Australian literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: Gloomy books

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

As I did last year for 1923, I plan a series of posts through this year about Australian literature in the year 1924. What I write about will be driven by what I find. So far, I’ve found articles on the Platypus Series, but I wrote about that inititiative last year, and of course about new releases, which I will feature in a future post. However, out of the blue I found a little article titled “Gloomy books” which I’m sharing this week. It’s a one-off rather than part of an ongoing discussion as far as I can tell, so I’m not including it in my 1924 series.

The article was written by one W.M.S. in Sydney’s The Land newspaper. I’m building up quite a list of mysterious by-lines that I’d like to identify one day, but it is often difficult. W.M.S. is an example. I found a reference to a W.M.S. in Wagga Wagga’s Daily Advertiser (10 October 1928). They identify him as W.M. Sherrie, and say that he had been an editor of the paper (for ten years) but was by 1928 a contributor. The paragraph says that he was “equally at home on a wide variety of subjects, and to his advocacy may be largely attributed the healthy tone of public life in Riverina”. This W.M.S. was ‘bred in “the bush,”‘. He “cultivated a love of nature” and wrote “delightful nature stories” which were popular state-wide. Trouble is, I can’t find much about this W.M. Sherrie.

However, I did find at the Mitchell Library transcriptions of letters written in 1916 and 1917 by Noel Hunter Sherrie, who was “wounded at Gaza taken by Turks & died in Damascus”. The addressee was his mother, Mrs. W.M. Sherrie, of Wagga Wagga. I believe this Wagga Wagga Sherrie is the W.M.S. who published in The Land, because while The Land‘s W.M.S. wrote occasionally about literature, most of the pieces I found were from his “Bush Notes” column.

So now the article (The Land, 18 January 1924). It starts with:

Book cover

The brilliant Marcus Clarke wrote that the dominant note of the Australian bush “was weird melancholy.” If Clarke had known Australia better he would not have written that erroneous estimate of the bush. But the mental attitude of the author of “His Natural Life” towards the Australian bush seems to find parallel these days in the mental attitude of most of our fiction writers to life itself. There was a time when all the intolerably gloomy and unhappy books were turned out by Russians and Scandinavians. To-day we find a similar tendency among English writers.

You can see in this opening his love of the bush – but it’s also clear that he was a man of his those optimistic early Federation times. The way he sees it, life can be gloomy or unhappy enough at times, “without having the same thing served up to us in our literature.” He doesn’t name contemporary names, but says, for example, that ‘much of the “new humour” of the Americans is more depressing than the gloom-saturated works of such great Russians as Turgeniev, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky’. He’s talking, presumably, about the early 20th Century realists and modernists, such as D.H. Lawrence (whom we will meet in our 1924 Aussie Lit travels), and T.S. Eliot. Did he include, in this, Katharine Susannah Prichard who’d started publishing by then but wasn’t really in full swing? I must admit that most of the writers I’ve read from these schools were published in the second half of the 1920s and into the 1930s and 40s, but the trend was well under way by the early 1920s, and W.M.S. didn’t like it.

As far as he was concerned, “life is not all gloom”. What the nation needed, he wrote, was “more light and shade in literary work”, because without it, “no work of the imagination can be entirely true”. Unfortunately, though, what he saw rising was “a new school of fiction writers” in which “the lens of the camera, register[ed] nothing but the dark patches of the object upon which it [was] focussed.”

I understand his point, but I don’t fully agree that every work needs some right amount of “light and shade” to be “true”. I share this because I know several readers who, like W.M.S. back then, worry about negativism in much of our contemporary literature. I see it a bit differently. When life gets challenging, as it was in those between wars years, and is again now with climate disaster looming, among a host of other challenges I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate, our writers want to capture and/or explore it. Some see hope, while others don’t. C’est la vie?

What do you think?

