Australian literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian literary biographies (2, poets)

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Eight years ago, I wrote a Monday Musings on Australian literary biographies, but the main focus there was on novelists. With this month being National Poetry Month and with, coincidentally, this year’s National Biography Award going to a biography of a poet, it seemed a match made in heaven. In other words, it seemed appropriate to share some biographies of Australian poets, on those writers, that is, for whom poetry was their main literary output.

In his latest emailed newsletter, Jason Steger, Literary Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, writes about this year’s National Biography Award winner, Ann-Marie Priest’s, My tongue is my own: A life of Gwen Harwood (2020). Harwood, some of you might remember, was one of Edwina Preston’s inspirations for her novel Bad art mother (my review). As a woman poet, she had to fight hard for recognition by the male-dominated publishing world. Steger explains that “Harwood’s was a complex life and Priest had to persevere to sort it all out”. Two would-be biographers, Alison Hoddinott and the late Gregory Kratzmann, who edited her collected poems, were, he explains, defeated by the task. Not Priest, though, for which we should be grateful. One of the judges, Suzanne Falkiner, says Steger, put it this way:

Ann-Marie Priest has captured completely the sprite-like nature of one of Australia’s finest poets; a woman who used a fierce intellect and penchant for trickery to upend dusty institutions that steadfastly refused to see women as capable or talented. Through these pages, the great poet feels so alive.

To completely capture the nature of their subject must surely be a biographer’s goal, by which I mean it is not to fill up the pages with unending chronicling of carefully researched facts, albeit facts are important, but to give readers a sense of who the person was. Sounds like Priest has done this.

Selected biographies of Australian poets

These are listed, in the time-honoured vein of biography sorting, by the last name of the poet being written about. It’s a small select list to get us started:

  • Sarah Mirams, Coasts of dream: A biography of E.J. Brady (2018): I had never heard of Edwin Brady (as a poet or otherwise) when this turned up in my search, but he was apparently “a socialist and bohemian who knew Henry Lawson and many other well-known writers”. He was mainly a composer of sea ballads. I haven’t read this but I am hoping to do a post on him next week, now that I’m on a Poetry Month roll.
  • Cathy Perkins, The shelf life of Zora Cross (2019, on my TBR): on poet and journalist Cross, who could be provocative and should, I think, be better known than she is. (See article by Jonathan Shaw on AWW.)
  • Phillip Buttress, An unsentimental bloke the life and work of C.J. Dennis( 2014): (my review)
  • W.H. Wilde, Courage, a grace: A biography of Dame Mary Gilmore (1985)
  • Gregory Bryan, Mates: The friendship that sustained Henry Lawson and Colin Roderick, Henry Lawson: A life (1999)
  • Deborah Fitzgerald, Her sunburnt country: The extraordinary literary life of Dorothea McKellar (2023, available for pre-order): apparently “the first definitive biography” of the author of one of Australia’s most favourite poems
  • Kathie Cochrane and Judith Wright, Oodgeroo (1994, on Oodgeroo Noonuccal)
  • Georgina Arnott, The unknown Judith Wright (2016) and Veronica Brady, South of my days: A biography of Judith Wright (1998)

“Enjoyably controversial” (John Docker)

Biographies, of course, can be quite the battleground when there is disagreement about the legacy of the subject, particularly when that subject may have been controversial to start with. I found such an example in my research. It concerns the poet James McAuley, who was known for the Ern Malley modernist poetry hoax. I came across two biographies of him. One, The heart of James McAuley: life and work of the Australian poet, was published in 1980 and is by Peter Coleman. He was editor of Australia’s conservative journal Quadrant – which was founded by McAuley – and is on record as saying of McAuley that “no one else in Australian letters has so effectively exposed or ridiculed modernist verse, leftie politics and mindless liberalism”. The other was by Cassandra Pybus who could be described as Coleman’s political opposite. Her biography, published in 1999, was provocatively titled, The devil and James McAuley. Coleman wrote an excoriating review of it in which he detailed multiple inaccuracies and called it “a silly book degrading a great writer”. Literary critic and cultural historian, John Docker, launched Pybus’ “enjoyably controversial” book, concluding with:

Cassandra has written a lively, entertaining and enjoyable book, very alive to the conflicts and differences within conservative groupings. She has the daring to break with the stifling convention of Australian literary criticism, which bizarrely is that critics should abandon the critical function, they should be obsequious to Australian writers living and dead, they should puff and promote and endlessly praise them – as Leonie Kramer, Cassandra points out, has tirelessly effected for her friend McAuley.

Now that was a book launch! Not having read either book, I can’t make any judgements. It is possible that Pybus, writing 19 years after Coleman, had found more information on McAuley’s life that was not available to Coleman. It’s also possible that Coleman’s sharing political values with McAuley affected his assessment, just as Pybus’ different political views may have affected hers. Whatever the merits of this particular situation, it reminds readers of biographies to consider who is writing the biography and why. I do like biographies in which the biographer introduces their book with this sort of background.

(A revised edition of Coleman’s book was published in 2008, and Coleman spoke at the launch. Pybus still rankles. Ignore Tony Staley’s and Tony Abbott’s comments, if you like, and move on down to Coleman. I enjoyed his closing story.)

Can you share any favourite biographies of poets?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Poetry Month 2023

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This year Red Room Poetry is running their third annual National Poetry Month. How excellent is that? I don’t know how successful it is at reaching its goal of increasing “access, awareness and visibility of poetry in all its forms and for all audiences” but sometimes you just have to hang in there and build recognition. Poetry Month runs throughout August.

They are offering similar events and activities to last year with their 30in30 daily writing competition with prompts from Red Room commissioned poets, poetry ambassadors, online workshops, showcases, a community calendar, and more. Do check their page, for events that might interest you.

