Australian literature

Monday musings on Australian literature: Peril, and Asian Australian literature

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

A decade ago, I wrote a Monday Musings post on Asian-Australian literature, in which I named, as I often do in such posts, 5 Asian Australian writers. Given the increasing problems of discrimination faced by Asian communities in western countries alongside, perhaps paradoxically, the increased visibility of Asian Australian writing here, I thought an update might be in order.

Peril

I didn’t know when I wrote my last post about the online magazine Peril which had been in existence since 2006! If I had known, I’d have referenced it. Peril focuse, says its About page, on “issues of Asian Australian arts and culture”. It is free, and is supported by donations from its readers, plus the Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria and other organisations.

Do read its About page for a full description of them, but, essentially, they want

to showcase new literature through diverse forms, including poetry, drama, translations, creative writing, memoir, essays, biographical profiles, interviews and other story structures. We are also interested in writing about the visual arts, theatre and film and other cultural arts practices. 

In the sidebar on its Home Page, you will find a list of its editions, from Edition 1 Nerds to Edition 44 Feminist Journeys.

Hoa Pham, Lady of the realm

Nerds is introduced in an editorial by Peril‘s founding editor, Hoa Pham (whose Lady of the realm, I’ve reviewed). It is a small edition with pieces by Hoa Pham, S.K. Kelen and Tom Cho, among others. Hoa Pham explains the origin of the name, Peril, as coming from the “so called Yellow Peril that labelled the wave of Chinese immigration in the 19th century. We are perilious (sic) and take risks but not in the way that the Pauline Hansons of the world think!” Well said!

In its now 15 years, it has published 44 issues, which is a great achievement. Contributors have included – and here I’m naming some of the writers I know, so it’s highly selective and not, necessarily, the most prolific contributors: Ouyang Yu, Alice Pung, Benjamin Law, Jessica Tu, Merlinda Bobis, Roanna Gonslaves, Eileen Chong, Shastra Deo, Melanie Cheng.

Edition 22 particularly captured my attention. Titled Black on Rice, it’s

A collaborative co-edition with the State Library of Queensland, Indigenous publishing initiative, black&write!. Together with co-editor, Ellen van Neerven, we consider six Indigenous and six Asian Australian writers whose work we love, whose work we like to see side by side, writers whose take on the relationships (or otherwise) between migrant and Indigenous Australia we would like to hear.

The writers included several Indigenous Australian writers you’ve met on my blog, like Ellen van Neerven, Marie Munkara and Jeanine Leane, in addition to Asian Australian writers like Ouyang Yu, Eleanor Jackson and Michelle Law. Even though, historically of course, their situations are radically different, the “othering” that both groups face binds them. I am often moved on shows like The Drum by the empathy Indigenous and immigrant Australians (of colour) regularly show each other.

There is, naturally, a strong political underpinning to the writing, as edition titles make very clear, like Why are people so unkind (8), We’re queer here (28 & 29), You don’t sound Asian (32), History Repeats (36). Peril is a rich source of contemporary writing, on tap whenever you want it – but do consider donating, if you read it!

Asian Australian writers, update

Now, I’m going to add 5 more writers to the 5 I listed in my first post, but I’m not limiting this list, as I did then, to writers only born elsewhere. Most of these writers have written and published more than the books I mention below – short stories, poetry, etc – and are actively involved in promoting diverse writers and writing.

Merlinda Bobis

Merlinda Bobis Fish-hair woman

Born in the Philippines, Bobis has written four novels, including Fish-hair woman (my review). Her most recent novel, Locust girl: A lovesong, won the 2016 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. She is also a visual and performance artist, and has won multiple awards across all her artistic endeavours. She is committed to Asian (indeed migrant) Australians being recognised for their “real” value and contribution rather than being exoticised as other.

Julie Koh

Born in Sydney to Chinese-Australian parents, Koh has had two short story collections published, Capital misfits and Portable curiosities, the latter of which was shortlisted for several awards and won her a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist award in 2017. A review at The Guardian reports that ‘Koh says her stories are essentially about “the entrapment of the individual in social structures”’. 

Hoa Pham

Born in Hobart to Vietnamese parents, Hoa Pham’s first novel, Quicksilver, was published in 1998. She has since had four novels published. Her second novel, Vixen, won a 2001 Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Writer of the Year award. As mentioned above, she was the founding editor of Peril, and I have reviewed her latest novel. She is passionate about about achieving equality for the Asian Australian community, and the role of literature/culture in supporting this.

Mirandi Riwoe

Mirandi Riwoe, The fish girl

Born in Brisbane, with a Chinese-Indonesian father, Riwoe’s The fish girl (my review) won Seizure’s Viva la Novella V, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Queensland Literary Award’s UQ Fiction Prize. Her latest novel Stone Sky Gold Mountain won the 2020 Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize, and has been longlisted for this year’s Stella. Both these works confront Asian people’s experience under colonialism.

Elizabeth Tan

Born in Perth to Singaporean parents, Tan’s debut novel, Rubik (on my TBR and reviewed by Bill) was well received. Her follow-up collection of short stories, the wonderfully named Smart ovens for lonely people (also on my TBR and reviewed by Bill) won the 2020 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and is longlisted for this year’s Stella. She writes about a range of contemporary ills, including climate change, capitalism’s failures, and racism.

Finally

In Peril Edition 41 AA17 (March 2020), Hoa Pham wrote “We’re a movement not a moment”. She looks how the Australian literary landscape had changed in the fourteen years since she founded Peril, and asks whether it was still needed. You will surely not be surprised to find that she concludes yes. (Do read her argument if you’re interested.)

And now, a word from Mirandi Riwoe:

I admire those authors who bring us stories and perspectives that reveal unfamiliar worlds. I’m talking of diverse writers, who favour a perspective that is not mainstream. I love books that are beautifully written but are also saying something.

Is saying something an important part of your reading choices?

Garry Disher, Bitter Wash Road (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 34 Comments

Garry Disher’s Bitter Wash Road has been sitting on my TBR pile for over seven years. It was sent to me on spec but, as crime is not my preferred reading, I didn’t feel obliged to read it – and yet, I hung onto it, just in case… So, when Kim (Reading Matters) decided to run an Aussie-New Zealand crime month, I knew what I was going to read.

