Australian literature

Carmel Bird (ed), The stolen children: Their stories (#BookReview)

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Carmel Bird, The stolen childrenCommenting on my post on Telling indigenous Australian stories, Australian author Carmel Bird mentioned her 1998 book The stolen children, describing it as her contribution “to the spreading of indigenous stories through the wider Australian culture”. It contains stories told to, and contained in the report of, the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Bringing them home)*. She offered to send me a copy, and of course I accepted (despite having read much about the Report at the time.)

Bird said in her comment that the book is “still regularly used in schools”. This is excellent to hear because it contains a history that needs to be told – forever, alongside all those other histories taught to Australian students. It needs to be as well (if not better) known by our students as the story of The Gold Rush or Our Explorers. We need to know it, we need, as a nation, to know our dark side, our failures, as well as our big adventures and achievements.

What makes this book particularly useful is Carmel Bird’s curation of it – and I would call what she’s done “curation” because of the complexity and variety of the writings she has gathered and organised. Bird has structured the book carefully to tell a story, with introductory front matter (including a preface from Ronald Wilson the National Committee’s prime commissioner); the Stories themselves; Perspectives from people at the time, including Hansard excerpts from politicians at the tabling of the Report; the Report’s Recommendations; and end matter comprising an Afterword from historian Henry Reynolds and a poem titled “Sorry” by Millicent whose story appears in the Stories section. Bird’s curation also  includes providing introductions to each of the stories to draw out important issues or points about that person’s situation, and adding other explanatory notes where appropriate.

This careful curation ensures that the book contains all the content and context it needs to stand alone as a resource for anyone interested in the Stolen Generations.

“It made no sense”

In her story, Donna says “It made no sense”. She’s describing her train trip away from her mother in the company of a white woman, a train trip she’d been initially excited about, thinking it was to be a family trip. However, with her mother staying behind on the platform and her brothers disappearing one by one as the journey went on, it just made no sense to her.

None of the stories make sense. And they are all heart-rending. Some children were given up willingly by their mothers, who believed it would result in better opportunities, and some, most, were stolen, often suddenly, with no explanation. Some were newborn, some pre-school or primary school-age, while others were 12 years old or more. Some found themselves in loving foster homes, but many found themselves in institutions and/or abusive situations. All, though, and this is the important thing, suffered extreme loss. They lost family and they lost language and culture. Fiona, for example, who will not criticise the missionaries who cared for her, says, on reconnecting with her family thirty-two years later:

I couldn’t communicate with my family because I had no way of communicating with them any longer. Once that language was taken away, we lost a part of that very soul. It meant our culture was gone, our family was gone, everything that was dear to us was gone.

Fiona also makes the point, as do several others, about the treatment of the mothers:

We talk about it from the point of view of our trauma but – our mother – to understand what she went through, I don’t think anyone can understand that.

The mothers, she said, “weren’t treated as people having feelings”.

The stories continue, telling of pain, pain and more pain. Murray says “we didn’t deserve life sentences, a sentence I still serve today”, and John talks of being a prisoner from when he was born. “Even today,” he writes, “they have our file number so we’re still prisoners you know. And we’ll always be prisoners while our files are in archives”. This is something that I, as a librarian/archivist, had not considered.

But, there’s more that makes no sense, and that’s the government of the time’s refusal to apologise, to satisfy, in fact, Recommendations 3 and 5a of the Report. This issue is covered in the Perspectives section, with extracts from speeches made by the then Prime Minister John Howard and the Minister for Aboriginal Torres Straight Islander Affairs Senator Herron who argue against making an apology, and from the Opposition Leader Kim Beazley and Labor Senator Rosemary Crowley, who made their own apologies. Crowley also says:

If ever there were a report to break the hearts of people, it is this one.

The Perspectives section also includes other commentary on the Report and the apology. There’s a letter to the editor from the son of a policeman who cried about his role in taking children away from “loving mothers and fathers”, and one from La Trobe Professor of History Marilyn Lake contesting the historical rationale for the practice of forcible removal. She argues that there had never been “consensus [about] the policy of child removal”. There’s also a long two-part article published in newspapers that year, from public intellectual Robert Manne. He picks apart the argument against making an apology, noting in particular Howard’s refusal to accept that present generations should be accountable or responsible for the actions of earlier ones. Manne differentiates between our role as individuals and as members of a nation:

we are all deeply implicated in the history of our nation. It is not as individuals but as members of the nation, the “imagined” community, that the present generation has indeed inherited a responsibility for this country’s past.

In the event, of course, an apology was made, finally, in February 2008, by Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. This, however, does not mitigate the value of Bird’s book. It has value, first, as documenting our history and the voices of those involved – indigenous people, politicians and commentators. And second, it contains thoughts and ideas that we still need to know and think about, not only for historical reasons, but because in the twenty years since the Report we have not made enough progress along the reconciliation path. It is shameful.

I loved Carmel Bird’s introduction. It’s both passionate and considered, and clearly lays out why she wanted to do this book. I’ll conclude with her words:

I think that perhaps imagination is one of the most important and powerful factors in the necessary process of reconciliation. If white Australian can begin to imagine what life has been like for many indigenous Australians over the last two-hundred years, they will have begun to understand and will be compelled to act. If we read these stories how can we not be shocked and moved …

“There can,” she says, “be no disbelief; these are true stories.” This is why the stolen generations should be a compulsory part of Australian history curricula (Recommendation 8a). It’s also why, to progress reconciliation, we should keep reading and listening to indigenous Australians. Only they know what they need.

aww2017 badgeCarmel Bird (ed)
The stolen children: Their stories
North Sydney: Random House, 1998
188pp.
ISBN: 9780091836894

(Review copy courtesy Carmel Bird)

* For non-Australians who may not know this Enquiry, its first term of reference was to “trace the past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence, and the effects of those laws, practices and policies”. You can read the full Report online.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest post from ACT Lit-blogger Emma Gibson

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With the ACT Lit-bloggers of the Future program in its closing months, I thought it would be lovely for you to hear directly from Emma and Angharad via a guest post, and they both agreed. First up is Emma  – and she chose to write about …

The great Australian writer you’ve (possibly) never heard of: Randolph Stow and Tourmaline

The sun is close here. If you look at Tourmaline, shade your eyes. It is a town of corrugated iron, and in the heat the corrugations shimmer and twine, strangely immaterial. This is hard to watch, and the glare of the stony ground is cruel.  The road ends here. – The Law, Tourmaline

Randolph Stow, TourmalineI was returning to Australia after two years of self-imposed exile when I first stumbled upon Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline.

It was July and I was spending a month writing poetry at an artist residency in Cadiz, Spain, an ancient city the shape of a fist that juts out into the Atlantic. I had chosen the location because it was almost as close to the antipodes as I could get – the actual antipodean point to Canberra is in the ocean – and because I’d spent my last two summers in Scotland or Iceland and wanted a taste of warmth before returning to Australia in August. I had forgotten heat. I was to discover that I did not miss it.

I did miss Australia, as reading Tourmaline made me realise. I read it twice in that month, hiding away from the afternoon sun, because the images it conjured up were so strong, even though it was not a part of Australia I knew.

