I haven’t posted on the Miles Franklin Award since 2019, and I didn’t post this year’s longlist when it came out last month, but, despite my woeful record – I’ve yet to read any on the longlist – I felt it was about time I returned to Australia’s best known literary award.
Unfortunately, I was driving in the back blocks of northeast Victoria when the announcement was made, with no Internet connection in our room overnight. We have landed in civilisation – hmmm – depending on you definition, and are once more connected! I thought I’d start by sharing the longlist:
Laura Jean Mckay’s The animals in that country (my, I wish I’d read this already, given its popularity on awards lists)
Andrew Pippos’ Lucky’s
Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone sky, gold mountain (on my TBR)
Philip Salom’s The fifth season (on my TBR) (Lisa’s review)
Nardi Simpson’s Song of the crocodile ((on my TBR and will definitely be read this year)
Madeleine Watts’ The inland sea
The judges describe the spread as “‘a rich mix of well-established, early career and debut novelists whose work ranges from historical fiction to fabulism and psychologism”.
And now, the shortlist:
Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty
Robbie Arnott’s The rain heron
Daniel Davis Wood’s At the edge of the solid world
Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth
Andrew Pippos’ Lucky’s
Madeleine Watts’ The inland sea
Some random observations:
Two of the authors – Adiga and Wood – are not Australian-born or based, but meet the award’s criteria because their subject matter is Australian (that is, they present ‘Australian life in any of its phases’). Adiga won the Booker Prize in 2008 with The white tiger, and Wood is apparently the founder and publisher of Splice, a small UK-based press.
None of these books are on my TBR pile – wah – though I have been wanting to read Lohrey so this might be the impetus I need.
There appears to be less diversity in terms of author background, though Adiga is Indian.
There are four women and two men, which is fine, particularly given the award has rebalanced the gender representation well over recent years.
None of these authors have won the Award before, but two, Arnott and Lohrey, have been listed before.
Two – Pippos and Watts – are debut novelists.
Lisa (ANZLitLovers) will be happy as she was mightily impressed with Lohrey’s Labyrinth (see her review above).
Each of the shortlisted writers will receive $5000 from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, with the winner receiving $60,000 prize.
‘In various ways each of this year’s shortlisted books investigate destructive loss: of loved ones, freedom, self and the environment … There is, of course, beauty and joy to be found, and decency and hope, largely through the embrace of community but, as the shortlist reminds us, often community is no match for more powerful forces.’
This year’s judges comprise, as always, continuing judges and new ones, providing I think a good mix of experience and fresh ideas: Richard Neville (State Library of NSW), author and activist Sisonke Msimang, and critics Melinda Harvey, Bernadette Brennan and James Ley.
The winner will be announced on 15 July.
And, for a bit of fun, we saw this on a school notice board as we drove by today:
I always knock on the fridge door just in case salad’s dressing. (Eltham Primary School)
Early in my retirement, I spent quite a bit of time creating and editing articles on Australian literature in Wikipedia. I focused on a couple of subject areas in particular, Australian women writers and Australian literary awards. One of the awards I worked on was the well-regarded The Age Book of the Year Awards.
They were established by Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, and were first awarded in 1974. For 15 years – between 1998 and 2012 – they were presented during the Melbourne Writers Festival (like the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards are during the Sydney Writers Festival.) They started with two awards – fiction and nonfiction – but in 1993, a third was added for poetry. One of the winning books from these categories was chosen as The Age Book of the Year. Sadly – at least, sadly for those who think literary awards have value – this award was cancelled in 2013. However, I have just read – in The Age of course – that it has been revived, and the winner will be announced, once again, at the Melbourne Writers Festival.
The revival was written up by The Age’s literary editor, Jason Steger:
In a double boost for writers, readers and the book industry The Age is sponsoring the Melbourne Writers Festival and reviving the Age Book of the Year award…
Apparently, The Age’s current editor, Gay Alcorn was “dismayed” when she joined the paper in 2020 and found that it no longer supported the Festival. Steger quotes her as saying, “I am thrilled that it has been rectified. The festival is about books and writing, ideas and debate in this city – exactly what The Age champions.” Even if you don’t like Awards, you will hopefully like this editor’s belief that a newspaper should champion “books and writing, ideas and debate”.
This year there will only be a fiction award, but there are plans to revive the other two categories and the overall “book of the year” in the future. With just three months to go, they’d better get their skates on to even do just one award this year! My web search has not found any further information about how the prize is going to be managed, how (or whether) books are submitted, and/or who will be judging. Neither is there any information about what the actual prize is. We will just have to wait.
We’ll also have to wait to see whether long and shortlists will be announced. For me, as a reader, these lists are as important as the award itself, as they provide good guides to what is going around.
Recap of Past Fiction Awards
You won’t be surprised that past winners of the fiction category include writers who are some of our biggest literary names, but before I share some of them, I should explain that the award was described as “Imaginative writing”. The result is that an early winner was a poetry collection – AD Hope’s A late picking – awarded before poetry was given its own prize. It also includes short stories, but as these are fiction, that shouldn’t be a surprise!
So, let’s look at some of the winners. Over the Award’s 38 years, there were 39 winners, as one year the award was shared. Of these, 16 were by women. The first award was made in 1974 to David Foster’s The pure land, and the last, in 2012, to Gillian Mears’ Foal’s bread (my review).
The writer who won the most awards is Peter Carey, with four, for True history of the Kelly Gang (2001), Jack Maggs (1997), The unusual life of Tristan Smith (1994), and Illywhacker (1985). One writer received three awards, Elizabeth Jolley, for The Georges’ wife (1993) (Bill’s review), My father’s moon (1989) (my review), and Mr Scobie’s riddle (1983).
Three writers won twice – David Malouf, Joan London and Thea Astley.
