Australian literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: Shortlist for the inaugural 20/40 Prize

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

Last November, I announced the creation of the new 20/40 Publishing Prize by the wonderful (and local-ish to me), independent, non-profit publisher, Finlay Lloyd. Now, eleven months later, the awarding of the inaugural prize is imminent, with the shortlist being announced last Friday and the winners to be announced on 28 October.

But, just to recap, 20/40 is a manuscript award, with the prize being publication. It is not limited to debut or young or women or any other subgroup of writers, as some manuscript awards are. However, it does have some criteria, in addition to looking for “writing of the highest quality”. The submissions can be fiction or non-fiction, must be prose (but “all genres … including hybrid forms” are welcome), and must be between 20,000 and 40,000 words (hence the award’s name, the 20/40 Prize). They aim to choose two winners, each year. In the communication I received last week about the shortlist, Finlay Lloyd publisher and commissioning editor, Julian Davies, says:

Our passion for creating this opportunity for writers and bringing their work to the reading public will continue next year and, we hope, for many more.

That’s great to hear … and we can do our bit to help by buying and reading the winning published novels.

And now, the Shortlist

You can read a brief description of the six works at the announcement link above, so here I will provide some brief author information that I have found online.

  • Roger Averill, Slippage: freelance researcher, editor and writer, with four books published by Transit Lounge – Exile: The lives and hope of Werner Pelz (Lisa’s review), the memoir Boy he cry: An island odyssey, and two novels, Keeping faith and Relatively famous (Lisa’s review).
  • Rebecca Burton, Ravenous girls: editor, and author of two young adult novels, Leaving Jetty Road and Beyond Evie, both published by HarperCollins Australia.
  • Rachel Flynn, New moon rising: author of children’s picture books and novels, including the I hate Friday series, published by Penguin.
  • Kim Kelly, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room: author of 12 , mostly historical fiction, novels, most if not all published by Brio Books.
  • Jane Skelton, Breathing water: writer of poetry, short fiction and novels, published by Flying River Press, Rochford Press, Spineless Wonders and others.
  • Olivia De Zilva, Hold on tight: writer and poet.

Julian Davies explains on the shortlist page that the works were judged blind.

The judging panel for the inaugural prize comprised Katia Ariel (author and editor), Christina Balint (whose novella, Water music, I’ve reviewed), John Clanchy (novelist and short story writer whom I’ve reviewed a few times), Julian Davies (the publisher and also an author whom I’ve also reviewed a few times), and Stefanie Markidis (writer and researcher).

When I first announced this prize last November, I noted its relevance to Novellas in November. So, I am thrilled about the timing of this announcement, because you can pre-order the two winning novellas at the Finlay Lloyd site, for a special discounted price of $43.20 (instead of $24 each). A bargain. And, if you’ve never read a Finlay Lloyd book before, you won’t be disappointed I’m sure in the artefacts themselves, as publishing good writing in beautiful packaging is what they do. Pre-ordered books will be shipped on announcement day, October 28, giving you time to read one or both by the end of November! I plan to.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Spineless Wonders

/ Whispering Gums / 18 Comments

For a small, specialist, independent publisher, Spineless Wonders has appeared on my blog more times than you might expect, sometimes in passing, sometimes as the publisher of an author I’ve reviewed, and a few times in posts on publishing and publishers. All that, I’ve decided, has earned them their own post.

The first – and main – time I mentioned Spineless Wonders specifically was back in 2013 in a Monday Musings on Specialist Presses, in which they were one of five presses I chose to introduce. I said then that I thought they’d been established around 2011 – and I added an aside that I wished all organisations would include at least some history on their websites. Well, they have now confirmed on their About page that they were indeed founded in 2011 by Bronwyn Mehan.

Who is Bronwyn Mehan?

Like other keen Aussie litbloggers, I know the names of several publishing company CEOs (or directors or managers, or whatever they are called), particularly at the small presses, but Bronwyn Mehan is not one of them. So, I went searching, and didn’t find much, but there was something on SPN, the website for the Small Press Network. Her entry there is not extensive, but it tells us a few things. It says, not surprisingly, that she “looks for innovative ways to connect Australian authors with new audiences, collaborating with artists and organisations engaged in multi-media and performing arts”. “New” audiences is so important to those of us who believe in the value of the arts, isn’t it?

Anyhow, it also said that in 2018, she spent a month in New York as part of a Publishing Fellowship researching trends in multi-platform publishing. She has also been a peer assessor for the Australia Council Literature Board and in 2021 she took part in the Australia Council’s (now Creative Australia) Future Form program. As far as I can tell it’s a “leadership program” intended to help small to medium arts organisations “transform and innovate their core business model”. And that’s about it, except that I did read elsewhere that she also writes – short and long fiction, and poetry.

What is Spineless Wonders doing?

At the time of my 2013 post, they described themselves as being “devoted to short, quality fiction produced by Australian writers … [to] brief fiction in all its forms – short story, novella, sudden fiction and prose poetry”. And, as I explained, their name referred to the fact that they delivered their publications “to readers via  smart phones and laptops”, but they did (and do) also in print and audio forms. Since, then, however they have expanded further, to, in their words, “a short story production company working collaboratively with authors and artists across many disciplines to get short fiction out into the world – everywhere”.

