Australian literature

Delicious descriptions: Elizabeth Jolley on the value of libraries

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Elizabeth Jolley, The orchard thievesRegular readers will know that in June I joined in Lisa’s (ANZLitLovers) Elizabeth Jolley Week by posting two reviews, one of which was for the novella Orchard thieves. In that post I mentioned the sly humour, but I didn’t really share a quote to demonstrate it. However, I knew that I could always write a Delicious Descriptions post, so here it is.

It comes when the grandmother is walking home from the library. She had urged one of her extra library-book tickets to another library patron because “she knew how awful it was to get home only to discover that the books were familiar, having been read before.” As a librarian by profession, I loved it.

Anyhow, our grandmother is also a bit of a worrier, regularly thinking about various disasters that could befall her or her family:

On the way home the grandmother thought about the special kind of wealth there was in the possession of library-book tickets. They were reassuring and steady like the pension cheque. She never went anywhere without her purse. You could never know in advance what the day had in store. There might come a time when it would be necessary to offer all she had to appease an intruder. She knew of women who spread crumpled and torn newspapers all round their beds at night so that they would hear an intruder coming closer. Or, she might be held at knife point by someone in the street. She would offer all she had in her purse, small change, pension cheque and the library-book tickets. There would be absolutely no need for the villain to either strangle or stab her in order to snatch her purse. She would hold it out to him and tell him he could have it and be off. She would tell him this in plain words. The library-book tickets might even make a changed man of him, especially if he had never had a chance to use a public lending library during a life with all the deprivation brought about by being on the run.

I mean, really, don’t you love it?

Australian Women Writers 2018 Challenge completed

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Mirandi Riwoe, The fish girlAs in previous years, I’m writing my completion post for the Australian Women Writer’s Challenge, around the middle of the year, even though I will continue to contribute until the year’s end. However, I like to get the formal completion post out of the way, so I can relax!

I signed up, again, for the top-level, Franklin, which involves reading 10 books and reviewing at least 6, and again I’ve exceeded this. In fact, by June 30, I had contributed 18 reviews to the challenge.

Here’s my list in alphabetical order (by woman author), with the links on the titles being to my reviews:

AWW Badge 2018There’s a significant difference between this year’s completion post and those of recent years – and that’s in the proportion of fiction to nonfiction. Last year, as you may remember from my 2017 Reading Highlights post, I read an unusually large proportion of nonfiction books (47%) and this was also reflected in my AWW Challenge reading. I said I wanted to recalibrate this in 2018 towards more fiction, and so far I’ve been achieving that (in my AWW Challenge reading and overall).

I don’t have specific goals for the rest of the year, except that I’d like to read more indigenous writers (besides Claire G. Coleman), at least one more classic (in addition to Tasma), and more from my TBR pile (besides Helen Garner and Elizabeth Jolley).

My 2018 AWW Challenge wrap-up post will tell the story!

Michelle Scott Tucker, Elizabeth Macarthur: A life at the edge of the world (#BookReview)

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Michelle Scott Tucker, Elizabeth MacarthurThere’s something special about reading a good, engaging history – and this is how I’d describe debut author Michelle Scott Tucker’s biography Elizabeth Macarthur: A life at the edge of the world. There are, in fact, three prongs to my statement, namely, it is history, it is good history, and it is engaging history. I plan to tease out each of these in my post.

First though, a bit about Elizabeth Macarthur, particularly for non-Australians who may never have heard of her. She arrived in Australia on the Second Fleet in 1790, at the age of 23, with her husband John Macarthur who had an army commission with the New South Wales Corps. Their aim was for John to gain a promotion, and then return to England. However, they soon started making their mark in the new colony as farmers – including pioneering the Australian wool industry – and Elizabeth never did return to England, though John did twice. The first time (1801 to 1805) was to stand trial over a duel with Colonel Paterson, and the second (1809 to 1817) to stand trial again, this time for his role in the rebellion against Governor Bligh. Now, have you noticed those dates? Four years away and then eight years. So, who ran the famous pioneer farming enterprise? Yes, Elizabeth of course. It was partly to correct the longstanding image of Elizabeth as helpmeet to her husband that inspired Tucker to write this biography.

Now, my three prongs, starting with that it is history. This is easy to explain. In form this is a biography, but like most biographies of historical figures it also operates as history, because the reason it has been written, the reason we are interested, is the subject’s role in an historical period. This is somewhat different from literary biographies which don’t necessarily engage with wider historical issues relating to the subject, though you could argue, I suppose, that all biographies are history. I’m good, you’ve probably learnt by now, at this on-the-one-hand-but-then-again-on-the-other sort of argument! Still, the story of Elizabeth Macarthur is ingrained in the history of the early British settlement of Australia.