Actually, though, this is not the first Disher to appear on my blog. Text had previously sent me an earlier one of his, Wyatt, which I managed to talk Son Gums into guest reviewing for me. You can read his review here. However, Wyatt is a thriller with an anti-hero as its protagonist, so is very different to Bitter Wash Road, a police procedural featuring the more sympathetic constable, Paul Hirschhausen (Hirsch).

More sympathetic he may be, but straightforward he is not, because Hirsch is a recently demoted detective who has been sent three hours north from Adelaide to a “single-officer police station” in Tiverton, a fictional “blink-and-you’d-miss-it-town” in struggling “wheat and wool” country. Having previously worked with a team of corrupt detectives, Hirsch, though not found guilty (which, he realises, is different to being found “not guilty”), has “a stink clinging to him”. For whatever reason, Internal Investigations is not convinced he’s clean. Consequently, Hirsch finds himself investigating crime in a fearful community where the police are hated, while also having to watch his own back. Who can he trust?

“an air of waiting”

To my surprise, I greatly enjoyed this novel. It’s well-plotted, so that while the ending isn’t a complete surprise – surely it’s not a good crime novel if it is? – there are enough possibilities thrown in your path along the way to keep you pondering which way it will go. However, it’s not the plot that grabbed me. It’s the characterisation, the writing, and the subtle way contemporary issues are referenced or implicated in the story.

Hirsch is introduced in the first paragraph as the “new cop in Tiverton” and then we immediately meet him through a phone conversation with his sergeant, Kropp, in nearby Redruth. Some shots have been heard out near Tin Hut and he is to investigate. We are then launched into the action as Hirsch drives off, but we are also introduced to his character. He’s observant and careful, but also, probably sensibly, a bit paranoid. When he comes across a gum tree blocking the road, he sees it as a potential ambush, but on closer inspection it’s simply a fallen branch:

All that sinewy health on the outside and quiet decay within.

A bit like the police, really.

With such language the tone is set. Hirsch is isolated, physically and psychologically, like many in the region, for different reasons. This is a tough place where Sergeant Kropp’s two brutal constables, Nicholson and Andrewartha, terrorise the locals, paying particular attention – if you know what I mean – to young girls and Indigenous youths. Hirsch needs all his resources to navigate this lot and the rest of the community’s officials. Fortunately, he’s a true policeman, sizing up every place and person he sees or comes across, alert to every nuance in behaviour. This is, after all, the key both to survival and getting at the truth.

Now, I’m not an expert on writing about crime, but even I realise that I haven’t actually mentioned the crime. It wasn’t the gunshots out near Tin Hut, in fact, but the body of a dead girl out that way, along Bitter Wash Road. Hit and run? Or something else? A little later, a woman is found dead, this time looking like suicide. What is going on in the area? Were these deaths murders? Are they connected?

Set in a dry, struggling outback community, Bitter Wash Road is an example of a sub-genre that is now loosely known as outback or drought or bush noir. It is typified by remote communities living in harsh, unforgiving landscapes, and, as Disher makes clear, by the sort of sexism and racism that is peculiar to such settings (which is not to say they aren’t found in other settings too.)

In this sub-genre you would, I expect, find descriptions like this:

A five-hour round trip. Lengthening shadows striped the crops, the highways, the hillsides. More birds on more wires. An air of waiting, of things drying, turning to dust.

So, with suggestive writing like this, a compelling and complex character like Hirsch, and a plot with as many dips and turns as its titular road, Bitter Wash Road makes splendid reading. I’m not surprised that Disher decided a few years later to return to Hirsch with Peace (2019) and Consolation (2020).

Read for Reading Matters Southern Cross Crime Month. Kim has also reviewed this novel.

Garry Disher
Bitter Wash Road
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013
325pp.
ISBN: 9781922079244

Review copy courtesy Text Publishing

Monday musings on Australian literature: A view from 1930

/ Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

Today, another post in my occasional series of posts about Australian literature from the 1920s to the 1940s, this one featuring two critics of the time, HM Green (1881-1962) and Nettie Palmer (1885-1964).

To do this, I’m using, primarily, a 1930 review in The Adelaide Advertiser of HM Green’s book, An outline of Australian literature, and a 1930 article the The West Australian by Nettie Palmer on the sudden flowering of the Australian novel. Both articles offer a brief survey of the Australian novel to date, with Palmer’s providing an update on “now”.

Green

The Advertiser’s reviewer notes that Green’s work is “admirably done”, and “covers all noteworthy ‘creative literature’—verse, prose, fiction, plays, and essays—from the earliest date to two years ago”. S/he goes on to name the works Green admires (with, given the paper’s location, a special reference to South Australia). The reviewer identifies two South Australian-relevant writers. One is Mrs Aeneas Gun’s We of the Never Never, which, Green admits, is “void of plot as are the lives of most people” but which, our reviewer says, is “one of the most popular of Australian books, perhaps because the lives of most people have so much in common with those of its characters”. The other is new to me, William Hay. Green has criticisms, but he also allows The escape of Sir William Heans to be “one of the most notable novels Australia has produced”. Our reviewer believes the same praise could be applied to Hay’s “fine story of the convict days” Herridge of Reality Swamp. 

Tasma, Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill

After this, the only writers our reviewer mentions from Green’s book are women, starting with Rosa Praed, Tasma, and Ada Cambridge. S/he writes that “in spite of the pains [they] lavished on their work, they are probably to the present generation not much more than names”. Green apparently wrote that Cambridge was in “some respects, ahead of her time, and though many of her advanced opinions have now been accepted, we are not quite ready for all even yet.” Our reviewer continues that Cambridge’s ability to feel “so poignantly the wrongs of the world enabled her, as the author [Green] says, to pierce deeper into the heart of humanity than most Australian writers have done”.