Al Campbell, The keepers (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

Al Campbell’s debut novel, The keepers, is a complex and ambitious novel about parenting, specifically about parenting children who are deemed too difficult by society, leaving their mothers, or carers, to survive, or not, as best they can. It’s confronting but, unfortunately, all too real.

That this is its theme is obvious from the novel’s opening page, which is titled “Scrapbook #12”, and comprises a news report from abc.net.au, 23 April 2018 (original here). The lead sentence reads, “special needs group pays tribute to 11yo boy with autism killed by train after escaping from respite care”. I remember this case.

We are then launched into the main storyline, which concerns Jay, a mother and full-time carer for her twin autistic sons, Frank and Teddy, and features a cast of other characters, some real, like her unsupportive husband Jerrik, and some imaginary, mainly her childhood “friend”, Keep (short for Keeper). Alternated with this storyline, which is told chronologically through time-stamped sections (like “Monday 2:06am” and, later, “4 days till extubation”), is the story of Jay’s childhood, in which she had experienced abuse and neglect at the hands of a grandfather and her dysfunctional mother. These sections are also time-stamped (such as “10 years old, autumn). Interspersed with these are scrapbook entries, like the one opening the novel. They are compiled by Jay, who clips and shares stories about the neglect and, even, murder of children with disabilities. As I said, complex and ambitious.

There is so much to like about this novel, starting with Campbell’s characterisation of Jay and her sons. It’s vivid and empathetic, which is not surprising given her own life experience. Write what you know, authors are told. These people are not her and her sons, but she knows them intimately, and the scenes featuring them shine off the page, even non-verbal Teddy who communicates via iPad, and especially patient, stuttering Frank. I’d love to share some of the interactions between Jay and her sons, because the warmth, the humour, the patience, the imagination make for some great reading and convey some of the joys in their relationship, but I’m not sure they’d work out of context, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Meanwhile, another strength of the novel is Campbell’s energetic, evocative writing. It starts with a bang and rarely lets up. The language is often breathtaking in its ability to capture a moment, a feeling. On the first page after the scrapbook entry, Jay refers to it as “the horror on the page a thing of thorns in my hands” and on the next page, the unsettled night outside is conveyed through a “lone plucky lamppost mooned by wanton whacks of lightning”. She’s talking in these opening pages to the mysterious and shape-shifting Keep, whose “latest incarnation” is “bald as bone and mouthless. No breath of course. Without ears … Some ancient mica, colourless and brittle? … His appearance is rarely the same”. The reader is immediately introduced to one of the meanings of the title, Jay’s “keeper”. Described later as her “poultice and protector, destroyer of others”, Keep has been with her since her difficult childhood. Another meaning is that her two sons, despite what the system might think or suggest, are “keepers” – at least until she is no longer around. What then? This question underpins all that Jay does and feels, and lies just beneath some of the uglier scrapbook items.

But, Campbell, does ask a lot of her readers. The structure is complex, which, on its own, would not be a problem, multiple storylines, after all, not being new. But, there is a lot going on. The exciting but idiosyncratic style, the switches in voice, the sudden appearances of Keep and later “the Other Things”, the shifts in storylines from mother-Jay to youthful-Jay, demand a level of attention that can sometimes get in the way of the story. I’m not convinced, in fact, that Jay’s childhood story – readable and interesting though it is – adds enough. Is it intended as another example of how the system lets children down? If so, I don’t think it’s needed, as Jay’s story with her sons, is powerful enough. Is it intended to contrast her own style of mothering with that of her mother, or to introduce the idea of child abuse? If so, these seem like different stories, and ones that potentially weaken what seems to be her intention to highlight the desperate situation families with special needs children find themselves in.

In other words, Campbell’s main story, as I see it, is a mother’s “warrior” style love for her “different” children, and the system that lets them – the children and the parent/carer – down, again and again. She tells of doctors who refuse to listen or heed, of the social welfare bureaucracy (through the NDIS) with its irrational rules, of schools which can be inflexible, of people in parks and shops who would rather not see her children – and so on. If it’s infuriating for the reader, imagine what it’s like for the parents.

