Australian literature

William Lane, The salamanders (Review)

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William Lane, The salamandersWilliam Lane’s latest novel, The salamanders, is a book that keeps you thinking from beginning to end. As I started it, I was thinking of it as a cross between Julian Davies’ Crow mellow (my review), a satirical novel about a house party for artists and their patrons, and Emily Bitto’s The strays (my review) about an artist colony, focusing particularly on the founding family. A few comparisons could be drawn, but I soon discovered that this is its own book.

I hadn’t heard of this* William Lane before, but The salamanders is his third novel. In a different version, with a different title, it was apparently shortlisted for the Vogel Prize. The book’s author bio also told me that Lane did his doctorate on Christina Stead. So, he’s been about the place – just not the places I’ve been haunting, clearly!

But now to the book. It starts during a beach holiday on the New South Wales coast. There’s the obsessed artist Peregrine, his ex-wife Naomi, their daughter Julia, his sons, David, Arthur, and George, from his previous relationship – and the adopted Rosie. There are also some visitors, including friend Elizabeth and her husband Johnno. The children range in age down from the 14-year-old David. Arthur, aged around 11, has a crush on the slightly older Rosie, and George and Julia form a happy play unit. Lane sets up the idyll – Naomi says they are “enjoying one another’s company far more than when we were married” – and then gradually pulls it apart, exposing past and present cracks. By the end of the first chapter – the book is told in 5 chapters – the idyll has broken, mostly due to Peregrine’s arrogant and self-involved behaviour, and Naomi departs with the two girls. Chapter 2 jumps 15 years or so. Arthur is around 27 years old, and is back at the beach-house living alone. Rosie comes to visit.

The rest of the book focuses primarily on Arthur and Rosie as they circle each other, coming together, separating, all the while trying to come to terms with their lives, their pasts and their desires for the future. Lane doesn’t over-explain, preferring to show not tell, so we are left to guess exactly what had happened on that holiday and just after, which resulted in changes to the family units. All we know is that the fallout has had long-lasting impact and that Rosie is coming from England, to which she’d run away. She refuses to eat with Arthur. This eating behaviour of hers is one of the motifs running through the novel, and represents an inner discordance, despite the refrain that what happened wasn’t their fault.

Other motifs run through the book. One is the indigenous rock art image, in a cliff near the house, of a falling man. It mesmerises Arthur, and represents his emotional state. The other main motif relates of course to salamanders – and various members of the somewhat-related lizard and snake families. These creatures occur both literally and metaphorically. Rosie, in Chapter 2, says to Arthur:

‘Skinks, salamanders, geckos, frill-necked lizards, water dragons,’ laughed Rosie in her burred and husky way, ‘this is the land of the lizard. When I see a lizard, I think of this country. I never realised that its surface is so lizard-like. That’s what I saw from the plane.

This motif is complex, conveying a range of ideas, many of them unsettling:

… Peregrine glittered, and his eyes grew milky. He might be covered in scales, with discreetly expanding gills. With an absolute, self-preserving, inward rush of energy, Elizabeth removed herself from him.

Lizards also represent the antiquity of the continent – “the young lizard … considered them from some million years ago”. And in this, they also represent resilience. “Lizards are tough”, says Rosie, and toughness, the ability to grow and move beyond their youth, is what Rosie and Arthur are working to achieve.

There’s an underlying Gothic sense to the novel which imbues it with an overall eeriness. Peregrine creates strange paintings in caves. There are mysterious shapes or shadows which appear out of the blue – “Something scurried outside the glass. He looked up, but did not catch its form” or “A liquid slithering passed along the glass of the house …” or “Then that scrabbling again. Something ancient was trying to get in”. There’s Arthur and Rosie’s roadtrip into Australia’s interior, and their uncertain relationship with each other. Not blood-related but brought up as brother and sister, they mystify and concern others.

So, where does all this go? I’m not sure it’s a book you can easily comprehend in one reading. The road trip to the interior and Peregrine’s bizarre painting projects in caves within caves suggest some sort of psyche-seeking but it isn’t completely resolved in my mind. Need it be?

Overall, then, it’s one of those mesmerising books that can be read in different ways, making it a little disconcerting. The first chapter felt a little over-written at times and I feared a clichéd story about dysfunctional artists’ colonies, but it then shifted into something more mysterious, less-defined, slippery, something incorporating a broad, abstract story about our relationship to art, place and nature, and a more personal story about identity and family.

