Australian literature

A.B. (Banjo, to most of us) Paterson

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Within the next few weeks I will be reviewing the Australian Classic Library’s re-release of Paterson’s The man from Snowy River and other verses, so this post is just a teaser. It was inspired by a column in The ABC Weekly (of 22 February 1941). Paterson died on 5 February 1941 – and less than three weeks later Australian novelist and critic, Vance Palmer, wrote a short item on Paterson’s impact on him:

I very well remember the excitement that filled me when, as a boy, I came across his new book, “The Man From Snowy River”, and I know that others around me shared the excitement. Here was the life we had known, suddenly given meaning, significance, a fresh interest. … It was as if a word had been uttered that was to awaken a dumb country, giving it a language of its own, and spreading a sense of fellowship between one man and another.

They were different times then – The man from Snowy River was first published in 1890, when Vance Palmer was 5 years old. We now have a language of our own, and we are a far more urbanised society than the one Paterson wrote about, and yet, I too have a soft spot for Paterson. Like Palmer, my love for Paterson also started when I was a child – when my father would read Paterson’s ballads to us. And in fact, I shared this Paterson-love only recently in an exchange with American blogger, Waltzing Australia, after she quoted “The Man From Snowy River” poem in full on her blog. We traded some favourite poems and lines, but I have to give her the award for the best response when she quoted these lines from his poem, “An Answer to Various Bards”, in which he responds to poets such as Henry Lawson with “their dreadful, dismal stories”:

If it ain’t all “golden sunshine” where the “wattle branches wave.”
Well, it ain’t all damp and dismal, and it ain’t all “lonely grave.”
And, of course, there’s no denying that the bushman’s life is rough,
But a man can easy stand it if he’s built of sterling stuff…

Yes, I can take a lot of Banjo – and so I greatly look forward to reading the recent re-release with its new introductory comments. Watch this spot!

Australian Battle Cry, circa 1941

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Dame Mary Gilmore, 1948 (Presumed Public Domain, from the State Library of NSW, via Wikipedia)

Dame Mary Gilmore, 1948 (Presumed Public Domain, from the State Library of NSW, via Wikipedia)

Somehow I would not have thought of socialism and patriotism being combined in the same person but, logically I suppose, there’s no real reason why they shouldn’t be. And it does appear they were combined in Dame Mary Gilmore, a famous Australian poet and journalist who was also well-known as a socialist.

How do I know? Well, today in my reading of The ABC Weekly (issue of 22 February 1941), I came across the words and music for a song titled “Australian Battle Cry”. I’m not sure what the copyright situation is for reproducing a song, but I’m going to take a risk and quote the lyrics in full – anything less (and you will soon see why) would seem rather ridiculous:

We’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders,
Sons of the Boomerangland !
We’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders,
We fight for the Boomerangland !
Boomerang, Boomerang, Boomerang*, Boomerang!

(* Pause for effect – as per instructions on the score).

The music was set by Madame (I suppose if you’re not a Dame, Madame will do!) Evelyn Grieg.

Now, the introductory notes to this, Australia’s first, “national battle cry”, calls it “a deep-throated and rousing theme calculated to stir a nation to action in war and effort in peace”. It goes on to say that Gilmore based it on an “Aboriginal corroboree cry” she heard as a child in 1872 in central New South Wales. These notes also inform the ABC Weekly’s readers that copies of the words and music have been sent to “our fighting forces in Africa and Palestine” and have been published in The Education Gazette so that schools can use it “to rally the rising generation in Australia”.

And so now I bring it to you. Consider yourselves (well, the Aussies among you anyhow) rallied!

Poet’s advice to Australian writers, 1940

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In 1940, Ernest G Moll’s poetry collection, Cut from mulga, was chosen by the Commonwealth Literary Committee as the book of the year. In that same year, in a talk on the ABC, he exhorted Australian writers to stop being apologetic about being Australian.