What does this mean? These initiatives, from their About page, give you an idea:

  • Performed Fiction: Since 2014, they have produced something they call Little Fictions (originally known as Spineless Wonders Presents… a short evening of tall stories). They describe this as a “unique literary event” involving short stories being read by actors to a live audience. Inspired perhaps by poetry readings? In 2017, the City of Sydney invited them to produce a series of these for their Late Night Library program. Ongoing funding from this has apparently enabled them to create something they call Off the Page, which is a multi-media platform for performed short fiction. Sounds wonderful to me.
  • Storybombing: In 2016, they formed an interdisciplinary artists’ collective called #Storybombing, which aims “to find innovative ways to activate public spaces with short Australian fiction curated and produced” by themselves. Examples of the initiatives include stories spraypainted onto pavements, installed in retro pushbutton phones, or projected onto buildings. They say you can find examples on their #storybombing tab, but I see there’s nothing there since 2020 so maybe this is a victim of COVID.
  • Microflix: In 2018, they established the Microflix Awards and Festival, which aimed “to encourage more Australian filmmakers to use work by Australian authors, to reward excellence and creativity in film adaptations and to champion the importance of the writer, and the original text, in the filmmaking process”. Sounds great as short stories make perfect starting points for film. Just look, for example, at how many short stories by Somerset Maugham have been adapted to film. However, around 2021, this initiative ended, but they note on their website that they had partnered with SF3 to continue to encourage collaboration between writers and filmmakers.

What these initiatives tell me is that Spineless Wonders is an innovative company with a clear goal to support short (including micro and flash) fiction. It’s also clear that this is not easy, but that the company is active, flexible, and willing to pivot where they can to achieve their goal. The goal is clearly the thing.

If you look on their home page, you will see in their side-bar other activities and initiatives, like their Es-Press imprint, their work In Translation, and their Audio Lounge. It’s inspired and ambitious, though looking at the dates when things have happened, I suspect these things happen somewhat in fits and starts, but they are clearly exploring every angle they can to get creators works to readers, listeners, and viewers.

You will also see a link to Opportunities and Awards. These include a current call for “startling stories set in Sydney’s past” for Imaginative Recreation – Sydney. There are talks and masterclasses to help creators “invent stories drawn from the archives”, and submissions are due by midnight 17 December 2023. This is where you will also find the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award, but it seems to be in abeyance at the moment. It was funded by the Copyright Agency. They did run again this year, though, their Slinkies Competition for writers under 30. This results in an anthology, and Slinkies 2023 can be pre-ordered now.

Meanwhile, though, Spineless Wonders continues to publish short stories, of which I’ve reviewed a few – two collections by Carmel Bird (The dead aviatrix and, most recently, Love letter to Lola) and the anthology The great unknown edited by Angela Meyer.

And, their YouTube channel has some current content, which provides another opportunity to get to know them.

My point overall, though, is that here is a publishing company working in a challenging form – short fiction – in a way that is inventive and always looking for new ways of reaching people. And, twelve years after being founded, they are still here.

Carmel Bird, Love letter to Lola (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 29 Comments

In her prose piece, “Ocean of story” (my post), Christina Stead wrote that

It is only when the short story is written to a rigid plan, or done as an imitation, that it dies. It dies when it is pinned down, but not elsewhere. It is the million drops of water that are the looking-glasses of all our lives.

The stories in Carmel Bird’s latest collection, Love letter to Lola, could never be accused of being written to a rigid plan – and if you know Carmel Bird, you would never expect them to. What I so enjoy about Bird is the subversive way she plays with form and tone, while never losing sight of the things she wants to say – but more on that later. Love letter to Lola contains eighteen short stories, the majority of which have been published elsewhere, but mostly in niche or themed journals and collections. However, “The tale of the last unicorn” appeared in The dead aviatrix (my review), as did the titular “Love letter to Lola”, except that here Spixi’s letter earns response.

This new collection is divided into two main sections – Animals, comprising twelve stories, and Human and Angels, the other six. These are followed by a Reflection in which Bird discusses the inspirations for the stories, and much more besides, including, if you read it carefully, her thoughts on stories, writing and fiction. Ignore it at your peril! She tells us, in this last piece, that while the collection has “no primary overall topic … there is a fairly consistent kind of slant on life in general, and a distinct recurrence of themes, motifs, and propositions”. That there is, and in big picture terms, it involves “peering at life and death from different angles, in varying moods”, with a particular interest in “the wild and weird things humans do to undermine the safety of the planet”.