If you compare this award with other major fiction awards over the same period – such as the Christina Stead Award (NSW Premier’s Literary Award) and the Miles Franklin – you will see a large overlap in authors, but not so much in actual titles. In other words, Carey, Jolley, Astley, and so on, have won awards on each list, but for different books. Carey, for example, won the Miles Franklin in 1989 for Oscar and Lucinda, and the Christina Stead in 1982 for Bliss. Jolley won the Miles Franklin in 1986 for The well, and the Christina Stead in 1985 for Milk and honey, while Thea Astley won four Miles Franklins, but all for different books than her two The Age winners.
Of course, there are also authors who only appear on one list. Nicholas Hasluck, for example, won The Age’s award but neither of the other two.
None of this is particularly surprising. Occasionally, we see a book sweeping the awards, but mostly – and this is a healthy thing, I’d argue – the accolades and largesse are spread around.
What is worth noting but not surprising about The Age’s award and the other two I’ve mentioned here is that before 2012, very few authors from diverse backgrounds won. Since then, authors like Kim Scott, Michelle de Kretser, Melissa Lucashenko, Tara June Winch and Melinda Bobis have won literary fiction awards, and it has happened often enough for it to be no longer particularly commented on, which is as it should be. Presumably, The Age’s award will continue this trend.
In his 1946 essay, “The prevention of literature”, George Orwell named “the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books” as one of the threats to literature. I commented in my post that I didn’t know how that stood now in England, but that I thought Australians were currently buying books. The week’s Monday Musings seemed a good opportunity to check this out.
It didn’t take long to confirm. Jason Steger, literary editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, reported on 4 June, in his weekly emailed newsletter, that:
total book sales in Australia, according to Nielsen BookScan, jumped by 9 per cent to 66 million in 2020 … It’s proof that even as we sink more and more time into streaming services and social media, we’re still finding entertainment and enlightenment in books, and increasingly so during times of crisis and change.
For the first eight months of 2020, adult fiction sales were up 12% in value compared to the same period in 2019, and children’s, YA and educational sales were up 7%, according to data from Nielsen BookScan. Only adult trade nonfiction was lagging slightly, with sales down 1%.
This includes some catch-up, because, apparently, sales were down 3% in 2019 after 5 years of “marginal growth”.
Unfortunately, the figures do not include “ebooks and audiobooks, as their sales aren’t tracked in Australia in any reliable way”. We don’t know, therefore, whether, with lockdowns, more people turned to eBooks, making the increase even better than they look.
On the other hand …
While this looks positive, it’s not evenly so. Books+Publishing notes that bookshops in major city centres and some shopping centres struggled – particularly in Melbourne with its long lockdown – while sales in suburban strip shopping centres and regional towns were up on last year. The major winners were the online retailers and discount department stores. I don’t know whether these “online retailers” include the bricks-and-mortar shops which introduced online options.
Books+Publishing also looked at the impact on publishing. They reported that major publishers “appear to have weathered the fallout from Covid-19 better than many of the smaller publishers, particularly those with titles doing well in discount department stores, chains and online retailers”. Many smaller publishers reported significant declines in sales. An exception was Melbourne’s Affirm Press which chose not to delay publishing any of its titles. It had excellent results with Pip Williams’ debut novel The dictionary of lost words which went into reprint in its first week.
Steger takes up the impact on writers, particularly debut authors who had “book launches, festival appearances and publicity tours cancelled”. He links to Melanie Kembrey’s article on how “six authors got their books published – in the hardest of times”. The article, actually, focuses more generally on these debut authors than on the impact of COVID-19, but a couple of authors do talk about it. Sam Coley, author of State Highway One, had a sense of humour about it saying:
Since you’re not going to make any money out of it, that’s the real fun part of it, drinking wine on our publisher’s expense account … It was disappointing. It was difficult to launch a book online and then still be inside your own house.
He also had a publicity tour of New Zealand cancelled (thus missing more excellent wine-drinking opportunities, I’d say!)
Vivian Pham, author of the well-regarded The coconut children, was “relieved” that the coronavirus meant cancellation of public events. It was a silver lining, for her, as it gave her time to process what was happening. She didn’t feel “ready”, having had no “public speaking” experience. She said she’d “mainly been doing online events and book clubs which feel really personal.” She liked that the pandemic “slowed things down” because it had been “overwhelming.”
Many of you will have seen/attended online events, like those mentioned by Pham. One lovely one that I attended was Writers in Residence, which focused on emerging writers. Blogger Lisa (ANZLitLovers) offered to host Virtual Launches and had three authors take this up.
What sold?
You may have noticed in the figures above that most areas increased, except for adult nonfiction which showed a small decrease. Steger reported in January on 2020’s bestselling books. He starts by noting a trend already under way, “the continuing absence of one of the staples of many annual bestseller lists, international and American fiction, particularly crime”. How interesting.
A decade ago, the top 10 books sold in Australia included only one Australian book (a cookbook), says Steger. However, in 2020, only two US books were on the list (one being Delia Owens’ Where the crawdads sing). Mark Newman, managing director of the 57-shop Dymocks chain, said there’s been a growing trend towards Australian stories. This started in 2016 with Jane Harper’s The dry. Novels which appeared in 2020’s top 10 included Trent Dalton’s All the shimmering skies and Jane Harper’s The survivors. Newman said that 2020 had been “particularly strong for Australian authors with new books.
Other Australian books which appeared in the top 20 included Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence and Bruce Pascoe’s Dark emu which was first published in 2014.
Books+Publishing categorised what people were reading, and came up with “escapist fiction, self-help and children’s books (middle grade)”. According to Allen & Unwin, crime by both Australian and international authors, was selling well, particularly from “well-loved local and international authors … as people are looking for something they know they will enjoy”. This was not me. Although for reasons many of you know I read less, my reading preferences didn’t change.
Anyhow, Books+Publishing writes,
In the absence of browsing opportunities, established brands, titles and authors were the clear winners. ‘Debut literary fiction has been more challenging,’ says Sherwin-Stark [Hachette Australia]. ‘In normal times, our debut authors would be out and about meeting booksellers and readers on publication, and this has just not been possible.’
The impact of the lack of “browsing” is something I hadn’t considered. You can browse books online, but, do you? Do you?
