name implies they grow along watercourses – including ones that are very very dry such as those you find in Central Australia. They are also a significant part of what makes the Murray River such a gorgeous old river. Apparently, though, they are not found in Tasmania.

One of the well-known places to see these gums is the beautiful Barmah Forest of the Murray-Darling Basin. It boasts trees that are over 500 years old. Sadly, though, there are concerns that due to the extended drought that area has been experiencing, many trees are threatened, if not already dying. I’ve been to this forest and it is a treasure – it would be tragic to lose it.

Being ubiquitous – and beautiful – they feature regularly in Australian arts (in poetry, song, fiction, and art). Of course, they feature in Murray Bail’s captivating novella Eucalyptus:

River Red Gum

Warty River Red Gum, Jessie Gap, East MacDonnells

Over time the River Red Gum (e. camaldulensis) has become barnacled with legends… there’s always a bulky Red Gum here or somewhere else in the wide world, muscling into the eye, as it were: and by following the course of rivers in our particular continent they don’t merely imprint their fuzzy shape but actually worm their way greenly into the mind, giving some hope against the collective crow-croaking dryness. And if that’s not enough the massive individual squatness of these trees, ancient, stained and warty, has a grandfatherly aspect; that is, a long life of incidents, seasons, stories.

River Red Gum

River Red Gum, Bond Gap, West MacDonnell Range

Too many poets to mention have written about this gum. I thought I’d choose just two. First is David Campbell, who addresses the threat to their continuation. Here are some lines from his poem “The Last Red Gum”:

So we stand, me and my brothers, just the bones of ancient trees
that have lined the riverbank since time began.
In a bare and barren landscape, fed by red dust on the breeze,
we’ve been ravaged by the careless hand of man.

Second is Lisa Bellear, an indigenous poet who, in her poem “Beautiful Yuroke Red River Gum”, uses the Gum to symbolise the post-colonial history of Aboriginal Australians. The poem starts:

Sometimes the red river gums
rustled
in the beginning of colonisation
when
Wurundjeri
Bunnerong
and other Kulin nations
sang and danced
and
laughed
aloud

Not too long and there are
fewer red river gums, the
Yarra Tribe’s blood
becomes
the river’s rich red clay

If this isn’t poignant enough, the poem concludes with:

Red river gums are replaced
by plane trees from England
and still
the survivors
watch.

What more can I say?

Were you an Argonaut?

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Before the sun and the night and the blue sea, I vow to stand faithfully by all that is brave and beautiful; to seek adventure, and having discovered aught of wonder, or delight; of merriment or loveliness, to share it freely with my comrades, the Band of Happy Rowers. (from The ABC Weekly, 28 Dec 1940)

Once an Argonaut always an argonaut!  Erato 30 (aka Cat Politics) has blogged a couple of times about the Argonauts Club , which was a hugely-popular-in-its-day children’s club broadcast on Australia’s ABC radio from 1941 to 1972. You had to be between 7 and 17 to join, and you were given a Ship Name and Number – that is you became one of the 50 rowers on one of Jason’s ships. (Jason and the Argonauts – get it!) Hence Cat Politics was Erato 30 and I, Whisperinggums, was Athos 26. As Cat Politics (or is it Erato 30?) says, avatars existed a long time before the Internet!

The Argonauts Club had a long history, which I won’t go into here. For a good rundown, check my link above to the Wikipedia article. Suffice it to say that members were encouraged to submit contributions – poems, stories, art works, musical compositions – as well as questions to experts such as Mr Melody Man (Lindley Evans). In addition stories were heard, and information imparted on everything from writing to sports, music to nature, all in the spirit of fun, adventure and creativity.

Now, the thing is that we Argonauts are starting to grow old and, while some histories have been written, such as Rob Johnson’s The age of the Argonauts, the ABC apparently does not have a complete list of ship names, let alone of the 100,000 or so members. The Friends of the National Film and Sound Archive would like to rectify this and so have set up an Argonauts Register. If you were an Argonaut and would like to register, here is the form. Please do – our cultural history needs you!

That was one reason for writing this post. My other reason was to comment on the number of significant Australian writers, artists and musicians who passed through the Argonauts Club, either as presenters or writers for the show, or as members. Presenters included poets A.D. Hope and Dame Mary Gilmore, artist Jeffrey Smart, actors John Ewart and Peter Finch, the photographer Frank Hurley, to name a very few. One of the most well-known writers for the the Children’s Session was Ruth Park whose serial, The muddle-headed wombat, is one of the first things mentioned whenever two or more Argonauts get together.