Next, that it is good history. Now, I readily admit that I’m not a trained historian. I did a little history at university – in fact just one subject on historiography – but I’m interested in history and like to read it when I can. So, what do I mean by “good history”? I mean that the history is, or at least appears to my lay eye, to be trustworthy. For it to appear this way, it needs to be well-researched, well-documented and well-presented. And this, Elizabeth Macarthur is. That it is well-researched is evidenced by the extensive bibliography containing significant primary and secondary sources, many of which I am aware and know to be authoritative. That it is well-documented is evidenced not only by this bibliography, but by the comprehensive, but unobtrusive end-noting. Very few facts that I wanted to check were not supported by a source. I read this book with a bookmark at the end-notes so I could easily check sources (or additional explanatory notes), which I did fairly frequently, not because I didn’t trust Tucker but because I was interested to know where she’d got her information. As for the presentation, this is also excellent with evocatively titled chapters, each headed with a quote, usually from Elizabeth or John’s own writings; the detailed index and the use of end-notes rather than foot-notes; and the sensibly selected and ordered pics.

These aren’t all that make it good history, though, because of course the “story” needs to be well-argued, and it is. Tucker marshalls the facts together clearly and logically to prove Elizabeth’s significant role in the family’s farming, but what I particularly liked was the way she handles her sources, and, in particular, the gaps, because of course there are gaps. There are, for example, letters not kept, information not documented in private journals, personal conversations not, of course, recorded. Tucker is careful to flag these, with words like “probably” and “maybe”, making it clear when she is presenting her own assessment of the situation. On one occasion when the frequently disputatious John Macarthur sends off a messenger with an inflammatory letter, that messenger is waylaid by his son Edward. Who sent the son, Tucker asks before exploring the possibilities, deciding in the end:

No. The most likely source is Elizabeth Macarthur, once more trying to mitigate her husband’s wilder misjudgements. But we have to imagine it: a hushed yet heated conversation with Edward to send him flying out after Oakes and then a vain attempt to placate and soothe John …

And finally, the last prong – that it is engaging history. It’s engaging partly because of the subject. Elizabeth Macarthur is an interesting woman, who lived long, achieved much, and left enough documentation for a story about her to be told. She was a woman of her times, as Tucker makes clear. She was aware of her social status, and wasn’t much into “good works” like some of the other leading women of the colony, but she and John were known to treat employees well. She was well-respected in the colony, and many times played conciliatory roles, but she and John were always driven, in the end, by money. And, of course, she was an excellent farm manager.

It’s also engaging history because of the writing. This story has a large cast. Elizabeth had seven children, for a start, but also, she lived in the colony for 60 years, so knew a large number of the often-revolving movers and shakers of colonial society. Tucker manages to keep the story moving despite all this, using some of the techniques more often found in fiction, including foreshadowing, clear character development, and succinct but evocative turns of phrase:

Yet for all their emphasis on the rewards of heaven, the gentlefolk of Georgian England maintained a steely gaze on the rewards of this earthly life.

AND

When the court sat at 10am the scene was more circus than circumspect.

Why, though, should we read this now? Well, there are several reasons, the main one being to re-balance the historical record to properly recognise women’s roles. There’s also the discussion about indigenous relationships in the colony, with Tucker chronicling the Macarthurs’ early good relations with local people followed by their changing attitudes as “their” land and livelihood began to be threatened. There’s John Macarthur’s mental health and the role it played in his behaviour (and thus history.) Did he suffer, for example, from bipolar disorder as Tucker and others suggest? And then, there’s the insight Tucker provides into the daily life of the early colony – the relationships in such a close community, the economic ups and downs, the communication challenges caused by distance from England, and so on. If you like social history, there’s much here for you.

I did laugh at Tucker’s concluding comments that Elizabeth Macarthur, born 9 years before Jane Austen, is “a real-life Elizabeth Bennet who married a Wickham, instead of a Darcy – albeit one who loved her as much as he was able.” I’m not sure I agree, but I applaud her for taking on the Austen fans of the world this way!

Meanwhile, for other bloggers’ reviews of this book, do check out Lisa’s (ANZLitLovers) and Bill’s (The Australian Legend).

AWW Badge 2018Michelle Scott Tucker
Elizabeth Macarthur: A life at the edge of the world
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018
xxxpp.
ISBN:

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Monday musings on Australian literature: New Territory 2018

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New Territory LogoLast year, some of you will remember, I was a mentor for the ACT Writers’ Centre ACT Lit-bloggers of the future program. It was great fun, and I really enjoyed working with Angharad and Emma over the six-months the program lasted. I wrote a couple of posts about the program, but if you’d like to refresh yourself, this one soon after it started would be a good place to start.

Well, it’s on again this year, but newly branded as New Territory: Adventures in Arts Writing, and with the Street Theatre joining the ACT Writers Centre and the National Library of Australia as program partners. The program, as last year, provides for two emerging ACT-region writers to attend events at the National Library of Australia, the Street Theatre and, in fact, the Canberra Writers Festival, and post their responses on the Writers Centre’s Capital Letters blog.

The ACT Writers Centre’s advertising of the program described it as follows:

[It] is a program that is committed to developing a deeper conversation about the arts: why we make art, how do we engage in art, and to what end? We aim to develop the arts writers, thinkers and provocateurs of the future.

In other words, the writers are encouraged to explore the arts in Canberra – and particularly the events offered by the partner organisations, which they can attend at no charge.