Sherwin-Stark also says something that I’m sure many of us observed:
“the pandemic has encouraged the industry to get more creative in their promotion. ‘Publishers and bookshops have been incredibly innovative to find ways to connect readers with authors—virtual events are excellent and attracting very large viewing audiences and these events will become a part of our promotional mix permanently.’
So there it is … a little round-up on the pandemic’s impact on the bookselling and publishing.
I’d love to hear about your experience of pandemic reading?
A bit of a fun post this week that I hope will engage you, regardless of where you live or what you read. This post is a sort of companion to one I wrote back in 2017 on Memorable Australian characters. I’ve had this post in mind ever since then, but have kept putting it off because – well – how many truly memorable fictional families are there in Australian literature? I have a few which I’ll share below, but first I thought to whet your appetite with some non-Australian ones like, of course, Jane Austen’s Bennets and Louisa May Alcott’s March family.
What makes a memorable family? Is it the relationship between the members? Is it the liveliness or some other strong characteristic of certain members? Is it the family’s ability to rise above misfortune or tragedy? Is it the chemistry of the family as a whole? Or is it all in the writing?
So, here is my list, presented alphabetically by the family’s name …
The Darcys: When I thought about this topic, Ruth Park’s Darcy family was uppermost in my mind. It comprises parents, daughters, a son-in-law and more as the books progress. I first read The harp in the south (1948) and its sequel Poor man’s orange (1949) in my mid-teens and I loved them because of the warmth of the family – they were real, they disagreed with each other, they struggled to make ends meet, but they fundamentally loved and supported each other. I also loved that nearly four decades later, in 1985, Ruth Park wrote a prequel, Missus (my review), in which she tells how the parents, Mumma and Hughie, met and got together. The thing about these books is that not only do they contain the story of an engaging family, but they tell an important story about early to mid-twentieth century Australia.
The Lambs and the Pickles: Winton’s two families, like the Darcys, have become classics of Australian literature – as is the house in which they live together, the titular Cloudstreet (1991). Park’s novels are very much about the Aussie battler, and so, in a way, is Cloudstreet, except that it’s a book of a different time and a different literary sensibility. Winton uses his families to confront us with our assumptions about who we are. Wikipedia quotes Australian picture-book author, Mem Fox, as saying “If you have not read Cloudstreet, your life is diminished . . . if you have not met these characters, this generous community, these tragedies, the humour. It is so wonderful.” Can’t say much better than that. For some, Cloudstreet is our GAN.
The Langtons: This family does not, I suspect, jump immediately into people’s minds, but Martin Boyd’s Langton Tetralogy, which started with The cardboard crown in 1952, and finished a decade later with When blackbirds sing (Lisa’s review), offers a fascinating insight into a very different sort of family to the Darcys, Lambs, and Pickles. The Langtons are well-to-do and are based on Boyd’s own, somewhat eccentric, intellectual and artistic family. They, the Langtons, think little of whizzing over to England when life is unsatisfying in Australia. I have read the second novel, A difficult young man (my review), and would happily read more. Wikipedia quotes academic Gillian Dooley on why these books may not as well-read today:
“Boyd’s subject matter is no doubt the principal reason for his neglect. By any standards, his prose is strong and luminous and his novels are beautifully crafted and immensely readable. But the late twentieth century had little patience with the scandals and vicissitudes of Anglo-Australian aristocratic families, with no apparent connections with convicts, sealers or whalers, or the indigenous people. Boyd was admittedly something of a good old-fashioned snob.”
Like Lisa, and I believe Dooley, I think Boyd’s novels are worth reading for their writing, their wit – and for their insights into a different place, time and people. I don’t agree with what seems to be a fairly common notion that the well-to-do are neither valid nor interesting to read about – particularly if the writing is of high calibre.
The Woolcots: If you don’t know who the Woolcots are, you are probably not Australian! They are Ethel Turner’s family in her Seven little Australians series. These are children’s books so the family focus here is on the seven children, their relationships with each other, and what they get up to. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, Seven little Australians, the first in the series which was published in 1894, was an instant hit in Australia and overseas. Here is some praise from Rockhampton’s Morning Bulletin (7 November 1894) which suggests why it was popular:
Because there is no preaching, or homilies on the evils of wrong-doing, children will read the book more readily, and they will be dullards who will escape the moral tone of it. Our authoress gives us nice descriptions of Australian scenery, all the more attractive that they are truthful and not over-coloured. Old hands, we dare-say, will pick holes in the book, but on the whole it is truthfully realistic.
So that’s my (very) little eclectic list. I know there are others but my aim is not to be comprehensive but to start a discussion about some of the “classic” families in literature and why we like them.
Now, over to you. Who are your most memorable families, Australian or otherwise, and why?
Over the weekend, I reviewed local Canberra author Irma Gold’s debut novel, The breaking, and described it as belonging to the eco-literature “genre”. I thought it might be interesting to explore this field a little more.
Definitions
I’ll start with definitions, because, does it really exist? Wikipedia doesn’t have an article for eco-literature, but it does for ecofiction, which it describes as
the branch of literature that encompasses nature-oriented (non-human) or environment-oriented (human impacts on nature) works of fiction. While this super genre’s roots are seen in classic, pastoral, magical realism, animal metamorphoses, science fiction, and other genres, the term ecofiction did not become popular until the 1970s when various movements created the platform for an explosion of environmental and nature literature …
This definition is broad, and encompasses what I call “nature writing”. However, eco-literature, as I’m using it, accords more with definitions/discussions I found at a wide range of sites. They all say it differently, but the essence is that eco-literature, today, is largely used for works which the Carnegie Library describes as offering “a literary lens through which to explore the natural world and the many threats it faces in our modern world”. In other words, these books focus on “environmental issues” (my emph.), as The Conversation‘s Ti-han Chang says in “Five must read novels on the environment and climate crisis”.
The other point I’d like to make is that some, though not all, see this “genre” as encompassing all forms of literature. EcoLit Books keeps to fiction, calling it
a super-genre of writing that straddles all genres (mysteries, thrillers, literary, children’s). We often refer to it as “fiction with a conscience.” (their emph.)