National Poetry Gala … and more

This year they also, they said, returned their National Poetry Gala to celebrate Red Room’s 20th anniversary. It was held, unfortunately, on 4 August! It was emceed by Benjamin Law, and was held at the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s new venue near Sydney Harbour Bridge. It featured some of Australia’s “finest contemporary poets” including Jazz Money, Sara Saleh, Freya Daly Sadgrove (NZ), Rebecca Shaw, Red Room’s 2023 Fellow Charmaine Papertalk Green, and this year’s Stella Prize winner, Sarah Holland-Batt.

There was also to be a musical performance by First Nations choir Mudjingaal Yangamba and the current Minister for the Arts, Tony Burke, was a special guest.

Also to commemorate their 20th anniversary, Red Room has published a poetry anthology titled A line in the sand: 20 years of Red Room Poetry. Its introduction is by Ali Cobby Eckermann, and it contains “over eighty pieces from leading poets and public figures in a retrospective that covers twenty years of the best commissioned Australian poetry”. They include writers I have heard of, and some of whom I’ve read, though not always their poetry, like Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Tony Birch, Dorothy Porter, Eloise Grills, Sarah Holland-Batt, Jazz Money, Omar Musa, Bruce Pascoe, Maria Tumarkin and Uncle Archie Roach AC. Tomorrow night, Tuesday 8 August, they are holding an online showcase via Facebook. The event is free but you need to book.

Meanwhile, if you missed the National Poetry Gala, you might be interested to know that the Victorian Poetry Month Gala has not been held yet. It is scheduled for 17 August at the Wheeler Centre. The host is a poet-playright I haven’t heard of before, Izzy Roberts-Orr, and the event will feature, says the promotion, “new work from a dazzling line-up of poets working across forms – from spoken word and performance to music and multimedia”. I don’t know many of the names those I do include Andrea Goldsmith reading unpublished poems by Dorothy Porter, and Eloise Grills whose book big beautiful female theory has been shortlisted for several literary awards this year. There is also a mention of “a collaboration” between journalist and author Erik Jensen and musician Evelyn Ida Morris. For other state and regional showcases and galas, check Red Room’s Showcases page.

These are just three of many events – online and live – scheduled during the month. If you are interested, check out the Community Calendar which lists events from across the country.

Do you attend poetry events – of any sort?

Chris Flynn, Here be Leviathans (#BookReview)

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I am not one of those readers who shun weird narrators. Indeed, you’ll find several in this blog, including a skeleton, a dead baby, a foetus and a mammoth fossil. The critical thing for me is not who the narrator is, but whether that narrator is convincing and offers a perspective that engages my mind and heart. Of all the writers I’ve read over the last decade, one that stands out in his ability to surprise and excite me with different voices is Chris Flynn. His short story collection, Here be Leviathans, is astonishing from its first page to its last in its array of narrators.

There are nine stories in this collection, and it is a testament to Flynn that by the second or third one I was fully invested in who would be the narrator this time. I was never disappointed, albeit they ranged from the animate (like the grizzly bear which opens the collection, in “Inheritance”) to the inanimate (such as the airplane seat which narrates the second story, “22F”).

But, before I continue with Flynn’s book, I want to share something he says in his also entertaining “Afterword/Acknowledgements/Blame apportioned” statement. Describing one of his stories as having been inspired by Thea Astley, he refers to his role as one of the judges in Meanjin’s Tournament of Books and shares the exact words of his that I quoted back in my 2013 post on that tournament:

Astley was the progenitor, the chain-smoking, wise-cracking, jazz-loving four times Miles Franklin-winning champion of linguistic manipulation whose style got on Helen Garner’s nerves and who pushed the envelope of Australian literature when no-one else had the cojones to do so.

Flynn’s work is different to Astley’s – time and experimentation having moved on – but he too pushes the envelope of Australian literature, which is why he was one of the writers mentioned the article that inspired my recent Monday Musings on weird Australian fiction. And like Astley, his interests are personal and political. He’s interested in the ways we live in the world, in the injustices we enact, which translates to a concern with issues like colonialism, the environment, and the fallout from an unbridled interest in progress. His touch might feel lighter than Astley’s – he can be laugh-out-loud funny at times – but fundamentally both writers question who we are as human beings. What does what we do say about who we are?

“What a piece of work is man” (Shakespeare via Albert VI)

So, let’s explore Flynn’s brand of weirdness, and why I enjoyed it so much – despite the fact that the opening sentences of the first story, “Inheritance”, were truly shocking:

I ate a kid called Ash Tremblay yesterday. Parts of him, at least. The good bits. The crunchy skull, the brain, a juicy haunch.

What is a reader to think? Fortunately, you don’t have to think very long because very soon our narrator outs himself (it is a “he”) as a bear. He shares a few home truths about humans and our assumptions and behaviours. If you ignore the gruesomeness – after all, a bear has got to eat – the story is pretty funny. Its ostensible subject matter is inherited memory – in this case the bear has inherited Ash’s memory – but it is also a work of ecofiction, which includes exploration of issues like sustainability and colonialism. It is refreshingly bold, asking us to envisage different ways of acting in nature, and, at 30 pages, it is also long. But who cares?

The second, much shorter story, “22F”, is also a work of ecofiction. Its first line seemed ordinary enough, “The first day in a new workplace is always nerve-wracking”. It is, isn’t it? As the story progresses, however, you start to wonder just who this new employee is until the penny drops, it’s seat 22F on a plane. After this story, I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of working out who was telling each story as I started it. But, back to 22F. In his Afterword, Flynn explains that the story was inspired by the Werner Herzog documentary Wings of Hope about the sole survivor of a 1971 airplane crash. Herzog and that survivor, Juliane Koepcke, return to the site of the crash, and find parts of the plane in the jungle. Flynn writes:

Memory and place. A reminder that we are only passing through and that everything is part of something larger.

Along the way, though, he discusses other issues, like workplace behaviour:

Toilets are inveterate boasters and disgusting perverts. You can’t believe half of what they say.