“inklings and threads” (“Two thirds of the truth”)

So, let’s start with the first section, Animals. The twelve stores are told in the voices of different animals, reminding me a little of Chris Flynn‘s Here be leviathans (my review). The animals, their locations and habitats, and their eras vary, but the subject matter all relates in some way to death, and, in several cases to a very particular type of death – extinction. Consequently, we have stories from, or about, a Spix’s macaw (“Love letter to Lola”), a passenger pigeon (“Resurrecting Martha”); a dodo (“The comeback or a pond of dreams”); and a thylacine (“Fertile and faithful”). In these stories, Bird plays with, among other things, plans by the “scientificators” to clone and return animals to existence, but in each one there is a different spin, drawn from the facts. Overall, there is a valid incredulity about the whole business, but the way Bird writes it through her various creatures is gloriously entertaining. Just read Dodo’s story to see what I mean.

“Fertile and faithful” is a good example of Bird’s playing with form and voice. It a distinct biblical look and tone to it, but the bite and wordplay are ever-present. She writes of plans by “delirious and magical scientists” to “grow a shiny new version of the great stripy animal within the being of a tiny little browny grey Sminthopsis, known as a dunnart”:

CHAPTER 3

8. And in the almost fullness of time the scientists became gods.

At the other end of the spectrum – hmm, is it the other end? – are the pathogenic creatures capable of playing havoc with the human race, like mosquitoes (“It’s a mosquito thing”), flies (“Surveillance”) and rats (“Completing the 1080 project”), not to mention that most reviled of creepy-crawlies, the cockroach (“The affair at the Ritz”). Then, there is the sad story of a spider, “Margaret Orb-Weaver, The Interview, 19 September 1922”, inspired by the small green spider seen crawling across a white card on Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin. This story takes the form of an interview with Margaret just before she descends into the vault on the coffin. In her brief moment of fame, Margaret manages to pass on a few truths. In this and other stories, like “The cockatoo’s question”, Bird, whose imagination runs rife while simultaneously being grounded in reality, reminds us of our contemporary ills, like the spectre of fake news, or our faith in money.

The second section, Humans and Angels, picks up more of Bird’s fascinations, fascinations that won’t be new if you’ve read other work by her, and particularly if you’ve read her bibliomemoir Telltale (my review). Through her love of fantasy and magic, and of weaving fact through her imagination, she further explores and shares her thoughts about the weird and disturbing things that humans do – and with the same sophisticated wit that we experience in Animals.

I loved “Yes my darling daughter” with its cheeky, pointed playing with the idea of wolves and sharks, and the dangers confronting young women. The chatty tone, as in so many of the stories, belies the message, but if you miss it, the “helpful quotations” at the end should see you straight.

Our last speaker is Beau, the Recording Angel (“Recording Angel”) who leads us on a merry dance (or, danse macabre, perhaps) through the island of Nevermind, referencing, presumably, humans’ general apathy. As he does so, he tells various stories including those of two young historical figures, “Walter’n’Matilda”, who suffer tragic deaths but find true love in Nevermind. If, as our angel instructs, you put their two names together quickly, you might catch a hint of a popular Australian song – and thereby catch some of the workings of Carmel Bird’s mind.

The delight of reading Carmel Bird is also the challenge. The delight comes from the playful way she digresses, the way she can allude to, or reference, anything from a children’s picture book to a Greek philosopher to the latest work of scientists, or even to her own characters and works. The challenge is how many of these we pick up because Bird‘s mind is not our mind and her reading is not our reading. But it doesn’t really matter because we are sure to pick up enough of the inklings and threads woven throughout to recognise the things Bird would like us to think about – seriously but with hope in our hearts too.

But again, if you are struggling, there are the four epigraphs which provide the perfect guide to how to approach her stories and what we should expect as we read them. Pure gold.

If you haven’t realised by now, I love reading Carmel Bird. Her “endless search for meaning”, as she describes it, is wrapped in the sort of darkly entertaining writing that I can’t resist. It is the sort of writing I can happily read again and again – with the same expectation that I read Jane Austen. That is, both writers can make me laugh and squirm at the same time, which for me is just right.

(Review copy courtesy the author, but copies are available from Spineless Wonders. Yes, Carmel Bird herself sent me this book, but that is not why I loved it. It made me do that all by itself.)

Carmel Bird
Love letter to Lola
Strawberry Hills: Spineless Wonders, 2023
223pp.
ISBN: 9781925052961

Monday musings on Australian literature: Introducing Uninnocent landscapes

/ Whispering Gums / 34 Comments

You heard it here first – or, first(ish) anyhow, as the webpage is up and orders are already coming in for a new, beautiful book, Uninnocent landscapes: Following George Augustus Robinson’s Big River Mission. Yes, I admit it isn’t out yet so I haven’t actually seen it, but I know it is beautiful because I’ve seen some of the content over the years, and I’ve seen the cover on the website. It looks stunning.

Of course, I’m biased because the creator is my brother, Ian Terry. However, it goes without saying that I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t feel his project was worthwhile.

So, the project … Ian introduces his motivation on the publisher’s website:

Without invasion, colonisation and the near destruction of lutruwita’s First People, without Robinson’s ‘Friendly Mission’, I would not have had the opportunity to feel so much at home on this island. This is a reality that, as much as we might try to ignore it, non-Indigenous Tasmanians cannot escape. How do we come to terms with our privilege and its Janus face, the violent and continuing dispossession of palawa/pakana?