However, The Wire’sRajesh Subramanian, who wrote “Could Eco-Literature Be the Next Major Literary Wave?” in 2017, sees it as encompassing
the whole gamut of literary works, including fiction, poetry and criticism, which lay stress on ecological issues. Cli-fi (climate fiction), which deals with climate change and global warming, is logically a sub-set of eco-literature.
I like this, but now, having made this point, I’m focusing on fiction.
Eco-literature in Australia
While The Conversation is an Australian site, Ti-han Chang is based in England, and her five books are non-Australian. However, in 2016 Overland published an article by Rachel Fetherston on Australian eco-fiction. She starts from the point of view that the Australian population is indifferent to nature. Is this true? Anyhow, she asks:
can fiction play a role in enhancing our connection to local species and habitats? The expansion and appreciation of less anthropocentric and more ecocentric literary works may well be a silver bullet.
She argues that while Australia has a good tradition of ecocentric writing and ecophilosophical thought, it “pales” compared to that of the US where there’s been a dramatic rise in the humanities’ engagement in the issues. Australia, she says,
needs to provoke a more public and accessible discussion of the modern environmental crisis, and eco-fiction presents a powerful means of doing so. It is not too late for Australians to embrace ecophilosophy, especially in regard to our own specific environmental concerns. But how can such concerns be translated into fiction?
Fetherston just names a few books, including two dystopian novels, James Bradley’s Clade and Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things(my review). Clade, she says, is “a world-shaking, cross-generational work of climate fiction that” presents “a truly Australian approach to climate change”, while Wood’s novel “is based strongly in ecophilosophical thought. Her characters become increasingly less human, more animalistic, and more connected to the landscape”.
Fetherston goes on to say that “depiction of the human as animal is … a theme that appears to be emerging more and more within our nation’s literary circles”. Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals, she says,explores similar themes, though it’s “not focused specifically on Australian landscapes and animals”. Different, but related, I’d say, is Laura Jean Mackay’s The animals in that country, which won this year’s Victorian Prize for Literature and which looks at animals and their language from, say the critics, a new and non-anthropomorphic way.
Fetherston is clearly interested in this field because a year ago, she wrote an article for The Guardian. She quotes “renowned nature writer Robert Macfarlane” who “lamented” the deficient “creative response” to the climate crisis and who argued for the arts to be involved in debating, sensing and communicating the crisis. She names more books in this article, including two which look at the bushfire issue, Mireille Juchau’s The world without us and Alice Bishop’s collection of short stories, A constant hum (Kim’s review). Further, she writes, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (Lisa’s review) “addresses the strong ties between colonisation and climate catastrophe”.
I named a few books in my introduction to my review of The breaking, but I’d like to add a couple more here. Cassie Flanagan Willanski’s collection of short stories Here where we live (my review) draws strongly on the environment, with stories looking at it from various angles, including climate change, the impact of tourism on the environment, and caring for the environment. Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and light (my review), comprises three sections, of which the middle one, “Water”, is a long dystopian short-story which posits a future world populated with mutant plantpeople alongside humans.
Eco-literature might be more politically-focused than some environment literature, but it is still a rather broad church, and is, I believe, increasingly preoccupying our writers, for good and obvious reasons.
Fetherston ends the first article I quote, with
It is time for our writing and art to focus on the non-human: the increasingly vulnerable, apparently insignificant lives and habitats that make Australia’s natural heritage so special and sublime.
And, not just that, but critical to our physical and mental survival and well-being. I’m glad to see more and more writers embracing it, from multiple perspectives.
Now, over to you. Do you read “eco-literature”? And it so, tell us your favourites?
Like many bookshops, Muse Canberra offers a wonderful program of book events. Unfortunately, I get to very few, but I did get to this weekend’s conversation between local poet (among other things) Sarah St Vincent Welch and Irma Gold about Gold’s debut novel The breaking (my review).
Irma Gold, reading from her novel The breaking, with Sarah St Vincent Welch, Muse, 23/5/2021
The participants
Irma Gold has appeared a few times on this blog, including for her collection of short stories, Two steps forward (my review), her children’s picture book, Megumi and the bear (my review), the Canberra centenary anthology she edited, The invisible thread (my review), and now, of course, The breaking. Irma is also a professional editor, and co-produces the podcast Secrets from the Green Room.
Sarah St Vincent Welch has also appeared in this blog, though more subtly. Besides having a piece included in The invisible thread, Sarah, a lovely past work colleague of mine, was the person behind my taking part in a public reading of Behrooz Boochani’s No friend but the mountains in March 2019. Sarah is a published poet and organises various arts events in Canberra, including a weekly poetry event, That Poetry Thing That Is On At Smiths Every Monday.
The conversation
Irma and Sarah know each other well – not just because they are both actively involved in Canberra’s literary scene but because they had been in the same short fiction writing group. This, I’m sure, helped make the conversation seem so effortless, but only partly, because Sarah’s natural warmth and Irma’s relaxed, thoughtful engagement with the questions made the conversation a delight. It covered a lot of ground, so I am going to use headings for the main questions Sarah asked. It started with a brief reading from the book.
Character or issue-led?
Nothing like getting straight into the nitty-gritty, and that’s what Sarah did with her opening question. Character-led, said Irma, not the elephant cruelty issue. Indeed, she said, she didn’t know at the start that the book was going to be about elephants. It started with the two characters, Deven and Hannah, who arrived fully formed on the page. But, here’s the thing – it also started as a short story, which, with interest from her writers’ group, became two linked short stories. At this point, John Clanchy (whose writing I love) suggested that she was writing a novel. Irma said she’s glad it was the characters who drove the book, because if it had been the elephants, it would have been more polemical. (That was one of my potential questions gone!)
Can a novel effect change?
Another great to-the-point question. Irma, who admitted she loves fiction best anyhow, said she believes fiction can investigate complex issues in a way that non-fiction can’t. Readers can be put in the shoes of characters to “see” the issues. Through characters, fiction can explore complex issues, like the elephant situation, without offering answers.