Eventually 22F’s plane crashes, and while the bodies disintegrate reasonably quickly, 22F is “fashioned from material that does not break down so readily … I will be here for a very long time”.

And so the stories continue, some with multiple voices. “The Strait of Magellan”, for example, is told by the appropriately named super yacht Nemesis, with interspersed commentary by a pandemic virus, HHSV1-ABAD. “Shot down in flames”, on the other hand, is told in sequential voices – by a creek which has been here for sixty-thousand years (that is, that’s how long it’s had its name!), a red fox, a rifle, and finally a bushfire, which wins the day:

I ate the defiant people who stayed.

Such arrogance. Who do they think they are, that they might resist me? I am elemental. I define this paltry world. I decide who stays in their current state and who transforms. I will find you and I will devour you, for I am Alpha and Omega. I was there at the beginning and I will be there at the end. There is no escape.

Many of the stories’ narrators, in fact, identify human stupidity – and arrogance.

In his Afterword, Flynn describes the last story “Kiss tomorrow goodbye” as the “hardest” story to read, but that does it an injustice. It’s the only one narrated by humans, and is inspired by the people who live in the tunnels under Las Vegas. It looks hard because there’s not a punctuation mark in its 30 pages, and its spelling is idiosyncratic to say the least, but in fact the voice and its rhythms are such that it’s not hard to read. It’s a story about survival and makes for a good end to the collection – one that leaves us in no doubt about all the troubling issues that Flynn has explored throughout but that also offers a glimmer of hope in the ingenuity and defiance of its protagonists.

The question of course is do these weird perspectives work or are they just a writerly exercise in “pushing the envelope”? For me they worked. It was fun trying to nut out whose voice it was this time. But there was a point to all this, because these are voices we can’t really argue with. They are not us, but they know us intimately. They speak their truths, like Albert VI, the space monkey (macaque) in “Alas, poor Yorick” who is so hopeful of surviving his space mission but who, like all the Alberts preceding him, is ultimately another pawn in the space race.

Colonial aggression and environmental destruction are recurring themes in the collection, but both are subsumed into an overriding idea which concerns something more paradoxical – mortality and survival. Death or its threat pervades the stories, but there are openings too. Some are small, but they are there.

In his Afterword, Flynn says that “they don’t make them like Astley anymore. She wrote what she wanted and didn’t give a shit”. I disagree. I think they do, and Flynn is one of them. It is great that there are publishers around like UQP who are willing to work with such writers.

Chris Flynn
Here be Leviathans
St Lucia: UQP, 2022
233pp.
ISBN: 9780702262777

Review copy courtesy UQP, via publicist Brendan Fredericks

Monday musings on Australian literature: Miles Franklin Award 2023 Shadow Jury

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Some of you have probably heard of “shadow juries”. I took part in one a decade ago, for the now defunct Man Asian Literary Prize. It was great, but I haven’t taken part in any blogger-inspired shadow juries again because of the time commitment needed. If I was already impressed by the work of literary award juries, I was even more so after that experience. But, had any of you heard of a Shadow Jury for the Miles Franklin Award? I hadn’t.

It was a project of the University of Queensland’s Writing Centre. Their jury is a bit different to the blogger-run ones I’ve seen, because their aim was not to select a winner. Here is how they describe their idea of a shadow jury, its composition and its aims:

A shadow jury is an independent panel of passionate readers, critics, and literary enthusiasts who come together to review a longlist of books. While the official judging panel ultimately determines the award-winning book, the shadow jury offers an alternative lens through which to appreciate and analyse the longlisted works. 

In this post, we present reviews from our shadow jury, which included students, writers and critics from UQ who delved into each longlisted book. Through these reviews, we aim to provide readers with a multifaceted understanding of the longlisted works and spark engaging conversations about their literary significance.

So, what I am going to do here is add an excerpt from the Shadow Jury’s reviews, for each book, to whet your appetite. You might then go on and read the review (which you can find at the UQ link above) and/or, perhaps, the book itself! I’ve added UQ’s reviewer’s name in brackets at the end of the excerpt