So, who was Ernest G Moll? He was born in Victoria in 1900, but moved to the USA in 1920 and was appointed the Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon in 1929. He retired from there in 1966, and lived out the rest of his life – he died in 1997 – in California. However, he did return frequently to Australia during this time, including in 1939-40 when he lectured on exchange at Sydney Teacher’s College. I must admit that I am not familiar with Moll or his work but he is clearly of some note – one of his poems, “On having grown old” (don’t you love the way this title is worded?), was selected for the rather gorgeous anthology published in 2008, 100 Australian poems you need to know.

Moll, then, has a certain amount of cred – and presumably did back in 1940 when he gave his talk on the ABC. A brief summary of this talk was reported in The ABC Weekly of 28 September 1940. Here is an excerpt:

If we write of things as they affect us as individuals – imaginatively and not as adherents of a literary tradition or of a relatively impersonal discipline of scholarship – we must write as Australians.

There’s no other way.

Our skies, our seas, our birds and plants, our landscapes, the qualities of our men and women, surely we have an eye for these.

Scientists find them distinctive enough and surely the eye of the artist is not second to the microscope in delicacy, discrimination, penetration?

I’m not sure what specifically prompted this outburst. There were many Australians writing “as Australians” in the 1920s and 1930s – Katharine Susannah Prichard, M. Barnard Eldershaw, Henry Handel Richardson, and Frank Dalby Davison to name a few. However, it is possible that they were working against a backdrop of cultural cringe: M. Barnard Eldershaw, for example, could not find a publisher in Australia for their award-winning novel A house is built, and so it was first published in England (1929).  Perhaps there was some politics behind Moll’s exhortation?

(NB The ABC Weekly column attributes the talk to “Professor E J Moll”. However, my research has not turned up a likely EJ Moll and so, given EG Moll’s background and the fact that he was in Australia at the time, I have assumed that this was a typo.)

Australian Classics Library

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Am I the last to know? I have just discovered that Sydney University Press is publishing a new set of Australian Classics, using a grant from the CAL Cultural Fund. Each title has a newly written critical introduction and, in a nice bit of collaboration, some biographical and bibliographical information from AustLit.

The titles – an interesting lot really – were selected from over 80 titles already sold by the Press and were chosen for “their importance in the canon of Australian literature and their applicability to the education market”. They are:

The commandant, by Jessica Anderson (SUP website, applying their fair dealing statement)

The commandant, by Jessica Anderson (SUP website, applying their fair dealing statement)

The prices, ranging from around $22.95 to $32.95, are a little high I think. Some (though by no means all) of these are still in copyright so that makes a difference, and there’s also the additional editorial material (but presumably that has been covered by the grant?). However, with the recent and very cheap original-look Penguin Classics range, the comparison may put people off, particularly when the covers of these, with their orange and white theme, appear to riff a little off those Penguins.

Anyhow, back to the selection. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve read almost none of these books though I have owned the Cappiello for quite a few years, and bought Maurice Guest a few years ago to fill a gap in my reading. I have read and do like Jessica Anderson – just not The commandant. It’s encouraging, in fact, to see a decent, well 33% anyhow, proportion of women in the list. Oh, and I must admit that I haven’t heard of Price Warung (apparently, according to Wikipedia, a pseudonym for one William Astley, 1855-1911).

The advertisement (and I have to remember that it IS an advertisement) that drew my attention to this new series described it as “12 best-known and loved works of Australian literature”. Hmmm…I have no serious quibble with the selection – after all, it is encouraging to see such support for our classics and any selection is going have a large degree of subjectivity. However, I’m not sure that I’d quite describe this set – fine as it is – as our “12 best-known and loved”. Would you?