Irma hopes that what her book (and fiction like it) can do is lead people to make different decisions, which, in this case, means not buying into the elephant tourism – not riding elephants, not attending elephant shows, etc. She feels that her novel is timely, because the current hiatus in travel gives us the opportunity to consider our travel decisions, and how we engage with another culture. This includes the practice of westerners volunteering (as she herself did). Are we helping or interfering? She mentioned the Instagram selfie culture, in which tourists take selfies with elephants, not seeing what’s going on behind them to keep that elephant in check.
Irma talked a little about the cruelty practised on elephants, but I won’t repeat that here. It is in the book, and is not pleasant reading, but is necessary knowledge, particularly for tourists to Asia. She also talked about how her love of elephants started in childhood.
Surpises as a debut novelist?
The best surprise has been the positive feedback, she said, as she’d steeled herself for criticism. She was particularly thrilled with an email from a long term Thai resident who thanked her for getting Thailand right, for avoiding cliches.
This led to a discussion about the work involved in writing the novel, because while she’d been to Thailand and worked in elephant rescue, she hasn’t lived there. She worked hard to get Thai life and culture right. She talked about working in the elephant sanctuaries where the two main groups of volunteers were young people in their 20s who have no strong sense of where their lives are going, and those in their 50s and 6Os.
On writing short stories versus novels
As a lover of both forms, I appreciated Irma’s practical responses. First, she said, you can hold all of a short story in head at one time. This is harder with a novel, so you need concentrated time, which she organised for herself. Then, she said, pacing is different in a novel, and, of course, a novel involves longer-term character development.
Place of her novel in the literary landscape
Another question up my alley! Irma said more novels are engaging with this sort of thing. She commented that one reader had asked her if her book was like We are all completely beside ourselves. She was surprised because it’s a very different book, but it was in fact an inspiration for her novel.
More books, she added, are engaging with animal rights. There’s a growing awareness she said, but she hopes, too, that the book is an enjoyable read.
Joy
Sarah ended by saying that as well as being about elephants, the novel is about madcap behaviour and the joy of love and life. Irma agreed, saying that everyone wants to talk about elephants, but she wanted to write about joy. She loved writing Deven she said.
Q & A
There was quite an engaged Q&A, but I will keep it brief:
On the aspect of the book most difficult to confront in herself: Irma likes to write from what she knows to doesn’t know, believing there is no black and white, but the most difficult thing was watching the “breaking”/phajaan videos.
On writing about “delicate” things: Irma understood the questioner’s not wanting to give plot points away, so let’s just say that she talked about how fiction, by definition, will involve writing about things that are not your lived experience, and that you have to consult.
On whether there is more Hannah or Deven in her: Irma is drawn to confident, intense people like Deven, so she has probably come out of that. However, she feels these characters came from nowhere, or, from the girls she saw at the sanctuary
On what we can do given the complexity of the problem: Irma said that the elephant industry only exists because of tourists, so the main answer is awareness! She hopes that not only will readers of her book become aware, but will talk to others. Tourists, though, need to make choices consciously and carefully because places will pretend to be what they are not. The Save Elephant Foundation is a good place to start.
On the editing process: There was quite a bit of talk about this. Irma, as an editor herself enjoyed the process – for the help it gave her book, and what it taught her about her own work as an editor. (I loved her comment about authors having “go to” words – bloggers do too – and the need to get those out!) Irma concluded by acknowledging John Clanchy for the immense help he gave her.
Irma Gold in conversation with Sarah St Vincent Welch Muse (Food Wine Books) Sunday 23 May 2021, 3-4pm
I have broken a golden rule! That is, I am reviewing Irma Gold’s debut novel, The breaking, out of the order in which I received it for review, which is something I (almost) never do! But, I am attending an author event on this book this weekend, and I really wanted to have read it before that conversation.
The breaking is an example of a growing “genre” of literature, eco-literature. This literature encompasses cli-fi, and focuses on human activities that endanger the environment in some way. It’s a broad church, covering climate, water and the land, deforestation, animal rights, and more. Books in this genre are often inspired by their writer’s passions. They tend to have a strong plot because the author wants to engage the reader in an issue: how better to do this than with an engaging plot. However, the plot is, largely, subservient to the issue, because at heart these are political novels, often in the “personal-is-the-political” sense.
So, some examples? Heather Rose’s Bruny (my review), which is deeply concerned about the future of Tasmania, Angela Savage’s crime novel The dying beach (my review), which explores the impact of shrimp-farming on the environment, and Karen Viggers’ novels, like The orchardist’s daughter (my review) which addresses deforestation, are three. These could be called “passion project” books. Critics often find this sort of writing difficult to asses. If it sells well, if it’s popular, is it good?
I’m going to sidestep the implication of that concern, and simply say that of course something popular can be good. If it’s well-plotted, well-written, has engaging characters – and deals intelligently with something relevant or important – then it’s good.
All of this is a very long introduction to Irma Gold’s book, but relevant, I hope. So, The breaking? The title doesn’t give away its passion, though if you look carefully at the gorgeous cover you might see it. It’s the plight or exploitation of elephants in Thailand. Gold, as she explains in the Afterword – I love an Afterword – has been to Thailand, and worked with elephant rescue projects, so she knows whereof she speaks. (I hope to have more to share after the weekend!)
It’s a grim situation, as I’m sure you know, and, like many grim situations in developing nations, it’s complicated by the fight for survival. For many Thais, elephants are their bread-and-butter, both as beasts of burden and, more, for their tourist potential. Gold addresses this dilemma in her novel without being overtly didactic, by having her characters see the situation with their own eyes, discussing it with each other, and weighing up the options.
“Be brave” (Deven)
The breaking is about two young Australian women, Hannah Bird, who has just arrived in Thailand as a tourist, unsettled and insecure because she’s lost her job, and Deven, who has been living there for some time and is involved in elephant rescue projects. They meet in a hostel lobby, as tourists do, and the experienced Deven invites Hannah to go to the night markets with her. From there, a friendship – and eventually something more – develops as the somewhat naive Hannah is drawn into the more experienced and confident Deven’s passions and views of the world. It’s not long before we discover the layers in the title as Hannah is introduced to the cruel practice of phajaan.