  • Kgshak Akec, Hopeless kingdom (UWAP): “This impressive first novel is less about immigration itself, and more about family as a living organism that once uprooted, wills itself to do more than survive.” The reviewer also comments on the losses that come with immigration, such as “the normalcy of being Black in Sudan, [which is] replaced by minority status and the accompanying racism in Egypt and Australia” (Doreen Baingana)
  • Robbie Arnott, Limberlost (Text): “The first chapter is a revelation and a masterclass in the economy of words”. The whole novel is, I’d say. “Would I go as far as to declare that Arnott is Tasmania’s Tim Winton? Yes, I would, and I am willing to die on that hill. Limberlost is a superb rendering of a coming-of-age story. Tender, evocative, brutal and radiant.” (Carly-Jay Metcalfe)
  • Jessica Au, Cold enough for snow (Giramondo): “The novel’s elliptical tone plays constantly with time and memory. How much we can know another person, even those as intimately connected as mother and daughter, haunts the book, as does how much we can know our (past, present, future) self…New Australian fiction, especially from the second- and third-generation diasporic communities of Western Sydney, is quietly but determinedly shattering the white male ceiling of Australian literature, as Maxine Beneba Clarke notes elsewhere, creating a provincial literature that is both local and global in scale. ” (Professor Anna Johnston)
  • Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (Ultimo Press): “What does it mean to be Australian in the 21st century? Shankari Chandran’s Miles Franklin shortlisted novel Chai Time At Cinnamon Gardens ponders this question with grace, humility, and confronting depictions of racism raging with Shakespearean levels of drama and tragedy…Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is an important and enthralling read. While it lacks subtlety on some occasions, the message it evokes is damningly clear.” (Olivia de Silva)
  • Claire G Coleman, Enclave (Hachette): “Few works of speculative fiction have been considered for Australia’s most prestigious literary award, a symptom of the genre’s uneasy relationship to literary fiction and culture…In addition to its literary merits, Enclave is concerned with decolonising Australia’s stories about itself and its future. In the process, the unexamined racism still driving speculative fiction’s narratives of empire, progress, or pastoral idyll are also decolonised.” (Dr Natalie Collie)
  • George Haddad, Losing face (UQP): “Ivan and Joey’s romance is what makes this an understated, lovely book with an episode of Special Victims Unit wedged inside. It’s the unusual parts of Losing Face that make it a remarkable Australian novel, not the parts ripped from the headlines.” (Pierce Wilcox)
  • Pirooz Jafari, Forty nights (Ultimo Press): “Forty Nights is a debut work of literary fiction by Pirooz Jafari, who has fictionalised his own life story in this novel…Insightful, tender and whimsical, Forty Nights is a standout novel on this year’s longlist.” (Martine Kropkowski)
  • Julie Janson, Madukka: The river serpent (UWAP): “While at times I struggled to understand how Janson’s first foray into crime writing had qualified for the longlist of the Miles Franklin, Madukka’s handling of issues of racism, climate change, drug use, and the ongoing First Nations’ struggle for land back and recognition ultimately makes it worthwhile. I’ll end with my initial thought; I actually think I’d really enjoy seeing this story adapted for the screen.” (Rani Tesiram)
  • Yumna Kassab, The lovers (Ultimo Press): “I expected a modern fable underscored by Arabic folklore with more traditional, less didactic conventions. What I found instead was something far more poignant, raw and real…Irrespective of whether The Lovers is the recipient of the 2023 Miles Franklin, its nomination speaks to the state and tenor of contemporary Australian literature embracing the novel as an experimental form.” (Bianca Millroy)
  • Fiona Kelly McGregor, Iris (Pan Macmillan Australia): “The blurb of this book asks a simple question: is Iris Webber innocent or guilty? At the end of some 430 pages, however, such a dichotomy feels terribly pale. It is the larger questions of history, reclamation, oppression, and humanity that mark McGregor’s work and transform the form of the historical novel into something alive and urgent, innovative and instructive. At its heart, Iris is (as Peter Doyle notes) a remarkable work of conjuring. With charm and grit, Iris conjures up Sydney of the 1930s, in all its grim glory. And Fiona Kelly McGregor, in a feat of sensitivity and skill, has conjured Iris Webber.” (Madeleine Dale)
  • Adam Ouston, Waypoints (Puncher & Wattmann): “an anxiety dream of a novel… In a breathless spiralling narrative told (more or less) in a single feverish paragraph, Cripp [the protagonist] pinballs from one association to another, circling back to grasp at his bearings before bouncing off again into further tangents, digressions, curlicues and cul-de-sacs. In lengthy, slippery sentences, he details the history of Houdini’s failed record-breaking attempt, he dips into Victorian showmanship, the swirl of misinformation around the disappearance of MH370, the history of powered flight, Alzheimer’s disease and Australia itself…It’s a strange, ambitious, reckless thing. But it flies; it really flies…” (Vince Haig)

It is damning – but true to our time – that so many these novels address racism. But there are other subjects here too, plus a variety of forms, and, it seems, some bold new writing. I enjoyed these reviews, particularly because, as you’d expect, they critiqued the books as literary works, as content, and against the forms or styles they represent.

Shankari Chandran won the official jury’s prize with Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens – as most of you know.

Thoughts?

Debra Dank, We come with this place (#BookReview)

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First Nations people are advised that this post contains the names of deceased people.

It has been my reading group’s tradition for some years now to read a book by a First Nations writer in July, the month in which NAIDOC Week occurs. Coincidentally, NAIDOC Week’s 2023 theme was “For our elders”, which worked beautifully with our chosen book, Debra Dank’s We come with this place, because a large part of it is about the value and importance of elders and ancestors.

This was not, however, why we chose Dank’s book from the options before us. Its subject matter intrigued us, about which more anon, but we were also influenced by the fact that, at the time we were choosing, it had just won a record number of four awards in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards: the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, the Indigenous Writers’ prize, and the overall Book of the Year. It was also shortlisted for this year’s Stella Prize, and, after we scheduled it, it won the ALS Gold Medal. These are significant awards and, for most of us, the book lived up to its advance publicity.

I mentioned the subject matter above, but We come with this place is one of those books that is tricky to categorise. It’s a sort of multigenerational memoir that is also a guide to her culture and a community history of her people, before and after colonisation. It grew out of her PhD in Narrative Theory and Semiotics. Dank describes it in her Preface as a:

strange kind of letter written to my place – a recording of events and activities that I and my family have experienced, in order to tell Garranjini that I remember, and I know. It is all based on real events. Some parts have been reimagined, because they happened outside my presence, and several names have been changed. Our relationship with our place, however, is genuine and lives in ways that not easily told in English words or western ways.

She goes on to say that she wanted to show “how story works in my community, and how it has contributed to our living with country for so long”. It also felt imperative, she says, to talk about the “voices, human and non-human, who guided the Gudanji for centuries before anyone else stepped onto this land”. This is a truly generous thing to do, and my group loved that, loved how Dank shared her story, and particularly how she helped us whitefellas “see” how First Nations people understand and relate to Country. I knew much of this from all I’ve read and heard, but this book really grew my understanding.

The other special thing about this book for me is that it is set in an area I know. I spent three formative late-childhood years in Mount Isa, close to Camooweal where Dank’s mother’s family were based. I visited Camooweal several times, and traversed parts of the Barkly Tableland which encompasses her Country. The first First Nations people I heard of were the Kalkadoons, whom Dank mentions in her book. Dank herself, though, is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman, the former through her mother and the latter, her father.