The two writers were chosen in June, and the program is now officially under way, so I’d like to introduce this year’s bloggers to you:

  • Amy (armchaircriticoz): like last year’s Angharad, Amy has a full-time job, and is developing her blog and critical writing skills on the side. Currently her blog roams across film, television, exhibitions, books and other topics that grab her fancy. Do check it out.
  • Siv Parker (On Dusk): and like last year’s Emma, Siv has some writing credentials behind her. Indeed, she won the  David Unaipon Award in 2012, and, in fact, I mentioned her twitter fiction piece in my post on the Writing back anthology last year. She is keen to rekindle her writing career, particularly in this arts writing area, and wants to explore how social media can be harnessed to this purpose. Check out her blog too.

I have asked Siv and Amy whether they’d like to write a guest post here during the program, as Emma did last year, and both seemed keen so you will hopefully see them here sometime in the not too distant future.

I will report back mid-program and point you to some of the work Amy and Siv have been doing, but meanwhile please do check out their blogs and Capital Letters (links above).

Until then, thanks again to the ACT Writers Centre, the NLA and the Street Theatre for sponsoring this program – and a special thanks to author Nigel Featherstone for overseeing this program and gently, encouragingly, shepherding us all through it. I am thrilled to be involved again. I loved getting to know, and spending time with, Angharad and Emma, and look forward to developing a similar relationship with Amy and Siv. Writers – of all sorts – are such fun to be around.

We’d love to hear if you know of any similar programs in your neck of the woods.

Randolph Stow, The merry-go-round in the sea (#BookReview)

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Randolph Stow, The merry-go-round in the sea

Randolph Stow is a writer I’ve been meaning to read for the longest time – since, would you believe, the 1970s? Embarrassing, really, given his significance. My plan had always been to read his Miles Franklin award-winning novel To the islands first. However, the first I actually bought was The merry-go-round in the sea – back in 2009 when it was re-released as a $10 Penguin classic. It’s taken me until now to read it – and I read it with my reading group, which made it an extra special experience.

BEWARE SPOILERS, albeit this is a classic with minimal plot so, you know …

The merry-go-round in the sea was Stow’s fourth novel, published in 1965 when he was 30 years old. It has a strong autobiographical basis, but is, by definition, fiction. It is essentially a coming-of-age story about a young Western Australian boy, Rob, who, like Stow, was born in Geraldton in 1935. It covers eight years of his life from 1941, when his favourite cousin, the 21-year-old Rick, leaves to fight in World War 2, to 1949, when Rob is 14-years-old and the now-returned Rick is about to leave again, this time to live in London. The plot is not a particularly dramatic one, but rather a lot happens nonetheless.

It all starts in 1941 with Rob and his family moving (“evacuating” is the strange word his mother uses) to a family station in the country, due to fears of Japanese invasion. There Rob enjoys the life of a “bush kid” and is unhappy to find, upon his return to town, that he is really a “townie”. Meanwhile, Rick is at war, ending up a POW on the Thai-Burma railway. His experience is told in three or four brief but vivid digressions from the narrative’s main focus on Rob’s life. We are told enough to prepare us for a changed Rick on his return. In the second part of the novel, the focus is on Rob’s growing up, on his gradual loss of childish innocence, and on Rick’s struggles to come to terms with his life after his experience of war. Nothing is the same for Rick, and Rob worries about his idol.

Now, this is a 400-page novel (in my edition, anyhow) and can be discussed from multiple perspectives, so I’m going to hone in on a couple that most interested me.

One of these is heralded by the book’s structure, by the fact that, although the protagonist, the person through whom we “see” most of the book, is young Rob, the book’s two parts are named for Rick, “1 Rick Away 1941-1945”, and “2 Rick Home 1945-1949.” Superficially, this can be explained by the fact that Rick is a major focus of Rob’s interest. However, I’d argue there’s something more here, that these two characters represent conflicting forces – a duality – within Randolph Stow himself, one being his love of place, of the land and country he grew up in, and the other being his discomfort with that same place and his need to get away, which indeed he did. This duality was, as I recollect, discussed by Gabrielle Carey in her book Moving among strangers: Randolph Stow and my family (my review).

So … through Rob’s third person eyes, Stow writes gloriously, authentically, about Geraldton and the surrounding areas in which he grew up. The language is lyrical, poetic, conveying an emotional intensity in addition to pure description:

By rock pools and creeks the delicate-petalled wild hibiscus opened, and the gold-dust of the wattles floated on water. Wild duck were about, and in trees and in fox-holes by water he looked for the nests, staring in at the grey-white eggs but touching nothing. Climbing a York gum, he was startled when a grey broken-off stump suddenly opened golden eyes at him. He gazed into the angry day-dazzled eyes of the nesting frogmouth and felt he had witnessed a metamorphosis.

There’s repetition of colours, plants, and landforms, but rather than becoming tedious they convey a deep familiarity with and love of place – and make the novel sing.