According to myth, salamanders are born of and resistant to fire. Rosie says during her road-trip with Arthur that “we’re salamanders – we don’t feel the fire”. And that, in a way, is the point of the novel, surviving the fires that confront us.

William Lane
The salamanders
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2016
255pp.
ISBN: 9780994395849

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge)

* I allude to the late nineteenth-early twentieth century Utopian of the same name, whose The workingman’s paradise I’ve reviewed.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Memory of the World and Dorothea Mackellar

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Memory of the World Logo

By UN [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re an Australian, did you know that last week seven new entries were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Australian Register?

If not, let me start at the beginning … with UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme. Established in 1992, it’s the documentary heritage equivalent of the World Heritage Site programme which protects physical sites of natural and cultural significance. It’s a significant programme, particularly for those of us who support libraries and archives.

Briefly, it’s a multi-pronged programme aimed at saving and preserving the world’s documentary heritage, but the most visible activity is its international register of “documents, manuscripts, oral traditions, audio-visual materials, library and archival holdings of universal value”. You can find out more on the official website.  To date, there are five “works” from Australia on the register. The first two added were the Mabo Case Documents and Captain Cook’s Endeavour Journal.

However, there are, of course, more “documents” that countries like Australia would like to register. Some of these might eventually make it to the international list, but some might only ever be of national, not universal, interest. For both these types of documents we luckily have the Australian Memory of the World committee which manages an Australian register – in addition to proposing nominations to the international register. The current chair of the Australian committee is Ros Russell, whose novel Maria returns I’ve reviewed here and who was on one of last year’s Canberra Writers Festival panels that I wrote up.

There are now 57 items on the Australian register, the last seven inscribed at a ceremony in Canberra last week. Knowing of my blog and interest in promoting Australian literature, Ros emailed me last week asking if I’d be interested in publicising one of these latest additions. Would I? Did she even need to ask? Of course I would … and so here goes …

Wide Brown Land sculpture

Wide Brown Land (National Arboretum)

Many of you – particularly my Australian readers – will have guessed from this post’s title what this particular addition is, and they’d be right, Dorothea Mackellar’s poem “Core of my heart (My country)”. This poem starts:

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

But, the verse which most Australians know by heart is the second one:

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

According to the notes accompanying the inscription, Mackellar, who was born in Australia in 1885, wrote the first draft sometime between 1904 and 1908 during a trip to England, and finalised it for publication in 1908. These notes conclude with this assessment:

Regarded by many as Australia’s quintessential poet, Dorothea Mackellar’s most iconic works offer powerful statements of fervent patriotism and connection to the land, captured as Australia was coming of age as a nation and on the brink of participation in global warfare. In the century since its creation, ‘My Country’ has had an almost immeasurable impact on the collective consciousness of Australians, especially within the sphere of literary culture and, for many, remains the ultimate expression of the centrality of the land to Australian identity. A wonderful poet of light and colour, commenting towards the end of her life, Mackellar made her own assessment of the significance of her poetry: ‘I did say more or less what I wanted to say, and that’s the satisfaction.’

Not only is this a worthwhile addition to the Australian list for the reasons given above but, as Ros pointed out, it’s the first literary work on the Australian register and it’s by a woman! Woo hoo! Not that I’m competitive or anything, but it is always encouraging to see a woman’s achievement recognised.

Now, I did a little search of Trove – of course – and found an article on Dorothea Mackellar by critic Bertram Stevens whose Golden treasury of Australian verse I featured in a Monday Musings last year. The article, written in 1919, came from his series, Some Australian Writers. He says of “Core of my heart” that ‘love of country has seldom been expressed more beautifully, or in language more simple and sincere’ and he comments particularly on her love of and ability to describe colour. He writes that in her poems about the Australian landscape she ‘helps many of us to realise the value of the gift of colour in Australia, which was so often considered sombre and melancholy — a “haggard continent,”* in fact.’

To conclude, I’ll share some of Canberra writer Adrian Caesar’s inscription ceremony address, which Ros sent me. He started by acknowledging the important work done by cultural institutions in ‘collecting, preserving and exhibiting documents of historical, political and cultural significance’. He noted the ‘repeated budgetary attacks’ on these institutions and said

it is more imperative that ever to stridently insist upon the lasting relevance of the documentary record. It is unfortunate, too, that the incursions of post-modern relativism by tending to suggest that all history is fiction has played into the hands of those who seek to benefit from what we have heard recently referred to as ‘alternative facts’. In the increasingly Orwellian world of political doublespeak, the preservation of documents to which empirical method might be applied, and from which ‘facts’ may be adduced, seems more vital than ever to our ability to understand our past and chart our future.