Kath Walker aka Oodgeroo Noonuccal

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I fell in love with Kath Walker, as she was known then, in my teens and bought her book of poems, My people. I loved her passion for her people and the intensity but accessibility of her poems. Every now and then I look at them again. Today, however, my mum gave me a dear little illustrated book produced by the National Library of Australia called Little book of dogs. It contains a small selection of Australian poems on, well, dogs. One of them was also in My people, and is called “Freedom”. It’s a powerful little poem about man’s (and the implication is white man’s) desire to tame “all things wild and tameless”.

Brumbies on the run in Central Australia

Brumbies on the run in Central Australia

For copyright reasons I don’t believe I can quote the whole poem – it only has four verses – but here is the first verse:

Brumby on the wild plain
All men out to break you,
My warm fellow-feeling
Hopes they never take you!

Simple stuff really but, if you have a message you must get across to as many people as possible, simple is sometimes best.

Breakfast with David, Malouf that is

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Malouf reading from Ransom, National Library of Australia, 16 August 2009

Malouf reading from Ransom, National Library of Australia, 16 August 2009

“Exploring in the dark” is how David Malouf frames the process of writing. In other words, writing, he says, brings out what is within the writer but is not fully understood until the writing starts. Furthering this notion, he quoted Herman Hesse as saying that a writer needs to be “a sleepwalker with the absolute assurance that he will put his foot down in the right place”. These were the first thoughts David Malouf shared with us, this morning, at the National Library of Australia’s last Books with Breakfast event of the year. He was in conversation with academic Brigid Rooney.

This is the second time my friend and I have attended a David Malouf literary event, the first being in 1990 when The great world came out. Admittedly that was a bigger event but we both felt that he was more relaxed today. I guess that’s not surprising given nearly 20 years of literary events have passed since then.

The focus of the conversation was, not surprisingly, Malouf’s most recent book, Ransom, which essentially recounts the last 24 hours of Achilles’ and Priam’s lives at Troy. Malouf explained his fascination with Troy, from his first introduction to the story in 1943 when he was 9 years old, through a poem he wrote around 1969/1970 called “Episode from an Early War”, to this latest novel of his, Ransom. Explaining his obsession, he talked about Troy being a city under siege waiting for war, and how Brisbane had felt the same in 1943; and about the 1960s being a period of maximum anxiety about nuclear war, and how Troy reminds us of the destruction of a civilisation. He sees Troy as an important part of our cultural inheritance and as emblematic of many of the things that confront us today – particularly in relation to war and its victims.

The discussion returned several times during the conversation to writing and storytelling, things of major concern to Malouf and about which he is wonderfully eloquent. He recounted Henry James’ description of “experience” as being “threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness”. Henry James also said that “a writer is someone on whom nothing is lost”. Similarly, Malouf said that he sees our consciousness as “whole”, by which he means “all our experience is always with us”. Writing, he said, is about making connections in our experience and is “an extraordinary illustration of how our consciousness works”.

At one point in the morning, he discussed his book An imaginary life, which explores the exile of the Roman poet Ovid. He said it initially puzzled people as to why an Australian would write such a book, and that it was not really comprehended until European commentators started noticing that it dealt with the issue of “living at the centre versus living at the edge”. Just as the exiled Ovid was “living at the edge”, so do we in the New World. This recognition, he said, helped readers see it as a book that was indeed about and relevant to Australia.

Towards the end, the conversation returned to Ransom…but as I have only read 20 pages (after all, while I wasn’t concerned about spoilers, I didn’t want to go to the event completely unprepared) I will save discussing those comments until I review the book (probably next year the rate I’m going!) The event concluded with Malouf giving a brief reading from the book. Rather tellingly – and perhaps cheekily – he chose a section that ended with the words:

This old fellow, like most storytellers, is a stealer of other men’s tales, of other men’s lives.

Would that I could be such a stealer!

Some Australian literary classics

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Lisa at ANZ LitLovers referred yesterday to ABC Radio National’s The Book Show program on Patrick White’s The solid mandala. This is in fact part of weeklong series they are doing on Australian classics. They have chosen an intriguing – but not unappealing – list of works to discuss:

Dare I admit it? I’ve only read two of these: the White and the Astley.