Our reviewer concludes with a whole paragraph on Catherine Helen Spence who, s/he writes, “bears a name not so conspicuous as it ought to be in Australian literature”, primarily because of her political activity. However, s/he writes ‘so competent a literary judge as the late Chief Justice Way … paid her the compliment … of describing her writings on proportional representation as “real literature for their terseness, strength, and brilliancy”.’ Green also praises Spence’s work:

The first and best, Clara Morrison [sic], written in the fifties, has, like the rest, been out of print undeservedly, if its merits are as great as Mr. Green says. It does not always follow that an omnivorous reader is a master of the pen; but Miss Spence was one of the best read women of her day, and as a novelist learned her craft from the greatest writers of her own sex in the nineteenth century, and had intelligence enough to perceive their faults and steer clear of them.

Unfortunately, my understanding of Green’s view is rather limited, here, so please just treat this as a taster. I’ll return to him again one day, because his was an important voice at the time.

Palmer

Palmer argues in her article that until the early 1920s, “the novel in Australia was a matter for apology”, but that there had recently been unexpected advances – in “the right direction”. 

She then does a bit of a recap starting with the early novels, of which only a few were still in circulation, including:

obviously, Clarke’s Term of his natural life and Boldrewood’s Robbery under arms, less obviously, some novels by Mrs. Campbell Praed, ‘Tasma’ and Ada Cambridge.

She then makes the interesting comment that there were others “with considerable power and importance” but they “were hardly novels in form”, like Tom Collins’ “remarkable omnium gatherum of the Riverina in the ‘eighties, Such is life“, and “such of Lawson’s short stories as were lightly linked together by their theme”.

Then come more women, with, around 1900, Miles Franklin’s “vivid, sardonic yet girlish confession, My brilliant career“, Barbara Baynton’s “painful, remorseless Human toll“, and a bit later, Katharine Prichard’s Pioneers (my review), followed by her “much more serious and original book, Black opal in 1920″, which had, to the time of writing, “never been well distributed and recognised”. There was not much else “except for commercial novels that were without roots either in the soil of Australia or in that of art”. 

Palmer never pulled any punches! She continued, “looking round us we saw, on the whole, desert”. The causes were clear, a major one being authors depending on “English publishers who naturally preferred to please English readers by giving them no Australian books except those showing, Australia as another America, a wild-west in which an English hero (magazine type) would have monstrous, adventures showing the superior prowess of his race”. The results was that

authors who desired to write simply and truly, of life in Australia as they knew it were hampered, to the point of paralysis, by a sense of hostility. No one wanted their books in advance. No one wants any new art form, handling new subject matter, until it has come into existence — and often not then!

But, she argues, things were starting to change by 1924. The first volume of Henry Handel Richardson‘s “great trilogy” (Australia felix) had appeared in 1917, but the second, The way home, was published in 1925. However, it received little notice in Australia, as “the air was not kindly yet to a genuine work”. However, soon after, Katharine Prichard’s “Working Bullocks, radiant, with awareness of the timber country and its challenging beauty” came out. Its “artistic ‘seriousness'”, she said, “made it more possible for other serious books to be recognised in Australia; and this has actually come about”.

These new novels included Martin Mills’ The Montforts, Vance Palmer’s psychological study The Man Hamilton, and the third volume of Henry Handel Richardson’s trilogy, Ultima Thule, which she described as having “deep literary significance”. A “particularly responsible London critic” called it a masterpiece, and she praised it herself, as being “symphonic in form, with sustained, and developed themes”. The trilogy was received so well by “serious readers in England, the Continent and America”, she felt, that it raised the status of Australian literature.

Book cover

But there’s more! Richard Mahony typified “the misfit”, but types of characters were also appearing, such as “pioneers who could take what advantages there were in the new world about them”. M. Barnard. Eldershaw’s A house is built features such a character. She also praises Brent of Bin Bin’s Up the country and Ten Creeks Run, which contain complex, full lives. And she makes the point I quoted a couple of months ago, about the lack of exploration of “aboriginal life of Australia” and Prichard’s Coonardoo.

Conclusions

So, did Green and Palmer agree about Australian fiction to that point? To some degree – particularly regarding those turn of the century women writers – but I did only read a review of Green (not Green himself) as Bill (The Australian Legend has). Also, Green’s book is a more encyclopaedic one about Australian literature while Palmer’s article focuses specifically on the novel.

Touchstone in his review of Green’s Outline in Melbourne’s The Herald shares Green’s assessment of what’s characteristic of Australian versus overseas literature:

“an independence of spirit, a kind of humorous disillusion, a careless willingness to take a risk, a slightly sardonic good nature and a certain underlying hardness of texture,” but, “in all but the best of it there is a lack of intellectual content, as compared, with work of similar level overseas.” 

This last point is, I think, where Palmer was seeing change in the mid-1920s, which is about when Green’s work finishes. Palmer concluded, with some relief it seems, that “we begin to have books that we can send abroad as our contribution to the literary world in the important form of the novel, the development of character by narrative”.

Note: Bill, Lisa and others have reviewed many of the books listed here. Please check their blogs if you are interested.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Commonwealth Writers Prize (now defunct)

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

March 8 this year is a packed one. Of course, it is always International Women’s Day, but the second Monday in March is also Canberra Day here in the ACT, Labour Day in Victoria, and Commonwealth Day in, yes, the Commonwealth. It is not a public holiday in most places, but I decided it could inspire this week’s Monday Musings!

Some of you will have come across the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize before. It was established by the Commonwealth Foundation in 1987, as a successor to their Commonwealth Poetry Prize. This Foundation was itself established in 1966 by CHOGM (the Commonwealth Heads of Government). As its Wikipedia page, says

the Commonwealth Secretariat was established [1965] to support the political endeavours of the Commonwealth, the “Foundation was brought into being in the hope that it would give further substance to the old truism that the Commonwealth is as much an association of peoples as of governments”.

In other words, it focuses on the social, cultural, professional and other more locally-focused aspects of the Commonwealth. This includes, the Wikipedia pages also says, “to help to create national professional societies as part of a general process of “deanglicization”. This sounds a bit quaint now, but maybe that’s because much of this “deanglicisation” has been achieved. Has it? Anyhow, another of its formal goals was “to aid the broadening of experience through the printed word”. Hence, I assume, the various literary prizes.