We follow their trajectory – told in Hannah’s first person voice – as they tread an activist’s path. It starts with involvement in organised, legal rescue projects that aren’t going to change the world quickly. However, as often happens to those who stay the course, they find themselves confronted with the ultimate activist’s dilemma of “how far will you go” for the cause you believe in? Always, it is Hannah following Deven, deeper and deeper into both political and personal engagement. Deven is driven to save those elephants, while Hannah, who believes in the cause, is more cautious, but, she’s falling for Deven, so, where Deven goes … the ending is powerful, confronting us head on with what can happen if you let passion rule your brain.
“We have to change the culture” (Deven)
Throughout all this Gold takes us on a journey through Thailand, showing it through the eyes of wide-eyed oblivious tourists, like Hannah, and those of the more experienced, aware Deven, who rejects the tourist path, the ladyboy shows, the elephant rides, and so on. Gold shares the food and culture of Thailand, using local words with little attempt to translate. She addresses this in her Afterword, explaining that although it is traditional to italicise foreign words, she “made a deliberate decision not to” do so here. Italics, she says, makes it easy for readers to “skim over foreign words” but she “wanted to encourage readers to engage with Thai language in the way that the Australian characters attempt to”. Gold’s solution is deft, because we readers puzzle and feel our way along with narrator Hannah, who is guided but not spoon-fed by Deven. Deven can be tender and caring, but she doesn’t mollycoddle!
However, if I have given you the impression that Hannah is all follower and Deven all leader, then you’ll have the wrong impression. Deven, alienated from her parents, has her own demons, and Hannah is not a push-over. As the novel progresses she takes in what Deven says but processes it in her own way. She sees “it’s not that simple; it’s not that black and white”, while for Deven it is simple. The denouement suggests where Gold lies, but the question remains for each reader, where do you lie? And, beyond that, whose rights should prevail?
Irma Gold’s The breaking reminded me somewhat of Madeleine Dickie’s Troppo (my review), which also explores the experience of young Australians caught up in unfamiliar lives and cultures, and who must forge their own way, morally and ethically, in places where the usual signposts are missing. Like Troppo, The breaking is an engaging debut novel that encourages us to consider some of the critical questions of our time.
Last year I posted on a book called Trailblazers: 100 inspiring South Australian women. I decided then that it could inspire some Monday Musings posts, because it includes writers among its inspiring women. The first writer to appear in this alphabetically-arranged book is Nancy Cato. She is described as “Writer and activist”, which enhances her interest.
Nancy Cato (1917-2000), who saw most of the 20th century, is best known to Australians for All the rivers run (which I have posted on) but there is much more to her than that.
Brief bio
Cato was born and raised in Glen Osmond, Adelaide. She started writing when she was 8 years old, but got her first writing job at 18, when she won a competition run by the Adelaide newspaper, News. The prize included a cadetship. However, says Trailblazers, she “bristled at sexism in the workplace”. She’d been told that when she became a journalist, she’d be treated and paid as a man, so was horrified when they assigned her to the social pages! She threatened to resign if they didn’t give her a “proper reporter” job.
The job they gave her was “the North Terrace round” which covered the art gallery, public library, museum, university and hospital. She learnt a love of art from gallery director, Louis Frederick McCubbin (son of artist Frederick McCubbin), while the public librarian introduced her to Australian writers writing about Australia. This, says Trailblazers, was “a revelation after being told by her ‘pomified’ university professor that there was no such thing as Australian literature”.
She became involved in the Jindyworobak Movement (1938-1953) which aimed to “express the Australian outback environment in terms that respected the Aboriginal resonances of the land”, though, unsurprising for the time, it was a white movement. Cato edited the 1950 Jindyworobak anthology.
Cato married racing-car driver and inventor, Eldred Norman. Early in her marriage, before they established a home on a vineyard on Adelaide’s northern fringes, she spent time grape-picking on the Murray River, thus gaining her river knowledge. Her first book was a poetry collection published in 1950, with her first novel, All the rivers run, appearing in 1958. She went on to publish another book of poetry, many novels, and a few works of non-fiction.
Cato and her husband moved to Noosa, Queensland, for health reasons, in the 1960s. That was where she died in 2000.
Writing and activism
Her activist nature is hinted in the biography above, in her willingness to resign over the paper’s treatment of her as a woman journalist. She was clearly no pushover from a young age. Trailblazers mentions her later activism in Noosa, where she became the bane of “the white shoe brigade” by opposing high-rise coastal development. The authors say that:
In her groundbreaking 1979 environmental study on the region, she described the seaside resort town as ‘a place of ancient unspoilt beauty and instant, man-made ugliness’.
Of course, I also went to Trove to see what I could find about Cato. I wasn’t surprised to find more than I could possibly read, both writing by, as well as about, her. I’ll share just some of what I found. I didn’t find a lot more about her activist activity. However, The Canberra Times, for whom, Trailblazers tell us, Cato wrote while living in Noosa, did have some articles by her about Indigenous Australians.
QUEENSLAND’S Aboriginal and Island Affairs Department has been dragged screaming into the 20th century by the Commonwealth Government’s threat to force changes in the existing Aboriginal and Island Affairs Act, if the State Government fails to amend its “discriminatory” clauses.
She goes on to describe how the Government responded, but that “the Queensland Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders’ [ATSI] monthly bulletin” was “hostile and critical” with the bill’s provisions. You can read the article yourself, but my sense is that the way the article is written suggests that Cato was sympathetic to the ATSI cause. Her description of her attempt to research first-hand conditions at Palm Island is telling. Her sympathy is borne out by another article (this one from 1972) in which she talks about Indigenous Australian poet, Kath Walker’s (later Oodgeroo Noonuccal) “new Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Museum on Stradbroke Island”. Cato went across on one occasion “to give a hand”. She writes:
Far from having difficulty in attracting artists, writers and others to stay at her Aboriginal cultural “retreat”, Kath Walker will probably have a waiting list as long as your arm, and the tourist industry will be gnashing its collective teeth at having overlooked the potential of the bay side of the island.