Now, Ian’s last job before retirement was a senior curator of history at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, during which time, among other things, he mounted exhibitions on First Nations history. He has, for nearly three decades, been an active and contributing member of THRA, the Tasmanian Historical Research Association. History was his undergraduate major, and in the early 1990s he complemented these studies with a Graduate Diploma in Cultural Heritage Management, after which he began working as a freelance history consultant – in lutruwita/Tasmania. History, you could say, is in his blood – and was not going to stop flowing after he retired. Enter the project …

But first, I need to add that in addition to his love of history, Ian has been a photographer since early adulthood. Way back in the the fall of 1983, he joined Mr Gums and me on a road trip through New England and Eastern Canada. We all took photos, but Ian was the one who would climb the hill behind the gorgeous white-spired church, or run across the bridge to the other side of a pretty river, to get the best shot. That interest has never waned and he has honed his skills to the point that he is now achieving recognition in photographic competitions.

This project, which involved his following the steps of George Augustus Robinson’s 1831 Big River Mission (brief description), combines these two passions. It has required historical research to identify Robinson’s movements and actions. It also called on Ian’s negotiating skills when, for example, he needed to enter private property to take the desired photos. It used his well-developed bush skills when he needed to explore more difficult landscapes. And, it depended on his photographic skills because photographs form the core of the book.

Of course, Ian’s tracing of Robinson’s path was not aimless. As the above-linked publisher’s website says, he had various questions in his head as he worked through his project, questions like

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 us about our own lives here on this island?

Uninnocent landscapes, the book, comprises a selection of Ian’s photographs documenting the landscape in a way that also expresses his ideas about it. 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 four essays, one by him and three he commissioned from:

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

I can’t wait to see and read it – and, isn’t it a great title?

Ian with our mother, 2017

But wait, there’s more … there is also Uninnocent landscapes, the exhibition. It will feature large-scale archival prints from the book, and will be held in the Sidespace Gallery at Salamanca Arts Centre in nipaluna/Hobart from 2–14 November 2023. I will be there at the opening.

Uninnocent landscapes is published and distributed by OUTSIDE THE BOX / Earth Arts Rights under their imprint An Artist’s Own Book, and will be available from early November. It costs $65, and all proceeds will go to the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania’s Giving Land Back fund. You can preorder here.

To fully disclose: Ian did not pay (or even ask) for this announcement, but he is accommodating me (I hope) on my trip to lutruwita to attend the exhibition opening!

 

Monday musings on Australian literature: Series or standalone?

/ Whispering Gums / 32 Comments

I started my recent post on Shelley Burr’s crime novel Ripper with a statement that crime novels are often written in series and that I am not a big series fan. Ripper looked at the start to be a standalone novel, but a few chapters in the protagonist from her first novel Wake appears. From then on, his voice is irregularly alternated with the novel’s main voice. But, more on that anon.

When I started reading Ripper, then, and thought it was going to be a standalone novel, I considered starting my post with singing the praises of standalones, but then, finding it wasn’t as it seemed, I shelved that issue for another day – like today. I did a little browser searching on the topic and found some useful discussions. They included ideas I’d considered, but some new ones too.

This topic is not specifically Australian, but there are many Australian crime novelists, and most of the ones I know, which is a smidgeon of what’s out there, write series. Crime is not the only genre in which series are common, of course, but it’s the one I’m using to exemplify the issue.

Here is a small selection of Australian crime, mostly authors I have reviewed or would like to read:

I have also read some Australian stand-alone crime – Emily O’Grady’s The yellow house and Emily Maguire’s An isolated incident, being examples. These are more likely to be promoted as “literary crime” as against “genre crime”, though the distinction is loose and not necessarily helpful.

Anyhow, here are some ideas on the subject…

On series

Dorothy Johnston, Through a camel's eye

My non-preference for series is based on a few things, the main one being that I read to hear different voices in different settings about different people, places and ideas. Series novels tend to be set in the same place and milieu, with some continuing characters. Another reason is that I like to be challenged by different approaches to story-telling a story, but series novels tend to follow a formula. It might be a good formula, the writing and characterisation might be great, but it risks becoming familiar rather than challenging or exciting.

These reasons relate in fact to what the Kill Zone named as the single biggest advantage to a series, for both writer and reader. Series, they say, provide “comfort food for the imagination”. However, they also recognise the risk that series can become formulaic.

Another issue for me is the amount of backstory that novels in series tend to include. I guess that’s for readers who start a series in the middle, but if you have read the previous novels, it can be irritating. The Kill Zone suggests that this backstory aspect is a challenge for writers too: “How much backstory does the author include in subsequent books without boring the dedicated series fan or confusing the mid-series pick-up reader?” Good question. The Career Authors site looks at it this way: “You want to make sure,” it says, “that each series title is a potential standalone, so that you can tell readers you don’t have to read my books in order!”