Overall, The keepers is a powerful story that wants us all to understand the life of the carer, the very difficult questions confronting them as they and their children age, and the way the system all too often treats them as lesser or as too hard or as “types” to be slotted into rules and regulations. For Campbell, the personal is the political, and vice versa in fact. She would like to believe there is real truth and commitment to the idea that it takes a village to raise a child, but “some village we turned out to be”, she says to Keep at one point. And right there it occurred to me that this book, despite its flaws, is the sort of thing that should be selected for the Prime Minister’s Summer reading list.

Al Campbell
The keepers
St Lucia: UQP, 2022
336pp.
ISBN: 9780702265488

Monday musings on Australian literature: My favourite (Australian) fictional character(s)

/ Whispering Gums / 34 Comments

Over the last twelve months or so, The Conversation has published occasional articles titled “My favourite fictional character“. In each article the writer names a character and justifies their choice.

As far as I can tell, there have been six so far, and most have chosen non-Australian characters. The choosers and their choices have been:

Ethel Turner, Seven Little Australians
  • Carol Lefevre, whose Murmurations I’ve reviewed: Ivy Eckdorf in William Trevor’s O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), for her “crazed, compelling voice”.
  • Edwina Preston, whose Bad art mother I’ve reviewed: Judy in Ethel Turner’s Seven little Australians (1894), who was “wild … equipped to conquer the world, but not to survive it”.
  • Melanie Saward: Queenie in Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie (2019), who is “complex, funny, broken, fun”.
  • Jane Gleeson-White, whose book, Australian classics: 50 great writers and their celebrated works, is in my reference collection: Lyra in Philip Pullman’s Northern lights (1995) AND (she cheekily chose two) Lila Cerullo in Elena Ferrante’s My brilliant friend (2011), for being “half-wild, ‘too much’ heroines”.
  • Amy Walters, who was a blogger in the New Territory program: Esme Lennox in Maggie O’Farrell’s The vanishing act of Esme Lennox (2006), who “refuses to be the ‘perfect victim’ – even in an asylum”.
  • Alexander Howard: John Le Carré’s George Smiley (first appeared, 1961), who is “unattractive, overweight, a terrible dresser – and a better spy than James Bond”

If you are interested in their justifications, you can find all the articles at the link in my opening paragraph. I note that to date only Preston has chosen an Australian character. Also, her character is the only one from a bona fide classic, which surprised me a little. So far, there have been five female choosers to one male, and their choices have matched their genders. Telling?

Meanwhile, I’ll share a few (yes, I’m allowing myself a few) of my favourite Australian fictional characters. It’s a challenge not just because it’s always hard to choose favourites, or because “favourite” is a slippery concept, but because favourite characters don’t necessarily come from favourite books. Most do, but, for example, a longtime favourite novel of mine is Voss, but I wouldn’t say the characters were favourites.

I’m giving you my favourites in six random categories:

Favourite childhood character: Ethel Turner’s Judy in Seven little Australians. I’m with Edwina Preston. How could any red-blooded Australian girl not want to be the brave, warm-hearted, rebellious Judy.

Kim Scott That Deadman Dance

Favourite First Nations character: Bobby Wabalanginy in Kim Scott’s That deadman dance (my review). While not the only voice in the book, young Nyoongar boy Bobby is our guide, and he fulfils that role with wit, intelligence and honesty. But I have others, like the flawed Kerry in Melissa Lucashenko’s Too much lip (my post) and the motherly Odette in Tony Birch’s The white girl (my post).

Favourite older character: Kathleen in Thea Astley’s Coda (my post). Being a woman of a certain age, I’m interested in women traversing the closing decades of their lives. There are more around in our literature than you might think, and I’ve liked many of them, but Kathleen is a favourite because she’s a memorable, wily, acerbic, old woman, a self-styled “feral-grandmother”, who is not ready to be, as she says, “corpsed”. She knows the “four ages of women: bimbo, breeder, babysitter, burden” and she’s doing her darnedest to rise above it. I’m not really like her, but that doesn’t mean I can’t love her.