Although I haven’t read as much of White as I want (plan) to, I’ve liked everything I’ve read. I like his style; I like the things he talks about. The solid mandala’s style includes multiple points of view, sentence fragments, and a somewhat complicated time structure: I’m a bit of a sucker for these techniques as they tend to keep my brain in gear while I’m reading. And while it sounds terrible really, there’s an aridity to his characters that fascinates me. This aridity is well evident in The solid mandala. It’s there in the repetition of yellow-brown colours: the main characters’ surname is Brown, their neighbours are the Duns, and the colour yellow features regularly (“waves of yellowing grass”, “yellow fluctuating light”, “yellow feet”). It’s there in the description of characters as dry and brittle (Waldo is “dry and correct”, “felt as brittle as a sponge” and “had shrivelled up”). And, somewhat ironically, it’s even there in the colour blue (“the moons of sky-blue ice fell crashing” and “his heart contracted inside the blue, reverberating ice”). It’s a desperately sad book about failed ambitions and missed connections – and yet it’s also about kindness and about the “truth above truth” (that is there if you look for it).

As to Astley, I have been promising for a while to write my next Favourite writers post on her – and I will do it soon!  Since reading Chloe Hooper’s The tall man earlier this year, I have been wanting to re-read The multiple effects of rainshadow as it’s been a lo-o-o-ng time since my first reading. Both, as you probably know, deal with violence and racial tensions on Palm Island – Astley through fiction, Hooper through non-fiction. Hooper is interviewed briefly in The Book Show’s program. She says of Astley that:

I think that she was very much interested in the violence of the frontier and she wrote about it and was very brave, because she was one of the first writers of her generation to deal with this question.

And that was Astley. Fearless, forthright and prepared to be confronting. I will get to her soon…

As simple Arthur says to would-be intellectual Waldo in The solid mandala, “it doesn’t matter what you write about, provided you tell the truth about it”. White’s and Astley’s truths are often uncomfortable – but that didn’t stop them and we, I think, are the richer for it.

Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Shortlist

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And so, as reported by Perry Middlemiss on his Matilda blog, it’s pretty much the usual 2009 suspects that have been shortlisted for the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. They are:

  • The pages by Murray Bail (Text)
  • Dog boy by Eva Hornung (Text)
  • The boat by Nam Le (Penguin)
  • The slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin)
  • Breath by Tim Winton (Penguin)

I have read the last three of these (links are to my reviews here or elsewhere), and will be reading The pages in the next month or so. Nam Le’s The boat won this year’s New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards Book of the Year and UTS Glenda Adams Award. Will it win in Victoria? I rather hope it does – if only because it represents a fresh new and talented voice that would be great to encourage.

More Jolley

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Elizabeth Jolley (Photo: Courtesy Fremantle Press)

Elizabeth Jolley (Photo: Courtesy Fremantle Press)

A decade or so ago my local reading group, with trepidation from some, decided to try a poetry night. The idea was that we’d all bring a favourite poem or two to share. What would I bring? I have some favourite poets from my student days – poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot and William Wordsworth – but was that all I knew about poetry? Well, it just so happened that my brother had given me a few years earlier The Penguin book of Australian women poets (1986) so I hied me thither to see whether anything inspired. And what did I find but one of my favourite writers, Elizabeth Jolley, there ensconced.

Now, fair dealing provisions of the Australian Copyright Act are not clear for poems and anthologies so I won’t reproduce the full poem, “Neighbour woman on the fencing wire”, but here is its beginning and end:

So you’ve bought this place well let me tell you
straight away your soil’s no good all salt even a
hundred and sixty feet down and up on the slopes
is outcrops of granite and dead stumps of dead
wood nothing’ll grow there we know we’ve tried
…
dead and then there was that pig ate a woman’s
baby right in front of her door mind you I always say –

Says it all really…how can you not laugh along with a writer who writes a poem like this. (It is also published in her book Diary of a weekend farmer, 1993).