British crime writer Carol Wyer writes about the work involved in writing a series. She says:

You’ll need to know your characters inside out, especially those who will appear in each book, and you must continue their personal stories, weaving them in between each storyline and… you need a theme, one that permeates each book and links them all. It must be something that hooks your readers, so they will want to read the next book, maybe another overriding storyline or simply reader investment in each of your main characters.

She has “notebooks and manilla files” for every character, recording their likes and dislikes, how they pronounce things, and so on. The Career Authors site also describes in some detail what writing a series involves for an author. You can’t kill the main character off, for example!

Still, says Wyer, “the rewards are huge” because authors are usually bereft when they end a book and have to “say goodbye to the characters”. With a series they don’t have to!

On standalone

Emily Maguire, An isolated incident

I’ve already implied why I like standalone novels. The Kill Zone, looking at it particularly from the series author’s point of view, says that “the advantage of writing a standalone … is it can bring on a breath of fresh air for you and the reader”. A standalone, that is, lets a writer explore or experiment with new approaches, techniques, subjects, and it lets the reader see new talents in a loved writer. However, the Kill Zone warns writers to not stray so far from their norm that their fans won’t recognise them.

On a Kindle discussion board, I found the warning that “standalone genre novels can be harder to sell”.

Happy mediums

Series vs Standalone looks like an either-or situation, but, is there a happy medium? Well, yes, there is. One is the approach that Shelley Burr took in Ripper. It is set in a different location, and has a different main protagonist, but the protagonist from her first novel plays a subsidiary investigating role from another location. The Kill Zone, in fact, suggests something like this when it recommends that authors could “touch on something” in their new book that had “appeared in a previous series”.

Dervla McTiernan, The ruin, book cover

The other idea, one that has a foot firmly planted in both camps is the “trilogy”. While she didn’t frame it in terms of this debate, Dervla McTiernan, in the meet-the-author event I attended, said about writing her Cormac Reilly trilogy, that she didn’t want to write a long procedural series, because they tend to be episodic without overall narrative arcs. She wanted to challenge her character Cormac; she wanted him to have a narrative arc which would see him changed by the end. That said, she did admit that Cormac might re-appear some time in the future!

Some sources

I found a few discussions on the internet that made some good points regarding the series vs stand-alone debate. The main ones were the Kill Zone blog (a joint blog), Carol Wyer, and Career Authors.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, whether you are author or reader. Do you prefer one or the other, or don’t you care? Over to you …

Shelley Burr, Ripper (#BookReview)

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When I started reading Ripper, Shelley Burr’s follow-up novel to her bestselling award-winning debut novel Wake (my review), I thought about crime novels, about how they are often written in series and how I am not a big series fan. Ripper looked to me like a stand-alone novel – and it is, somewhat! I say somewhat, because a few chapters in we come across one Lane Holland.

The plot thickens…

Lane Holland, I thought. I know that name. Sure enough, Lane Holland is the private investigator protagonist of the aforementioned Wake. However, he is not the prime investigator in this novel, because he is in prison as a result of his previous investigation. (You’ll need to read Wake to find out more!) The result is an intriguing crime novel in which we have our prime, self-appointed amateur investigator, Gemma, plus the police working away in the background, and Lane who is pulled into the investigation by his prison governor, Patton Carver. Yes, you’ve guessed right, the plot thickens – except I haven’t really told you about the plot yet.

Ripper is set in a fictional town called Rainier, which, as Burr confirms in her acknowledgements, is partly based on the town of Tarcutta. Seventeen years before the novel opens, three murders had occurred in this little country town, the last one outside the door of Gemma’s little teashop. She – and the town – have never fully recovered from these events. The town has stagnated under its black reputation, and Gemma herself suffers PTSD from what she had experienced. Now a tour company has arrived wanting to run a true crime or dark tourism walking tour of the Rainier Ripper’s murderous path, but Rainier’s residents have mixed feelings about the idea. On the eve of the trial tour aimed at garnering their support, the tour operator is killed in what looks like a copycat murder. It has to be copycat because the Rainier Ripper is in prison, the same prison as Lane Holland. As I said, the plot thickens, and part of the thickening springs from why prison governor Carver is interested.

Once again, I enjoyed Burr’s story, because once again it is more than a crime story, exploring issues like the impact on a small town of having a reputation for violence, the impact on people who have been close to a violent crime, the idea of dark tourism, and the murky world of police investigations and the ways in which confessions are elicited. I am not an expert but Burr’s research into the relevant issues, including prison life, felt thorough but lightly applied.

I also enjoyed Burr’s characterisation. Gemma and Lane are well-evoked. Other characters are necessarily more sketchy, but they are individualised enough to lift them above pure stereotype, to make them feel true. There is an engaging exploration, through Gemma’s daughter and her friends, of how teenagers cope with a complex adult world. There are some truly “tangled” family relationships in the town. There is some diversity, including a non-binary teen and a Wiradjuri woman, which Burr introduces without trying to appropriate other experiences. There are farmers, business people, pub owners, and doctors whose lives are entwined through marriage and murders. It’s a lot to convey, and there are plenty of names, but I rarely got lost!