The first was the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, which was succeeded in 1987 by today’s focus, the Commonwealth Writers Prize. This prize had two components – Best Book (1987–2011) and Best First Book (1989–2011). They were awarded for four regions: Africa, Caribbean and Canada, South Asia and Europe, and South East Asia and Pacific. There were winners in each category, Best Book and Best First Book, for each region, and from these, overall Best Book and Best First Book winners were chosen. In 2011, this award was discontinued. A new cultural programme was launched, with a new prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which is still going.

Anyhow, as most of us love lists, I thought I’d share the Australian winners of the Best Book and Best First Book awards over the duration of the award. Australia was in the Southeast Asia and South Pacific region, which comprised Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Fiji Islands, Kiribati, Malaysia, Nauru, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

So, the lists … bolded titles were overall winners for the year. Also, please note that I’m not being ethnocentric, just true to the Aussie Lit focus of Monday Musings! You can see all the prizes on the website.

Best Book

Kim Scott That Deadman Dance
  • 2011: Kim Scott’s The deadman dance (my review)
  • 2009: Christos Tsiolkas’ The slap (my review)
  • 2008: Steven Carroll’s The time we have taken
  • 2006: Kate Grenville’s The secret river
  • 2005: Andrew McGahan’s The white earth
  • 2004: Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton case
  • 2003: Sonya Hartnett’s Of a boy
  • 2002: Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s book of fish
  • 2001: Peter Carey’s True history of the Kelly Gang
  • 2000: Lily Brett’s Too many men
  • 1999: Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus
  • 1998: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs
  • 1997: Sue Woolfe’s Leaning towards infinity
  • 1996: Gillian Mears’ The grass sister
  • 1995: Tim Winton’s The riders
  • 1994: David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon
  • 1993: Alex Miller’s The ancestor game
  • 1991: David Malouf’s The great world
  • 1990: Robert Drewe’s The bay of contented men
  • 1988: George Turner’s The sea and summer
  • 1987: Blanche d’Alpuget’s Winter in Jerusalem (shared with a NZ book)

You will see that Australia won the lion’s share of these prizes (21 of 25). The exceptions were 2010 won by a Samoan writer, 2007 and 1989 by a New Zealand writer, and 1992 by a Samoan-New Zealand writer. Things were a little different for the Best First Book award …

Best First Book

Book cover
  • 2010: Glenda Guest’s Siddon Rock
  • 2008: Karen Foxlee’s The anatomy of wings
  • 2007: Andrew O’Connor’s Tuvalu
  • 2005: Larissa Behrendt’s Home
  • 2004: Nada Azar Jarrar’s Somewhere, home
  • 2002: Meaghan Delahunt’s In the blue house
  • 2001: Arabella Edge’s The company
  • 1998: Emma Tom’s Deadset
  • 1995: Adib Khan’s Seasonal adjustments
  • 1994: Fotini Epanomitis’ The mule’s foal
  • 1993: Andrew McGahan’s Praise
  • 1991: Thea Welsh’s The story of the year of 1912 in the village of Elza Darzins
  • 1989: Gillian Mears’ Ride a cock horse

So, fewer won by Australians here (13 of 23), and another country involved too: 2011, 2009, 2000, 1999, 1996, 1992, and 1990 by New Zealand writers; 2006 and 2003 by Malaysian writers; and 1997 by a Samoan writer.

There’s another interesting thing here. All of the winners of the Best Book award continued to be published and be well-known after their win. This is not the case with the Best First Book winners where a few have not become well-known on the literary scene (though many have continued to write and publish, some now overseas).

I have read many of the Best Books, and a few of the Best First Books, but mostly before blogging. Interestingly, the Best Books reflect the very “white” focus in Australian literary awards at the time (with a couple of exceptions), while the Best First Books reflect greater diversity. I wonder whether this fact is behind the Foundation’s change to focusing on short stories, because the aim seems to have also changed from “simply” recognising achievement to developing, promoting and encouraging writers. The prize, they say,

is open to writers who have had little or no work published and particularly aimed at those places with little or no publishing industry. The prize aims to bring writing from these countries to the attention of an international audience. The stories need to be in English, but can be translated from other languages.

What do you think about all this?

Stella Prize 2021 Longlist announced

/ Whispering Gums / 43 Comments

Unfortunately, because I’m on the road, I wasn’t able to “attend” the announcement earlier this evening, but at least I have been able to get my post out on the night, as it were.

As I say every year, I think, I don’t do well at having read the Stella Prize longlist at the time of its announcement. In 2017 I’d read none; in 2018, one, and in 2019, two! Last year, I was back to one! By the end of 2020, I’d read 3.5 which is worse than previous years.

Again, as I’ve said before, I do better at reading the winners, having read Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds (2013), Clare Wright’s The forgotten rebels of Eureka (2014), Emily Bitto’s The strays (2015), Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things (2016), Heather Rose’s The museum of modern love (2017), and Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The erratics (2019). So far, I’ve missed 2018’s winner, Alexis Wright’s Tracker, and I’m only halfway through reading last year’s winner, Jess Hill’s See what you made me do. I will finish though, as it’s a significant book I believe.

The judges are again different to last year’s with only Zoya Patel (this year’s chair), continuing on the panel: memoirist and editor Zoya Patel (Chair); playwright, author and Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival Director Jane Harrison; 3RRR radio producer, presenter and literary critic Elizabeth McCarthy;  production editor of The Saturday Paper Ian See; and Deputy Programme Director at Edinburgh Book Festival Tamara Zimet. As always, attention has been paid to diversity on the panel.