“to see the pain as it lies in the landscape”

We come with this place is a confronting book, from its perfect and defiant title to its chronicling of the atrocities that her people faced. The fear of children being taken away pervades the book. There are stories of massacres, and other appalling brutalities including a rape of her father’s mother. Lucy’s “choices were both dire – a drover’s boy or a special girl. The same, just in different clothes”. There is intergenerational trauma, which Dank exemplifies through her father, Soda. Hardworking and loving, he bears traumas, which she characterises as “newer stories … that pushed and jostled with the older stories” and sometimes “pushed their way out with a violence” that was often directed at her mother, and sometimes herself.

Dank doesn’t hold back; the way she tells it is strong, speaking her truths and segueing between past and present, between brutal history and rejuvenating story, between people and ancestors. Amongst the tough stories are warm-hearted anecdotes about family life. An example is Dank telling of being on country with her grandfather Bimbo and her surprise and joy in learning how to catch fish in arid land. The stories speaking of deep love sit alongside the hard ones, and together convey that the people, their ancestors, and Country are interconnected. This idea is mirrored in the structure.

However, I admit that I did, initially, find the structure a bit confusing, but as I read on, I started to sense an overriding arc similar to that of Bangarra Dance Theatre’s recent offering, Yuldea. Both start with origin stories, then move through colonial history, and conclude with the power of kinship and connection to Country. But it’s not as linear as this sounds. For example, starting the book, and threading through Dank’s narrative are the three Water-women who came from sea in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and travel far to create “the freshwater and hill country” of the Gudanji. They also end the book, giving it an overall cyclical structure which, I think, reflects First Nations’ understanding of life. Other cycles occur within this structure, so there is a continuous sense of moving forwards and back in time, as experiences and stories build on each other to create “Gudanji memory” – for us, and for her people to whom she is writing. This idea of building “memory” from stories, from lines between places and the things that have happened there, is strange to western ways of thinking, but Dank makes it make sense. She shows us how stories are made and passed on through Country.

I’ve been trying to decide how to end this post, and then it came to me that the best way might be with some words from Dr Tyson Yunkaporta’s Introduction to the book. He is a First Nations scholar, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, and the author of Sand talk. He admits to not being able to face “the through line of history from the savagery of the frontier wars to the interventionist policies of today”. Dank, though, has. He writes:

She hurts us, digs bullets out of old wounds that never healed properly, sucks out the poison and then begins our healing with love and laughter. She does this for everybody, no matter which side of the rifle you’re on.

Dank, in other words, doesn’t pull any punches, but neither does she ram them down your gullet. Her aim is to tell the truth, proud and clear, but to do it in order for healing to take place. Isn’t that what we all want?

Kim (Reading Matters) also loved this book.

Debra Dank
We come with this place
London: Echo, 2022
252pp.
ISBN: 9781760687397

Miles Franklin Award 2023 winner announced

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The winner of the 2023 Miles Franklin award was announced this evening, and it’s not one I’ve read, even though this year I’ve actually read two of the six shortlisted books! A record for me in recent times. The winner is:

Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens

It’s a book I’ve been toying with reading since it first came out, and it is on my reading group’s short list of schedule suggestions, so maybe its time will come.

ArtsHub, in announcing the award, quotes Chandran’s response to winning:

I’m excited by the prospect of a wider readership for for this novel. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens can take the reader to a difficult and uncomfortable place; there’s trauma and bigotry – but I have tried to explore that within a safe space of humour and love and respect

The book has a cutesy title and a pretty cover which I admit initially made me think it was one of those cosy murder stories. It is set in a nursing home in Western Sydney where, you know, you can imagine Miss Marple investigating a murder. But, after seeing Brona’s review (see below), I realised that this is not what this book is at all. It is, says ArtsHub, “a multigenerational and historical journey of revelation and reckoning across time and place”. Chandran, who calls Australia her “chosen home, and Sri Lanka her ancestral home” says her novel is set “against the backdrop of rising racism in contemporary Australia”. It also flashes back “to big movements in Sri Lanka’s history” and “dives into the contested formation and histories of both countries”.

Big congrats to Shankari Chandran!

Just to remind you … the shortlist

  • Kgshak Akec, Hopeless kingdom (UWAP)
  • Robbie Arnott, Limberlost (Text) (my review)
  • Jessica Au, Cold enough for snow (Giramondo) (my review)
  • Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (Ultimo Press) (Brona’s review)
  • Yumna Kassab, The lovers (Ultimo Press)
  • Fiona Kelly McGregor, Iris (Pan Macmillan Australia) (Lisa’s review; kimbofo’s review)

The 2023 judges wereRichard Neville, Mitchell Librarian of the State Library of NSW and Chair; author and literary critic, Dr Bernadette Brennan; literary scholar and translator, Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty; book critic, Dr James Ley; and author and editor, Dr Elfie Shiosaki.

Thoughts?

Monday musings on Australian literature: on 1923: 6, A postal controversy

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Who would have thought that the cost of postage would generate controversy in the book world? And the sorts of issues that would be raised as a result?

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(Courtesy OCAL, via clker.com)

In my research of Trove for book-related issues in 1923, I came across a letter to the editor opposing some proposed changes in postal rates for books and other printed matter. Of course, I researched it a bit more, and discovered that the issue had started in 1922 (or perhaps even earlier. I didn’t look further, as my aim here is to document some issues that seem interesting rather than use all my reading time on detailed research!)

As far as I can work out, investigating postal rates had started perhaps in 1921, but it was in early 1922 that the Postmaster General promulgated new regulations. They are described in detail in Melbourne’s Age of 25 January, which explains why they were needed:

These regulations are the outcome of prolonged conversations between Postal officers and those interested in the trade, and are designed to put an end to the confusion which has existed for many months past, while removing some anomalies which caused great irritation, and were responsible for considerable loss. Up to the present none has been able to say definitely what constitutes a book from the stand point of the Post Office. The new regulations, while opposed by some who are engaged in the book selling and book buying business, will at least establish uniform practice throughout the Commonwealth. 