Favourite nice guy: Russell Bass in Trevor Shearston’s Hare fur (my review). OK, I admit it. I’m a sucker for “nice guys”, in fiction as well as in life. I’m not one of those (see below) who find nice guys boring or unbelievable. Fiction is full of unpleasant men, or, if not that, of dull, dithery, helpless, “dun-coloured” (to quote Patrick White) men. But there are good men too, like Will the doctor in Eleanor Limprecht’s The coast (my post). I’m going with Russell Bass, however, because of how, with humanity, he navigates the tricky human, legal and moral territory of supporting kids who are hiding from welfare authorities.

Favourite villain: Father Pearse in John Clanchy’s In whom we trust (my review). What makes a villain a favourite? Their villainy? Their redemptive qualities? Or, that they are only villainous because of their circumstances? For me, certainly not their villainy. I was never one of those girls who liked “the bad boys”, though “favourite” doesn’t necessarily mean “like” does it? Grenouille in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume could be a favourite character because he is pure villainy perfectly rendered, but I don’t like him. Father Pearse is not the worst character in Clanchy’s book, so is perhaps not, literally, a “villain”, but he is a weak man whose cowardice impacts the the children in his charge, until he is confronted.

Favourite independent woman (in a nod to Bill): Sybylla in Miles Franklin’s My brilliant career, of course. Like Ethel Turner’s Judy, she’s impossible to go past. She set the standard. But I must also give a nod to two femocrats, Cassie Armstrong in Sara Dowse’s West block (my review) and Edith Campbell Berry in Frank Moorhouse’s Edith trilogy. I’ve only read and reviewed the third, Cold light, since blogging, but she has energy and force that might land her in trouble at times but she keeps on going.

So, an eclectic lot, really, and I’ve sidestepped – because I can – the challenge of choosing ONE favourite character, but I hope I’ve got you thinking.

Would you care to share one or two favourite characters (and, if you are Australian, I’d really love to hear your Australian ones!)

Monday musings on Australian Literature: the Story Factory

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

In last week’s Monday Musings on Parramatta’s inaugural Laureate for Literature, I mentioned that Parramatta had been chosen as the second location for the non-profit organisation, the Story Factory. I said I’d do a separate Monday Musings on it, and have decided it might as well be now.

So, who or what is the Story Factory?

I love that like any good storyteller, and unlike many websites, they have a page on their history – and it’s a good one, the history I mean, because it has an inspiration that is truly inspiring. This inspiration comes from San Francisco, where, in 2002, the novelist Dave Eggers and educator Ninive Caligari founded something called 826 Valencia. This is “a creative writing centre for under-resourced young people” in the city.

Apparently, the idea spread quickly across the USA, “with seven more 826 chapters in places including New Orleans, Boston and Brooklyn, New York”. From here, the idea has spread internationally, with similar creative centres set up, some also by or with the help of successful authors. These include London’s the Ministry of Stories (with help from Nick Hornby); Dublin’s Fighting Words in Dublin (with Roddy Doyle); and Melbourne’s 100 Story Building, which started life in 2009 as Pigeons, becoming 100 Story Building in 2012.

The Story Factory was also founded in 2012 – in Sydney – after Sydney Morning Herald journalists Cath Keenan and Tim Dick had visited 826 Valencia in 2011. Their aim, says the website, was “finding a solution to the growing concern about writing skills rates and limited creative opportunities among marginalised children”. That year, a Board was established. Members included Michael Gonski, the Chair and “a solicitor and leading young philanthropist”; educator and well-known First Nations author to us, Professor Larissa Behrendt (my posts); and Professor Robyn Ewing, “an expert in creativity in education”. They launched in May 2011, but were not officially opened at the Redfern premises until July 2012. Their initial focus was the Redfern/Waterloo area, but increasingly they were asked to work in Western Sydney, resulting in Parramatta being opened in 2018. They make very clear on their website that they “only work with young people from communities that are under-resourced”.