Famous Australians who were Argonauts include comedian Barry Humphries, novelist Christopher Koch, composer Peter Sculthorpe, writer Robert Dessaix, musician Rolf Harris and television writer Tony Morphett, again to name a very few. Morphett is reported as saying that the Argonauts inspired him to see writing as a career: “This is a valid thing to be doing – it’s okay to be a writer.”

As for me, I was not one of those keenly contributing Argonauts who aimed for the Dragon’s Tooth award let alone the ultimate Golden Fleece and Bar, but I loved the show. It was an important part of my childhood. There has, I think, been nothing quite like it since, on radio or TV, that has inspired such a wide age-group for so long. What a shame that is.

Rob Johnson
The golden age of the Argonauts
Rydalmere: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997
270pp
ISBN: 0733605281

On the literary road, in Gippsland

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The Gippsland area of Victoria is a particularly rich one in terms of Australia’s literary history. It is also an area I’ve never visited before and so this week we decided to return home from Melbourne via the less common path, that is via Gippsland. Unfortunately our trip through the region was a quick one, with just one overnight stop at the pretty little fishing and tourist town of Lakes Entrance. It has whetted my appetite for a more leisurely exploration of the area in the future. Gippsland is a diverse region with plains, lakes, rivers, mountains and coastal landscapes – the sort-of “something for everyone” place that tourist guides like to promote.

Some of the authors commonly associated with Gippsland are Eve Langley, Mary Grant Bruce, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Hal Porter … Some were born there (such as Porter) and some visited there (such as Katharine Susannah Prichard), but all wrote about the region. The English writer, Anthony Trollope, also visited the area in 1872.

Eve Langley, whose novel The pea-pickers was the subject of one of my early posts, was particularly well known for extolling the virtues of Gippsland. In The pea-pickers, her two main characters travel through Gippsland – to places like Bairnsdale and Lakes Entrance – working as agricultural labourers. Steve, the main character, yearns to return to her family’s glory years as “princes” of Gippsland.

One of my favourite – though rather politically incorrect these days – childhood authors was Mary Grant Bruce. She set several of her lesser novels in the region and drew on her experiences there for her children’s series, The Billabong novels. My literary guide suggests that “the sense of escape and immersion in untouched nature”  are evident in Bruce and Langley. While clearly there is more settlement now than there was in the early to mid twentieth century when these writers were writing, there are still many wild and natural spaces to enjoy in the Gippsland.

One discovery – and a rather embarrassing one for a person who prides herself on her knowledge of Australian geography – was that it is in Gippsland that the Snowy River, of Banjo Paterson fame, has its mouth. How did I not know that? Anyhow, I was pleased to see it at its quieter end!

Gum tree, Orbost

Towering gum tree, Orbost

None of the region’s literary heritage was evident to the casual traveller – how I wish we celebrated our writers more. I will finish though with some lines from a poet of the region, Jennings Carmichael, as quoted in the guide under the entry for the town of Orbost:

Each soaring eucalyptus, lifted high,
The wandering wind receives;
I watch the great boughs drawn against the sky,
Laden with trembling leaves.
A soft harmonious music, full and rare,
Murmurs the boughs along–
The voice of Nature’s God is solemn there,
In the deep undersong.

On the literary road

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Back in the mid 1990s I bought The Oxford literary guide to Australia. Having not looked at it for a few years, I decided to take it on our current little road trip. Two days ago, for example, we drove through Gundagai and Tarcutta, both of which appear in the guide.

The Dog on the Tuckerbox, GundagaiGundagai, NSW

Most Australians will have heard of Gundagai – there is the famous Dog on the Tuckerbox (which features in many songs and poems) and the well-known song, “Along the road to Gundagai”, by Jack O’Hagan. Its lines include:

where the blue gums are growing and the Murrumbidgee flowing.

The funny thing is that Jack O’Hagan apparently never visited Gundagai! This didn’t stop him writing other songs about the town too including “When a boy from Alabama meets a girl from Gundagai”.