The article describes the new regulations in detail, which I won’t repeat here. You can click on the link above if you are interested. I will just share the main contentious issues:

  • the definition of a book for postal purposes: a cookbook, for example, isn’t one, and nor is one containing advertisements.
  • the requirement to register books that are wholly printed in Australia (because they will get a favourable rate). The article tells us that books printed in Australia would cost 1d. per 8oz to post, while those printed outside Australia would cost twice that, at 1d. per 4oz. 

Now, let’s jump forward to 29 January 1923 which is when I first clocked the issue. It was in a letter to the editor in Brisbane’s Telegraph by one E. Colclough who was the Hon. Secretary of the Queensland Authors’ and Artists’ Association. His beef primarily concerned the issue of advertisements preventing a book’s “registration” as a book:

Such a regulation renders it prohibitive for a poor individual to undertake the publishing of his own works because it frequently happens that only by the assistance of the kindly advertiser is he enabled to finance his literary venture.

His association wanted Australian writers to be “encouraged and assisted in every way possible”, and asked for the regulations to be amended.

A few months later, on 13 June 1923, W.T. Pike, President of the Booksellers’ Association, wrote a letter to Melbourne’s The Argus in which he enumerated seven changes the association wanted made to the regulations. Number three was for the book rate to be applied to

all books printed in Australia without regard to subject or where the author lives. At present books printed in Australia are subject to the pernickety whims of officials. For instance, postal officials say a “cookery book is not a book but printed matter.

The Association wanted “a reasonable number of general advertisements to be allowed” and for books to not have to be registered. They argued that this was an “unnecessary time waster” because the printer’s name and address always appear on books, and books are “automatically sent under the Copywright [sic] Act to two public libraries”. They also wanted reciprocity with New Zealand in terms of rates, and suggested the reduction of overseas postage rates from the “absurd” 8d per lb to 4d per lb would be beneficial. “Quite a lot of books would be sent South Africa if postal rates were reduced”, wrote Pike.

The Commonwealth’s proposed rates bill was moved in Parliament in August 1923, and reported in Adelaide’s The Register. It makes for some entertaining reading, with some arguing against the changes because the money could be spent on other things, such as improving the actual post offices. Do read the report, as it’s short and entertaining.

Meanwhile I will end with two things, one being that the bill was passed, and the other being The Register’s report of one MP’s contribution:

Dr. Maloney (V.) supported the measure, but pleaded hard for an increase to pay to officials in allowance post offices. Some of the women, he said, worked for eight hours daily, under great difficulties, and only got 20/ to 25/ a week, or less than messenger boys.

I like this Dr Maloney, who, according to Serle in the ADB, “loved humankind, fought inequality and pressed the rights and needs of the poor”. I’ve moved away from my topic here a bit but, you know, this little series is as much about serendipity as about books!

I hope you like serendipity as much as I do?

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

Monday musings on Australian literature: Weird fiction

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All being well, my next post – or, a very near future one – will be on Chris Flynn’s astonishing short story collection, Here be Leviathans. As I was reading it, I came quite serendipitously across Nina Culley’s article titled “Weird is in“, in Kill Your Darlings*. The article references Chris Flynn’s collection and some other works I’ve read recently that are a bit, well, off-centre.

Culley opens the article with:

Australian fiction has long been dominated by the realist novel. A new wave of writers continue the avant-garde tradition—but are experimental and offbeat stories always destined to be relegated to a literary niche? 

Now, I do tend to prefer realist (or realistic) novels. I am not much into the various forms/subgenres of speculative fiction (though I don’t mind dystopias, which just seem to me to be future realism!) However, this is not to say that I don’t occasionally venture into the more imaginative, surreal or even fantastical. I like Murakami, for example; I loved Jane Rawson’s A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (my review); and in more recent times I enjoyed Chris Flynn’s Mammoth (my review). I am certainly enjoying his Here be Leviathans. Would Culley’s article, I wondered, explain why?

She follows her intro with the point that “experimental and strange fiction is often viewed as a niche of the literary world, reserved for audacious writers who dare push the boundaries of storytelling and their open-minded readerships”. Such writing is also, she says, “frequently subjected to mixed reception – some ardent, some bamboozled”. I can understand the latter, because, almost by definition, weird writing tends to subvert, if not actively eschew, the conventions against which many of us think about what we read. When that happens, we can struggle to work out how to assess it. or example, if our benchmark is realistic characters, what do we do with characters who are determinedly not so?

Culley, who actively sought out unusual fiction, was surprised to find that there was more out there than she’d thought. It’s hard to categorise but she found it under genre labels like “bizarro fiction” and “new-weird fiction”. She suggests that these genres seem “to have a lot in common with post-modernism and early avant-garde movements, with self-reflexive tendencies towards satire, irony and pastiche”. They “playfully comment on their own artifice” and challenge readers with “bold questions”. I often enjoy writing like this. I have no problem with writers reminding me that it is art I’m consuming, not a representation of reality, because, well, it is art I’m reading and I want to think about the art.

Anyhow, she argues that Australian literature has moved on from a focus on ‘bush and beach’ to something she calls ‘urban existentialism’. Much of this is “wonderful” albeit often “bleak”, but it is also Euro-centric. She characterises it as being concerned with “weaving together a character’s multi-faceted relationship with their country—how it’s threatening and how it’s beautiful, notions with complex colonial implications”. The problem is that this writing might be significant to a point, but it is also homogenising. It “undermines the demand and presence of a diverse literary scene”.

And now, before you jump in with but, but, but, she agrees that Australia has “fostered bold voices and innovation” from the likes of Patrick White through Helen Garner, Gerald Murnane, Murray Bail, and that fascinating import from South Africa, JM Coetzee, to newer writers like Alexis Wright, Robbie Arnott, Ellen van Neerven and Evelyn Araluen. I’ve reviewed all of these writers here at lest once (and admit that while I have enjoyed their writing, most have challenged my reviewer faculties! Which is no bad thing!)