The longlist

Book cover
  • Rebecca Giggs’ Fathoms: The world in the whale (non-fiction)
  • SL Lim’s Revenge (fiction) (Lisa’s review)
  • Laura Jean McKay’s The animals in that country (fiction)
  • Louise Milligan’s Witness (non-fiction)
  • Cath Moore’s Metal fish, falling snow (fiction)
  • Intan Paramaditha’s The wandering (fiction)
  • Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone sky gold mountain (fiction) (on TBR; Kate’s mini-review)
  • Ellena Savage’s Blueberries (non-fiction/essays)
  • Nardi Simpson’s Song of the crocodile (fiction) (on TBR)
  • Elizabeth Tan’s Smart ovens for lonely people (short stories) (Bill’s review and on TBR)
  • Jessie Tu’s A lonely girl is a dangerous thing (fiction) (Kim’s review)
  • Evie Wyld’s The bass rock (fiction)

Well, I guessed five of these might be in the list – McKay, Riwoe, Simpson, Tan and Tu, but I also guessed some more non-fiction like Grace Karskens’ People of the river, and Jacqueline Kent’s Vida. However, as I haven’t read any of the longlist – and have not, in fact, heard of several of them – I’m not going to judge. I’ll just say, how interesting!

Oh, and for the record, I’ve read none – though I have a few on my pile!

The judges’ chair, Zoya Patel commented on the longlist:

The 2021 Stella Prize longlist demonstrates the breadth of expression present in Australian literature, and the importance of raising the profile of women and non-binary voices in celebrating this expansive talent. In reading these titles, we pondered what might be lost or overlooked should a prize such as the Stella not exist to specifically examine the output of Australian women and non-binary writers. […]

This year’s reading presented a diversity of talent and expression, with books exploring the people and animals through the lens of fiction and non-fiction, and with a common objective to reach into the heart of what it means to exist in the world today.

To read the judges on each of the longlisted books, do check out the Stella website.

Stella’s announcements are all later this year than in previous years – including this longlist which has usually been announced in February. So, the shortlist will be announced on March 25, and the winner on April 22.

Any comments?

Bill curates: Ruth Park

/ Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

Bill curates is an occasional series where I delve into Sue’s vast archive, stretching back to May 2009, and choose a post for us to revisit. This is a most enjoyable project as I read every post and usually the comments too. Which is why I’m still only up to Oct. 2010. Today, because I can, I’ve chosen an AWW Gen 3 post on Ruth Park which I had previously overlooked.

______________________________

My original post titled: Monday musings on Australian literature: Ruth Park

The muddle-headed wombat by Ruth Park, book cover

For a New Zealander, Ruth Park is a very popular Australian! Not only did she write the much-loved (and studied) Harp in the south trilogy, but she also wrote the hugely popular (in its time) radio serial The muddle-headed wombat, was married to the Australian D’Arcy Niland (now deceased) who wrote The shiralee, and is mother to children’s author-illustrators Deborah and Kilmeny (now deceased) Niland. Ruth Park also won the Miles Franklin Award with her Swords and crowns and rings, and wrote two very popular autobiographies, Fence around the cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx. And this is not all – or even all of the best – that she’s produced in her long career.

Park was born in New Zealand in the early 1920s and first came to Australia in 1940 when she met D’Arcy Niland. She writes that Australian writer Eve Langley*, with whom she had a longstanding friendship, said of Niland:

‘That’s a good face … Do you know what it is saying?’
‘No, what?’
‘It says “Take me or leave me.” I like that.’

So apparently did Park. She returned to Australia in 1942 to work as a journalist, and married Niland. They worked at various jobs in rural New South Wales for some years before Park’s stories gained the attention of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) resulting in their decision to try to make a living from free-lance writing. They wrote, and wrote, and wrote – anything that would earn money. They wrote, for example, short stories, genre stories (such as romances and westerns), radio talks and radio plays, scripts for radio comics, all the while honing their skills for their more serious writing goals. And they lived during these early years in Sydney’s inner city slum, Surry Hills.

These experiences of living in rural areas and city slums are clearly evident in Swords and crowns and rings (the story of the dwarf Jackie, and his love Cushie Moy) and the Harp in the south trilogy (the story of the Darcy – ha! – family). The thing I love about these books – both of which span the first 4-5 decades of the twentieth century – is the way Park explores gritty issues like poverty, abortion, religious bigotry, unemployment and illness with a psychological and social realism that also encompasses warmth and humour. Her main characters tend to be the quintessential Aussie battlers, but their concerns transcend time and place. It’s not surprising, really, that these works keep being read, re-published, set for study, and adapted for television and film.

Realism though is not the only string to Park’s fictional bow. She wrote in several “genres” for a range of audiences, including fantasy for children. Her Muddle-headed wombat stories ran on the ABC Children’s Session from 1957 to 1971. I have to say that I never have really been one for anthropomorphism, and have read few children’s classics featuring animals (no, not even The wind in the willows) but even I would tune in for the wombat! Park also wrote a children’s time-travel fantasy Playing Beatie Bow, which is taught in schools and has been made into a film.

And yet, for all this, I’m sure she is little known outside Australia … if I am wrong, please let me know!

In the meantime, I will conclude with her description in her first autobiography, Fence around the cuckoo, of her first sighting of Australia as she arrived by boat:

What I saw were endless sandstone cliffs reflecting the sunrise. A chill ran over my skin, my ears buzzed as they had once done when I was about to experience uncertainty about something as yet unknown. The sea fled south, its malachite green changing to beaming blue; the sky was sumptuous with a sun hotter than I had ever known.

This was my first glimpse of Australia Felix, the ancient, indifferent, nonpareil continent that was to become the love of my life.

Ruth Park is not one of those ground-breaking writers who makes you go, wow!, but  she is an excellent story-teller who has an enviable ability to create and develop memorable characters who confront the real “stuff” of life. You could do far worse than read her if you want an introduction to Australian literature. If I haven’t convinced you, read Lisa at ANZLitLovers and Tony of Tony’s Bookworld on Harp in the South, and kimbofo at Reading Matters on her “Top 10 novels about Australia”.

*Park mentions Langley (whom I reviewed early in this blog) several times in Fence around the cuckoo. One concerns Park’s decision to stay with Eve to escape a Peeping Tom uncle but, when she arrived at the windmill in which she believed Eve to be living, she found no Eve but another woman who had heard of Eve but not for some years. “What had happened to that weird girl?”, the new windmill resident wondered. Poor Eve. She was indeed a bit weird and had a rather sad life, but that is another story.