Elizabeth Jolley, My father’s moon

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‘No one,’ she says, ‘can write anything till they’ve had experience. Later on perhaps. You will write later on.’ (Elizabeth Jolley, My father’s moon, 1989)

Although fiction demands imagination, it must be based on  some kind of genuine experience. (Elizabeth Jolley, “Only Connect”, essay first published in Toads, 1992)

My father’s moon is the first book in Jolley’s semi-autobiographical trilogy, the others being Cabin fever and The George’s wife. It won The Age Book of the Year Award in 1989.

I am an Elizabeth Jolley fan – and, along with Helen Garner, another Jolley fan, I enjoy the way she repeats and revisits stories and characters from one book or story to another. In this book is the chapter, “Night Runner”, which was published as a short story in Meanjin in December 1983, and again in a short story anthology, Room to move, published in 1985. The narrator of the story – and of the novel – typifies Elizabeth Jolley’s alienated protagonists and their often peculiarly self-centred and self-deluded ways of coping with their loneliness. Clearly Jolley decided that this was a character she wanted to develop further. And clearly she also drew a lot from her own experience to develop this character. Like Vera, Jolley was brought up as a Quaker, her parents sheltered refugees before and during the Second World War, and she trained as a nurse. Like Vera, Jolley probably experienced loneliness and alienation. However, this is fiction and so we need to be careful about how far we take these analogies between Vera and her creator. Much as I can empathise with Vera’s predicament, I must admit that I would hate to think she is Elizabeth Jolley.

It’s an uncomfortable novel. Vera, the first person narrator, is not a highly sympathetic character but neither is she totally disagreeable either. What she is, though, is lonely. The book has a somewhat challenging structure – and I had to concentrate to keep track of where I was. It starts with Vera, a single mother, leaving her parents’ home, with her young daughter, to live and work in a boarding school. Her hopes for a lovely life there among people “who feel and think as I do” are dashed. Such people “are not here as I thought they would be … I am by my own mistakes buried in this green-leafed corruption and I am alone”. In this first chapter are flashbacks to the past, and gradually the book moves into the past, providing us with insights into her character and how she has ended up where she is. Most of this past takes place in the hospital where she trains as a nurse during the war. The book finally returns to the beginning of the novel with Vera resolving to make a step towards alleviating her loneliness. However, we are by no means convinced she will.

Moon, by atomicshark @ flickr, licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY 2.0

Moon, by atomicshark @ flickr, licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY 2.0

The book comprises titled chapters, many if not all of which could be (and some have been) published separately as short stories. This gives it a somewhat disjointed feel – but seems appropriate for the story of a person like Vera. It is full of wonderfully drawn characters, with some very funny (if often dark) scenes and dialogue. Just think nurses and hospitals! There are many references to music – something that is common in Jolley’s works. Music is usually a comforting force for her characters, offering them respite from what is often a cruel world – and this is the case here, with Vera being drawn to characters who love and play music. There is a lot of irony, some of it subtle, some of it less so as in Magda’s comment to Vera who has fantasised about an affair with her husband: ‘You are so innocent and good … Don’t ever change’. Naive perhaps, innocent no!

So, what about the title? Funnily enough(!), it refers to Vera’s relationship with her father, a major stabilising influence in her life. He tells her throughout her childhood that wherever she is she can always look at the same moon he is looking at, ‘And because of this … you must know that I am not far away. You must never feel lonely’. A lovely concept and one to which Vera regularly returns in the book.

My father’s moon is not, I think, the easiest Jolley to read, and there are some things that might become clearer on a second reading. However, its concerns are very representative of her work – loneliness and alienation, homosexuality, parenting, memory, music and religion. While Vera is deeply lonely, while she often behaves selfishly, she can also be kind. She is also no quitter. For that I rather like her.