Australian literature

Monday musings on Australian Literature: Parramatta’s inaugural Laureate for Literature

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This week’s Monday Musings is one I’ve been waiting to post ever since I saw the announcement a month ago. This time of year is so busy and I have my traditional little suite of posts that I wanted to keep to, so this post had to wait.

The announcement, as you have guessed from the post title, concerned the appointment of Parramatta’s first (or inaugural) Laureate for Literature. For those of you unfamiliar with Australia, or, with Sydney in particular, Parramatta is a suburb of western Sydney. It’s a big suburb, or, as Wikipedia describes it, “a big CBD”. It was home to the Dharug People for at least 30,000 years before the colonists started settling it in 1788, and was the setting for First Nations author Julie Janson’s historical novel Benevolence (my review). Set in colonial times, the ironically titled Benevolence opens in 1816, when a young motherless girl is handed over by her trusting father to the British to be taught English at the Parramatta Native Institution.

Parramatta is also the second location of a non-profit organisation called the Story Factory, whose aim is to “help Indigenous and disadvantaged school-aged children (generally 7 to 17 years old) to develop their writing and storytelling skills”. It started in Redfern in 2012, with the Parramatta site opening in 2018. Perhaps, though, I’ll leave this for another Monday Musings.

All this, however, is simply to set the scene for sharing the announcement made on 4 December 2023 that local Parramatta author, Yumna Kassab, had been made the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature. This role is the result of a partnership between the Sydney Review of Books literary journal, the City of Parramatta, and Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre. Their aim was to “select a highly regarded writer with links to the Parramatta region”, and who is “making an outstanding contribution to literature”. The expectation is for this person to “help animate a vision for the future of Parramatta as it cements its position as the true heart of global Sydney”. I’m not sure about the “true heart of global Sydney”. That’s perhaps a bit of a reach that other parts of Sydney might quibble about, but I love their vision of a laureate in literature as able to make a meaningful difference to a place.

The announcement goes on to say that Kassab ‘will receive a stipend of $50,000 to write what she describes as “a dictionary of Parramatta”, grounded in the city’s complex histories and diverse communities’. She will also run some writing workshops with local participants, and “advocate publicly for writing cultures”.

You can read the announcement at the link I’ve provided above, but I will just highlight two things. One is the comment by the Editor of the Sydney Review of Books, Dr James Jiang, that “She brings to the role exceptional talent, and the cosmopolitan sensibility and civic-mindedness that are hallmarks of the city’s culture and ambitions”. And the other is that, reading between the lines, I understand that applications for the role were called for, and that applicants were asked to suggest projects they would undertake. The announcement also shares the rest of the shortlist, which comprised Gary Dixon, Eda Gunaydin, Bilal Hafda, Fiona Murphy and Vivian Pham.

Who is Yumna Kassab?

Some of you will know of Kassab as, although she’s relatively new on the literary scene, she has garnered some excellent critical attention. According to various sites, including GoodReads and Giramondo which published her first book, she was born and raised in Western Sydney, and completed most of her schooling in Parramatta, “except for two formative years when she lived in Lebanon with her family”. She studied medical science at Macquarie University and neuroscience at Sydney University. 

She has written four works of fiction:

  • The house of Youssef (short story collection, 2019, Giramondo): listed for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, Queensland Literary Award, NSW Premier’s Literary Award, Readings Prize, and The Stella Prize (kimbofo’s review)
  • Australiana (novel, 2022, Ultimo)
  • The lovers (novel, 2023, Ultimo): shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction
  • Politica (novel, 2024, Ultimo)

She has also written for newspapers and journals, including The Saturday Paper, Meanjin, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, and the Sydney Review of Books.

Kassab’s themes seem to be family and relationships; and migration, class, and othering. Critics describe her work with terms like “unsparing”, “unnerving”, “poetic”, “unobtrusive realism”. Promoting her latest book, Politica, which is due out this month, Ultimo calls it “a powerful new novel that asks again if it’s possible to ever measure the personal cost of war.” Oh my … how relevant is that.

My question for you: Does a city or place (not a whole country) near you have a Laureate for Literature? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some New Releases in 2024

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This year we start with my first Monday Musings post appearing on Tuesday! This is due to conflicting new year traditions – my Blogging Highlights post on 1 January, and my first Monday Musings being New Releases for the coming year. When 1 January is a Monday, I’m in trouble! I could have left this until next Monday, but I already have a post that’s been waiting to go, and I don’t want it to wait any longer, so Tuesday it is!

As before, I have drawn from the Sydney Morning Herald, where Jane Sullivan and the team has again done a wonderful job of surveying publishers large and small. This year, I have also used The Guardian’s list put together by Canberra Writers Festival director, Beejay Silcox. As always, I have also sussed out a few of my own! Also, this is Monday musings on Australian literature post, so my focus is Australian authors in areas of interest or relevance to me. This means I’ve not included non-Australian writers, nor all the Australian nonfiction. To see those, click on the SMH link.

Now, there are many ways to do this sort of list. Kim (Reading Matters) has posted a list of new releases by publication month, but, as is my wont, I’ve arranged mine by author, under some broad form headings.

Links on the authors’ names are to my posts on those authors.

Fiction

As always, not every book listed last year, ended up being published that year so a couple appear here again. And, also as always, I have read a very small number from last year’s list, but a few more are on my TBR and will be read this year. Here’s this year’s selection:

  • Jenny Ackland, Hurdy gurdy (June, A&U)
  • Alan Attwood, Houdini unbound (May, Melbourne Books)
  • Shirley Barrett, Mrs Hopkins (June, A&U): posthumous 
  • Anne Buist and Graeme Simsion, The glass house (April, Hachette)
  • Donna M Cameron, The rewilding (March, Transit Lounge)
  • Brian Castro, Ruins and fragments (late 2024, Giramondo)
  • Shankari Chandran, Safe haven (May, Ultimo)
  • Melanie Cheng, The burrow (September, Text).
  • Chairman Clift, The end of the morning (May, New South): posthumous autobiographical novel
  • Miranda Darling, Thunderhead (April, Scribe)
  • Michelle de Kretser, Theory and practice (November, Text) 
  • Francesca de Tores, Saltblood (April, Bloomsbury): pseudonym for Francesca Haig
  • Brooke Dunnell, Last best chance (April, Fremantle Press)
  • David Dyer, This kingdom of dust (October, Hamish Hamilton)
  • Rodney Hall, Vortex (Picador, October)
  • Anita Heiss, Dirrayawadha (August, Simon & Schuster): First Nations author
  • Julie Janson, Compassion (March, Magabala): First Nations author
  • Gail Jones, One another (February, Text)
  • Melanie Joosten, Like fire hearted suns (March, Ultimo)
  • Yumna Kassab, Politica (January, Ultimo)
  • Malcolm Knox, The first friend (October, A&U)
  • Siang Lu, Ghost cities (May, UQP)
  • Catherine McKinnon, To sing of war (May, Fourth Estate)
  • Stephen Orr, Shining like the sun (March, Wakefield Press)
  • Liam Pieper, Appreciation (March, PRH)
  • Diana Reid, untitled novel (second half of the year, (Ultimo)
  • Alice Robinson, If you go (July, Affirm)
  • Jock Serong, Cherrywood (September, HarperCollins)
  • Jessica Tu, Honeyeater (July, A&U)
  • Karen Viggers, Sidelines (January, A&U)

SMH lists many books under Crimes and Thrillers, but this is not my area of expertise or major interest, so, do check SMH’s link if you are interested. I will, though, bring a few to your attention: .