Far from civilisation, the town of Tourmaline was once a prosperous gold mining settlement in Western Australia, where its potential for riches saw it imagined as having streets pathed with the very gold taken from the earth. It was, as Gabrielle Carey describes in her introduction to the new edition of the novel, ‘a colonisers fantasy’ until the gold was exhausted, and so too the water.

The book is narrated by the Law, the ageing sheriff of the town who lives in the crumbling gaol tower and fears his irrelevance. Now, he is little more than a bystander, who has appointed himself as the memory keeper for the town. It is his testament we read, although it may not be reliable, as his recollections are tinted by nostalgia, memories of rains that the younger generation have never known.

I have seen rain in Tourmaline. Can you believe that? How can you? You have not seen that green, that green like burning, that covers all the stones on the red earth, and glows, gently, upward, till the grey-green leaves of the myall are drab no longer, but green as the grass, washed in reflected light.

Stow writes in his author’s note that the novel is to be imagined as taking place in the future.

Something has happened in the outside world, something that has changed civilisation forever. The town’s war memorial plays host to an annual event that bears resemblance to an ANZAC day service, where the Law delivers the same sermon each year. Outside, where “wild beasts are loose upon the world”, Tourmaline has been forgotten in its isolation, thought long-buried by the drifting red sands that claimed the nearby settlement of Lacey’s Find. No one comes to Tourmaline, and no one in recent memory has left; those who did leave never returned. The exception is the monthly supply truck, and its arrivals are a town event.

Among those assembled for the truck one month are town publican Kestrel, Deborah, his young Aboriginal de facto, Deborah’s adopted parents, Mary and Tom, who run the town’s only store and Byrne, the acne-scarred drunk troubadour and Kestrel’s cousin. As well as the supplies, they are delivered a near-dead man, found fifty miles down the road. Deborah, Mary and Byrne nurse the man back to health. When the stranger recovers, he introduces himself as Michael Random and claims to be a diviner. In his promise of water and gold for the town, he becomes a messiah for the people of Tourmaline – but is Random’s promise of salvation as much of a mirage as water in the desert?

Tourmaline was Randolph Stow’s fourth novel, published in 1963. Stow was a prodigious writer. By the time he was 30, he has published two poetry collections and five novels, as well as working at an Aboriginal community in the Kimberly, as an assistant anthropologist on the Trobriand Islands, and stints as an academic.

But it’s likely that Randolph Stow is the great Australian writer you’ve never heard of. I had never heard of Stow until I found Tourmaline, and as I raved about it to friends over the ensuing months, they hadn’t either, except for one who recalled reading The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea as a student in Geraldton, where the book is set. I became obsessed with learning more about the man and his life.

Stow won the Patrick White Award and the Miles Franklin Award, as well as a fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts (which he later terminated in a letter to Gough Whitlam). He was a contemporary of Patrick White’s and mates with Sidney Nolan, who designed some of the covers for his books.

Yet he is described as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’.

I wonder why this is. While it’s likely more complex, there are two reason I can see. One is that his work could be considered difficult. While others were writing social realism, Stow was instead interested in the symbolic, drawing on Taoism spiritualism in Tourmaline, which has been described as an ecological allegory. Patrick White himself professed that Tourmaline had “Come to grief in a lush labyrinth of poetic prose.” (Quoted by Bruce Bennet in Westerly 55:2, p. 152).

The other is that Stow himself was elusive. Always a solitary figure who had struggled with mental health issues and alcohol, he spent long periods travelling in the 1960s and then settled in England. Perhaps, in this exile to the home of his ancestors, was a reflection of a theme apparent in his work, of the tension around colonial identity and the impact of European settlement on Indigenous Australians.

After leaving Australia, Stow published few books, and over time, disappeared from our literary consciousness. When Stow died in 2010, most of his books were out of print in Australia – a forgotten relic like Tourmaline, perhaps, already thought long buried. But unlike his narrator in the novel, Stow need not fear lapsing into irrelevance. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in his novels and poetry.

In 2015, Text republished five of Stow’s novels as part of its Text Classics series. Gabrielle Carey’s Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family, was published in 2014 and Suzanne Falkiner’s comprehensive biography, Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, followed in 2016.

I hope then, that Stow’s work will find new readers.

***

About Emma Gibson

Emma is a writer and performance-maker here in Canberra. She’s particularly interested in writing about place (which of course appeals to me), and is currently studying a Masters of Creative Writing (Place Writing) with Manchester Metropolitan University.

Emma has written plays, some performed locally, such as Johnny Castellano is mine (Canberra Youth Theatre/Street Theatre), The Pyjama Girl (HotHouse Theatre), and Widowbird (The Street Theatre), and others performed internationally, including War Stories (24:7 Festival, Re:Play, Greater Manchester Fringe, Buxton Fringe), and Bloodletting (Bread and Roses Theatre, London).

Emma also writes prose, and has had short pieces published in the Skagastrond Review, Seizure, and Iceview. She has created a site-specific poetry installation in Spain, helped run an artist residency in Iceland, and made an audio walking tour around Garema Place for Canberra’s You Are Here Festival.

Her posts for the ACT Lit-bloggers program can be found here on the Capital Letters blog.

Thanks, Emma, for this first piece on Stow in my blog. I appreciate it! And now, Emma and I would love to hear what you know or love about Randolph Stow …

Monday musings on Australian literature: International Day of the Girl and adult Aussie fiction

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Kirst Krauth, Just a girlLast week, on October 11, was UN International Day of the Girl. Its aim was to focus “attention on the need to address the challenges girls face and to promote girls’ empowerment and the fulfilment of their human rights”. More than that, the day, says the UN, also marked “the beginning of a year-long effort to spur global attention and action to the challenges and opportunities girls face before, during, and after crises.”

With literature being such an important part of how many of us learn about the world, my thoughts turned to books about girls – not to pure-YA, which is not my area of interest, but to literary fiction for adults. Adult readers can be, I know, suspicious of books with child protagonists, but there are reasons for reading them – and the International Day of the Girl encapsulates many of them.

Child protagonists in adult fiction

So, what differentiates, say, a YA novel with a teenage protagonist from an adult novel with such a protagonist? Well I suggest it’s largely to do with intention. YA (and children’s) literature centres on young people’s lives – on their thoughts, their activities, their relationships with each other, and their needs. The intention of these books tends to be young people learning about themselves and the world they live in. In YA literature, this is usually about identity and/or coming of age. John Marsden’s Tomorrow, when the war began series is an obvious, if dramatic, Australian example.

However, adult literature featuring young protagonists is something quite different – though there are cross-overs. Nothing, when it comes to defining literature, is ever black and white. Quite coincidentally, two days after I started drafting this post, I went to an event in which Sofie Laguna was in conversation with Karen Viggers, and Sofie Laguna, as some of you know, has written adult novels with child protagonists. Naturally, the question of these protagonists came up. Laguna said that writing in a child’s voice – that is, a vulnerable voice – enables her to comment on the adult world in a more powerful way.