Culley then discusses the publishing of weird writing – who is publishing it and why enough isn’t publised – but I want to explore a little about why read “weird” fiction.

Take weird narrators, for example. Some readers don’t like them, they don’t like, say, skeletons (in Carmel Bird’s Family skeleton) or foetuses (in Ian McEwan’s Nutshell) but in the hands of authors who know what they are doing, weird narrators can jolt us with fresh perspectives on an idea or issue. Chris Flynn’s Mammoth, as I wrote in my review, tells the story of humanity’s destructive, often brutal march through time, through the eyes of those we supplanted, the fossils of extinct creatures. Seeing the world through such eyes is mind-bending and eye-opening.

Julie Koh takes a different approach. Most of her stories in Portable curiosities (my review) start realistically but often turn surreal or absurd. Her targets, though, are grounded – in issues like consumerism, capitalism, commercialism, and the stereotyping of Asian people in Australia. Again, the weirdness can jolt us into seeing (or feeling) things that realism may not expose because it’s all so familiar.

With First Nations writing, the situation can be different again. What we western readers might think is weird is perfectly natural to First Nations people, because, for example, there is no line between the humans and country. It is all interconnected. There is no hierarchy, but mutual responsibility. Reading the writing of others may not change our own worldview, but I like to think it can help us understand different worldviews and see that they are just as valid as our own.

Returning to Culley now, towards the end of her article, she says that Flynn’s Here be Leviathans was described as “boundary pushing”. His response was that this kind of labelling indicates “that the Australian literary scene has been beholden to a streak of misery realism for so long that it’s forgotten to…have fun.” I am not averse to “misery realism” – it has its place – but it’s not my only diet. I also like fun. I like cheeky writers who know how to make points with a light – or even bizarre – touch. Watch out for my review of Here be Leviathans to see what I mean.

Meanwhile, do you read “weird” fiction? Why or why not?

* KYD is an online subscription journal, but some free access is provided.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Trove treasures (10), On short novels

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As I’ve said before in this series, not all the “treasures” I find, particularly those from the 19th and early 20th centuries, are specifically Australian, but I justify them because in those colonial and early post-colonial times English content tended to reign supreme.

This post was inspired by my serendipitously coming across an article praising short novels. Most of you will know that I love short stories and short novels (or novellas) so of course I was interested. I went looking for anything else on the topic, and I found a few little items that I felt worth sharing.

Plea for shorter novels

The article that inspired this post appeared on 6 July 1907 in Sydney’s The Australian Star. It cites one Basil Tozer, who made a “plea for shorter novels” in the Monthly Review. Naturally, I researched Basil Tozer. He’s not in Wikipedia, but it looks like he was born in Devonshire around 1872 and died in 1949, and that he wrote some fiction and nonfiction. In the article, he seems to be railing against books like those Victorian “big baggy monsters”. He says:

The habit of loading a story with indifferent descriptive passages still prevails to a great extent, though it might with considerable advantage be dispensed with. A beautiful woman loses her charm when every good point she possesses, from the creamy smoothness of her complexion to the alluring, curve of her eyebrow, is described separately and in detail; and in the same way a glorious scenic panorama metaphorically falls flat when every square mile of it is analysed and dissected. 

These “faults”, he says, are “commonest among young writers” but they are also “flagrant enough still among some of our novelists who have served a long apprenticeship”. He names French writers like Daudet, Hugo and de Maupassant, suggesting there is no “superfluous verbiage” in them. These are, he admits, three of France’s most polished fiction writers, but even “the rank and file” French novelists “seldom err upon the side of overloading their work with unnecessary vocables and third-rate descriptive passages”. He believes that British novels would be strengthened if they were more condensed.

The long and short of it

The next article I found was published in late 1925 and early 1926 in several regional newspapers across Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania. It reports on comments made by someone called Mark Over in Outlook. I struggled to identify Mark Over, but I assume the journal is the British magazine which Wikipedia says was, in full, The Outlook: In Politics, Life, Letters, and the Arts. It ran from 1898 to 1928. The first version of the article I found appeared on 14 January 1926 in Victoria’s Shepparton Advertiser. It reports that Mark Over had written that readers are appearing to prefer the short book over the long one, that they “seem to be frightened by the book of many closely printed pages, and choose the large type, thick-paper novel which is really hardly longer than a short story”.

However, this doesn’t spell the end of the long book because Over believes that “this type of reader” does like to buy long books as gifts, as they are – wait for it – “better value for money”! (I’ve heard this before as an argument against novellas.) Booksellers, he says, will vouch for this. And, he adds, library staff and owners also prefer long books: they mean less work because they take longer to read so they are changed less often and experience less wear and tear. Mark Over’s advice?

Let would-be novelists remember these prosaic facts, and count their words.

Love it …

Ten years later, on 31 August 1937, Melbourne’s The Herald shares a report from Arthur J Rees in London. This name rang a bell and yes, he is in Wikipedia. He was an Australian mystery writer, who “likely went to England” in his early twenties. He reports the opposite to Over, saying that the British don’t like short novels and that this had caused quite a controversy because “a leading critic” had recommended an American novel of 100 pages “worth many a contemporary English novel of four times the length”. Unfortunately, the newspaper I found this article in is in poor condition so the scanned text is not completely legible, but he wanted to know why English fiction writers didn’t attempt this sort of close writing “instead of plunging themselves and their readers into masses (?) of words and padding out their novels (?)”. 

Except, he knows why. Readers don’t like short novels. Libraries won’t stock them because they can’t “persuade library subscribers to take them out; they don’t think they are getting enough for their money”. (There it is again.) Readers, he reported to The Herald, like a “thick book”. So, of course, publishers also won’t publish short novels. On the rare occasion that they do, said Over, it is ‘printed in larger type, and “bulked out” by thicker paper’. (Short stories, he added, suffered a similar fate.)