However, through Rick’s eyes – albeit eyes damaged by his war experience – we see a more conflicted, and arguably more adult, understanding of this place. At the end, he explains his decision to leave to Rob:

‘Look, kid,’ Rick said, ‘I’ve outgrown you…

[…]

‘I can’t stand,’ Rick said, ‘this – ah, this arrogant, mediocrity. The shoddiness and wowserism and the smug wild-boyos in the bars. And the unspeakable bloody boredom of being in a country that keeps up a sort of chorus. Relax, mate, relax, don’t make the place too hot. Relax, you bastard, before you get clobbered.’

Stow wasn’t the only intellectual to leave Australia in the 1960s. Others include Germaine Greer, Clive Robertson, Barry Humphries and Robert Hughes.

My other issue is trickier to discuss: it concerns Stow’s references to Indigenous people in the novel. It’s complicated to tease out, and to do so properly would require a re-read, but I can’t leave the novel without saying something about it, given our heightened awareness these days. As I’ve already said, the book was written in 1965 about the 1940s. In 1957, Stow had spent three months as a storeman at the Forrest River Aboriginal mission in the Kimberleys. His biographer, Suzanne Falkiner, argued (on ABC RN Late Night Live) that this experience created some conflict for him:

‘[His family] had achieved a lot: they had been colonists in America, in the West Indies, the earliest settlers in that region of Australia,’ she says. ‘But as he grew older and as he got to know Aborigines, having worked in the Forrest River mission, I think the conflict became a real source of pain for him.’

I believe that Stow tried to convey some of this in The merry-go-round in the sea. Several times, Rob quotes his family’s racist attitudes, including here:

Rob did not mind the blackn*****s, some of the older ones he rather admired. But his mother was furious because Nan [Rob’s sister] was sitting next to a blackn****r in school. ‘They’re dirty,’ said his mother. ‘They all have bugs in their hair.’

It was funny about blackn*****s. They were Australian. They were more Australian than Rob was, and he was fifth generation. And yet somehow they were not Australian. His world was not one world.*

In other parts of the novel, he describes seeing Aboriginal art in caves, and ponders the people who made them. Not all are so sensitive or interested, however. When he’s taunted at school with having “n****r blood”, he reacts defensively, but when he’s a little older, and schoolfriends once again express racist attitudes, he responds:

‘I like them,’ the boy said, ‘There’s some nice boong kids at school.’

A poor choice of words, but at least Rob stands up for his beliefs. If we take Rob as Stow’s mouthpiece, then it’s pretty clear that Stow is conveying in this novel some disquiet about prevailing attitudes to Australia’s Indigenous people.

There is so much more to explore in this book – including the motif of the merry-go-round itself. As a young boy Rob had been shattered by the discovery of “time and change”, leading him to cling to the idea of a merry-go-round, which revolves and revolves around a solid centre, his family, never changing. By the end, however, with Rick about to leave, he realises that this too is illusion, that the world is not quite as he’d seen it. A bittersweet ending – one that must come to us all at some time!

Several bloggers have posted on this novel in the last few years, including Lisa (ANZ Litlovers) and Kim (Reading Matters), and offer additional perspectives to mine.

Randolph Stow
The merry-go-round in the sea
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2009
400pp.
ISBN: 9780143202745

* I have blanked out this word to, hopefully, deflect the wrong sort of “hits” on this blog.

Monday musings on Australian literature: VerityLa

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I’ve mentioned the literary blog-cum-journal, VerityLa, a few times before here, partly because one of its founders is local writer, Nigel Featherstone. For those of you who haven’t come across it, however, it is, in its own words, “an on-line, no-way-for-profit, creative arts journal, publishing short fiction and poetry, cultural comment, photomedia, reviews, and interviews.” I have subscribed to it for some years now – it was established in 2010 – and have loved receiving in my email inbox its intriguing mix of content, from contributors both known and unknown to me. (My only complaint was that I wanted it to be like a “traditional” blog that I could comment on, as there were many times that I wanted to respond to the content.)

However, I was thrilled to receive an email last week announcing VeritaLa mark II, a stylish new website for the “journal” that significantly expands (and better organises) its content, including, the email, says, two new publishing streams:

  • Slot Machine (spoken word and performative text) curated by David Stavanger; and
  • Rogue State (bold nonfiction) edited by Kathryn Hummell

Overall, there are 14 streams, covering such areas as emerging indigenous writers, deaf and other disabled writers, travel writing, LGBTQI writers, visual artists, plus interviews and reviews. The full list as well as instructions on how to submit to the journal are available on their Submission Guidelines page. The excitement doesn’t stop with this expanded content, though. In other news on the same page, they announce that, due to financial support from Australia Council for the Arts, they will be paying, this year, $100 for each piece published (except for previously published book extracts). This amount, they say, is a “grand (in literary circles) sum.”

It just goes to show what can be achieved by plugging quietly away, gradually proving that what you are doing has value. That it does indeed have value is evidenced by the site’s being archived by the National Library of Australia’s Pandora, by its being comprehensively listed on the AustLit database (paywalled, though some content can be accessed free-of-charge), and by the archiving of selected pieces at Deakin Research Online.