The child protagonist in an adult novel is (generalising here) the quintessential naive narrator. The child’s worldview – even if not exactly innocent – lacks the experience and knowledge of the adult’s, so readers will recognise that what the child sees is not necessarily how or why it is. In this way, the child narrator can throw new light on, force us to see another perspective on, whatever issues – psychological and/or societal – that they find themselves confronting.  By contrast, child protagonists in children’s literature would normally be taken at face value because they are speaking for and to a similar age-group to themselves. Would you agree? Or am I drawing a long bow?

Anyhow, the point of all this is to say that there is value in reading adult books with child protagonists, because they can both expose truths about children’s lives to adults as well as truths about adult lives. Hence, this post.

Now, because this post is in my Monday Musings series and was inspired by the International Day of the Girl, my examples will be confined to adult Australian books featuring girl protagonists. The more I thought about this topic, the more examples came to me, so I had to keep it manageable. I have therefore decided to focus on contemporary examples set in contemporary times. This means excluding novels written in the past and/or historical fiction about a past, such as Emily Bitto’s The strays, Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Ruby Moonlight, Barbara Hanrahan’s The scent of Eucalyptus, Henry Handel Richardson’s The getting of wisdom, Madeleine St John’s The women in black and Christina Stead’s The man who loved children.

Tara June Winch, Swallow the airAlso, I’ve decided to include memoirs in my list because they make a significant contribution to teaching us about the lives of girls. So, my small, but hopefully varied, selection (in alphabetical order by author):

  • Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The hate race (my review): a memoir about Clarke’s growing up as an Australian-born girl of West Indian parents, and the ferocious racism she faced in the Western suburbs of Sydney.
  • Brooke Davis’ Lost & found (my review): novel with three protagonists, one of whom is a seven-year-old girl whose father dies and mother abandons her, and who sets off on a journey to find her mother.
  • Tegan Bennett Daylight’s Six bedrooms (my review): short story collection, mostly featuring young women from teens to twenties, dealing with outsiderness, lack of confidence, loss, sexual maturation.
  • Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Too afraid to cry (my review): memoir about Eckermann’s growing up as an indigenous child with loving but non-indigenous parents, and the trauma she suffered by being dislocated from her culture while being ostracised (and worse) because of it.
  • Kate Holden’s In my skin (read before blogging): memoir of an adolescent (and early twenties) girl who, uncertain, unconfident, ends up with a drug habit that leads her into prostitution.
  • Kirsten Krauth, just_a_girl (my review): novel about a sexually precocious and internet-active young adolescent girl who’s more confident than her experience supports, and who gets herself into some tricky situations.
  • Rochelle Siemienowicz’s Fallen (my review): memoir, that had its origins in a novel, about a sexually precocious girl and young woman coping with a strict religious upbringing.
  • Tara June Winch, Swallow the air (my review): novel about a young indigenous Australian girl who, having suffered many losses, takes a journey to find her origins and herself.

I have been necessarily brief and therefore a bit simplistic in my descriptions of these books, but hopefully they give a sense of what such books offer to someone who’s interested in learning about girls and the challenges they face – from racism and cultural dislocation through family dysfunction and loss to coping with identity and sexual maturation. In some cases, the issues are not gender-significant, but in most, being female contributes an additional element to the challenges faced, which makes them particularly relevant to UN’s International Day of the Girl.

And now, I’ve love to hear your thoughts about young protagonists in adult books, and/or your suggestions for titles. Yours can be Australian or otherwise, but let’s keep the protagonists female.

Sofie Laguna in conversation with Karen Viggers

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Sofie Laguna and Karen VIggers

Sofie Laguna and Karen Viggers

What a treat it was to witness a conversation between two lively, intelligent Australian women writers in the company of other writers. I mean, as you can see from the post title, Miles-Franklin award-winning author Sofie Laguna and local writer Karen Viggers whose book The lighthousekeeper’s wife has just hit 500,000 copies sold in France!

I must say that I felt a bit like an interloper, given the event was organised by the ACT Writers Centre in their “Developing Writers and their Work” program, but I did enjoy eavesdropping on what writers talk about and want to know!

“I wasn’t ready to win”

The evening started with Sofie (I’m going to use first names) reading from the second chapter of her new book, The choke. Then we got down to business, starting with how Sofie handled her Miles Franklin win for The eye of the sheep (a book which still sits on the pile next to my bed, I’m afraid.) She had a new baby at the time and wasn’t expecting to win. She felt out of her depth. She had no speech prepared, and was suddenly surrounded by media and the press. It was both too much and something you want, she said. However, she felt the prize would be positive for many years to come, and said it made her feel her work was now validated by the literary establishment.

Karen Viggers, The lighthouse keepers wifeKaren then asked her about her experience as a woman in the industry, but Sofie turned this back on Karen – as she did several times during the conversation! Karen, though, was up for the challenge. She commented that she did feel her gender has impacted her career, including such things as the covers of her books.

Sofie agreed that she works in an unfair world, and that women get less attention. She talked about dealing with practical demands of winning the prize and managing a baby. It helps, she said, to trust your instincts. However, “you still have to empty the dishwasher every day”. That got a rueful laugh from many!

“Character IS the plot”

Sofie Laguna, The chokeMany times during the interview, Sofie returned to character. It’s clearly what she writes for, and about.

Karen asked her how she “found” Justine’s voice, the 10-year-old girl living on the Murray with her war-damaged grandfather in The choke. Sofie referred to her training as an actor, and how actors discover that some characters are easier to inhabit than others; she finds young voices easy. Young protagonists, she said, can have a fresh view on the world. Moreover, the more vulnerable voice of child characters frees her to comment on the adult world in a more powerful way.

Sofie then talked about Justine’s Pop. He’s narcissistic. He cares about Justine, albeit not necessarily as he should or could. She admitted that yes, he was another damaged character, but that seeing him that way was too simplistic. Many of us, she said, are damaged in some way. It was clear that she felt there’d been too much focus in interviews on “damage”!

Nonetheless, Karen commented, Sofie did write demanding books, to which Sofie responded that she’d grown up with war-caused loss and damage in her family, something she hadn’t talked about before.

The conversation then returned to Justine, who is dyslexic and generally powerless. Karen asked whether there were ways in which Justine was powerful. Sofie said that while Justine’s in a difficult world, she has the power – can choose – to respond in positive ways. She’s able to form connections. Unlike Pop, she’s not self-absorbed, and can enter other people’s worlds, can empathise. Sofie believes there’s much positivity in the book.

Sofie said that it’s the characters and the tensions between and within them that drive the narrative.

Later, when asked whether her books are character- or plot-driven, whether the plot fits the character or vice versa, she said that character IS the plot.

Place

While character is Sofie’s focus, Karen noted that place is significant in the novel. Sofie described how the Murray River and the Barmah Choke inspired her setting. She said the Murray is brown and gritty which works metaphorically in her story. The choke is where the river becomes narrower. Trees in the choke may look like they’re dying, but they don’t die, they keep growing, which makes a lesson for Justine.