I found a couple more articles, but these contain the gist of the pros and cons. Has anything changed much do you think?

Meanwhile, I will leave you with a funny little par I found in one of those literary news type columns. It was in Ian Mair’s The Argus Literary Supplement on 2 February 1946. Headed “Writing to space”, it went like this:

The factory chief of a New York publishing firm recently asked the author of a very long novel if she would mind cutting a few pages of her book, then in process of manufacture, not yet bound.

The author couldn’t help asking why the request didn’t come from one of the house’s editors.

“Because,” said the production man, “we have some thousands of cartons (book casings) to use up, and they’re a shade too narrow for this job.”

The author cut her book, which is now one-eighth of an inch thinner than it was before.

Now there’s a new type of editing – to suit the size of the cover!

Monday musings on Australian literature: First Nations Australian non-fiction

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Since 2013, I have devoted the Monday Musings that occurs in NAIDOC Week to a First Nations topic. This year I’ve chosen First Nations Australian non-fiction. I have previously written Monday Musings on biographies, autobiographies and memoirs by First Nations writers, but what about other sorts of non-fiction?

Before I get to that though, a bit about this year’s NAIDOC Week theme, which is “For our elders”. The website says that

Across every generation, our Elders have played, and continue to play, an important role and hold a prominent place in our communities and families. 
They are cultural knowledge holders, trailblazers, nurturers, advocates, teachers, survivors, leaders, hard workers and our loved ones. 

And they say more, but you can read that at the website. I will just add that it was thrilling to watch the 2023 NAIDOC Week Awards on television on Saturday night and see Aunty Dr Matilda House-Williams win the Female Elder of the Year award. She has been an absolute force for her people – and for reconciliation – in my city for as long as I can remember. She was our city’s go-to Welcome-to-Country person way back when that practice started. She was involved in the creation of the historic (and still existing) Aboriginal Tent Embassy. And so much more. These days it is often her son, Paul, who does Welcome to Country, as he did last month at the 2023 ANU Reconciliation Lecture. However, accompanying him on stage was mum, Aunty Dr Matilda, and his son. It was truly special, as they performed a song for us as part of the Welcome. Anyhow, you can read more about her on the NAIDOC Awards site.

Now, today’s topic. There’s a wealth of literature to choose from so my aim here is to give some sense of the breadth of recent non-fiction writing by First Nations Australian writers.

Bruce Pasco, Dark emu

Probably the best known non-fiction book, today, by a First Nations writer is Dark emu (my review) by Bruce Pascoe. It argues for us to rethink our understanding of First Nations culture, specifically to appreciate that pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians were more than hunter-gatherers as they had been traditionally described. The book won several awards, has a younger people’s version, and was adapted into a ballet by Bangarra Dance Theatre. It has also had its share of controversy, but overall it has played a significant role in changing people’s attitudes to First Nations history and culture.

Pascoe’s book, however, is not the only First Nations book to address First Nations knowledge. Indeed, this seems to be a growing area of interest. Some of these books aim primarily to explain First Nations culture to others but most also share knowledge in the belief that it will help all Australians to better understand and thus more fully engage with our country. I’ll list a few of these, in alphabetical order by author:

  • Paul Callaghan and Uncle Paul Gordon (2022). The Dreaming path: Indigenous thinking to change your life
  • Gay’wu Group of Women (2019). Song spirals: Sharing women’s wisdom of country through songlines (Denise’s review)
  • Duane Hamacher with Elders and Knowledge Holders (2022). The first astronomers: How Indigenous elders read the stars
  • Terri Janke (2021). True tracks: Respecting Indigenous cultural knowledge and culture (Lisa’s review)
  • Marcia Langton and Aaron Corn (2023). Law: The way of the ancestors (in the First Knowledges series (on my TBR)
  • Katie Noon and Krystal de Napoli (2022). Astronomy: Sky country (in the First Knowledges series)

As you can imagine, it is difficult to categorise the non-fiction books I’ve selected into subject areas, because there’s so much overlap, but here are a couple books that are primarily history:

  • Larissa Behrendt (2016). Finding Eliza: Power and colonial storytelling (Lisa’s review; still on my TBR)
  • Rachel Perkins and Marcia Langton (2008). First Australians: An illustrated history

First Nations historians are working in academia, and producing important texts, but I want to focus here on books that are accessible to the general reader.

Many First Nations writers have written what I would call hybrid memoirs, books which in their case combine memoir with sociopolitical commentary. By definition, memoirs tend to have a specific focus, like Biff Ward’s Third chopstick (my review) in which she, as a Vietnam War protester, later talks to those who fought to understand their experience, and Carmel Bird’s bibliomemoir Telltale (my review) which examines her life through the books she’s read. However, with many First Nations hybrid memoirs, memoir elements are used to illustrate their exploration of issues like colonialism, racism, social injustice, dispossession and reconciliation. One of the best known writers in this area is Stan Grant whose Talking to my country (my review) and, most recently, The Queen is dead (kimbofo’s review), explore contemporary Australia with reference to his own experiences along with his extensive knowledge of history and philosophy.

But, he’s not the only one. Some others include:

Anita Heiss, Am I black enough for you?
  • Claire G Coleman (2022). Lies, Damned Lies: A personal exploration of the impact of colonisation (Bill’s review)
  • Inala Cooper (2022) Marrul: Aboriginal identity and the fight for rights
  • Anita Heiss (2012). Am I black enough for you? (my review)
  • Chelsea Watego (2021). Another day in the colony (Bill’s review; on my TBR)

For a good list – with reviews by some of your favourite litbloggers – of First Nations Australian nonfiction, check out Lisa’s page dedicated to this topic.

Are there any First Nations non-fiction books that you’d like to recommend?