  • Steven Carroll, Death of a foreign gentleman (April, HarperCollins): a new genre for Carroll
  • Garry Disher, Sanctuary (April, Text)
  • Sulari Gentill, The mystery writer (Ultimo, March)
  • Louise Milligan, Pheasants nest (March, Allen & Unwin): her first foray into fiction

Most of the sources I checked identified Debut Australian fiction and I think it’s useful to separate them out, so we don’t all wonder why the names don’t seem familiar:

  • Sharlene Allsopp, The great undoing (February, Ultimo): First Nations author
  • Katherine Allum, The skeleton house (June, Fremantle): Fogarty Literary Award winner
  • Susanna Begbie, The deed (May, Hachette): Richell Prize winner
  • Amy Brown, My brilliant sister (January or February, Scribner/Simon & Schuster): adult novel debut
  • Amanda Creely, Nameless (March, UWA): Dorothy Hewett Award shortlist
  • Belinda Cranston, The changing room (May, Transit Lounge)
  • Winnie Dunn, Dirt poor Islanders (March, Hachette)
  • Kyra Geddes, The story thief (May, Affirm)
  • Melissa Goode, Ordinary human love (May, Ultimo)
  • Kirsty Iltners, Depth of field (May, UWA): Dorothy Hewett Award winner
  • Katrina Kell, Chloe (February, Echo): adult novel debut
  • Finegan Kruckemeyer, The end and everything before it (July, Text)
  • Abbey Lay, Lead us not (March, PRH)
  • Bri Lee, The work (March, A&U): fiction debut
  • Murray Middleton, The degenerates (July, Text): full length novel debut
  • Deborah Pike, The players (April, Fremantle)
  • Raeden Richardson, No Church in the wild (April, Macmillan)
  • Linda Margolin Royal, The star on the grave (February, Affirm) 
  • Jordan Prosser, Big time (June, UQP)
  • Helen Signy, Maya’s dance (March, Simon & Schuster)
  • Ruby Todd, Bright objects (May, A&U): 2023 Victorian Premier’s unpublished manuscript award shortlist.

Short stories

  • Georgia Blain, We all lived in Bondi then (January, Scribe): posthumous
  • Ceridwen Dovey, Only the astronauts (July, PRH) 
  • John Richards, The Gorgon flower (April, UQP) 
  • Mykaela Saunders, Always will be (March, UQP): First Nations author
  • Ouyang Yu, The white cockatoo flowers: Stories (April, Transit Lounge)

Non-fiction

The newspapers include a wide range – and a large number – of new non-fiction books, and I found more in my own research, so I’m sharing a few that particularly caught my eye. Click the newspaper links for more.

Life-writing (very loosely defined, and selected to those focused mainly on the arts and activism)

  • Wayne Bergmann with Madelaine Dickie, Some people want to shoot me (March, Fremantle): First Nations memoir, focusing on native title
  • Tony Birch on Kim Scott (April, Black Inc “Writers on writers”)
  • Brooke Bland, Gulp, swallow: Essays on change (November, Upswell): memoir-in-essays “about family and friends, life and mortality, memory and forgetting”
  • Hermina Burns, Barbara Tucker: The art of being (February, MUP)
  • Samantha Faulkner (ed.), Growing up Torres Strait Islander in Australia (August, Black Inc)
  • Peter Goldsworthy, The Cancer Finishing School (March, PRH): “shares lessons from his incurable cancer diagnosis”
  • Jeremy Hill and Ronald Millar, No singing in gum trees: The honest life of Max Martin (no date, Wakefield Press)
  • Robert Manne, untitled political memoir (December, Black Inc)
  • Brenda Niall, Joan Lindsay: The hidden life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock (October, Text)
  • Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham (ed), Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower: The letters  (May, NewSouth)
  • Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood, Black duck: A year at Yumburra (April, Thames & Hudson): First Nations memoir, about life on their farm
  • Magda Szubanski, untitled memoir (October, Text)
  • Tara June Winch on Alexis Wright (October, Black Inc “Writers on writers”)

History and other non-fiction (esp. social justice and environmental issues)

  • Larissa Behrendt, Weaving with words (November, UQP)
  • James Bradley, Deep water (April, PRH): eco-literature
  • Clint Bracknell and Kylie Bracknell, Shakespeare on the Noongar stage: Language revival and Hecate (May, Upswell): on Macbeth in Nyoongar language
  • Santilla Chingaipe, Black convicts: How slavery shaped colonised Australia (August, Scribner): examines the First Fleet, investigating the place of people of African descent in colonial Australia.
  • Simon Cleary, Everything is water (June, UQP): eco-literature
  • Anne Coombs, Our familiars: The meaning of animals in our lives (August, Upswell): “meditation on the awe-inspiring responsibility we take on with other living creatures”
  • Helen Garner, untitled nonfiction (July, Text): inspired by time spent with a grandson’s football team
  • Amy McQuire, Black witness: The power of Indigenous media (June, UQP)
  • Jasmin McGaughey and The Poets Voice (ed.), Words to sing the world alive (November, UQP): “leading writers discuss their favourite First Nations words”
  • Ellen van Neerven and Jeanine Leane (ed), Shapeshifting (October, UQP)
  • Amy Remeikis, The truth about nice (July, Hachette): on “the politics of civility – and its pernicious myths”
  • Clare Wright, The Yirrkala Bark Petition (October, Text): third in her Democracy trilogy

Poetry

Finally, for poetry lovers, I’ve sussed out a few more than were listed by the two newspapers, but even then haven’t listed them all. Poetry in Australian is flourishing, it seems:

  • Robert Adamson, Birds and fish: Life on the Hawkesbury (February, Upswell): posthumous
  • Alison Barton, Not telling (no date, Puncher & Wattmann): First Nations
  • Judith Beveridge, Tintinnabulum (August, Giramondo)
  • Judith Bishop, Circadia (May, UQP)
  • David Brooks, The other side of daylight (March, UQP)
  • Bonny Cassidy, Monument (February, Giramondo)
  • Nandi Chinna and Anne Poelina, Tossed up by the beak of a cormorant (Fremantle, July)
  • Robbie Coburn, Ghost poetry (January, Upswell)
  • Lloyd Jones, The empty grandstand (September, Upswell): New Zealander
  • John Kinsella, Spirals (March, UWA)
  • Jeanine Leane, Gawimarra gathering (February, UQP): First Nations
  • Nam Le, 36 ways of writing a Vietnamese poem (March, Scribner)
  • Kent McCarter, Fat chance (January, Upswell)
  • Kate Middleton, Television (February, Giramondo)
  • Jazz Money, The fire inside August, UQP): First Nations
  • Roslyn Orlando, Ekhō (February, Upswell)
  • Suneeta Peres da Costa, The prodigal (late 2024, Giramondo)
  • Nathan Shepherdson, soft meteorites (September, Upswell)
  • Elfie Shiosaki, Refugia (July, Magabala)
  • Anne-Marie Te Whiu (ed), Woven (February, Magabala/Red Room Poetry)

Anything here interest you?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some little recaps

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It’s Christmas Day, so the the question was, do I do a Monday Musings post or not? Will anyone be looking at blogs. If you take part in this holiday season, I hope you are enjoying it in the way you most enjoy – with family, on your own, at the beach or in front of a fire, around a table or with plates on your laps somewhere comfortable. And, if it’s not a holiday season for you, well, then, you just might appreciate things continuing as normal.

But then, the next question was, what to post, because it needed, I felt to be something non-demanding. So, how about a couple of little recaps.

Recap 1: Top Ten Monday Musings posts

I started posting Monday Musings in August 2010, and since then have written 674 of them, making this one no. 675. I love writing them, though at times I leave it a bit late, and they end up being more rushed than I’d like. I can’t promise this will improve as life just seems to keep being busy, but I hope that even the ones that aren’t as comprehensive as I’d like offer some readers something to think about to look into further.

Now, though, I’m sharing the ten posts that have had the most all-time hits. Most of them are older posts – over half are ten plus years old – which is not surprising, I guess. However, in a sense I am surprised to find how many older posts still have a life. I wouldn’t necessarily call these Top Ten my best Monday Musings, and some feel dated to me now, but they are still attracting some attention. Here they are, with their all-time ranking (out of all my posts), and the year they were posted):

Recap 2: Australian Women Writers Challenge

Over the past decade or so, I have devoted my last Monday Musings of the year to the Australian Women Writers Challenge, largely because it was an actual challenge, so I would report on what I had read and on the challenge’s overall stats for that year. However, in January 2022, it changed from being a challenge to a blog/website devoted to promoting often under-recognised or overlooked women writers, from the 19th- and 20th-centuries. We want to bring them back to wider notice.

Barbara Baynton 1892
Baynton 1892 (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

As in 2022, we continued this year to post twice a week: articles or reviews on Wednesdays, and actual writings by women, related where possible to the previous Wednesday’s post, on Fridays. While our change in focus resulted in a drop in stats (that is, in visits to the site) last year, they picked up this year, increasing by nearly 30%. I put this down to the hard work put in by Bill (The Australian Legend), our commissioning editor and writer of monthly posts, and to Challenge founder Elizabeth Lhuede, who prepares all the Friday posts, as well as doing her monthly post. We welcomed a fourth member to our team this year, Stacey Roberts (allforbiblichor), who is doing a PhD in Australian literature. It has been good having another head take part in our discussions and decisionmaking, and she wrote two fascinating posts on female domestic service in colonial women’s fiction, here and here.

Our most visited 2023-published post turned out to be mine on Barbara Baynton’s short story, A dreamer. I don’t take great credit for this, however, because I believe its popularity is due to the story being a set text.

The blog does take a lot of time, and we are currently talking about future plans. We expect to do things a little differently in 2024, but we will be continuing.

Recap 3: Books given for Christmas

This is probably not, technically, a recap, but what better day than this to share the titles of Australian books I gave as Christmas presents this year. They are not necessarily my favourites – indeed, I haven’t read them all – but were chosen to suit the recipients’ likes. (I hope I got it right.) Here they are:

  • Carmel Bird, Love letter to Lola (my review)
  • Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls (my review)
  • Garry Disher, Consolation
  • Michael Fitzgerald, Late: A novel (Lisa’s review) (on my TBR)
  • Toni Jordan, Dinner with the Schnabels
  • Kim Kelly, Ladies Rest and Writing Room (my review)
  • Mori Ogai, The wild goose (not Australian, but translated to English by the Australian Meredith McKinney) (on my TBR)
  • Tracy Ryan, The queen’s apprenticeship (Lisa’s review) (on my TBR)
  • Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in my family is a murderer
  • Ian Terry, Uninnocent landscapes (my review)
  • Emma Young, The disorganisation of Celia Stone

And, here I will leave it, as I don’t want to take too much away from my annual Reading and Blogging Highlights posts which are coming soon. In the meantime, I wish all of you reading this, all the best of the season, whether you celebrate it or not. I look forward to seeing you all on the other side, whenever you raise your heads again.

Ian Terry, Uninnocent landscapes (#BookReview)

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This is my third post on my brother’s beautiful book, Uninnocent landscapes: Following George Augustus Robinson’s Big River Mission. My first post announced its publication, and my second was on the book’s launch and the opening of the accompanying exhibition. Finally, I come to my review post. Yes, you could call me biased, but this project has had so many accolades that I don’t feel my bias contradicts the general run of opinion. However, you must decide for yourselves.

Uninnocent landscapes, as I wrote in those previous posts, is the culmination of an idea Ian started thinking about around a decade ago, but that he actively worked on over the last two to three years. It involved his following the journey taken by George Augustus Robinson on his 1831/32 Big River Mission (brief description), which was a poorly conceived attempt to conciliate between settler and Aboriginal Tasmanians. As those versed in Tasmanian history know, it was a disaster, and effectively ended First People’s resistance in lutruwita/Tasmania (back then, anyhow!) For Ian, who has come to call lutruwita home, there is discomfort in reconciling his privileged life as a middle-class white man with the devastating impact of colonialism on Tasmania’s First Peoples. This is his truth-telling project – his questioning, as he describes it, of how non-Indigenous Tasmanians (and, by extension, all non-indigenous Australians) “come to terms with our privilege and its Janus face, the violent and continuing dispossession of palawa” (and, by extension, all First Nations people). And he found a unique way to do it, by combining the three big passions of his life (besides family) – history, photography and the bush – to produce this book. 

Uninnocent landscapes, then, contains a selection of Ian’s photographs accompanied by excerpts from Robinson’s text. It also contains an introduction by Tasmanian art historian, curator, essayist and commentator on identity and place, Greg Lehman (a descendant of the Trawulwuy people of north-east Tasmania), and five essays, the first and last by Ian, and three he commissioned from:

  • Rebecca Digney (manager, Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania and proud pakana woman)
  • Nunami Sculthorpe-Green (activist/artist and proud palawa and Warlpiri woman)  
  • Roderic O’Connor (sixth-generation woolgrower and Connorville custodian)

These essays provide different perspectives on country and on colonialism’s impact on it. Together they work as a dialogue which encourages us to test our own thinking about what has happened in the past and how we might progress into the future.