There are several other songs and poems featuring the town – including by Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson –  but the Guide says it is a mystery as to why this particular town “was such a popular inspiration for songs”. If they don’t know, I don’t know either … but it is a pretty town with a famous old bridge.

Tarcutta, NSW

Not all that far down the road from Gundagai is Tarcutta. According to the Guide it is a popular truckies stop. It also features in the poem “Under way” by Bruce Dawe:

…there would be days
banging open and shut like the wire door of the cafe in Tarcutta
where the flies sang at the windows…

Ah, the flies! Apparently in 1961 Les Murray wrote his poem “The burning truck” in the same cafe. Unfortunately, having already had coffee at Bullocky Bill’s near the Dog on the Tuckerbox, we did not test our muse in Tarcutta.

And yesterday we drove through other towns, including…

Emerald, Vic

Down in the Dandenongs east of Melbourne is the pretty little town of Emerald – quite different from the somewhat drier and dustier Tarcutta and Gundagai. It was a gold town – hmm, wonder then why it was called Emerald! Apparently Katharine Susannah Prichard spent her honeymoon here with Hugh Throssel in a cottage owned by her mother. She wrote her novel Black Opal (1921) while staying in the town in another cottage.

Vance and Nettie Palmer lived there in the early 1920s. Nettie wrote:

You could easily imagine yourself taking root there, developing a local patriotism, bringing up your children to know its history and become attached to its soul.

Having passed through, I can think of worse places to live. Vance Palmer’s novel, Daybreak (1932) is set here and in the Dandenongs in general.

Peter Pierce (ed)
The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 (rev ed)
501pp.
ISBN: 0195536223

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, 2009

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Nam Le’s The boat has won the fiction category in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Much deserved too I say! Interestingly, the non-fiction prize was shared by two books: Evelyn Juers’ House of exile, and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’ Drawing the global colour line. Lisa, at ANZLitLovers, recently wrote about Juers’ book – you can read what she says here.

The Boat – Recap

Back in February I reported on my bookgroup’s discussion of The boat on our group blog, but that was before I started writing here. I won’t repeat here what I said there – as you can read it yourselves. I will note though that one of its stories was included in Mandy Sayer’s recent anthology, The Australian long story. That has to say something! If you haven’t read it yet, think about it now. Nam Le is a new voice on the scene and I certainly hope he isn’t a flash in the pan.

A.B. Paterson, The Man from Snowy River and other verses

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Cover for The man from Snowy River and other verses (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)
Cover for The man from Snowy River and other verses (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

Is there an Australian out there who doesn’t like Banjo Paterson? Who can’t sing “Waltzing Matilda”, or quote a line or two from “The Man from Snowy River” or “Clancy of the Overflow”? While some of the 12 titles chosen for publication by Sydney University Press in its first set of Australian Classics Library might be surprising, the selection of A.B. Paterson’s The man from Snowy River and other verses should not be. Indeed, Peter Kirkpatrick writes in his introduction to this edition that “You’re about the read the most famous book of Australian poetry ever published”. As well as having been published in entirety many times over the more than 100 years since it first hit the streets in 1895, its poems have also appeared in collected works editions and too numerous to count anthologies. This then is not really the sort of book a reviewer “criticises” in the traditional sense of the word.

Perry Middlemiss, at the appropriately named  Matilda, recently reprinted an 1895 Brisbane Courier review of the first edition. This review makes it clear that many of the poems were already well-known and quoted “all over Australia”. And nothing, I’d say, has changed in the intervening century or so! Why is this? In Derek Parker’s  new biography, Banjo Paterson: the man who wrote Waltzing Matilda, Paterson is quoted as saying:

Poetry is older than civilisation … and it will make men laugh or weep or fight better than any acting or speech-making. Of course, this only applies to real poetry, and not to the verse that most of us write. There is a great difference between poetry and verse, and when a man speaks of real poetry, he should always take his hat off.

So Banjo, it seems, didn’t make great claims for art…I’m not so sure about that.

Paterson was 31 when this collection was published. Many of the poems had been published in The Bulletin, whose editor, according to Peter Kirkpatrick, wanted his readers in the lead up to Federation in 1901 “to imagine the kind of nation Australia might become”. Paterson was an important tool in his vision-making armoury. This provides an interesting hook from which to view the poems. What is the Australia and what are the values that Paterson espouses?