The hunger

VerityLa Anthology 1, The HungerTo celebrate this new phase in its existence and “to recognise what’s been achieved” the VerityLa team has also produced its first anthology, chosen to reflect the journal’s diversity. Titled The hunger, it’s an eBook and costs only $10. A bargain, so I’ve bought it!

This anthology was edited by novelist and playwright Nigel Featherstone, poet and editor Michele Seminara, and poet and critic Robbie Coburn. It is described as follows:

Hunger is defined as an intense desire or craving. Artists published in Verity La crave a creative purity and truth, forging a place outside of what might be considered fashionable and publishable in the mainstream. The work appearing in this anthology is defined by the journal’s mantra, Be Brave: be hungry for your voice to be heard and to articulate your soul, no matter the cost.

It includes contributions from both well-known writers like Robyn Cadwallader, Leah Kaminsky, Wayne Macauley, Anna Spargo-Ryan, Prime Minister’s Literary Prize winner Melinda Smith. They also include indigenous contributors such as Graham Akhurst, Brenda Saunders and Teena McCarthy the Iranian poet and asylum-seeker Mohammad Ali Maleki, and many more. What the diverse group of contributors in this volume shows is the liveliness of the arts in Australia.

Now, I haven’t read it properly, yet, but dipping into it, I’ve been moved by, for example, Brenda Saunders’ poem, “Taxi!” about the ongoing racism experienced by people with black skins, and entertained by Kristen Roberts’ clever, cheeky piece “Urban alphabet”:

P is for toilets and sometimes behind trees, never for footpaths or front doors, and definitely never for faces. Not cool at all.

Q is for tickets, or the dunny at a good gig (see? Use the  toilets!). Not too sure about those people who sleep out the front of a shop the night before a new phone comes out though. I mean, it’s just a bit of technology that’s gonna be superseded by another one in a few months, yeah? My time is too valuable for that.

(from “Urban alphabet”)

“Be brave”, as the volume’s promotion says, is VerityLa’s mantra. And the pieces I’ve read so far certainly are – in content and/or in form.

So, if you haven’t checked out VerityLa before, now might be the time. You might even consider donating (as little as $5 is appreciated) to help them keep paying contributors, among other costs. Or you could buy The hunger (at the link above). At these prices, you can’t really lose!

Do you read on-line literary journals, and if so, which ones and why?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Grace Gibson

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Today’s post was inspired by a tweet, yesterday, from the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB). Using the hashtag #OTD (On This Day), they promoted their entry on Grace Gibson who was born on 17 June (in 1905.) Not only was that tweet a blast from my working-life past, but it also introduced an aspect of Australian literature that I haven’t really talked about here before, radio serials.

I am using “literature” here, of course, in its widest, or most generic, sense which, according to Wikipedia, includes “any body of written works.” Radio serials, of course, start with written scripts.

A brief bio

Zenith Console Radio, 1941

Zenith Console Radio, c. 1941, By Joe Haupt, USA [CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

So, Grace Gibson, for those of you who haven’t heard of her, was a radio executive producer, who was born in El Paso, Texas. While still young, she became a successful salesperson for the Radio Transcription Co. of America, and was noticed, in the early 1930s, by Sydney radio-station 2GB’s general manager, Alfred Bennett, who was visiting the USA. He invited her to help him establish and manage the company that later became Artransa Pty Ltd. They sold American recorded radio programs throughout Australia. However, in 1941, Gibson, on a buying trip to the USA, became stranded there when the country World War II.

She returned to Australia about  1944, and established her own company, Grace Gibson productions. Lynne Murphy, writing for the ADB, says

The ban on the importation of non-essential goods during the war was a boon for Australian-made products including radio programs, which were now locally produced and increasingly locally written.

So what Gibson did was to make her own productions using American scripts “with local actors as compères or narrators.” She sold these programs to radio stations around Australia. Gradually, the productions became more and more Australian. Here’s Murphy again:

Gibson was astute in her choice of drama directors who, in turn, cast good actors, resulting in high-quality, successful productions. Talented writers adapted the American scripts to local conditions and created original material when the American scripts ran out. They were encouraged to write their own serials—with some outstanding results such as Lindsay Hardy’s spy thrillers Dossier on Dumetrius, Deadly Nightshade and Twenty Six Hours.

By the mid 1950s, says Murphy, the company was producing thirty-two programs per week, and they were broadcast not only in Australia, but in New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong and Canada. The programs included evening programs,, Night Beat, and her “two flagship productions”, the daytime soap operas, Dr Paul (which ran from 1949 to 1971) and Portia Faces Life, about lawyer Portia Manning (which ran from 1954 to 1970.) Television eventually saw the end of the radio serial heyday, though Gibson claimed to be the last survivor among of the commercial studios. She wasn’t described as the “human dynamo” for nothing.

Maryanne Doyle, writing on the NFSA’s website, says:

Though Gibson concentrated on the sales side of the business, she could recognise a good script and was noted for her skill at spotting talent.

So, why have I included her here? She wasn’t a writer. However, her programs – together with programs from other studios and production companies – were important providers of stories to people before the days of television, and not just to housewives during the day, but to families at night, to shift workers, and so on.

Stories for Australians?