“battered but still recognisable” (Nunami Sculthorpe-Green)

Ian explains in his first essay that the photographs were taken in a sprit of enquiry:

What memories do the landscapes of lutruwita/Tasmania hold? What stories are embedded in the rocks, the trees and grasses, the waters of rivers and lagoons? What could the landscape tell us about invasion, colonisation and the destruction of First People’s life and culture? What could it tell me about my own life here on this island?

The juxtaposition of Robinson’s text to Ian’s images offers literal, historical, symbolic and/or emotional readings of the photographs. They confront us with a colonial way of thinking about country that we haven’t fully shaken. Robinson’s reflection that “the whole of this country is peculiarly adapted for natives” is jolting, when you think about what this is really saying. Some excerpts reveal a man tired of his mission, while others show a sincere wish to be humane, but most of course are also overlaid with the arrogant confidence of the colonist. There is, though, also some humour, such as this:

I cautioned my natives and said if the whites saw them they would shoot them. They replied that they could see the whites first, and that they could not always shoot straight.

The image accompanying this text depicts a road passing through a fence on which is appended a security notice advising the area is under surveillance. It returns us to the reality that despite their knowledge, skills and confidence, the “natives” lost.

I’d love to share other examples of text and image, not to mention the thoughts of all the essayists, but instead, I’ll just say that this book provides a reading experience that is enlightening, provoking, and sobering.

When Ian first told me the title of the book, I thought it was inspired. He explains its origins in his opening essay. It comes from a conversation between two nature/landscape writers, the British Robert Macfarlane and the American Barry Lopez. Referencing the impact on the Slovenian landscape of war and atrocity, Macfarlane spoke of “a sense of the uninnocence of landscapes”. Nunami Sculthorpe-Green, however, expresses a different idea in her essay. She writes that “it is not the landscape that is uninnocent. It was not a party to the atrocities committed here, but a witness to them, and truly a victim itself”. Just reading these two opposing but sincerely felt ideas shows how important open and honest dialogue is if we are to understand each other. In some ways, the actual words are less important than the conversations they generate and what we learn through them.

It’s a big call, perhaps, to say Ian found a unique way to truth-tell, but I’m not the only one to see this project as original. One of those is Sculthorpe-Green who writes in her essay:

I do see this project as something different from the norm, in that it finally takes this story off the paper and re-centres our land as the storyteller and story keeper.

So yes, I’m hugely proud of what Ian has done. It’s a beautiful book that works aesthetically, intellectually and emotionally – and, more importantly, that moves the conversation forward. It’s a book that explores the depredations of the past, but that also contains hope. As Digney says at the end of her essay, “History resonates. We continue.”

Ian Terry
Uninnocent landscapes
Mt Nelson: OUTSIDE THE BOX / Earth Arts Rights, 2023
136pp.
ISBN: 9780646881058
Price $65, with all proceeds going to the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania’s Giving Land Back fund. You can order here (but supplies are dwindling).

 

Monday musings on Australian literature: Favourite books 2023

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Over recent years, I’ve shared favourite Aussie reads of the year from various sources, with the specific sources varying a little from time to time. This year, a significant source – The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age – is unavailable to me as it is behind a paywall, and at this time of year I just don’t have the time to go to the library to access the paper. I have no problem with paywalling. We should pay for journalism, and I do. Just not these ones. (But, I am disappointed as they invite writers to identify their favourites and I always enjoy seeing their choices. I wish I could just buy an article.)

However, I still have other sources: ABC RN’s panel, Australian Book Review, The Australian Financial Review, The Conversation and Readings bookshop’s Ten Best Australian fiction. The picks range widely, with different “pickers” use different criteria, making this more of a serendipitous than an authoritative list. As always, I’m only including their Aussie choices. Do check the links if you’d like to see complete choices.

Last year, I noted that five of the “favourite” novels and short story collections were on my TBR, and this year I read four of those: Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost, Robert Drewe’s Nimblefoot, Kevin Brophy’s The lion in love, and Chris Flynn’s Here be Leviathans. This must be a record for me.

Novels

  • Graham Akhurst, Borderland (Heidi Norman; Tony Hughes-D’Aeth; Tony Birch )
  • Tony Birch, Women and children (“poignant novel about strong women, family, and the loss of innocence…”, Readings; Claire Nicholls; Kate Evans)
  • Stephanie Bishop, The anniversary (“a tense and superb literary novel”, Readings; “addictive”, Carol Lefevre) (Kimbofo’s review)
  • Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (Jason Steger) (on my TBR)
  • JM Coetzee, The Pole and other stories (Cassie McCullagh; Geordie Williamson)
  • Trent Dalton, Lola in the mirror (Hannah Wootton)
  • Briohny Doyle, Why we are here (Tony Birch)
  • Nicholas Jose, The idealist (“sophisticated and artfully restrained espionage thriller, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth) (Lisa’s review)
  • Simone Lazaroo, Between water and the night sky (Julienne van Loon)
  • Amanda Lohrey, The conversation (Felicity Plunkett) (Lisa’s review)
  • Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (“a tour de force”, Readings; Kate Evans; Jennifer Mills) (on my TBR – see my conversation post)
  • Laura Jean Mackay, Gunflower (“McKay’s prose both illuminates and psychedelically reimagines our world”, Readings)
  • Angela O’Keeffe, The sitter (“execution and reading experience are second to none”, Readings) (Lisa’s review)
  • Matthew Reilly, Mr Einstein’s secretary (Jason Steger)
  • Sara M Saleh, Songs for the dead and living (Jason Steger)
  • Gretchen Shirm, The crying room (James Bradley) (Lisa’s review)
  • Amy Taylor, Search history (“witty and insightful novel of our times”, Readings) (Kimbofo’s review)
  • Lucy Treloar, Days of innocence and wonder (Kate Evans)
  • Christos Tsiolkas, The in-between (changed her mind about the author, Beejay Silcox; “captivating novel by a writer in top form which has already won over new readers and old fans alike”, Readings; Jason Steger; Kate Evans) (Kimbofo’s review)
  • Pip Williams, The bookbinder of Jericho (Readings; Jason Steger) (Lisa’s review)
  • Charlotte Wood, Stone yard devotional (Kate Evans; “the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret”, Kerryn Goldsworthy; James Bradley) (Lisa’s review)
  • Alexis Wright,  Praiseworthy (Tony Hughes-d’Aeth; “resists political simplifications”, Paul Giles; Philip Mead; “magnificent work of politics and imagination”, Jennifer Mills; “epic, addled, visionary examination of the contemporary implications of those foundational crimes”, Geordie Williamson) (Bill’s second post which includes a link to his first)
  • Jessica Zhan Mei Yu, But the girl (“astute and witty coming-of-age novel”, Readings)

In a little shout out to our friends across the ditch – in new Zealand: Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood was chosen by AFR’s Hannah Wootton and ABC’s Claire Nicholls, and Pip Adams’ Audition by ABR’s Jennifer Mills and Emma Shortis.