They are part of over 60 organisations that form the International Alliance of Youth Writing Centres, which they describe as “a coalition inspired by 826 and united by a common belief that young people need places where they can write and be heard, and where they can have their voices polished, published, and amplified”. The organisations names vary, but there are places over the US, the UK, and in places like Chile, Argentina, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Pakistan. There is even a travelling program, Story Board, based in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales.

So, what do they do?

They offer a wide range of programs, which mostly sit under the following umbrellas::

  • Digital Programs: online interactive programs, across many age levels, run via Zoom and bookable by classroom teachers.
  • School Programs: face-to-face, “one-off, term-long, and year-long, curriculum-aligned writing programs”.
  • Special Projects: often run in collaboration with other arts organisation, and bringing students together from different schools.
  • After School and Holiday Programs: in-person and online.

Clicking on their Programs link and navigating around will give you a sense of the sorts of programs they offer – in different forms; for different age-groups, from primary to secondary; and exploring different ideas, from magic to cli-fi, from literary form to developing the imagination.

They also produce stuff! You can read some of the stories produced by young writers, online on the Stories pages. Or, you can buy books, because they also publish writings. For example, they run annual programs like Year of Poetry and Year of the Novella, and publish selected output. You can see 2023’s here, but to see all their publications, this link will take you to the first of NINE pages.

Maya Jubb’s I still remember the end of the world was one of the books published from the 2023 Year of the Novella program. This year long program aims for the participants to complete a novella. The page says that “Maya is a 17-year-old writer who loves to write fantasy novellas”. All the books look gorgeously designed, which is probably at least partly due to “the unstinting support of the editorial and production teams at Penguin Random House”. So nice to see a big publisher helping out.

As for how effective they are at achieving their goals, that’s harder to tell:

  • the University of Sydney wrote in 2016 about a formal impact evaluation that had commenced in early 2014. This was very early days, but they said that “focusing on case study methodology, the preliminary findings of the longitudinal evaluation suggest that some students have demonstrated substantial development in their creative writing and literacy skills, as well as improved problem solving, persistence, collaboration and discipline – all important indicators of creativity”. This is somewhat qualified, “some students”, but it’s indicative of potential.
  • Canterbury Boys High School was clearly so happy with the Story Factory’s role in their “literacy achievements” in 2017 that they continued the partnership in 2018. (They reference an independent evaluation which concluded the partnership had been “a huge success”, but the link is broken).
  • Better Reading shared some statistics in 2018, saying that the Story Factory had had “16,000 enrolments from young people, with 20% Indigenous and 40% from language backgrounds other than English”. 

But the best piece of evidence I can give readers is the achievement of Vivian Pham. Her debut novel, The coconut children, which is set in 1990s Cabramatta, was published by Penguin Random House in 2020 when she was just 19. Some of you might remember it as it made quite a splash. She was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Australian Novelists in 2021 (my post) and won ABIA’s Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year. The novella was also shortlisted for that year’s Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction and the Voss Literary Prize. In an interview for Writing NSW, she said that:

Every Sunday when I was in Year 11, I attended Story Factory’s Novella Project workshops at the local arts centre.

Her book was published as part of that year’s program, and she thought that was it. But through the intercession of others, it was picked up by Penguin and, after more editing, was published. There’s more in the interview, but I’ll just share her answer to the question about “marginalised voices in Australian society” and “the responsibility of fiction authors to explore diverse perspectives in their writing”:

I don’t think of this as a responsibility so much as an imperative.

How better to conclude a post on the Story Factory?

Do you know of other organisations like this? I’d love to hear about them.

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

/ Whispering Gums / 41 Comments

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)

/ Whispering Gums / 17 Comments

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?