Ripper has some similarities with Wake, in addition to also belonging to the rural noir sub-genre. It’s told through roughly alternating third person voices (Gemma and Lane); the protagonist is privately investigating; and it deals with a cold case, which involves a missing person. But it is significantly different, too, including the fact that Gemma is an amateur unlike Wake‘s Lane, and that it is set in a different place with different issues to confront. This means that it is not formulaic, which keeps us readers on our toes. We can’t assume anything about where Burr is going.

Now, I am not a big plot-follower, by which I mean I don’t put serious brainpower into trying to work out who dunnit. Rather, I read crime like I read most books, that is, with a focus on the characters and the issues being explored. But of course, I can’t help following the actual plot, particularly when the characters have engaged me and I want them to fare well. In Ripper, I worked out one of the plot twists, but it had several – like those Christie and Christie-like TV shows I watch – and they left me for dead. They did make sense, though, which is the important thing.

On the basis of her manuscript for Wake, Burr won a two-book deal with Hachette, and Ripper is the second book. I do hope she is offered more book deals because, while there is absolute closure on this book’s crimes, there is also a clear hint at the end about where a next book might go – and I’m intrigued. Burr is a clever writer, with her wits about her. Ripper’s readers will guess the main investigation Burr plans for her next novel, but what will the context be this time? What will be the issues? Time will hopefully tell.

Shelley Burr
Ripper
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2023
346pp.
ISBN: 9780733647857

(Review copy courtesy Hachette Australia)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Elizabeth Webby (1941-2023)

/ Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

This might be a first for me, an obituary-style post for an academic/literary scholar rather than for an author. However, this post seemed appropriate as, Elizabeth Webby, who died last month, is someone whom I’ve mentioned several times in my blog due to her having written in areas that are of interest to me. Specifically, these areas were colonial Australian literature and contemporary Australian writers, particularly women writers. I heard about her death from the Association of the Study of Australian Literature, for which she was a founding member and of which she was President from 1988 to 1990.

A significant legacy

Julieanne Lamond, current president of ASAL and co-editor of its online journal, Australian Literary Studies, has posted a tribute to her on ASAL’s website. It is well worth reading, because it outlines her major roles and achievements, which include her being Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney from 1990 to 2007. This involved her “supporting works of scholarly infrastructure including the AustLit Database, numerous scholarly editions, and the online Australian Poetry Library”. I have often used AustLit (albeit much of the content is paywalled) and the Australian Poetry Library (which seems not to be currently available, perhaps due to lack of ongoing support?) Webby also edited the Southerly literary journal for over a decade.

However, my “experience” of Webby has also been more specific. While I had come across her before, I became seriously aware of her through The Cambridge companion to Australian literature (1996), which she edited. This book is a little different from those “companion” style books which contain alphabetic encyclopaedic entries related to their chosen topic. Rather, it comprises essays which provide a partly chronological, partly thematic, survey of Australian literature starting with “Indigenous texts and narratives”. It works, in other words, more like a text book or history than a reference book. I often dip into it, when I am researching specific aspects of Australian literature, and find it sometimes useful sometimes not, depending on how well my particular interest has been covered.

However, I had came across Webby earlier via her essay on colonial poets in Debra Adelaide’s A bright and fiery troop (1988), which is another book of essays on Australian literature, but this one limited to 19th century women writers. It’s another book I often dip into when researching earlier writers.

Both these books, though, were in my ken before I started blogging. Skip a couple of decades to 2018 when I wrote a Monday Musings post titled Literary culture in colonial Australia drawing on Webby’s work. It was fascinating research, both for what she found and for the sorts of sources she used and their varying levels of completeness. Then in 2021, I wrote another Monday Musings on the Irish-Australian poet, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880), using research by Elizabeth Webby and another academic, Anna Johnston. These are just two examples of Webby’s work but, as Lamond of ASAL writes, her research interests spanned the breadth and depth of Australian literature, from early colonial literature, through early 20th century writers like Miles Franklin and Barbara Baynton, and mid-20th century ones like Patrick White, to those more contemporary to her own times like Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Harrower and Joan London. She was also, apparently, a loved and respected teacher, academic supervisor and mentor.

All this is important and significant, but another measure of who she was can be found in the funeral notice for her in the Sydney Morning Herald where can be found the following request, “In lieu of floral tributes, please consider a donation to the Indigenous Literary Foundation”. Presumably that was her own request – or from her family based on their knowledge of her passions. Either way, it’s the icing on the cake. Vale, indeed, Elizabeth Webby.

Monday musings on Australian literature: 2023 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award shortlist

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Occasionally, as you know, I use my Monday Musings post to make awards announcements, particularly if the announcement is made on Monday, as this award usually is. And so it happened again today, a Monday, that the shortlist for this award was announced.

I have written about it before and so if you are interested to read about its origins and intentions please check that link. In a nutshell, it celebrates “excellence in research and writing”, and, like the Stella Prize, it is not limited by genre. However, given its research focus, nonfiction always features heavily.