Short stories

  • John Morrissey, Firelight (“already widely considered the first instalment in a [First Nations] career to watch”, Readings)

Poetry

  • Dan Hogan, Secret third thing (“a wildly inventive wordsmith whose work is as playful as it is political”, Yves Rees)
  • Kathryn Lomer, AfterLife (Glyn Davis)
  • Alan Wearne, Near believing (John Hawke)

Nonfiction

  • Dean Ashenden, Telling Tennant’s story (Peter Mares)
  • Ryan Cropp, Donald Horne: A life in the lucky country (Patrick Mullins; Glyn Davis; Mark McKenna)
  • Graeme Davison, My Grandfather’s Clock: Four centuries of a British-Australian family (Bain Attwood; Penny Russell)
  • Sarah Firth, Eventually everything connects: Eight essays on uncertainty (Jen Webb)
  • Hannah Forsyth, Virtue capitalists: The rise and fall of the professional class in the Anglophone world, 1870–2008 (Penny Russell; Marilyn Lake)
  • Kate Fullagar, Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled (“an inventive structure and humanistic care”, Patrick Mullins; Frank Bongiorno; Mark McKenna)
  • Anna Funder, Wifedom (Jason Steger; Lisa Murray; Frances Wilson) (on my TBR)
  • Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (Claire Nicholls; Jason Steger; Cassie McCullagh; “meditation on the mutability of family, place, the past, is imbued with wistful nostalgia, one that resonates deeply”, Des Cowley) (on my TBR)
  • Richard King, Here Be Monsters: Is technology reducing our humanity? (James Ley)
  • Catherine Lumby, Frank Moorhouse: A life (Glyn Davis; Mark McKenna) (Lisa’s review)
  • Maggie MacKellar, Graft: Motherhood, family and a year on the land (Anna Clark)
  • Kim Mahood, Wandering with intent (Peter Mares)
  • David Marr, Killing for country: A family story (Geordie Williamson; Frank Bongiorno; Glyn Davis; Kieran Pender; Brenda Walker; Mark McKenna)
  • Walter Marsh, Young Rupert: The making of the Murdoch empire (Patrick Mullins)
  • Thomas Mayo, The Voice to Parliament handbook (Glyn Davis)
  • Gemma Nisbet, The things we live with: Essays on uncertainty (Lynette Russell)
  • Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: A writing life (“one of the finest literary biographies published in Australia”, Peter Rose)
  • Noah Riseman, Transgender Australia: A history since 1900 (Yves Rees)
  • Alexandra Roginski, Science and power in the nineteenth-century Tasman world: Popular phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (“rich, enthralling account”, Penny Russell)
  • Heather Rose, Nothing bad ever happens here (Tristan Banck) (on my TBR – see my conversation post)
  • Alecia Simmonds, Courting: An intimate history of love and the law (“uniting zest for narrative with immense research and hard-hitting analysis”, Penny Russell)
  • Ellen van Neerven, Personal score: Sport, culture, identity (“unique, poetic memoir and meditation on gender, sexuality, identity, and sport”, Kieran Pender)
  • Chris Wallace, Political lives (Tom McIlroy)
  • Sally Young, Media monsters: The transformation of Australia’s newspaper empires  (Frank Bongiorno)

Finally …

It’s interesting to see what books feature most. Popularity doesn’t equal quality, but it does provides a guide to the books that attracted the most attention in the year. Last year I noted that one of 2021’s most frequent mentions had won the 2022 Miles Franklin. In 2022, the two most frequently mentioned books were Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost and Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow. Neither won the Miles Franklin, but both won significant awards during 2023 including the Prime Minister’s (Fiction) Literary Award for Jessica Au.

This year’s most mentioned books are fewer this year because that paywall issue significantly reduced significantly my “haul” but we still have some (and all are well-established authors):

Fiction

  • Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (5 picks)
  • Christos Tsiolkas’ The in-between (4 picks)
  • Graham Akhurst’s Borderland, Tony Birch’s Women and children, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone yard devotional (3 picks)

Nonfiction

Did you notice two books in this section were subtitled, “essays on uncertainty”? I’m intrigued.

  • David Marr’s Killing for country (6 picks)
  • Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (4 picks)
  • Ryan Cropp’s Donald Horne, Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong & Phillip, and Anna Funder’s Wifedom (3 picks)

An advantage of lists like this is discovering new books. I was excited to read about First Nations Kalkadoon writer John Morrissey’s Firelight, because it’s short stories and because the Kalkadoons were the first First Nations people I knew (back in the 1960s). Gemma Nisbet’s The things we live with: Essays on uncertainty has also caught my eye.

Besides the books which are already on my TBR, and hence known to me, there are others I had heard about and that interest me. David Marr’s Killing for country feels a bit close to home, but worth reading, as I too have “skin in the game”, as my brother calls it. The literary biographies I missed this year, including Olubas’s Shirley Hazzard and Lumby’s Frank Moorhouse, are also in my sights. And there are several First Nations books here, besides the Morrissey and Lucashenko, that I am keen to read. Birch and Ellen van Neerven, for example.

I could go on because, you know, readers love talking about books we’d like to read, but I also know when it’s time to stop and pass the baton on …

POSTSCRIPT: The day I posted this The Guardian Australia, as kimbofo shared in the comments, published their Top 25, which more or less reinforces these but adds some books not here, including one I’ve read, Rebecca Burton’s Ravenous girls (my review)!

Thoughts, anyone – on this or lists from your neck of the wood?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List, 2023

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December is when I start my round of regular end-of-year posts, and a new one I’m adding to the fold is the The Grattan Institute’s annual Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List. The institute is an Australian non-aligned, public policy think tank, which produces readable, reasoned reports on significant issues, like, most recently, the role of hyrdrogen in Australia’s green energy goals and an analysis of the keenly awaited review of the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme).

My focus here, though, is another activity of theirs, their Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List, which they have published annually since 2009. This list, as they wrote on the inaugural 2009 list, comprises “books and articles that the Prime Minister, or any Australian interested in public debate, will find both stimulating and cracking good reads”.

As I wrote in last year’s post, the Institute’s then chief executive, Danielle Wood, said they aimed

to pick books that have something interesting, original, or thought-provoking to say on issues that are relevant to the Australian policy landscape. The books don’t have to be by local writers or about Australia … but they do have to address issues that have relevance in an Australian policy context.

I managed to read, after the event, two of last year’s list, Debra Dank’s We come with this place (my review) and Jessica Au’s Cold enough for snow (my review). Dank’s is an obvious choice, but I love they they also chose something quietly, and perhaps even enigmatically, reflective about life and change in Au’s book.