Hope

Sofie believes that hope is important. She quoted a writer’s adage, which is that you want readers thinking:

“I fear she won’t, but I hope she will”

Writing to this tension keeps readers reading. (I love this, and will try to remember it.)

Around here, the issue of writing about disadvantage came up. Sofie said that people living disadvantaged lives often find themselves in self-destructive patterns. And yet, like the women in her book who don’t have much power, they can find ways to survive. However, she said, her subject is the richness of world, not specifically poverty and disadvantage. Her stories would not work if she decided to write about disadvantage. She sees her job as being to endow world with life not to be a spokesperson for marginalisation. Anyhow, privilege doesn’t save people from suicide, crime, etc, she argued.

The writing process

Given that the session’s focus was “developing writers”, Karen concluded by turning to the writing process. A lesser interviewer would have been flummoxed at this point when Sofie responded that she had “no answers for questions about how she does it”. But, of course, she did have answers, and she shared them. She:

  • plunges in with a plan
  • writes millions of drafts
  • doesn’t always write from beginning to end, and sometimes stops when she has more to say which can make it easier to start next sitting
  • has found that, with experience, writing has got faster over the years
  • knows her character’s “soul”, but the rest she gets to know as she writes. She noted that initially she found it hard to differentiate Justine from The eye of the sheep’s Jimmy, but Justine’s character developed as she kept writing
  • prefers one-person to multi-person narratives
  • doesn’t choose to write for a specific audience (i.e. young people or adults) but writes for character, and the audience falls into place
  • likes to have some time and space between books (partly because of the promotion she needs to undertake for the most recent book)

It felt at times that Sofie was discovering more about her book as she discussed it with Karen. Her excitement and Karen’s flexibility in going with it made the conversation fun and engaging. It was one of the liveliest I’ve been to, and we all laughed when Sofie said that she wasn’t like this at the breakfast table! I’m glad I decided to go.

Ellen van Neerven (ed.), Writing black (#BookReview)

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Writing black: New indigenous writing from Australia is one of the productions supported by the Queensland Writers Centre’s if:book that I wrote about in a recent Monday Musings. It’s an interactive e-book created using Apple’s iBooks platform, and can be downloaded free-of-charge via the if:book page or directly from iBooks.

Title page for Ch. 16, Sylvia Nakachi

Ch. 16, Sylvia Nakachi (Using fair dealing provisions for purposes of review)

Writing black was edited (and commissioned) by Ellen van Neerven (whose book Heat and light and story “Sweetest thing”, I’ve reviewed here). It contains works by 20 writers, in a variety of forms, including prose by writers like Bruce Pascoe, Tony Birch, and Marie Munkara; poetry by Tara June Winch, Lionel Fogarty, Kerry Reed-Gilbert and Steven Oliver (most of which are presented in both text and video); and twitter-fiction by Siv Parker. For each writer, there is a “title” page which provides a brief biography, and the works are illustrated with gorgeous sepia-toned photography by Jo-Anne Driessens.

In her editor’s introduction, van Neerven states that, by the time of publication, there had not been a “digital-only anthology of Australian indigenous writing”. This book addresses that gap, but with a very particular goal. It was, she writes, “moulded by possibility”, by the fact that “the multimedia and enhancements a digital publication allows lifts the imagination”. Certainly, we see some of these possibilities in this production.

Her point, though, that particularly interested me was this:

Expectations of what we write about are changing, no longer the narrow restriction of life stories and poetry. Indeed, Indigenous writers do not need to write about Indigenous issues at all, if they choose not to. With more Indigenous books and authors comes a new generation of readers — open-minded to what Indigenous writers can write about, and across new forms and experiences.

Great point – just as it’s important that we see indigenous people on television and in movies, for example, without their indigeneity needing to be referenced or be part of the story. Anyhow, we see this broadening of content in Writing black – in Jane Harrison’s “Born, still”, for example – although, not surprisingly and completely understandably, given where we are on the reconciliation journey, many of pieces do have political intent.

This brings me to one of the appealing aspect of this production, which is its variety, not only in form as I’ve already mentioned, but in tone and content. The pieces span moods from the intensity of Tara June Winch (“Moon”) to the cheeky humour of Marie Munkara (“Trixie”), from the anger of Kerry Reed-Gilbert (“Talking up to the white woman”) and the frustration of Steven Oliver (“You can’t be black”) to the melancholy of Bruce Pascoe’s (“A letter to Barry”). Many of the pieces speak to loss of country and identity, and the emotional impact of these. What makes them particularly powerful is that they come from all over, from the tropical north to country Victoria to various urban settings.

Another appealing thing, which stems from its being an e-Book, is that we can hear poets perform their own work, as well as read the text ourselves. One of these is the new-to-me Steven Oliver. He has four poems in the collection – “Real”, “You can’t be black”, “Diversified identity” and “I’m a black fella” – with video of him reading each of them. He (or his poetic persona) is an urban dweller who regularly confronts questions concerning his indigenous identity. In “Real” he describes a discussion with another who refuses to accept he’s “black”, who produces those crass arguments like he’s “more of a brown” and “not really a full”, but who suddenly turns when our poet responds that his English name suggests he’s not “from here”. Oliver writes:

Listen here Abo, you know-it-all coon
It seemed that my friend has spoken too soon
Just moments ago I was not the real thing
Yet now by his words my heritage clings

This is a long-ish poem, but is accessible. Its use of rhyming couplets provides a light touch that keeps the reader engaged while the actual words drive home a serious point about Aboriginal identity. I hope it’s taught in schools.

Another poem of his, “You can’t be black”, also addresses assumptions others make about what being Aboriginal is:

You can’t be black
When the media shows Aborigines they live on communities
And struggle with petrol, poverty and disease
So you can’t be black
If you’re black you wouldn’t have nice clothes on your back.

Oliver’s poems are made to be performed, as are those of the next poet Kerry Reed-Gilbert.

She also comes out fighting, with five poems. She writes of being in a bar, waiting for the racist slurs (“A conversation and a beer”), or of being exploited by people who only want to know her to further their own aims (“Talking up to the white woman”). She speaks in the voice of a white racist in “Because my mum said so” to show how racism is learnt through families. This is a particular concern of mine. I’ve seen schools trying their hardest to teach tolerance and respect – but that role-modelling at home is mighty powerful stuff.

Another well-established poet who has been politically active for decades is Lionel Fogarty. His two poems in this collection focus more on caring for country, on sharing the land, on passing knowledge on.

The prose pieces are, overall, more diverse. There’s Tristan Savage’s cheeky short film script, “Gubbament man” about Freddy the indigenous “discrimination prevention officer”. Siv Parker’s twitter-fiction piece “Maisie May” was originally released as tweets over several hours on, note, 26th January, in 2014. It tells of a trip to country for the funeral of Aunty Maisie May who “could tell you about country and our ways that we lost over the years.” Marie Munkara is here too with her particular brand of humour to tell about “Trixie” who takes revenge on her ex. There’s also Tony Birch whose “Deep rock” clearly draws from (or fed into) his novel Ghost River (my review). And there’s David Curtis whose “What kind dreaming” tells of three young indigenous men, two already becoming familiar with the life and law of their country and the other a greenhorn from the city, who go bush. Our greenhorn soon learns a few things from the other two, who respect “them old people”.