Paterson was born in the country but at the time of writing these poems was a city solicitor. Many of the poems, though, romanticise the country over the city, such as “the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city” versus “the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended” (“Clancy of the Overflow”). And many, in a similar vein, champion the underdog – the working man versus the toff or boss. It’s not always simple black and white though. If you only knew Paterson from his well-known poems like “The Man from Snowy River”, “Clancy of the Overflow” and even “The Geebung Polo Club” you would be forgiven for thinking his view of the bush and bushmen was romantic. This is not completely so, though. Paterson in fact chronicles human behaviour in all its diversity. Alongside the hardworking drovers and shearers (albeit some with a touch of cunning) like “Saltbush Bill” and the characters in “A Bushman’s Song” and “The Droving Days”, there are the easily duped “Man from Ironbark”, the rogue Ryan who is helped to escape the law by his loyal girl in “Conroy’s Gap”, and the cheating horse-owners whose attempt to sell off a poorly performing horse comes back to bite them in “Our New Horse”. Having read William Lane’s The workingman’s paradise I was tickled to see a reference to shearers and unions in “A Bushman’s Song”: “‘We shear non union here,’ says he. ‘I call it scab’, says I”.

Many of the poems are humorous: there are characters whose gullibility lets them down as in “Johnson’s Antidote” and others who fail in their attempts at trickery (often to do with horse-racing). Paterson lauds ingenuity, but not when it is deceitful. There are also the nostalgic poems yearning for the romance of the simpler past (before money and business got in the way), such as “On Kiley’s Run”. And then, of course, are the tragic ones, speaking directly of the hardships of life. The saddest has to be one of my childhood favourites, “Lost” (“Though far and wide they sought him, they found not where he fell;/For the ranges held him precious, and guarded their treasure well”). Another is “Only a Jockey” about a 14-year-old jockey who dies in a training accident (“What did he get from our famed Christianity?”).

While all the poems are rhyming, Paterson uses a great variety of rhythms and rhyming schemes to match the tone of his “verse” – from the heroic, romantic and elegaic to comic. There’s also intertextuality (such as Clancy appearing in “The Man from Snowy River”) and a good deal of irony. I like the self-conscious story-telling in poems like “Conroy’s Gap”:

And that’s the story. You want to know
If Ryan came back to his Kate Carew;
Of course he should have, as stories go,
But the worst of it is, this story is true:
And in real life it’s a certain rule,
Whatever poets and authors say
Of high-toned robbers and all their school,
These horsethief fellows aren’t built that way.

Not all the poems work equally well – some are a little awkward and clumsy – but, taken as a whole, recognising the spirit in which they were written, they present an intriguing insight into late 19th century Australia and values, and make entertaining reading as well. Whether you call it poetry or verse, I take my hat off to Banjo!

A.B. Paterson
The Man from Snowy River and other verses
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009 (orig. pub. 1895)
128pp.
ISBN:9781920899035

(Review copy supplied by Sydney University Press)

Favourite Australian novel

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Matt over at A Novel Approach has brought to my attention the Australian Book Review’s poll to find our FAN, that is our Favourite Australian Novel. Not, they say, Australia’s favourite novel (which would end up with books like Lord of the Rings on the list), nor our favourite Australian book (which could very well result in memoirs like A fortunate life or Mao’s last dancer being on the list). No, we are talking our Favourite Australian (ie written by an Australian, however you personally define that) Novel (ie prose fiction of a certain length) of all time.

ABR is keen to get a good poll going: they are offering some rather nice bookish prizes. So, here is your chance to make a difference – and possibly win a very appealing prize!

I’ve voted. It was hard. I don’t really like making such judgements about something that is so subjective – but the prize was calling. Ha! I wondered whether to go political – and choose a novel by a minority author like a woman, an indigenous person, or a non-English speaking background (NESB I believe they are – or were – called) person. Or, should I be a little iconoclastic, and choose a favourite book that has been forgotten and/or ignored by the literary establishment? In the end, though, I went with my heart and voted for the first Australian novel to grab and inspire me when I was still at school. Care to guess what it was?