Here is the 2023 list in their order, with a small excerpt from their reasoning:

  • Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life (on my reading group’s 2024 schedule, Brona’s review): “People don’t become invisible by accident … a powerful case study of the hidden lives of wives whose contributions are downplayed or entirely disregarded”
  • Ellen van Neerven, Personal score: “highlights the disproportionate impact of a changing climate on Indigenous people, the importance to Aboriginal health of story and being heard, and the complexity of gender and belonging, on and off the field. A new and transformative piece of sports writing … an essential read for anyone wanting to better understand sport, community, and power on sovereign land”.
  • Mark Considine, The careless state: Reforming Australia’s social services: “Australia’s social services are doing a bad job of looking after people … impressively summarises the problems, explains how we got here, and shows that what may seem like separate problems have many shared roots”. 
  • Micheline Lee, Lifeboat: Disability, humanity, and the NDIS (Quarterly Essay 91, September 23): “describes how the NDIS’s disempowering, confusing, and bureaucratic processes have worn out the trust of people with disability and their families … [yet] there is a warming tone of optimism running through Lee’s analysis”.
  • Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better: “Technology is the front door to many government services … But too often, the design of online services is an afterthought, and users are left to grapple with lengthy, confusing, and duplicative processes … [and] bad design can entrench inequalities … “a compelling call to arms for better design and delivery of government services”.
  • Henry Dimbleby and Jemima Lewis, Ravenous: How to get ourselves and our planet into shape: “explores the complex machinations of modern food systems … details how our food choices are influenced by the industries that make our food, and the environment that surrounds us … shows how our decisions about what foods to put in our shopping baskets are subtly but constantly influenced by a vast food system. The consequences are rarely good for us, our health, or our planet”.

So, one biography, one part memoir-history-poetry, an essay, and three specific-issue-focused non-fiction works, with four by Australians, one by an American, and one from the UK. It’s good to see a First Nations author here again, and to see important issues – like disability, the challenges of the digital age, and modern food systems – front and centre in the Institute’s thinking.

I would, of course, love to see a greater recognition of the value of fiction to addressing “issues that have relevance in the Australian policy context”. Fiction has been included in the past, but not often. I wrote a little about some of their choices last year. We don’t know whether the relevant prime minister reads the suggestions, but some thoughtful or provocative fiction might be better summer reading for our poor top politician needing some break?

I could suggest Chris Flynn’s short story collection, Here be Leviathans (my review), and Carmel Bird’s Love letter to Lola (my review), to fill that bill. Short stories are perfect for busy people, and these two collections are entertaining but also offer some real meat in terms of thinking about various issues confronting humanity, including the environment and environmental destruction. Also Tony Burke made a good point about Paddy O’Reilly’s Other houses (Lisa’s review) which was shortlisted for this year’s Prime Minister’s literary awards and which is about a group of people we rarely read about, cleaners. Surely a book about the working life, that is, the battlers, the people whom journalists and politicians this year have constantly pointed out are “doing it tough”. Fiction about such lives would be perfect for our PM.

You can see all the lists, by year, to date at these links: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.

If you had the opportunity to make one book recommendation to the leader of your country, what would it be?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Henry Mayer Book Prize

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This last week I have become aware, via two different paths, of the Henry Mayer Book Prize. I feel I’ve seen it referenced before, but it hasn’t fully registered. I certainly haven’t written about it before, so, now’s the time.

I’ll start by introducing the person for whom the prize is named, Henry Mayer (1919-1991). He has a well-detailed entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but in a nutshell, he was – surprise, surprise – a professor of politics. German-born, he moved with his father to Nice, France, in 1934 after Hitler had become Chancellor in 1933. From there he went to Switzerland, and thence England, where, after the war started, he was identified as an “enemy alien”. He was among the group of over 2,500 enemy aliens transported on the infamous Dunera from Liverpool to Australia, became an academic, and was a foundation member of the Australasian Political Studies Association (APSA). ADB characterises him as having “wide reading, love of argument, and disdain for sacred cows”.

Now, to the award. Offered by APSA, the Henry Mayer Book Prize is a biennial prize is for “the best book on Australian politics (including political history) published during the previous two years”. It is funded by income generated by the APSA endowment established, in 2009, by the Henry Mayer Trust. The prize is $1000.

To add a little more detail to the criteria, the current website for the prize (linked above) says that book can be “published by a university or commercial publisher (in Australia or overseas)” and that preference is “given to a monograph that focuses on one or more of Mayer’s special interests: the media, political parties or Indigenous affairs”.

The prize, says the same website, judges by a panel which is chaired by a member of the APSA Executive, and will “consist of at least three judges (including the chair), of which at least one will be a woman”. (Interestingly, there’s no similar qualification that “at least one will be a man”. That rather presumes that male judges are a given?)

The reason this prize came to my attention this week was because:

  • On Tuesday, I attended the second Rod Wallace Memorial Lecture, held by the Friends of the National Film and Sound Archive. Our lecturer was Jenny Hocking, whose book, The Palace letters: The Queen, the Governor-General and the plot to dismiss Whitlam, was highly commended for the 2021 award.
  • On Friday, I attended the announcement of the 2023 ACT Book of the Year Award (my post), and the winning book, Frank Bongiorno’s Dreamers and schemers: A political history of Australia, also won the 2023 Henry Mayer Book Prize.

I love it when serendipity strikes like this.

Henry Mayer Book Prize winners to date

  • 2023: Frank Bongiorno, Dreamers and schemers: A political history of Australia, Black Inc, 2022.
  • 2021: Sally Young, Paper emperors: The rise of Australia’s newspaper empires, UNSW Press, 2019.
  • 2019: Paul Strangio, Paul ‘T Hart & James Walter, The pivot of power: Australian Prime Ministers and political leadership, 1949–2016, Melbourne University Press, 2017.
  • 2017: Sarah Ferguson and Patricia Drum, The killing season uncut, Melbourne University Press, 2016.
  • 2015: Stephen Mills, The professionals: Strategy, money and the rise of the political campaigner in Australia, Black Inc, 2014.
  • 2013: Paul Strangio, Neither power nor glory: 100 years of political Labor in Victoria, 1856 – 1956, Melbourne University Press, 2012.
  • 2011: James Walter, What were they thinking? The politics of ideas in Australia, UNSW Press, 2010.
  • 2009: Sarah Maddison, Black politics: Inside the complexity of Aboriginal political culture, Allen & Unwin, 2008 AND David McKnight, Beyond Right and Left: New politics and the Culture Wars, Allen & Unwin, 2007.

Since 2016, the prize has been alternated with the Crisp Prize, which is offered for a similar topic but with a different qualification -“the best scholarly book on political science by an early or mid-career researcher“, which they define as someone who has graduated with a PhD within the previous 10 years.