In an interview in Sydney Review of Books, Ellen van Neerven comments briefly on why she wanted to do this “digital collection”:

For me it’s as much about audience and access. There is a really hungry international audience for Indigenous writing but also lots of roadblocks in getting the books out there. Being able to access work online is definitely an advantage and we’ve had a lot of feedback and contact from people overseas who have been able to find out about Indigenous writing and read content from 20 different authors that way.

And that’s exactly it. This oh-so-rich collection introduces readers to many of Australia’s current significant indigenous writers, not to mention the range of issues that interest them. And it’s free to download. That we should be so lucky! A big thanks to if:book and the Queensland Writers Centre for supporting such innovative and sophisticated projects as this one.

aww2017 badgeEllen van Neerven (ed.)
Writing black: New indigenous writing from Australia
State Library of Queensland, 2014
133pp.
ISBN: 9780975803059

Monday musings on Australian literature: Grateful Brits send books to Aussies

/ Whispering Gums / 31 Comments

As I was searching Trove for another topic, I came across some articles that I just had to share, particularly given my recent posts on bookswapping and bookselling for charity.

These articles date from post-World War 2 when Britain was living under strict rationing, which continued for a long time – until 1954, in fact. To help the struggling Brits out, Australians – often through CWA (Country Women’s Association) groups – sent food parcels. The British people were very grateful, as an article from the Molong Express and Western District Advertiser (Wednesday 14 January 1948) conveys. Molong, a small town in central New South Wales, was one of the many towns to send food across the waves, and in this article, the editor writes that “almost daily, the Town Clerk (Mr. E. H. Scott) receives letters of appreciation from British people for gifts of food from the Molong municipality. The writers range from all walks of life — from hospital matrons to mayors and old age pensioners.”

Mr Scott, he continues, provided some of these letters for the paper to publish. Here’s a selection:

I wish to thank you and the residents of Molong for the generous gifts of food to our people. I wish you could have seen the gratitude of the old people  … Some of them could not express their thanks for tears, but so many said “Thank the dear people of Australia for me.” …  Mayor of Blackburn

AND

We thought it was really very kind of you to send us such wonderful food parcels, and, although we know that you have been thanked by the authorities here in England, we felt obliged to send you a personal letter of thanks. To people like us who have only one ration book, it is a little difficult at times, although, of course, we are not grumbling. We thank you very much for your kindness …

AND

We have today received at the hospital … a gift of tinned jams, marmalade and tinned rabbit from Australia … I felt that I must write, and tell you just what that thought means, for us. Not only are we extremely grateful for your kindness, but the thought and spirit behind the gift means perhaps more to us when we think that you, so many miles away, have spared such a lot of time and have given, so much that we may share the good things of your country. I am afraid it is beyond my powers of expression to make you realise exactly what we feel, but I do want you all to accept our most sincere and grateful thanks. With all good wishes and much happiness to you all, I remain, yours sincerely  … Matron, Liverpool.

AND

I have just been presented with two tins of jam, one tin of powdered soup, one tin of casserole rabbit and 2 lb. of dried pears, being a present from you … there is no name on the tins to go by, only “From the residents of Molong, N.S.W.” I address this letter to thank you very much … Hardly a week passes without a cut in our food ration, and a little extra food is very welcome. The extra food is for my wife and myself — both old age pensioners … may God bless you …

I guess it’s only right that we sent back to England some of those pesky rabbits! Seriously though, what wonderful letters. They would surely have encouraged continued kindness from the citizens of Molong. (And doesn’t your heart go to Eva Wood who says, “Of course, we are not grumbling”?)

That’s the background to this post!

“Book parcels for food”

Early on in this process of Australians sending food to Britain, the British wanted to reciprocate in some way. As London-based R. G. Lloyd Thomas wrote in The West Australian (7 September 1946):

For long the people of Britain have been rather worried by the one-sided traffic in gifts from Australia. They have received very gratefully enormous quantities of food parcels and found no tangible method of appreciation which would satisfy their independent spirit.

Book Stack

(Courtesy: OCAL, from clker.com)

But then, the “Women’s Institute, the equivalent in this country of the C.W.A.” lit upon an idea, that of reciprocating with parcels of books for distribution “to the people of the outback and the nearer but still amenity-remote areas which lack public libraries, and find it difficult to obtain an adequate supply of books”. What a wonderful idea, eh?

Not all the books would be new, Thomas writes:

Collections are being made of books regarded as suitable, some new, some from the bookshelves of the donors, and others purchased secondhand. They are being cleaned and repaired when necessary and made up into parcels which will be sent to the people and organisations who have been sending gift food parcels to Britain. The first consignment of books to Western Australia will be sent from Lancashire and Yorkshire Women’s Institutes.

An article in The Sydney Morning Herald (27 July 1946), describes the geographical arrangements a little more: “the Yorkshire and Lancashire institutes will send books to Western Australia, South Wales to New South Wales. Cheshire and Staffordshire to South Australia, Cambridgeshire and adjoining counties to Tasmania, Surrey and Middlesex to Queensland, and Essex and Bucks to Victoria”.

Lloyd Thomas, noting that “one of the few things here off the ration is books”, says that the women hope to reach every person and organisation responsible for sending food parcels. He comments on “the joy and humiliation these food parcels have brought to the women of England”, and that

the naturally proud independence of the people has been disturbed by the one-sidedness of the gesture. The majority could and would willingly pay for the parcels – but to do so would destroy the fundamental requirement of admission of these parcels, that they are unsolicited gifts.

These books, he says, will have special bookplates which will identify the donor and recipient, and it is hoped that the books will “form a valuable link of friendship between Britain, the Dominions and the Colonies who have shown such a spontaneous and generous attitude.”

Interestingly, Lloyd Thomas concludes by noting that while the food recipients are too grateful to offer suggestions, certain items are particularly appreciated:

Rich fruit cakes travel well in tins and provide an exceptional luxury these days. Tinned meats and milk are always welcome and (provided it is packed only with tinned food) soap of any sort. Jam (with special emphasis on marmalade) is a much-appreciated supplement, and, if Australians themselves can obtain any, tinned fruit. Dried fruits, sweets and nuts are welcome rarities. In fact, outside coffee (plentiful and unrationed) tinned soups and meat extracts, any foodstuff is welcome. Honey and dripping, provided they are melted into tins to ensure transport through the tropics, are other precious commodities for the English housewife.

Such a lovely insight not only into rationing, but also the food and cooking culture of the time. I mean, dripping! (But this just shows my fortunate life, doesn’t it?)

I apologise for the heavy use of quotations in this post, but in stories like this, there’s nothing like the expression of the times. Anyhow, I’d love to know how successful this reciprocal program was …

Catherine McKinnon, Storyland (#BookReview)

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Catherine McKinnon, StorylandIt is still somewhat controversial for non-indigenous Australian authors to include indigenous characters and concerns in their fiction, as Catherine McKinnon does in Storyland. But there are good arguments for their doing so. One is that not including indigenous characters continues the dispossession that started with white settlement. Another is that such fiction brings indigenous characters and stories to people who may not read indigenous authors, which is surely a good thing?