The question is, though, what stories? To answer this, I went to the National Film and Sound Archive website and, of course, to Trove’s digitised newspapers – and found an interesting story, that took us from the importation of American serials on physical discs, to the production of American scripts here using Australian cast and crew, to the production of scripts written by Australians.

There were various reasons behind this trajectory:

  • legislation: importation of transcriptions from the USA was banned in 1939.
  • political action: an article in The Mail in 1951, for example, notes that although there was no evidence of the importation ban being lifted, such programs were starting to come in again, perhaps via England. Actors’ Equity, the article said, was hostile and passing resolutions against the practice. The article says, though, that opinion was divided. Grace Gibson, it says, seemed to sympathise with the actors, but warned that “if the imports don’t stop soon she’ll be forced to join in the game, too, to protect her business.” On the other hand, the article reports that C.G. Scrymgeour, rep for Towers of London*, argued that “the influx of shows by people like Gracie Fields, Clive Brook, and Donald Peers, made and sold by his organisation, have raised the standard of Australian radio programs.”  The article writer concluded that “the policy of nothing but the best, irrespective of country of origin, sounds good to radio listeners. And an occasional English or American shows adds a welcome variety to our programs.” However, s/he realises that “some form of a quota does seem indicated — that is, if we want our actors to eat.”
  • popularity: some American serials were so popular that when the American scripts ran out – meaning I think that the serial in question had done its dash in the US – the stories were continued by Australian scriptwriters!

Interestingly, in all I read on this issue, the main concern seemed to be supporting the Australian industry – the writers, technicians, producers, and musicians who made their livings out of radio – rather than telling Australian stories for Australians. It confirms that old “cultural cringe” attitude in Australia. Who wanted our stories when you could have overseas ones!

Oh, and it sounds like Grace Gibson may have felt “forced to join in the game” because a 1954 Sydney Morning Herald report says that Grace Gibson Radio Productions was fined £200 for importing prohibited goods, though the Department of Trade and Customs “refused to reveal what the goods were or what their value was.”

Anyhow, Grace Gibson did also produce original Australian scripts, some even telling Australian stories (unlike the afore-mentioned Dossier on Dumetrius, which was an MI5 spy story.) One example is Cattleman which comprises 208 x 12-minute episodes:

He [the character Ben] is a kind of ideal Australian in his generosity, and his contempt for authority and affectation. Even his cattle duffing seems to be more an endearing failing than a serious crime. His life history, covering pioneering, marriage and wartime service is also true to the prototype of the ideal Australian. (Grace Gibson Productions website)

See, real Australian!

Are any of you old enough – or prepared to admit you are – to remember listening to radio serials?

* An independent, British radio production company.

Miles Franklin Award 2018 Shortlist

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Having posted this year’s Miles Franklin Award Longlist I decided I may as well keep on with it! After all, it is, probably, Australia’s most watched award. The shortlist was announced in Canberra tonight – not that I was invited!

Catherine McKinnon, StorylandHere is the list:

Some random observations:

  • Gerald Murnane, a neglected Australian author has made it through to the shortlist, which is great to see. Of being longlisted, he said he was “gratified”, because it was “a suitable reward for the hard task of writing the book.”
  • Two previous winners, Michelle de Kretser and Kim Scott, have made it through.
  • Recent winner of the Premier’s Award in the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Hornung, has also made the cut. Her novel The Last Garden has also been shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal. Hornung, who hasn’t been listed for the Miles Franklin, said of being longlisted that it felt “like a personal endorsement.”
  • McKinnon, who has been overlooked, to date, by other awards, has also been shortlisted – which is great to see because it’s an interesting book and a good read. She said about being longlisted that she was “Delighted, dizzy, honoured, thrilled.” What will she feel now!
  • Four of the six books are by women writers, and one is by an indigenous writer.

Judge Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian of the State Library of NSW, said, justifying the shortlisting in terms of Miles Franklin’s criteria:

The Miles Franklin 2018 shortlist engages with the complexities of Australian life in all of its phases, and the legacy of its timeless Indigenous past and its recent European present. All the novels explore how Australians connect with their complex stories, with their emotional histories, and with the legacy of colonisation. Each author in the shortlist considers what it means to live in a particular location, with unique and challenging vision. The vibrancy of contemporary Australian literature, and its relevance to thinking through the challenges of modern Australia, is confirmed with this diverse and intelligent shortlist.

The winner will take away $60,000, and each shortlisted order will receive $5,000 from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

The judges for this year are: Richard Neville (State Library of NSW),  Murray Waldren (journalist and columnist for The Australian), Dr Melinda Harvey (book critic), Lindy Jones (bookseller), and Susan Sheridan (Emeritus Professor in Humanities, Flinders University).

The winner will be announced in Melbourne on 26 August. I congratulate them all and wish them luck …

Is your favourite there? Do you want to make a prediction?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian literature in Australian schools

/ Whispering Gums / 28 Comments

As I was trawling my little collection of ideas for Monday Musings, I lit upon a paper by the late educator Annette Patterson titled “Australian literature: culture, identity and English teaching”. Bingo!  I had my answer, because it will contribute to a discussion I took part in on Guy Savage’s His futile preoccuptions blog. The discussion concerned the following statement in Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel The life to come: “It had been explained to Ash that the government funded the Centre of Australian Literature after a ministerial survey of humanities graduates found that 86 percent of English majors had never read an Australian book.”