How many more specialist book awards are there out there?

Holly Throsby, Clarke (#BookReview)

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My reading group’s last book of the year, Holly Throsby’s third novel, Clarke, was a popular end-of-year choice. It’s a straightforward but compelling read that was inspired by a story we were all across, the Lynette Dawson story. Inspired, though, is the operative word, as Clarke is not Lynette Dawson’s story.

For a start, while Clarke’s missing woman disappears in the same decade as Lynette, the 1980s, Throsby’s story is set in a different location (a regional town not a capital city) with a different sort of husband (a physiotherapist, not a teacher). Further, there is some sort of resolution a few years, not forty years, later. This was a wise choice by Throsby. It decouples the story from Lynette Dawson, which encourages us to see it as part of a bigger story. And, setting it in a smaller environment lets Throsby explore regional town life. This latter is one of the strengths of the book.

The novel opens with fifty-something Barney being visited by the police at the house he is renting. They have a warrant to excavate the backyard as the result of their having received new information concerning the disappearance of Ginny Lawson five years previously. Clarke tracks this new police investigation through the eyes of the neighbourhood, primarily Barney, his next-door neighbour Leonie, and Dorrie and Clive across the road. Leonie, Dorrie and Clive all knew Ginny and believe her husband Lou, now living in Queensland, is implicated. They have wanted this investigation ever since Ginny disappeared, but the police at the time weren’t much interested in missing women.

The main joy in reading the novel comes from Throsby’s handling of the relationships between her characters, and the way she conveys how neighbours and communities chat or gossip about and try to second-guess situations like these. They phone each other, visit each other, talk over the fence, and discuss it with their workmates. It’s so realistic, you can hear yourself doing the same over similar scenarios.

It’s a fundamentally tough story – a disappeared wife with its hints of domestic abuse, among other griefs – but Throsby handles it with a light touch, including occasional black humour. Here, for example is Leonie talking to her workmates about some concrete in Barney’s backyard that the police are now excavating. It’s clear that it had been a topic of conversation at the time of the disappearance:

The suspicious concrete’, said Varden.
‘Yes, because that’s what you do when your wife and the mother of your child has just disappeared’, said Leonie. ‘You landscape.’

There is also some subtle wordplay. For example, Ginny’s husband Lou’s “disturbing the dirt and who knows what else” in his back yard after his wife’s disappearance mirrors the disturbance felt by the neighbours. And there are some wonderful descriptions, like Leonie’s on her tricky relationship with her mother: “Leonie remembered the warmth of her mother as a heady storm that blew in fast but never stayed long”. Or on sad Barney: “His skin was kind of grey and rough and reminded Leonie of an egg carton”.

“It would be fantastic to be able to choose one’s memories. It would make life so much more bearable.” (Barney)

There are, as I hinted above, other layers to the the narrative besides the disappeared-Ginny plot line. Barney is no longer living with his wife Deb (but why?) and Leonie has her four-year-old nephew Joe living with her (why too?). Both people, it’s clear, are dealing with some sort of grief. Throsby drip-feeds us their backstories as we get to know them, and as they get to know each other. Dorrie, across the road, provides a voice of reason for Leonie, while also engaging in the neighbourhood speculations about Ginny.

I’ll leave the narrative there, and move onto the form. Clarke is fundamentally a crime story or mystery, but it doesn’t fit those genre expectations. It’s a cold case, but the criminal investigation occurs in the background. There is no protagonist detective, and we only meet the police through their interactions with the main characters. There is, admittedly, an element of the amateur-sleuth cosy-mystery going on. Our main characters do a little of their own “amateur surveillance”, as Barney calls it, and we would, of course, like to know what happened to Ginny. But, the main focus is on what is going on for Barney and Leonie, personally, and whether they will resolve the griefs in their lives that are holding them back. It reminded me of that idea that if you scratch just beneath the surface of most people’s lives you will find a sadness or tragedy.

So, my overall assessment? I thoroughly enjoyed the read. Throsby’s language, excellent characterisation, and authentic evocation of suburban 80s-90s Australia made it a compelling read. However, the twist near the end felt a bit forced, and the ending is a bit neat, albeit there was some restraint. Generally, I prefer edgier books, books that keep me thinking about where they are going. With Clarke, I wondered about what happened to Ginny, whether we’d find out, and whether a relationship would develop between Leonie and Barney, but it didn’t, for example, delve deeply into the fundamental issues that brought about the situation in the first place. As a result, it called more on my emotions than my mind, and I do like both.

Nonetheless, Clarke is an enjoyable read – and I’d happily recommend it to readers looking for generous stories about real people grappling with life’s challenges.

Holly Throsby
Clarke
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2022
346pp.
eISBN: 9781761185540

ACT Book of the Year Award 2023 shortlist and winner

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This year I attended, for the first time, the announcement of the ACT Book of the Year award, which was held at the Woden Public Library. For some reason our award doesn’t get the media recognition or attention that it deserves. Sure, it is not one of the wealthiest literary prizes in the country, and it is geographically limited to local authors, but, we have some impressive authors here. They produce good books that are worth shouting about – within and without the ACT.

The ACT Book of the Year is one those broad-based awards, meaning that it encompasses fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. The award is presented by the ACT Government, and was first made in 1993, making this year its 30th anniversary. The first award was shared by poet AD Hope and novelist Marion Halligan. Halligan has won it three times.

The award was announced by ACT Minister for the Arts, Tara Cheyne. She advised that the winner would receive $10,000, and the highly commended authors, $2,000.

I posted last year on the 2022 shortlist. It had seven finalists from 43 eligible nominations, and comprised a play, a short story collection, a book of poetry, a novel, and three works of non-fiction (two histories and a memoir). The novel, Lucy Neave, Believe in me (my review) won.

The 2023 shortlist was very different. It comprised ALL nonfiction, which Tara Cheyne said was not surprising coming from Canberra, the “knowledge capital”. There were 38 entries – books published in 2022 – and they included books which have been shortlisted in other awards over the last year. The shortlist comprised 6 titles.

The 2023 shortlist and winner

  • Frank Bongiorno, Dreamers and schemers: A political history of Australia (political history; winner of the Henry Mayer Book Prize; shortlisted for this year’s NSW Premier’s History Awards)
  • Robert Bowker, Tomorrow there will be Apricots: An Australian diplomat in the Arab world (memoir)
  • Marion Halligan, Words for Lucy (memoir; on my TBR)
  • Julieanne Lamond, Lohrey (literary criticism; Lisa’s review)
  • Katrina Marson, Legitimate Sexpectations: the power of sex-ed (social science)
  • Niki Savva, Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s fall and Anthony Albanese’s rise (political history; winner of the the 2023 Australian Political Book of the Year)

Cheyne announced that the judges had made two Highly Commended awards, Marion Halligan’s book which the judges described as ““empathetic … and relatable” and Julieanne Lamond’s which they called, among other things, “immersive”. But, the winner was:

Frank Bongiorno’s Dreamers and schemers: A political history of Australia

Bongiorno, who is one of Canberra’s well-loved and generous academics, spoke briefly. He described himself as an academic historian, but one who believes that academics should be writing “accessible and affordable” books. I liked that he included “affordable” because so many academic books have stratospheric prices which put them out of the market for the general reader. The judges’ statement included that:

Through Dreamers and Schemers Frank Bongiorno has skilfully combined multiple elements to deliver a captivating account of Australia’s political history. The book’s perceptive honesty and contemporary sensibility shine throughout the narrative, providing readers with a fresh perspective on the subject.