___________________________

Book cover

It’s interesting for me to re-read these old posts of mine, and think about how I’d write them now! Regarding Park, my admiration has only grown for her warmth, humour and abiding sense of fairness. Check my Park posts here.

But, back to Bill. He says he’s not a fan of Park’s autobiographies but he does recommend, whenever he can, the Park/Niland memoir The Drums Go Bang, which we have both reviewed (Bill’s review) (my review). I enjoyed her autobiographies, but The drums go bang is very special.

Are you are Park fan? If so (or if not), we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Bill’s literary tour of the Mallee

/ Whispering Gums / 37 Comments

I love road-tripping around different parts of Australia, and for some time now have had a hankering to explore the Mallee-Wimmera region of western Victoria. This hankering has been enthusiastically supported by Bill (The Australian Legend) for whom this part of Australia was his youthful stomping ground. We have discussed the region and what might be included in a Mallee literary tour several times over the years – with Lisa joining in on occasion too.

Jenny Ackland, Little gods

We would all, I think, like to compile a list of books set in the region. I’ve reviewed a few on this blog – at least I think they are set in the Mallee, as the region’s borders are a bit confusing to me – such as Jenny Ackland’s Little gods, Charlie Archbold’s Mallee boys, and Sue Williams’ crime novel Live and let fry. Lisa recently posted a review of a new Mallee-set book, Anne Brinsden’s Wearing paper dresses, and last year, another, Bill Green’s Small town rising.

But, topping it all, is that this week, Bill has finally put fingers to keyboard and written a post on touring the Mallee which he has generously said I can post here too … He starts:

Sue/Whispering Gums a year or so BC set me the task of devising a literary tour of the Mallee – the northwest corner of Victoria, a triangle bounded by the Murray River to the north and northeast, the South Australia border to the west and let’s say to the south the 36th parallel, so a line from a bit north of Route A8 to the Murray north of Echuca. To read the rest of the tour, please check out his post. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you hitched a ride and took the tour too!

Thanks so much Bill … there’s a possibility we might even do a bit of this trip this month. It all depends … no glamping in Little Desert is a bit of a worry!

Monday musings on Australian literature: Mining in Australian fiction

/ Whispering Gums / 37 Comments

I was inspired to write this post by Bill’s (The Australian Legend) post on Catherine Helen Spence’s novel Clara Morison whose subtitle is “a tale of South Australia during the gold fever”. Mining is one of Australia’s biggest industries. Iron, copper, coal, silver, gold, zinc, bauxite and opals have all played significant roles in Australia’s economy and thus in the lives of many Australians. But, how often has it featured in our fiction?

The funny thing is that when I think of mining in fiction, my first thoughts don’t go to Australian novels, but to books like Richard Llewellyn’s coal mining classic How green was my valley, and Wallace Stegner’s Angle of repose about white settlers in the American West. This post, then, is as much a brains-trust fishing expedition as it is an informative one, but I plan to throw a few thoughts into the mix.

Nineteenth to mid-twentieth century

Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison was published in 1854, and, as Bill writes, a major stream is the mining story, including the loss of men from South Australia’s copper mine to the excitement of the Victorian goldfields.

Katharine Susannah Prichard wrote several novels about mines, mining and/or mining towns, starting with her third novel, Black opal (1921). Set in an opal mining settlement, Falling Star Ridge, it draws from New South Wales’ Lightning Ridge where she’d spent some months. Prichard biographer, Nathan Hobby, discusses it on his blog. He says that by the time she wrote this novel Prichard “had committed to communism, and the influence is evident”. For example, she “paints a picture” of the settlement as a “workers’ utopia”. Prichard’s Goldfields trilogy (The Roaring Nineties, 1946; Golden Miles, 1948; and Winged Seeds, 1950) came later. It chronicles life in Kalgoorlie from the the discovery of gold up to the early 1940s when Prichard lived there. Hobby has also written on his blog about these books, focusing particularly on the political impetus behind their writing.

Vance Palmer also wrote a mining trilogy – the Golconda trilogy: Golconda (1948), Seedtime (1957) and The big fellow (1959). They tell the story of a mining town – one I once knew well, Mount Isa – from the time it was a mountain of silver and lead through to the established town. Deborah Jordan (in the Queensland Historical Atlas) writes that the characters include Macy Donovan, who begins as an obscure union organiser in early Golconda, but ends up the premier of Queensland, and Christy who “embodies the dying prophetic vision of the socialists of the 1890s”. Palmer, she says, was apparently fascinated by political leadership, especially those leaders who emerged from the ranks.

Mid to late twentieth century

Thea Ashley, It's raining in Mango

Another author who has written more than once about mines and mining towns is Thea Astley, though not as intensively as Prichard and Palmer. An item from the late news (1982) (my review) is set in the dying town of Allbut, which was once a thriving mining centre. Mining is not the focus – indeed I don’t mention it in my review – but its aftermath, the directionless machismo simmering in the town, underpins the novel. A few years later, Astley wrote It’s raining in Mango (1987), a four-generation story set in north Queensland, which I read around the time it came out. It covers a lot of ground, but includes references to the massacre of Indigenous people by goldfield diggers in the 1860s.

I’m guessing that miners and mining feature in outback-set commercial fiction, but this is not my area my expertise. However, my research suggests, for example, that Bryce Courtenay, who had worked in mines in South Africa, has two brothers working on goldfields, among other places, in his novel, Tommo and Hawk.

Twenty-first century

Historical fiction, which has been part of most of the novels/trilogies I’ve described above, continued into the 21st century. Mirandi Riwoe’s Big sky stone mountain (2020) explores the experience of Chinese people in late nineteenth Australia, including on the Queensland goldfields. Gail Jones’ latest novel, Our shadows (2020), takes us back to Kalgoorlie. It’s apparently a three-generation story starting with the discovery of gold there in 1893. Guardian reviewer Bec Kavanagh says that “Jones tells a story of gold and greed that goes beyond myth and folklore, deep into a family trying to reconcile their past with the present”.