However, such writing requires sensitivity, or empathy, on the part of non-indigenous writers. Indigenous author, Jeanine Leane says that this can only be achieved by social and cultural immersion (which can include informed reading of indigenous writing). McKinnon addresses this in a couple of ways. In her author’s note, she refers to discussing “stories and ownership” with local Illawarra region poet and elder, Aunty Barbara Nicholson, which resulted, for example, in her telling a brutal story from the convict perpetrator’s point of view rather than from the indigenous victim’s. She also acknowledges Nicholson “for reading, local knowledge and generous advice both early on in the process and nearing completion”. But now let’s get to the reason for all this …

Storyland is set in the Illawarra region south of Sydney, and tells the story of the Australian continent, post-white settlement, from 1796 to 2717. It has a nine-part narrative arc that takes us through five characters and six time periods: Will Martin 1796, Hawker 1822, Lola 1900, Bel 1998, and Nada 2033 and 2717. These form the first five parts of the novel. The final four parts return through Bel, Lola, Hawker, finishing with Will Martin, each picking up its character’s story where it had been left first time around. Got it? Two of these characters – Will and Hawker – are based on historical figures, while the rest are fictional.

… a tricksy plot

Will’s employer, the explorer George Bass, says early on that “the land is a book, waiting to be read”, and this, essentially, is what the book’s about. Will is a 15-year-old who sailed with Flinders and Bass in 1796 on their search for a river south of Sydney. On their trip they meet “Indians” whom they fear might be cannibals. We leave them at a nervous moment in their encounter to move to 1822 where we meet the convict Hawker. He’s a hard man, who believes you need “a mind like flint and a gristly intent”. He has his eye on a young indigenous woman, but also on improving his future. From him, we jump again, this time to 1900 and young hardworking dairy-farmer Lola who lives with her half-sister and brother Mary and Abe, both of whom have indigenous blood. There is racism afoot, with a neighbouring farmer suspicious of Abe’s friendship with his teenage daughter Jewell. We leave this story, with Jewell having gone missing, to meet Bel in 1998.

Bel, the youngest of our protagonists at 10 years old, spends her summer rafting with two neighbourhood boys on a lagoon that features in each of the stories. They befriend a couple, Ned and his indigenous girlfriend Kristie. Bel is a naive narrator, but adult readers quickly see the violence at the centre of this relationship. Meanwhile, down the road lives the slightly younger Nada, who is the pinnacle of our chronological arc, featuring in 2033 and 2717. In 2033, climate change has created havoc in the land, and a dystopia is playing out …

Country and connection

I hope this doesn’t sound too confusing – or fragmented – because in fact Storyland is a very accessible book. Superficially, it seems disjointed, but McKinnon connects the stories through links that gradually register as the narrative progresses. For example, the transitions between each story all feature birds, such as this one from Hawker to Lola:

The women are disappearing into the forest. And then they are gone. Lost in the dark trees. An owl

Lola
1900

calling boo-book, boo-book.

(My html skills aren’t up to replicating the layout I’m afraid.) Other links include the aforementioned lagoon, a creek, a cave which most characters reference, a big old fig tree and an ancient stone-axe. None of these are forced, or feel out of place. Instead these places and objects naturally connect the stories, despite their very different narratives, to provide a continuity that transcends the people to focus on the land itself – because, ultimately, this is a story about the land and our ongoing relationship with it.

McKinnon, the author bio says, has been a theatre director and playwright, as well as a prose writer. This is evident in the voices (all first person) and dialogue which beautifully capture the rhythms, vocabulary and grammar of the different characters and their times. Will Martin talks of “Indians”, Hawker talks of “forest”, while turn-of-the-century farmer Lola uses structures like “Jewell and me carry buckets of skimmed milk” and “When he were done”. Ten-year-old Bel is language-proficient, with a good vocabulary, but she sees things through a ten-year-old’s eyes, such as this on the abused Kristie, who “has her big black sunglasses on” and “looks funny, her lips look bigger or something”.  (In a delightful in-joke, her father Jonathan is writing his PhD on unreliable narrators).

The real star of the novel, though, is the land. McKinnon traces its trajectory from an almost pristine state at the dawn of colonisation through being farmed by Hawker and Lola to climate-change-caused destruction in 2033 followed much later by a mysterious post-apocalyptic world. She similarly traces our relationship with indigenous people from early caution, uncertainty and tentative goodwill, through 19th century brutality and ongoing dispossession, to the continuing racism and exploitation of the twentieth century.

The question to ask here is why did McKinnon structure the story the way she did, starting and ending with 1796? Here is Will at the end, exploring a beach on his own:

The white sand curves around the land; the dunes in the late night are dark mountains and valleys; the forest behind is thick and green to the sky. This is a wild place. Too wild for civilisation. It is a place for adventure.

And “the water is fresh” to drink! Is McKinnon, by ending with this more idyllic picture of the land, suggesting that there’s still hope? This is how it was, this is what could happen. Does it have to? Can we yet turn it around? Well, yes, perhaps. As Uncle Ray says to Bel, “it’s our job to look after all this land around here. If we don’t, bad things can happen.”

“To dare is to do”, George Bass tells Will, and this is what McKinnon has done in Storyland. She has combined historical, contemporary and speculative fiction to tell us a story about our land – and our relationship with it and with the people who know it best. This land, these mountains, creeks, lagoons and trees, were here first, Uncle Ray says, and this makes us “part of their history, not the other way around.” The message is clear.

Storyland is a beautiful book physically – in cover, design and construction – as well as being a moving and relevant read. I dare you to read it today.

Bloggers Lisa (ANZlitLovers) and Bill (The Australian Legend) liked this book too.

aww2017 badgeCatherine McKinnon
Storyland
Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2017
382pp.
ISBN: 9781460752326

(Review copy courtesy HarperCollins Publishers)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Queensland Writers Centre

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Today’s Monday Musings is the fourth in my little series on our writers centres, and it’s to Queensland I’m turning this time, partly because next month GenreCon will be held at the State Library of Queensland. But, more on that later in the post. First, I’ll introduce the Centre.

The Queensland Writers Centre was founded in 1990, as a membership organisation, with “the aim of nurturing Queensland literature and building a community of writers”. On its About page, they say:

… we love stories. We love the writers who tell the stories and the readers who give them life. We love the way they help us to understand and connect with those around us and gain a greater understanding of ourselves.

QWC … supports, celebrates and showcases Queensland writers and writing in all its forms. We work with our members and partners to promote a vibrant and diverse writing community across Queensland.

Like all writers centres they offer a wide range of programs, including workshops, seminars and online courses, magazine and newsletter, mentorship and manuscript assessment program (aka The Writer’s Surgery), and fellowships and prizes. Here though, as in previous posts, I’ll highlight a few programs that particularly caught my attention.