Interestingly, one of Cato’s few non-fiction books tells the story of a missionary, Mister Maloga: Daniel Matthews and his mission, Murray River, 1864–1902, published in 1976. The mission failed, for various reasons, and I’m not sure exactly what Cato’s take was, but reviewer Leonard Ward praises the detail it contains, and says that “As an historical document Mister Maloga earns a place on the bookshelves of those who have at heart the welfare of the Aboriginal people”.
In her novels, her passion for ideas she believed in was more subtle, but definitely there. There is a brief review of her 1960 novel Green grows the vine in the Communist Party’s newspaper, Tribune. The review calls it “a slight piece about the love life of three girls who go grape picking”. However, it continues, the novel “is lifted from the mundane by the author’s … careful descriptions of the labor process. The humor, the pain, the comradeship and the joy of labor, garnished with a democratic contempt for chauvinism, snobbery and such like”.
John Graham, writing in The Canberra Times about her 1965 novel Northwest by south is more explicit, calling Cato “a curious phenomenon in Australian literature, a feminist without a formed social outlook”.
Her major contemporaries — Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant, Eve Langley and Dorothy Hewett — have all expressed definite views on society through their novels. Mostly, they are militant socialist rather than purely feminist ideas, a tradition of political awareness handed down to them by Mary Gilmore and Katherine Susannah Pritchard.Nancy Cato has never been drawn into this dynasty.
She is closer to the individuality of Judith Wright and Rosemary Dobson in her poetry, much more aggressively feminist in her novels.
He argues that Delie, the Murray River trilogy’s heroine, has “all the pioneering qualities that come from one side of the feminist tradition” but is not given “a social viewpoint that might have turned her into a memorable figure”. In Northwest by south,
Lady Franklin’s feminism is of the same activist variety, but much more capable of development through her position as a Governor’s wife. She also has the virtue of reality, a considerable advantage for a writer with limited powers of character development.
(Limited character development is a common criticism of Cato’s work). The review is thoughtful, and makes good reading. Graham argues that Cato shows improvement in her “technical development”, but “has still not controlled her tendency to rush from one event to another without pausing for significance”. He notes positives about her portrayal of Jane Franklin, particularly in exploding some myths about her, but feels that Cato became “so enmeshed in the historical details that the book is not satisfactory either as a character study of an unusual woman or as an examination of Franklin’s governorship”. However, “it is an interesting and at times fascinating study of the dilemma of the intelligent woman in early Victorian, and particularly colonial, society”.
Cato, in her time, was one of Australia’s most popular writers of historical fiction. She was also, I’ve learnt, a woman of strong social values. A worthy trailblazer, I’d say.
Have you read any Nancy Cato? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I’ve posted twice on The Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists, last year, and back in 2013. Bill, in fact, chose that 2013 post in his Bill Curates series on this blog.
The award was established in 1997 by the newspaper’s then literary editor, Susan Wyndham, making this year its 25th year. An emerging writing award, it is open to “writers aged 35 and younger” at the time their book is published. It is called a “novelists” award, but is made on the basis of a specific book, which can now include short stories. It seems that the newspaper’s Fairfax Melbourne stablemate, The Age, is involved which is why the name now seems to be, simply, Best Young Australian Novelists. I don’t know when that change occurred.
This year’s winners, as announced by Jason Steger, the current Literary Editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, are:
Vivian Pham’s The coconut children (winner, $8,000)
K.M. (Kate) Kruimink’s A treacherous country (runner-up, $1,000) (see Lisa’s review)
Jessie Tu’s A lonely girl in a dangerous thing (runner-up, $1,000) (see Kim’s review)
The judging panel always includes the papers’ literary editor, so Jason Steger, plus a previous winner, Pip Smith, and another novelist, Peggy Frew. The number of awards made varies, but this year, as last, there were three.
The winners, briefly
Vivian Pham
According to Steger, Pham was a whopping 19 years old when her novel was published last year. Not what you’d call a “late bloomer” then! Her novel is set in the Vietnamese Australian community in Sydney’s Cabramatta. Steger says that while redrafting the novel, Pham came across the idea of “second-generation trauma inherited via the stories and behaviour of the previous generation”. This idea apparently runs through the novel.
Pham says that “You want to know the people that are closest to you. You know something epic has happened to them, to make them the people that they are, and you want to know why that happened.” She agrees with Steger that that novel is “a love letter to Cabramatta”, because “she felt more connection to Vietnam there than in Vietnam, when she spends all her time at her grandmother’s home”.
One of her significant influences is James Baldwin, who apparently “got her into reading seriously and realising that it could change your world”. Her second favourite writer is P.G. Wodehouse!
The judges said that “Pham’s non-judgmental portraits of parents living with trauma, and children struggling to comprehend their parents’ choices, was nuanced and wise”.
K.M. Kruimink
Lisa, as noted above, has reviewed A treacherous country, and described it as having “a playful narrative”. She tells us, as does Steger, that this novel also won the Vogel (unpublished manuscript) Award. It has also been longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.
Unlike Pham’s more contemporary work, this novel is historical fiction set in colonial Tasmania. It’s about a young man coming to Tasmania to bring a message to a young convict woman. Originally, Kruimink was writing about the woman. However, she was a new mother at the time that she decided to pick up the work again, and
Because I was in a vulnerable place, it was too emotional for me. It was a sad story and I felt like I couldn’t write about this sad young woman and I decided to write about a silly young man instead.
She thinks she will go back to the young woman’s story, though her next novel is about something very different.
She named Hilary Mantel and Kazuo Ishiguro as writers she likes to read.
The judges loved the voice, saying that she delivered “a stand-out voice – eccentric, funny and deceptively endearing. While the research behind the writing is evident, it is handled with a lightness of touch, and the language itself is truly impressive, ornate, yet controlled and deft”.