The new thing, though, that is worth sharing in today’s post is that in April this year, Waverley Council which manages the award announced that the winner’s prize had doubled in value from $20,000 to $40,000, thanks, they say on their website, “to an ongoing multiyear commitment by the award’s principal sponsors, Sydney philanthropists, Mark and Evette Moran, Co-Founders/Co-CEOs of the Mark Moran Group”. This is a significant prize. The Council’s announcement also said that it had “also increased the People’s Choice Prize to $4000 and will be offering six shortlist prizes of $1,500 each”.

The Award is also supported by community partner Gertrude and Alice Bookshop and Café.

The judges for the 2023 award are Katerina Cosgrove (author), Jamie Grant (poet and editor), and Julia Carlomagno (publisher).

The 2023 shortlist

  • Alison Bashford, An intimate history of evolution: The story of the Huxley family (family biography, Allen Lane)
  • André Dao, Anam (debut novel, Hamish Hamilton) (Brona’s review)
  • Jim Davidson, Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland (dual literary biography, The Miegunyah Press)
  • Fiona McMillian-Webster, The age of seeds: How plants hacked time and why our future depends on it (science nonfiction, Thames & Hudson Australia)
  • Ross McMullin, Life so full of promise: further biographies of Australia’s lost generation (multi-biography, Scribe)
  • Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: A writing life (literary biography, Virago, on my TBR)

Waverley Council Mayor, Paula Masselos, said that the shortlist was chosen from more than 230 nominations, a number that, she said, reinforces “the importance and gravitas of this award”.

As commonly happens with this award, life-writing features heavily in the shortlist, with just one work of fiction. It is not as diverse as other awards are increasingly becoming, but most of these books wold interest me.

The winner of the overall prize and the People’s Choice Award will be announced on 9 November. For information on how to vote for the People’s Choice Award, check out the shortlist announcement page.

Do you know any of these books?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Masterpieces of fiction, 1910-style

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A straightforward post this week, and one shared in the spirit that readers love lists of books. This list is not Australian (despite my posting it in my Monday Musings series) but it was shared in multiple Australian newspapers in 1910 which makes it part of Australia’s literary history, don’t you think?

The list was headed in most newspapers as “A short list of masterpieces of fiction” and the explanation provided was essentially this, “An American paper offers the following as an excellent though, of course, limited list of the best books for one to read”. The papers don’t value add, so we don’t know which American paper produced the list or under what circumstances. However, I thought it was a fun one to share because it’s not just a list of recommended books, but of the “best” in different categories. Here they are:

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
  • The best historical novel — Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott, Scottish) 
  • The best dramatic novel — The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas, French)
  • The best domestic novel — The vicar of Wakefield (Oliver Goldsmith, English)
  • The best marine novel — Mr. Midshipman Easy (Frederick Marryat, English)
  • The best country life novel — Adam Bede (George Eliot, English)
  • The best military novel — Charles O’Malley (Charles Lever, Irish)
  • The best religious novel — Ben Hur (Lew Wallace, American) 
  • The best political novel — Lothair (Benjamin Disraeli, English)
  • The best novel written for a purpose — Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, American)
  • The best imaginative novel — She (H. Rider Haggard, English)
  • The best pathetic novel — The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles Dickens, English) 
  • The best humorous novel — The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens, English) 
  • The best Irish novel— Handy Andy (Samuel Lover, Irish) 
  • The best Scotch novel — The heart of Midlothian (Sir Walter Scott, Scottish)
  • The best English novel — Vanity Fair (William Thackeray, English)
  • The best American novel — The scarlet letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, American)
  • The best sensational novel — The woman in white (Wilkie Collins, English) 

And:

  • The best of all — Vanity Fair (William Thackeray, English)

I was interested, and infuriated, that the authors’ names were not included in the over ten published versions I saw, so I’ve added them in parentheses. I don’t care whether readers at the time knew the names of the authors or not, the authors should be identified. It is a little soap-box issue of mine that there is often not enough recognition of the authors of the books we read. This is why I always start my review posts with the name of the author not the title of the book. It’s my little bit of literary activism!

Like all such lists, this one is interesting for what is and isn’t there. Where are Austen or the Brontes for example, while other authors like Dickens and Scott appear twice? Clearly their popularity hadn’t waned. More to the point, perhaps, why only one non-English language book? No Russians, for example? It’s also interesting to see which books have dropped off the radar. Does anyone know Mr Midshipman Easy for example? Wikipedia tells me that it’s been adapted to film twice,

The “best” categories also tell us about the interests and reading habits of the time – “best pathetic novel” anyone? Or “best religious”? Or “best novel written for a purpose”? And so on.

Anyhow, I’ll leave it there … and ask you,

Just for fun, what categories would you suggest for a similar list today?

Source: The first paper in which I saw the list was Victoria’s The Elmore Standard, 12 February 1910.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Thoughts on literature’s moral purpose

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I struggled with titling this post because I don’t want it to sound like a thoroughly thought through treatise on the topic. However, I jettisoned my original plan for today’s post to respond to Angela Savage’s question on my CWF post on the Robbie Arnott interview because it seemed worth exploring.