With this win, Frank Bongiorno joins Marion Halligan as a three-time winner of the award.

This year’s judges were fiction writer Kaaron Warren, writer Adam Broinowski, and playwright Dylan Van Den Berg.

Big thanks to my reading group friend and Marion Board Member, Deb, for inviting me to join her at the announcement.

Tara Cheyne closed the event by encouraging us all to share “literary joy” in 2024! Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Monday musings on Australian literature: on 1923: 7, Humour

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With 1923 nearly over, I’m running out of time to share more of the thoughts and ideas I found regarding Australian literature in 1923 from Trove. This post, I thought to share some of the ideas expressed about humour in Australian literature.

Humour wasn’t always specifically mentioned in 1923 as being a feature of Australian literature, but was mentioned enough to suggest that some, at least, appreciated its use.

The most frequent mention I found concerned, Steele Rudd, famous for the Dad and Dave stories. He is praised for using humour to make interesting and enjoyable the truths he has to tell about Australian lives. The Queensland Times (2 May) introduced Rudd’s new book, On Emu Creek, and describes it as giving “full play to his whimsical humour, his knowledge of the rural dwellers, and his sympathy with their struggles”. Melbourne’s The Age (5 May) is more measured, but seems also to like the humour, describing it as “an agreeable story, without any affectation of style, and containing points of humor”.

Others, though, are a little less enamoured, with various reviewers qualifying their approval. One of these is J.Penn, writing in Adelaide’s The Register (19 May). There is some satire, he says,

But the main idea of nearly every chapter is someone being knocked over. It is difficult to think of any other humourist who would not seek to find humorous terms in which to describe intendedly humorous incidents. But Steele Rudd is firmly convinced that his readers will find sufficient fun in the mere fact of some one being humiliated or hurt, without the author’s having to worry to hunt for words.

Presumed Public Domain, from the NLA

Ouch … This is not to say that J.Penn doesn’t like humour. He clearly likes satire. And, he critiques another 1923 literary endeavour for lacking “gaiety”. It was a literary magazine titled Vision: A Literary Quarterly, that was edited by Frank C Johnson (comic book and pulp magazine publisher), Jack Lindsay (writer and son of Norman Lindsay), and Kenneth Slessor (poet). The quarterly, which only lasted 4 issues, aimed, says AustLit, “to usher in an Australian renaissance to bolster the literary and artistic traditions rejected by European modernists”, but they also wanted to “invigorate an Australian culture they claimed was stifled by the regressive provincialism of publications such as the Bulletin“. 

Anti-modernist in ethos, Vision, continues AustLit, was influenced by “Norman Lindsay’s principles of beauty, passion, youth, vitality, sexuality and courage” and “consistently provided readers with potentially offensive content”. Penn was thoughtful about the first issue:

It is a welcome guest, as giving outlet for a lot of good work which might not find a fair chance elsewhere. But it has three faults, one of outlook, two of detail. Contemplation of sex matters is not the only way to brighten life; yet they constitute quite four-fifths of this opening number.

Not only that, but, he says, ‘while it would seem difficult to be heavy, even “stodgy,” on matters of sex, that feat has been accomplished here’. Indeed, it has “no spark of gaiety”, which is exactly what Norman Lindsay, in the same issue, accuses James Joyce of. (Excuse the prepositional ending!) However, not all of Vision is like this:

The poetry in this volume, by Kenneth Slessor and others, has much of the desired element of gaiety; and a page of brief quotations from modern writers in other countries, with satirical footnotes, is delightful. There remain the pictures. These are as bright and gay as could be wished—a riot of triumphant nudity, in which Norman Lindsay in particular finds full opportunity.

Overall, he feels that “with some judicious editing, this endeavour to brighten Australia should have at any rate an artistic success”. (Also, he does like Jack Lindsay’s “valuable essay … on Australian poetry and nationalism, with a theory that we must get away from shearers and horses”.) 

A very different magazine is one praised for its cheerfulness, Aussie. It ran from 1918 to 1931, and had various subtitles, The Cheerful Monthly, The National Monthly, and The Australian Soldiers’ Magazine. I had not heard of it before, but AustLit once again came to my rescue. Created for soldiers in Europe, most of its early contents came from them, and comprised, says AustLit, “jokes, anecdotes, poems and drawings” which reflected “the character (most likely censored) of the Australian soldier in World War One”. In 1920, it was revived as a civilian magazine, but “the humour … was maintained”. Now, though, its contributors were established writers and artists, like AG Stephens, Myra Morris, and Roderic Quinn. I found a review of a 1923 issue in The Armidale Chronicle (19 September). It is unfailingly positive, telling its readers that “every page of Aussie breathes cheerfulness, and there is not a joke, a picture, or a story that fails to portray some phase of Australasian humor”. I wish it described what it meant by “Australasian humor” but the word it uses most is “cheerfulness”. This perhaps makes sense, given AustLit’s assessment that “it maintained its position between political extremes, addressing the views of a predominantly middle-class audience”. 

Humour is also mentioned reviews of books for children, such as The sunshine family, by Ethel Turner and her daughter Jean Curlewis. It is described in the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate (14 December) as having “rare good humour”, but is that unusual for a book for children?

The descriptions of the 100 books chosen by AG Stevens for Canada, that I wrote about earlier this year, include several references to humour – in fiction, such as EG Dyson’s 1906 Factory ‘ands, with its “brilliant satirical humour”; in children’s books, like C Lloyd’s 1921 The house of just fancy, whose pictures “have quaint loving humour”; and in much of the poetry, including JP Bourke’s 1915 Off the bluebush, which contains “verses of sardonic humour”.

Humour is such a tricky thing – from the sort of situational humour in Rudd’s On Emu Creek, through the apparent “cheerfulness” of Aussie, to the more satirical humour liked by J.Penn – but unfortunately, most of the references I found don’t analyse it in much detail. I will keep an eye out as we go through the years.

Meanwhile, do you like humour in your reading? And if so, what do you like most?

Other posts in the series: 1. Bookstall Co (update); 2. Platypus Series; 3 & 4. Austra-Zealand’s best books and Canada (1) and (2); 5. Novels and their subjects; 6. A postal controversy