Patterson’s article was published in JASAL (the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature) in 2012, so it’s reasonably up-to date. The article’s abstract describes says:

The development of the Australian Curriculum has reignited a debate about the role of Australian literature in the contexts of curricula and classrooms. A review of the mechanisms for promoting Australian literature including literary prizes, databases, surveys and texts included for study in senior English classrooms in New South Wales and Victoria provides a background for considering the purpose of Australian texts and the role of literature teachers in shaping students’ engagement with literature.

Patterson starts by arguing the importance of literature to cultural or national identity, stating that this link is expressly made by several of Australia’s major literary prizes. These awards, plus other indicators such as the growth in resources to support the teaching of Australian literature, demonstrate, she says, “the health of Australian literature”.

She then reports on a survey of Australian secondary teachers regarding the factors affecting their selection of Australian texts for teaching. A major factor was one of the main points I made on Guy’s blog: “the availability of the text in the school storeroom”! This was one of the reasons my son’s high school teacher gave me for teaching Steinbeck’s Of mice and men, and not an Australian book.

And then, interestingly, she provides an historical perspective on the teaching of Australian literature in Australian schools, pointing to concerns about the issue dating back to the late 19th century. She writes about the use of Royal Readers back then which included some reference to Australia but were, overall, firmly grounded in the northern hemisphere. She quotes an inspector of schools, H. Shelton, from 1891:

I have often wondered how the Wimmera farmers relish the statement in the Second Book [of the Royal Readers] that ‘it is a pleasant sight to see wild rabbits running over the fields.’ This lesson should either be struck out, or the other side of the picture be given for the benefit of young Australians.

Tara June Winch, Swallow the airMoving on in her paper, we get to discussions about texts being studied by senior secondary students in NSW and Victoria. I’m going to focus on prose fiction, though she includes non-fiction, poetry, plays and film. So, for example, of the five prose fiction texts set for the 2010 NSW Higher School Certificate, only one was by an Australian, Tara June Winch’s Swallow the air (my review). Things were better in those other forms I mentioned.

Patterson focuses her study, though, on Victoria. She tabulates the occurrence of Australian texts and directors listed for study for the Victorian Certificate of Education from 2001 to 2010. Again, I will focus on the prose fiction – listing those that appear three of more times in order of frequency:

  • Henry Lawson’s Short stories (4 times)
  • Tim Winton’s Minimum of two (short story collection) (4 times) and The riders (1 time)
  • Larissa Behrendt’s Home (4 times)
  • David Malouf’s Dream stuff (short story collection) (3 times) and Fly away Peter (1 time)
  • Christopher Koch’s The year of living dangerously (3 times)
  • Thomas Keneally’s The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (3 times)
  • Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro (3 times)

Hmm, a fascinating list. Not a bad one, but there’s not a good gender balance here, and there’s only one indigenous writer (who happens to also be the only woman!) It’s also interesting to see the preponderance of short story collections – and that the novels are mostly short ones. Does this mean students won’t read full novels?

Anyhow, Patterson concludes that the lists she presents provide clear evidence of the important place of Australian literature in school curricula, formally at least. But, quite rightly, she notes that being listed doesn’t mean the works are actually “taken up”. Through a process which she describes briefly, she identifies only one work of prose fiction on the most popular list for the period in question. It’s Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro (which, interestingly, “was voted one of the Top 40 Australian books of all time by members of the Australian Society of Authors”), although other works, including the films Lantana and Look both ways, also appear on the list.

Several prose works appeared on the least popular list:

  • Larissa Behrendt, HomeShane Maloney’s The brush-off
  • Amy Witting’s I for Isobel
  • Henry Lawson’s Short stories
  • Julia Leigh’s The hunter (though she may mean the film adaptation, she doesn’t clarify)
  • Thomas Keneally’s The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
  • Larissa Behrendt’s Home
  • Beverley Farmer’s Collected stories

Disappointing, but Patterson is encouraged because:

  • more Australian works appeared on the most popular lists later in the decade indicating a “positive shift”; and
  • “top scoring students appear to be working with Australian texts” – including Beverley Farmer’s Collected stories.

In the last part of the paper she discusses the value of including the study of literature, and particularly Australian literature, in the curriculum – and the theoretical underpinnings for the arguments. They are fascinating, and clearly presented. I loved, of course, her conclusion that

In teaching Australian literature, teachers do a great deal more than teach about the quality of language or the characteristics of a genre. English teachers teach techniques for living, ways of behaving and responding, building empathy, promoting tolerance and developing responses to texts that are considered appropriate within current social and cultural contexts.

She ends by returning to her study, and arguing for the value of undertaking ongoing research into text lists, and their use.