(I was going to start with their Regional Events, which seemed worth promoting, but when I clicked on the Regional Events link, I was taken to an Events page for July to December 2017, which seems to have only one event outside Brisbane, “Thriller Writing with James Phelan” in Townsville. That was a little disappointing, but I know these Centres run on minimal funding, and servicing a physically large state would be a challenge.)

Events

In fact, following from the paragraph above, the About page lists a number of activities under What we do which all link to the Events page. These activities are:

  • Regional Events
  • In Conversation Events
  • Salons and Reading Events

Over the second half of 2017, their events include, in addition to the above mentioned James Phelan on Thriller Writing:

  • a panel (“in conversation”) with Jane Harper (whose book The dry has been one of this year’s big publishing successes) and Matthew Condon;
  • a seminar on writing about music and musicians;
  • a four-part course for beginners on developing narratives;
  • workshops for intermediate and established writers, such as one on public speaking and another on editing (given by Melina Marchetta); and
  • workshops on other topics such as speechwriting, writing romance fiction, writing media releases.

A diverse program don’t you think?

if:book Australia (The Future of the Book)

This is a QWC initiative which:

explores new forms of digital literature and investigates the changing relationship between writer and reader.

It’s not, as you might think, about eBooks. The medium is not the point. Instead it’s about the interaction or relationships forged between writing and reading, and looks at such topics as “the purpose of the book”, “new forms” that can expand how stories “are discovered and shared”, interactions between old and new technologies, and “what changes when we change the book”. The program extends beyond Queensland, and links internationally with programs in the USA and UK.

If this sounds a bit mystifying, the following examples of their projects should help:

Rod Howard, A forger's tale

Rod Howard’s book on Henry Savery

  • the tweets of Henry Savery (probably Australia’s first novelist, about whom I wrote a couple of years ago) in the Rumours of Death project: a live Twitter feed by Christopher Currie, undertaken during the 2105 Brisbane Writers Festival. You can read the tweets at the link above. (Such as, “I will be most interested to see how the Australian literary landscape has changed since I founded it some 184 years ago. “)
  • lost in track changes: the title provides a hint. Five writers (Cate Kennedy, Ryan O’Neill, Krissy Kneen, Robert Hoge and Fiona Capp) were asked “to create a short piece of memoir, a vignette” each of which was then “passed onto another author within the group” who then had to transform the piece into something else, with if:book tracking the changes! You can download the ebook version from the link above.
  • Writing Black: new Indigenous writing from Australia: an interactive book using the iBooks platform, edited by Ellen van Neerven, and including writing, photography, audiovisual, and twitter fiction, from such creators as Bruce Pascoe, Tony Birch, Tara June Winch, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Sylvia Nakachi, Siv Parker and Marie Munkara (several of whom I’ve reviewed here, in traditional formats!) You can download Writing Black from iBooks.
  • Memory makes us: ever thought of writing as performance? Well, this is it, but it’s “distinct from other performative aspects of literature: this isn’t a reading of a prepared work, nor is it freestyle poetry. It’s improvisation not with speech but with text and the tools of contemporary writing: keyboard and cut-and-paste.” This “event” has involved several North American and Australian writers, including Paddy O’Reilly, Marie Munkara, Angela Meyer and Maxine Beneba Clarke (all of whom you’ll find on my blog). if:books says that “For most readers, Memory Makes Us is a web site. For festival visitors, it’s a live event. We have also taken it to print. But none of these individual ‘formats’ capture the whole project.”

I love all this – I mean, I love the exploration. I can’t imagine these forms will replace traditional reading but, like most new media, some might stick around as an alternative form. In the meantime, the process must surely help both creators and readers/consumers break “normal” patterns, and that can only be good for literature.

GenreCon

I wrote about GenreCon in 2013. It’s actually called AWM GenreCon, AWM being the Australian Writer’s Marketplace which I understand is managed by the Queensland Writers Centre. GenreCon is a three-day biennial conference comprising panels, talks and workshops with Australian and international genre fiction writers, editors and agents – across all genres. It also offers one-on-one pitching sessions.

This year’s conference runs from 1oth to 12th November, at the State Library of Queensland. The “special guest” is Australian Garth Nix, and one of the international guests is Fiji-born New Zealand writer Nalini Singh. (I had to laugh because the brief bio names her books but not her genre, which apparently we should know. Unfortunately I don’t! Oh dear. Ah, Wikipedia tells me she writes paranormal romance.) Other Australian speakers include debut author and Noongar woman Claire Coleman, award-winning crime writer Emma Viskic, and award-winning fantasy author Angela Slatter, all of whose names I do know I’m happy to say.

… and that’s about it for another clearly active and inspiring Writers Centre.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Memorable Australian characters

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Image on screen as we waited for Kim Scott

Image on screen as we waited for Kim Scott

The inspiration for today’s somewhat fun post, came from something more serious, Kim Scott’s Ray Mathew lecture that I attended last week. As I was waiting in the National Library’s gorgeous theatre waiting for the lecture to start, I found myself thinking about Bobby in Scott’s novel That deadman dance. What I realised was that Bobby is still vivid in my mind, years after I read the book – and I started to think about other similarly vivid characters…

Because, I don’t know about you, but I have read many books over the years. Some have been forgotten, some I remember generally, and some in more detail for one reason or another. Those reasons can vary – they can be the emotion that was engendered in me, or the ideas the book inspired me to think about, or the language delighted me, or, even, the plot surprised me, but there’s only a few for which that reason is very specifically a character. I thought it would be fun to share those – and for you to share back. Of course, as this is my Australian literature post, I’ll be focusing on Aussie books only. In other words, you won’t find Darcy or Elizabeth here! You, though, don’t have to be similarly constrained, so go for it. Bring out your Atticus Finches and Emma Bovarys. Let’s see what happens.

I have another proviso for this post, besides my characters having to be from Australian books, and that’s that I have to have read the books at least five years ago. Otherwise, I’m not sure I could say they’ve stood the test of time. My earliest favourite character comes from my pre-teen reading.

I noticed something interesting as I was compiling this list: not only do the characters vary in terms of age, gender, role/position, etc., they also fall into types like “my favourite pioneer character” or “child character” and so on. There’s very little duplication of these categories.

I am a bit nervous about this post, because I know I’ll omit some memorable characters that have slipped my mind (briefly!), exposing my shallowness, but I’ve decided to screw my courage to the you know what, and jump in. Oh, and one final point before I do: while these characters come from books I’ve loved, those books won’t necessarily be among my top books, particularly now, years later (though some will be).

So, here is my list, presented alphabetically by the character’s first name!

  • Bobby Wabalanginy, from Kim Scott’s That deadman dance (published 2010, read and reviewed 2011) is a luminous, unforgettable First Contact character whose generosity of spirit is knocked back again and again by the colonial settlers. He represents all that could have been good and positive in our first indigenous-settler relationships in this country.

We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we’d lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours.