Book cover

However, one of the biggest contemporary issues facing mining in Australia is the right traditional owners of Aboriginal land have to make agreements with mining companies concerning use of their land. It’s encouraging to see this issue appearing in modern novels. Mining and rights is the main focus of non-Indigenous writer Madeleine Dickie’s 2019 novel, Red can origami (my review). Dickie explores the issue from multiple perspectives – indigenous, environmental, political and personal.

Book cover

But, importantly, mining is also covered by Indigenous Australian writers. Maggie Nolan, writing in Australian Literary Studies, argues that while Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (my review) “can be, and has been, read in a range of ways, … the impacts of mining are central to any understanding” of it. She says that “few commentators have focused on the centrality of mining in the story”, to which I must hold up my hand, though when I thought of this topic, Carpentaria immediately came to mind. Mining also features in Tara June Winch’s The yield (my review). When August returns home for her grandfather “Poppy” Albert’s funeral, she discovers that a mining company is staking its claim. Ellen van Neerven, writing in the Australian Book Review argues that “The Yield is an anti-mining novel for the present day in the wake of the approval of the Adani coal mine in central Queensland”.

I’ll stop here, but I’ll just observe that politics – labour issues, environmental issues, indigenous land rights issues, for example – features in most of the fiction I’ve listed here. What does that say about Australia’s relationship with the mining upon which so much of our wealth depends?

What are your thoughts, and do you have more examples (from whichever country you come from) of mining novels?

Bill curates: Charles Dickens and Australia

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

Bill curates is an occasional series where I delve into Sue’s vast archive, stretching back to May 2009, and choose a post for us to revisit.

I’m such a fan of Monday Musings – I guess we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t all enjoy talking about books, and writing, and authors, and translators, and publishers – that all the posts that jump out at me, seem to be MMs. From Sept 2010 Sue discusses the Australianness of an author who was never in Australia. As Hannah Gwendoline D’Orsay Tennyson Bulwer [Last Name] wrote in Comments “I had no idea Dickens had such a connection with Australia.”

______________________________

My original post titled: Monday musings on Australian literature: Charles Dickens and Australia

Charles Dickens, c1860

Here’s something completely different for my Monday musings! Not an Australian author, not even a foreign born author who came to Australia (though, being the great traveller he was, he did consider a lecture tour), but Charles Dickens does have a couple of interesting “connections” with Australia. These connections are supported by the existence of some letters written by him at the National Library of Australia.

On convicts and migration in general

Transportation of convicts to Australia – actual, implied or threatened – features in several of his novels. These include John Edmunds in Pickwick Papers (1836-37), the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist (1837-1839), Mr Squeers in NicholasNickleby (1838-39), Alice Marwood in Dombey and Son (1846-48), and Magwitch (probably the most famous of all) in Great expectations (1861), not to mention Jenny Wren who threatens her father with transportation in Our mutual friend (1864-65). Dickens apparently learnt quite a lot about convict life, and particularly the penal settlement on Norfolk Island, from his friend Alexander Maconochie (to whom I refer in my review of Price Warung’s Tales of the early days).

Clearly, it was this knowledge which inspired the letter he wrote to the 2nd Marquess of Normanby (George Augustus Constantine Phipps), who was Secretary of State for the Home Office . He suggests

a strong and vivid description of the terrors of Norfolk Island and such-like-places, told in a homely narrative with a great appearance of truth and reality, and circulated in some very cheap and easy form (if with the direct authority of the Government, so much the better) would have a very powerful effect on the minds of those badly disposed … I would have it on the pillow of every prisoner in England. (3 July 1840, Original in the National Library of Australia, Ms 6809)

He offers to write this narrative, gratis. As far as I know, although Dickens and the Marquess were friends, nothing ever came of this offer.

While Dickens deplored the treatment of convicts in the penal settlements, he also saw Australia as a land of opportunity. The transported Magwitch, as we know, made his fortune in Australia. Mr Micawber, debt-ridden at the end of David Copperfield, emigrates to Australia and becomes a sheepfarmer and magistrate. But, perhaps the strongest evidence of Dickens’ belief in Australia as a place where people could get ahead, is the emigation of his sons.

On his sons

Two of Dickens’ sons – Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens* (nicknamed Plorn) – emigrated to Australia, both with their father’s encouragement.

Alfred (1845-1912) migrated to Australia in 1865. He worked on several stations/properties in Victoria and New South Wales and as a stock and station agent, before partnering with his brother in their own stock and station agency, EBL Dickens and Partners. He died in the United States in 1912, having left Australia on a lecture tour in 1910. Dickens’  youngest son, Edward (1852-1902), went to Australia in 1869. He also worked on stations before opening the stock and station agency with his brother. He later worked as a civil servant and represented Wilcannia in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 1889-94, but he died, debt-ridden, in 1902 at Moree. Australia did not quite turn out to be the land of opportunity for these two that Dickens had hoped, but fortunately he was not around to see it!

A couple of Dickens’ letters to his sons are held at the National Library of Australia. One was written in 1868, not long before Plorn left England, and includes some fatherly advice:

Never take a mean advantage of anyone in any transaction, and never be hard on people who are in your power …

The more we are in earnest as to feeling religion, the less we are disposed to hold forth on it. (26? September 1868, Original in National Library of Australia, Ms 2563)

One does rather wish that Dickens had taken his own advice regarding not being “hard on people who are in your power” in his treatment of his poor wife Catherine.

Eighteen days before he died in 1870, he wrote this to Alfred:

I am doubtful whether Plorn is taking to Australia. Can you find out his real mind? I note that he always writes as if his present life were the be-all and end-all of his emigration and as if I had no idea of you two becoming proprietors and aspiring to the first positions in the colony without casting off the old connexion (1870, Original in National Library of Australia, Ms 6420).

These are just two of the many letters that he wrote to (and about) his sons in Australia. More can be found in published editions of his letters. I have chosen these particular ones purely because we have them here in Canberra. It’s rather a treat to be able to see Dickens’ hand so far away from his home.