Jessie Tu
Tu’s A lonely girl is a dangerous thing has been making a bit of a splash, having been shortlisted for Readings’ New Australian Fiction Prize and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Multicultural Award, as well as longlisted for the Stella Prize.
Kim, whose review I linked above, was mightily impressed. She thought it would be another book about a millennial, but found it was much more. “Its real strength,” she writes, “lies in its perspective of an Asian-Australian trying to succeed in a closeted world dominated by the white and the privileged”.
Taiwanese-born Tu was apparently clear from the start what she was writing about, and also believes, says Steger, that “what drives a good novel … is the kind of questions it considers”. For her, loneliness is a big issue – as the title suggests. She says that:
I’ve been trying to think constantly where to seek solace for my feeling that I don’t belong in this world and what I found really comforting was reading stories about women in the past, especially female artists or female writers, and realising that they have also gone through sad, lonely lives. For me to know that helps me understand that this feeling that I have is not at all special.
The judges said that “Tu, with unswerving clarity, draws out many unsettling and compelling questions regarding race, talent, performance, perfectionism, agency and worth”. They called it “provocative” and “uncompromising”, reflecting Kim’s assessment, in fact!
It took Kate Jennings’ death for me to finally pick up one of Black Inc’s Writers on writers books, Erik Jensen’s On Kate Jennings. The series, says Black Inc, involves leading authors reflecting “on an Australian writer who has inspired and influenced them”. It continues, “Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.” Let’s see how Erik Jensen goes!
But, who is Erik Jensen? Most of the series’ writers are well-known, such as Alice Pung, Stan Grant, Michelle de Kretser and Nam Le, but a couple are less so. Jensen is a Walkley award-winning Australian journalist and author. He’s probably best known for being a founder, and still editor, of The Saturday Paper. However, in 2014, he also wrote a biography, Acute misfortune: The life and death of Adam Cullen. It won a NIB Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Victorian Literary Awards’ Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction. As you’d expect for this series, then, he has some cred.
However, his writing seems to be primarily non-fiction, so why Kate Jennings? Fortunately, he answers that in the opening paragraphs:
I had looked up Kate because I was a fan of her essays – pieces about her life, mostly, ruthless in their precision.
In the next paragraph, he launches without warning into describing the opening of Snake (my review), Jennings’ autobiographical novel. You have to be familiar with Jennings and Snake to get what’s going on here, but it’s unlikely you’d be reading this, I think, if you weren’t. What follows is an introduction to Kate Jennings, realised through interweaving the content and trajectory of this novel with his interviews and communications with Jennings and, occasionally, others.
I was moved by the insights, and impressed by the richness of the portrait Jensen achieves in around 100 small-book pages. He is clearly very fond of Jennings. Indeed, he concludes his essay with
This essay is for Kate Jennings. It is a love letter to her work and to the life that produced it. As a friend and a writer, I am grateful for both. More than anything, I want to thank Kate for the generosity she has shown – in agreeing to this essay, in being so open with the material, and in how with her own work she has shown me what to do.
However, Snake is a tough book. It portrays a dysfunctional family, with a difficult and self-centred mother. Jennings tells Jensen, “I was so very lonely. And at the mercy of my mother.” To his credit, Jensen also talks to Jennings’ brother, Dare, whose perspective on the family is very different. Dare, writes Jensen, “remembers the same mother Kate does, although he remembers her differently. They had a very different relationship. It was warm, close.” Dare supports Kate, but his experience of the family was different. He was the adored son.
This brings me to that whole issue of autobiographical fiction, which is Jennings’ forte (much like her friend, Helen Garner’s.) Jensen writes that “Kate writes close to life. Not completely close, she says. She does make up things. ‘I round the corners,’ she says, ‘and make the really ghastly stuff a little better.’” She writes to work out what she thinks. She also says that “the emotions were autobiographical but not necessarily the story“. This is a significant distinction, and serves as a reminder that fiction needs to be “true” but should not be read as “factual”.
Much of this wasn’t particularly new to me, given I’ve read both Snake and her fragmented biography, Trouble. However, Jensen value adds. For example, he writes that he sees Snake as “the Great Australian novel”. He gives it to people inscribing it as such. One recipient was Ian Donaldson, a former professor of English at Cambridge and a fellow of King’s College. Jensen shares Donaldson’s reaction:
‘The great Australian novel?’ he writes the next morning. ‘Yes, I’d agree, it certainly warrants that sort of ranking, though that phrase as conventionally used conjures up a kind of laborious realism which Snake so spectacularly lacks. I loved its spareness, its brevity, its ability – like the creature it mimics – to strike without warning then vanish without trace.’
You can see why I like Snake too – its spareness! I was interested in Johnson’s comment that a GAN “conventionally … conjures up a kind of laborious realism”. Do you agree? Anyhow, Snake, “a poet’s novel” as Jensen calls it, is not that.
After spending some time on the content of the novel, Jensen also discusses its path to publication (including the rejections) and its reception. Australian reviewer Elizabeth Riddell was not particularly impressed, but in North America, Carol Shields (in The New York Times) and the Publisher’s Weekly, were highly positive. Yet, the novel was soon “lost”, or, as Jennings put it, “pretty well ignored”, largely she felt due to the feminists who “couldn’t accept the treatment she gave her mother”. Seven years later, however, it was re-released, with the Age describing it as “probably the most accomplished, realistic novel about bush life to be produced in the past decade”.
Jennings shares much of her life with Jensen, including her challenges with alcohol and depression, and her loving marriage to Bob Cato. The result is a picture of someone who was both “obstinate and fragile”, as Jensen writes in his The Saturday Paper obituary (8 May 2021), who had great successes but also faced tough challenges, and who was, above all, an uncompromising and stylish writer.
In other words, through exploring Snake, from multiple perspectives, supported by critical truths about Jennings’ life, Jensen does meet Black Inc’s stated aims. It’s intelligent and compelling. I have now bought another in the series.
Erik Jensen, On Kate Jennings: Writers on writers Carlton: Black Inc, 2017 112pp. ISBN: 9781925435818
Whispering Gums 