  • The drover’s wife, from Henry Lawson’s short story “The drover’s wife”. As far as I remember, she doesn’t have a name, but stands for the archetypal 19th century pioneer woman who had to face the terrors of the bush alone while her husband was, well, droving. She, like the rest of her ilk, had to become “used to the loneliness”.
  • Joe Harman and Jean Paget, from Nevil Shute’s A town like Alice, survived much, particularly being POWs during World War 2, before finally realising their love for each other. Yes, they are my favourite romantic couple from my adolescence, and I had to share them here.
  • Judy Woolcot, from Ethel Turner’s Seven little Australians, is, in a way, Australia’s version of America’s Beth (from Louisa May Alcott’s Little women). She’s the tragic character of our childhood. However, where Beth was a sweet town-living girl, Judy was a courageous, feisty tomboy from the bush.
  • Patrick White, VossSybylla Melvyn, from Miles Franklin’s My brilliant career, has to be in the list of any Aussie female reader. How can she not be, with her independent spirit and her refusal to let a handsome, wealthy man distract her from her dream of a “brilliant career”.
  • Voss, from Patrick White’s Voss, was inspired by Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt and his expedition into the Australian outback in the 1840s. He’s tragic, mythic, romantic, and I first fell for him, and thus also for Patrick White, in my teens.
  • Weekly, from Elizabeth Jolley’s The newspaper of Claremont St, is a working class woman, a cleaner in fact (hence her “name”). She works steadily towards a dream that she will not give up, not for any anything.

And I think I’ll leave it there. I could go into families – like Tim Winton’s Lambs and Pickles (Cloudstreet) and Ruth Park’s Darcys (The harp in the south) but that would be diluting the theme which I don’t want to do. I’m aware that this is not at all representative of my favourite authors, but that’s because I love them for other reasons.

And now, over to you. Who are your most memorable characters?

Stephen Orr, Datsunland (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Stephen Orr, DatsunlandTwo things I loved about Stephen Orr’s novel The hands (my review) were its evocation of men, boys and their relationships, and its rural setting. And this is also why I liked Datsunland, his recent short story collection comprising thirteen short stories and a novella. It’s a no-holds-barred exploration of the lives of boys and men. It is not a pretty book, but it feels real, even where it pushes extremes.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) interviewed Orr in one of her early Meet an Australian Author Series of posts. Answering her question about who inspired him to write, he said

I became convinced the human psyche was the only thing really worth worrying about, so I’ve been working at it ever since.

This is true of these stories in which men confront their dreams and hopes, their strivings to achieve these, and their frequent failures. Take, for example, the first story, “Dr Singh’s despair”, which is about an Indian doctor from the Punjab who obtains a visa to work in rural Australia. We are desperate for doctors in rural/outback areas and he seeks a better life for his family. Unfortunately, his welcome – to Coober Pedy, which would be a challenge for anyone – is less than ideal. Indeed, we could call it non-existent. Not surprisingly, Dr Singh does not last and returns home, “disappointed … [but] at least happy”. This is the first story in the collection … worth considering, that ordering of the stories!

The stories in this collection are loosely linked. Most are set in rural or suburban South Australia; all focus on men (though women do appear); and many reference, sometimes so briefly you could miss it, a particular school, the Christian Brothers’ Lindisfarne College. The characters never cross into each other’s stories, however. It’s more that the school represents a certain conservative or inward-looking value or attitude – which makes this a good time to introduce the second story, though I promise to not describe every story in the collection! Titled “The shot-put”, it is set on a farm in 1919, just after World War 1, and concerns a couple whose son, a school shot-put champion, is being publicly listed on a Cowards’ List and has therefore been removed from his school’s – the aforementioned college – Honour Board. It’s another story of hopes (and in this case promise) unfulfilled – and more, of lack of compassion.

Lack of compassion is, in fact, one of the underlying themes of the collection. Had Dr Singh in the first story, for example, been shown some compassion, he may have stayed. In the fourth story, “A descriptive list of the birds native to Shearwater, Australia” a new wife begins to realise that what she’d hoped might be compassion in her husband was something entirely different, and in the fifth story there’s something creepy in Brother Vellacott’s caring for Miss Mary. It all, though, comes to a head halfway through the collection, in “Akdal Ghost”, the seventh story. It’s about a preacher, Pastor Fletcher, who should be compassionate, right? He hires a commercial video producer to make a video showing people what will happen if they don’t “find God”. It features the Akdal Ghost, which I had to look up in Wikipedia, and is absolutely shocking, though, as in several of the stories, Orr does not play it fully out. Much more effective to leave it to the reader’s imagination!

Religon is another motif that runs through the collection, and is behind some of the most violent stories. Besides “Akdal Ghost”, there’s “Confirmation” in which a massacre in 1976 Ireland is set against the hopefulness of a son’s confirmation, and “The Syphilis Museum” about a man preparing for the end of the world. One gets the impression that Orr is not a fan of religion.

And, so the stories continue. Some are more poignant, such as “The Barmera Drive-in” about a 45-year-old man who buys an old, long defunct, drive-in, thinking (hoping) he can reclaim his childhood and in so doing make the (or his) world a better place, and “The Shack” about an aging father who needs to decide what to do about his “retarded” son.

Most of the stories focus on adults, but a few feature children, including the 9-year-old boy lost in the hull of ship under construction (“The One-eyed Merchant”) and the 6-year-old boy trapped with a neglectful mother and an abusive step-father (“The Adult World Opera”). The final, titular story, “Datsunland’, which appeared in last year’s Griffith Review IV novella edition, also features a child, though in this case a teenager.

At 100 pages, “Datsunland” concludes the collection beautifully, continuing the melancholic tone but containing just that little bit of hope to leave us not completely discouraged as we turn the last page. It concerns teen-aged Charlie Price, his widowed father Damien, who sells second-hand cars at Datsunland, and his Lindisfarne College guitar teacher, William Dutton. The story opens with William Dutton, a struggling musician who finds teaching, particularly at that “poor cousin of elite schools” Lindisfarne, stultifying. He hates the narrow focus on assessment and performance, on trivialities, such as the proper wearing of socks, on rules that squash motivation and creativity.

Meanwhile, Damien knows his son is bright, has potential, but becomes increasingly concerned about the relationship developing between Charlie and William. The story leads us on, keeping us, along with Damien, unsettled, exploring the awful challenge faced by teachers in today’s fearful environment. What are the boundaries between teacher and student, and where are they crossed? How can a teacher nurture, safely?

Now, more often than not, reviewers describe short story collections as uneven, which is probably not totally unreasonable, because how can every story have equal punch for every reader. So, I’m not going to go there. I don’t think it particularly helps and, anyhow, I’ve seen reviews of collections where different reviewers identify very different stories as the best or the weakest. It’s so subjective, particularly given short stories can range from quiet slices of life to plot-driven-tales-with-twists. If you are a plot-twist lover, can you equally love the quieter story? I’ll simply conclude by saying that in Datsunland, we, like William Dutton, find ourselves “caught in the middle of multiple truths” – and what uncomfortable truths they mostly are. It’s a provocative read, but a good one.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) reviewed the novella and the collection. The collection has also been reviewed by French blogger Emma (bookaroundthecorner) and Carmel Bird (The Newtown Review of Books) whose insightful analysis of the language and style is well worth reading.

Stephen Orr
Datsunland
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2017
295pp.
ISBN: 9781743054758

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)