If you haven’t read that post, the gist is that Robbie Arnott talked about why he writes fiction and what he likes to read. Responding to a question about whether fiction does something, he made clear that for him it does (or at least that he would like it to.) Fiction, he said, can expand our consciousness, can make us feel things. We come away a different person after reading it. In this way fiction shapes who we become. Later in the interview, he talked about there being a moral aspect to everything we do, which for him, includes writing. This translates into his feeling a strong responsibility, for example, to tell stories about the land in a way that improves our country. My response to this was that I loved Arnott’s absolute commitment to fiction – to its ability to change us, and to its moral (but not didactic) heft.

Enter the lovely Angela Savage, award winning novelist, former director of Writers Victoria, and current CEO of Public Libraries Victoria who comments occasionally on my blog. She commented on the post with:

Interestingly, I just read an article arguing against the premise that literature/fiction needs to be moral or change us. Would be interested in your opinion.

The article appeared in last Friday’s The Conversation, and is by Dan Dixon, Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Sydney. It’s titled “Friday essay: what do publishers’ revisions and content warnings say about the moral purpose of literature?” It was inspired by two recent issues: the controversy about the rewriting of passages from authors like Roald Dahl to remove “potentially offensive material”, and the “precautionary measure” being adopted by some publishers of adding content warnings and disclaimers to some older books.

It’s a thoughtful piece, and I recommend it to you because I only going to discuss bits of it here, the bits that relate to my answer to Angela’s question.

Dixon makes the point that the media only becomes interested in literary stories when there are “moral concerns” and that these discussions are part of a “moral battle which encourages the application of the same ethical criteria to books that might be apply to elected officials or ministers of religion.” He then suggests that writers’ festival programs demonstrate that we “struggle” to talk about books on any other terms.

Dixon looks at the economic drivers behind these controversies and how they can commodify books. He recognises that literature is affected by the marketplace but argues that it also pushes back against that. Do read his argument if you are interested. Meanwhile, I want to focus on his exploration of what literature is about.

A common question, he says, is:

is there a necessary connection between a work’s literary value and its moral quality? When we read a book do we expect a degree of moral instruction, as to how we should or should not live?

He believes this is a worthwhile question, but that it is not the only question. Literature is more than this. Indeed, he argues that limiting discussion to moral debates encourages “definitive judgements” which enables us, he says, to

avoid what Keats described as negative capability: “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

This is where I want to come in, because I am perfectly happy with what Dixon calls “the unpleasantness of irresolution” – and so, I believe, is Robbie Arnott. In Limberlost, for example, Ned’s daughters confront him with being a farmer on stolen land. Arnott believe it was important for Ned to be confronted with this fact, that to ignore the issue would not be real. But he offers no resolution, no moral closure; it just sits there, as it often does in life.

I’m not sure what Arnott meant exactly by his statements, but I think he’s right that there’s a moral aspect to everything. However, I don’t think he means, as a result, to provide the moral answers. In fact, I’m confident that he knows there aren’t necessarily any, or at least not easy ones. Rather, I understood him to mean that he is aware of the moral implications of the way we live and wants to include those in his books, because that’s real. This is subtly different from saying there must be a moral to the story (to literature, to any art).

Now, I’ll return to Dixon and some things he says about literature. First:

The best literature can be spiky, ambiguous, difficult, cruel, strange, unpredictable, hectoring and unpleasant. It is not the job of a book to ease the life of its reader. Reading a good book might mean having a terrible day, a day in which you are scared, sad, distressed. 

I can agree with this. Arnott’s point that you come away changed could work with this!

Then Dixon says:

But literature does not have an obligation to be useful; we do not have to learn anything from it. It need not produce anything except a readerly response.

I also agree with this. My belief is that, at the purest level, the only thing literature (art) needs to be is whatever its creator wants it to be. It is then up to the reader/viewer/listener (whatever the art form is) to decide whether they appreciate the art. I know this is simplistic as creators are, for a start, constrained by any mix of economic, legal, social, political and practical factors, but this is my theoretical starting point.

Returning to Dixon one more time, he says near the end of his piece that “any argument that treats literature as fundamentally therapeutic, self-improving or society-improving, risks reducing literature to self-help”. This is a bit trickier, but I think it hangs on the word “treat”. And it takes me back to my previous point. If I argue that literature doesn’t “need” to be anything, then by definition I should not “treat” it as needing to be something. I can, however, prefer literature that tries to improve or change things. A fine line perhaps but I think it’s defensible.

I therefore like Dixon’s conclusion that the best way to think about literature might be as a “conversation”. He expands this to say that conversations “can be morally nourishing or deadening … neither good nor bad”. Seeing literature this way suggests for him that “reading resembles conversation … an ongoing exchange between reader and writer”. Which brings me back to Arnott who sees novels as a two-way communication between author and reader, one in which he’d love to know whether what he feels resonates with the reader. 

I hope I’ve answered Angela’s question, and I also hope I have accurately represented Arnott in terms of the question. What do you think?