Do you enjoy close literary encounters of the handwritten kind?

Image: Dickens, c. 1860 (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

___________________________

What an interesting choice of Bill’s but I am glad to be reminded of this post as I have been wanting to read more of Dickens’ journalistic writings. Whether I will is another thing but, you never know.

Are you a Dickens fan?

Elizabeth Harrower, The long prospect (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 34 Comments

Oppression and tyranny, power and manipulation in human relationships are the stuff of Elizabeth Harrower’s writing, at least in my experience of it, and so I found it again in her second novel The long prospect. Unlike The watch tower (my review), however, which explores the more traditional domination of women by a man, The long prospect’s tyrant is narcissistic grandma Lilian who makes pre-pubescent granddaughter Emily’s life a misery. Why is a novel about a cruel, manipulative person wielding power over someone whom they should love so enjoyable? Let me try to explain …

The long prospect, which was first published in 1958, is set in postwar Ballowra, a fictionalised industrial town based on Newcastle, just a couple of hours’ drive north of Sydney. The major part of it takes place in the home of forty-seven-year-old Lilian who wields sadistic power over all who come within her purview, including but not limited to the aforesaid granddaughter Emily. The novel starts, in fact, with Lilian visiting her ex-tenant and apparent friend, thirty-something Thea, in her new apartment in another part of Ballowra. Lilian walks into the apartment, without being invited, “her eyes on swivels”, and very quickly we realise that this friendship is one in which Lilian has assumed power but is now feeling put out. Words like “disapproval”, “frowning” and “affronted” leave us in no doubt that Lilian’s visit is not the sort of generous one you’d expect from someone visiting their friend in their new home.

This controlling, self-centred, unaffectionate behaviour of Lilian’s, as I’ve said, is not limited to Thea and Emily but extends to all her relationships, including to her daughter Paula, and to the various men who populate the novel, such as the hapless “boy-friend” Rosen and the tender, thoughtful but powerless boarder Max.

At the heart of The long prospect is Emily’s desperate search for affection and attention, which she finally finds in this thirty-something Max, who had been introduced earlier, by name only, as a past lover of Thea. Max warms to the intelligent – but clearly neglected – young girl, and starts spending time with her, mentoring her intellectual and emotional development. Unfortunately, this doesn’t go unnoticed by Lilian’s self-centred and jealous entourage, and eventually insinuations are made that bring about the novel’s denouement. Before that, though, Emily’s blossoming enthusiasm for life and learning is a delight to see.

Harrower constructs her novel and builds up the tone and tension beautifully. She introduces Lilian’s character via her opening visit to Thea. She sets up Emily’s need for affection and her subsequent bond with Max through her previous attachment to Thea and her desperate crushes on teachers. Harrower’s word use is precise, from the recurring appearance of “grey”, describing people and place, to the plain spare language that pares relationships and actions down to their essence. Here’s the desperate Rosen, trailing after Lilian into the kitchen, still hoping she will keep him:

There, catching her, he chances a reproachful expression, seeing that, anyway, her grey eyes were no longer hard, but mild and blank. She had quite abandoned her fiery mood. He was reassured, and smiled at her sheepishly. Her new look must mean apology. In fact, Lilian thought about salmon sandwiches. She filled the kettle.

Catastrophic emptiness

But, now, here’s the thing folks. I finished this book, and half-wrote this post, just before my Dad died three weeks ago. I am having trouble remembering all the thoughts I had while reading it, thoughts that particularly related to Bill’s AWW Gen 3 Realism vs Modernism discussion we were having – but I’ll try. Harrower falls primarily into the Modernist tradition. She reflects the ills of the time through individual psyches, rather than exploring causes and social impacts as we find in Realist books like Mena Calthorpe’s The dyehouse (1961) (my review).

Both Emily and Max feel the psychological impacts of their environments. Early on Emily, desperate to belong, finds herself an outsider yet again:

There was a chill lack of desirability about the room she had left, and about those she might enter – a bleak and rigid lack of warmth that penetrated the future as well as the present and the past.

Max recognises that he had responded to “the catastrophic emptiness of the past few years” by settling for:

Comfortable resignation. He looked at the idea of it. It had not always been that, but the change had been slow and subtle, worked in him secretly. Now the metamorphosis was complete, surprising, disagreeable. (p. 150)

Disagreeable, particularly now that a crisis involving Emily, whom he had wanted to nurture and protect, had come:

Max fought down a sense of alienation … (p. 150)

And yet, in The long prospect there is also a subtle backdrop of the industrialisation that is one of the drivers behind Modernism’s theme of alienation and the individual. Emily’s father Harry Lawrence, on his way for a rare visit with her, considers his old home town:

After years in the country, this subjection to industry, the smoky sky, the matured deterioration immanent at the birth of such towns as Ballowra left him oppressed and indignant. He was unwilling that it should be so bad.

The overriding sense in the book – from all the characters – those we like, and those we don’t, is one of disappointed lives. Max is one of those we like, for his warmth and his capacity for mature reflection:

No external excuse, not lack of this or that fine feeling could be counted as justification. Nothing could undo the harm these casual people had done. Yet, Max argued, they were themselves and lived as they could, and had not been wisely treated either, very likely.

I like the “very likely” qualification! I also like this fundamentally non-judgemental attitude, that doesn’t then follow through to excusing poor behaviour. Max goes on: “it was too easy to exempt from responsibility those who felt no responsibility for their actions. Too easy, reductive, wrong.” In other words, understand but don’t excuse!

The long prospect is thoroughly engaging, despite its overall depressing subject matter. The perfection of Harrower’s insight into human psychology combined with the delicious precision of her writing make it, yes, a joy to read, even though Emily’s plight is heartrending. It’s no wonder, really, that Patrick White was disappointed when Harrower stopped writing. He knew a good writer when he saw one.

Read for Bill’s (The Australian Legend) AWW Gen 3 Week; also reviewed by Kim (Reading Matters).

Challenge logo

Elizabeth Harrower
The long prospect
Melbourne: Text Classics, 2012 (Orig. ed. 1958)
277pp.
ISBN: 9781922079480