Murray Bail, The pages

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The pages, Paperback cover (Image: Courtesy Text Publishing)

The pages, Paperback cover (Image: Courtesy Text Publishing)

It’s not surprising that someone who calls herself Whispering Gums loved Murray Bail’s previous novel, Eucalyptus, and so it was with some enthusiasm that I picked up his latest novel, The pages, a few days ago. My edition, unlike the one imaged here, is the hard cover one and, funnily enough, it looks like the bark of a tree (like, say, a eucalyptus!). That makes sense I suppose since trees are the source of paper.

It is, I have to say, a bit of an odd book – but I did like reading it nonetheless. Plot-wise, it’s pretty flimsy. Middle-aged Erica, a philosopher, goes outback with her friend, the psychologist Sophie, to stay with brother and sister graziers, Roger and Lindsey, in order to examine their late brother Wesley’s “philosophy”.  This gives the novel two narrative strands – the women’s experiences as they stay with Roger and Lindsey interspersed with the told-in-flashback story of Wesley and how he came to write his philosophy. Both strands are told in third person until near the end when, as Erica starts to read some of Wesley’s writings (his “pages”), his strand switches to first person.

Occasionally inserted between these strands are funny little digressions on topics such as hospitality in relation to philosophers and psychoanalysts (Ch. 8), and psychoanalysts, philosophers and their chairs (Ch. 23). Juxtaposition may partially throw light on these but I’m not sure it does fully. Bail seems to want to say something about psychoanalysis (which Bail says is typified by the “endless sentence”) versus philosophy (“the long sentence”) but I’m not sure exactly what it is. He seems more negative about psychoanalysis, but philosophy is also found wanting.

I like the characterisation. Bail’s characters are very comprehensible as people and as types: the socially awkward but dependable Erica, the self-centred flirtatious Sophie, and the practical no-frills Lindsey, for example, are recognisable but interesting too. I also like the language, the description of the setting in particular is evocative but not overdone:

Through the window she saw a tall pale-grey eucalypt surrounded by a darker cluster of pines, elms, cedars. It pronounced a solid leave-it-or-take-it way of being. The simple strength of the tree: stand it alongside the lack of statement, on her part. For a moment – before looking away – Erica saw herself as resolute only in a few minor things.

There is humour in it too, mostly of the ironic or sly type. The solicitor, for example, is described as having “pursed lips from the many years of putting words in parentheses”. And, as you can see from that, there’s play on words, about words, and with words (and language): the sandstone “weathered and worn smooth by the never-ending revision of ideas” and the ambition of philosophers to “build a word-model of the world, an explanation, parallel to the real world.”

The book is rather elliptical (in both its literal and literary meanings). Wesley goes from country to Australian city to foreign cities and back to the country in search of a philosophy, a new way of understanding the world. During these journeys we are tantalised with “glimpses of clarity”  as he tries to comprehend what might comprise his philosophy while at the same time he is confronting (seeking?) something way more human – love. In these later moments he wonders whether  “the ambition to supply the answer to everything is a form of madness” and suggests that “philosophers have been unsatisfactory in the examination of emotions”. Meanwhile, Erica moves from the city to the country (a physical and metaphysical “interior”) to, she hopes, find a new philosophy in Wesley’s “pages” but what she actually finds, in the country, is love. Somewhat akin to Wesley’s questionings she comes to wonder “what possible dent could philosophy make on the fact of existence?” Contrasts and contradictions underpin the book.

Earlier, around the middle of the book, it is said of Wesley that he “was finding a gap existed between the clarity of his chosen subject, and the softer unavoidable intrusions of everyday life”. It seems to me that, by the end, he has not closed that gap OR, rather, he finds that true philosophy lies IN the gap. The final line of the novel is that “we are philosophers; we cannot help being”. I love the wordplay on the last word: “being” as in “existing”, and “being” as in “being philosophers”.

Somewhat similarly, Erica says near the end of the novel:

One of philosophy’s functions has always been to shine light into the dimly lit, the imprecise, the hopeful.

What we find reflected in Bail’s The pages, then, is “a glimmer of clarity” that, for we readers as for the characters, comes and goes with the “light”. And, isn’t that pretty much how it is in life?

Murray Bail
The pages
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2008
199 pp.
ISBN: 9781921351464

Note: I’ve read a small number of reviews since reading this book, seeking a more complete understanding. These reviews are more erudite than mine and most are longer so delve a little more deeply, but none, really, offer me a better understanding. The one I like the best, because it most closely reflects my understanding of and reaction to the book, is by Hermione Lee.