However, I’ll return to Guy’s blog discussion and say that Patterson’s paper reveals that Australian texts are being taught in Australian schools – and have been for a long time. However, whether all schools teach them, and whether all students in the schools that do actually “take them up”, is another question. There is, in other words, sure to be some truth in the statement in de Kretser’s book, but I sure hope it’s not 86%!

Elizabeth Jolley, Poppy seed and sesame rings (#Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

In her introduction to Learning to dance: Elizabeth Jolley, her life and work, a book that was intended to comprise only non-fiction to create a sort of autobiography, literary agent Carolyn Lurie wrote that Jolley would sometimes “draw so directly on her life” for her stories “that it seemed illuminating to include a small selection of her fiction.” From what I know of Jolley, this seems like a sensible decision.

For example, in “Poppy seed and sesame rings”, the first person narrator says:

I often heard Mother crying in the night. When I called out my father always explained in a soft voice, ‘She is homesick, that is all.’ So I always knew what was the matter.

Compare this with the opening piece in another compilation, Central mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on writing, her past and her self, which contains only non-fiction. The piece is titled “What sins to me unknown dipped me in ink”, and in it Jolley writes that “because of her marriage, my mother was an exile. I remember that her homesickness lasted throughout her life.”

Anna Gibbs, FrictionsHowever, before I discuss the story itself, a little about its background. Jolley, born in 1923, started writing novels and short stories very early in her life. Although her first book wasn’t published until 1976, she’d written her first novel around 1939, and had had short stories published by the 1960s. As far as I can tell from a list of her papers at the University of Western Australia, the story “Poppy seed and sesame rings” was written around 1965, and was initially titled “Pumpernickl, poppy seed and sesame rings”. So, it was an early story, and has been published at least three times, twice in anthologies and once in a collection of her stories, and has also been broadcast on radio:

  • Frictions: an anthology of fiction by women, edited by Anna Gibbs, Alison Tilson (1982) (contains three Jolley stories)
  • The Oxford book of Australian stories, edited by Michael Wilding (1994)
  • Fellow passengers: collected stories: Elizabeth Jolley, 1923-2007 (1997)
  • Read on BBC Radio 4, by Kerrie Fox, 26 Oct 1997

I wonder how many of Jolley’s other stories have had such exposure?

And now, the story. As I said above, it’s clearly autobiographically based, but of course that doesn’t mean that what happens in the story happened in real life. It simply means that the story’s broad outline and main themes draw from Jolley’s experience of being the daughter of an Austrian immigrant mother. In the story, the family, comprising her father, mother, aunt and grandmother, has migrated to the “New Country” from an unidentified Germanic country. In reality, Jolley was born in Birmingham to an English father and an Austrian immigrant mother.

The main theme of the book is the immigrant experience, and particularly the mother’s homesickness. Initially, the mother tries to make it work. She is generous with their shop’s customers in a desire “to be accepted”, and she feels supported by the company of her sister and mother. However, gradually things deteriorate. The sister and mother die; her daughter (our first-person narrator) leaves home for nurse training; she continues to miss her favourite foods like “poppy seed bread and sesame rings”; and the shop struggles to make a living so her help is not needed. Her life becomes a lonely one, spent largely “in the dingy room at the back.” She becomes more set in her old ways and attitudes while the daughter, finding her own way in the world, feels less and less inclined to visit. It’s a common story in migrant families.

There are other things in this story, though, besides these ideas of exile and loneliness, that give it the Jolley imprint. The story starts with the sudden death of the narrator’s aunt while the two are visiting an Art Gallery and Museum. The daughter describes her aunt’s death on the steps of the museum:

I tried to pull her from the step but she only sighed and, making no attempt to get up, she simply leaned forward and died. I ran straight home leaving her there with the pigeons and the coming darkness.

‘Tante Bertl wanted to walk,’ I told them so they did not expect her for a time.

This sort of shocking moral failure – plainly stated, and often never discovered – is not uncommon in Jolley, and reflects her acknowledgement of our darker natures. It’s part of the surprise of her work – and so at odds with her appearance! Such a sweet-looking, unassuming little old lady in a cardigan, she was!

There’s also a hint of lesbian attraction. The daughter brings a friend, Marion, home to cheer up her mother, a “friend” she “hardly knew” and “had chosen … because she looked healthy and very clean and the nearest one to speak to in the hospital administration department.” The visit goes badly, due to the mother’s refusal to be welcoming to the visitor. Afterwards, the daughter finds herself thinking about Marion:

Upstairs I sat at my table and tried to read and write and study but I kept writing Marion’s name everywhere.

I thought about her. I kept thinking about her without being able to do anything about it.

These thoughts cause her to digress from her nursing study to write from her heart “about quiet lakes and deep pools which have no reflection and no memory”, to express the “unknown store-house of feelings” she had found within herself. There’s a double whammy here, it seems – a discovery of attraction and also, perhaps, of the power of writing. No wonder this early story has had several outings.

Read for Lisa’s (ANZLitLovers) Elizabeth Jolley Week.

AWW Badge 2018Elizabeth Jolley
“Poppy seed and sesame rings”
in The Oxford book of Australia short stories (ed. Michael Wilding)
Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994
pp. 177-183
ISBN: 9780195536102