Yes!

He then discussed the poem. He talked of the value of having access to original manuscripts, discussed the poem’s cultural relevance and importance to Australian life, analysed its meaning including addressing the problematic issues of “patriotism and nationalism”, and explained his preference for the original title “Core of my heart”.

He concluded that the inscription of this poem’s manuscript to the Register:

leads us both to a contemplation of the circumstances of its composition and to the power of its potential ongoing contribution. For surely in this its first completed form, it might lead us and students of the future to think about our relationship to land and landscape, and not only to use that to assert our independence from England, but also to seek an empathetic understanding of Aboriginal notions of country. Instead of ‘us’ and ‘them’, it seems to me that love of landscape, love of country as it is articulated in Mackellar’s poem might provide a bridge towards healing rather than a chasm between colonisers and colonised.

Nicely done, eh? And thanks to Ros for the heads up.

NOTE: The original manuscript draft of the poem has been digitised and can be viewed online.

* Referencing, I presume, the poem “Written in Australia” by New Zealand-born Arthur H Adams.

Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman (eds), Rebellious daughters (Review)

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Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman, Rebellious daughtersTo rebel or not to rebel, that is the question. At least, it’s the question that interested memoirists Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman who, having written their own stories about “conservative upbringings and subsequent rebellions”, wanted to discover what other women could reveal about that “universal life experience”, the rebellion against parents. This book, Rebellious daughters, is, obviously, the end result – and it makes for fascinating reading.

In their Introduction, Katsonis and Kofman quote American author Gordon Lish’s statement that the  best thing writers can do is to get themselves “in trouble”, to “make it hot” for themselves. This is what they wanted from their contributors, they wanted them to take risks – and it’s what they got.

Like most anthologies, Rebellious daughters has been carefully ordered. It starts with one of the grand-dames of Australian literature, Marion Halligan (“The daughters of debate”) who describes herself as “well-behaved”, as the “good girl” that so many of the later contributors rebelled against. But this is not to say that she didn’t engage in her own little subversions, such as reading forbidden books. They didn’t do her any harm, she writes, “the delicate ones were my parents.” I related to Halligan’s story because, like her, I was the eldest, “the one who came before, who paved the way” and didn’t rebel dramatically. But, enough of that, I’m talking order, structure, here.

The book ends with author-journalist Jane Caro (“Where mothers stop and daughters start”) who shares her daughters’ rebellions, the loud in-your-face one and the withdraw-and-don’t-engage one. Her motherly perspective provides a satisfying, logical conclusion to the anthology. And then, right in the middle, the ninth story of seventeen, is author-publisher Rebecca Starford’s “Who owns my story”. Drawing on her own life and memoir, Starford grapples with the form, with the ethics and practice of memoir writing. I was intrigued by the placement of this contribution, but it’s clever. Having read eight already, I was ready to think about the issues Starford posed, and then, as I read the final eight, I had them in mind.

So, what are the issues? Starford starts by quoting author JP Dunleavy, who said that “The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame”. Starford likes this quote because

it reveals, simply and with a degree of sharp comedy, the risky nature of memoir writing.

She touches on several issues. One is the idea of shame, and whether it is “an emotion women memoirists suffer from more acutely than our male counterparts.” She thinks it is, and wonders if this is due to girls being taught that they should never speak out. She also explores “a nagging moral quandary”, that is, “the right” to tell stories that involve others. It is, she admits, “the biggest ethical question a memoirist faces” particularly when the memoir portrays these others “in an unflattering light”. She discusses the option of writing the story as fiction. (But we all know cases where people “see” through that – or think they do – don’t we!) Anyhow, she says that she couldn’t choose the fiction option:

For me, the act of writing a memoir was important to the process. If I’d written my experiences as fiction, I would have been hiding behind the genre, and that would have been self-defeating, less courageous, and less honest.

This makes sense to me – and implies that many memoirs are a form of catharsis or, at least, of resolving one’s past. This seems to be the case for Starford who concludes that her memoir has resulted in improved communications with her father. And, she says, while her memoir might have seemed like rebellion to him, for her it was about “seeking to understand him and my mother” and how her experiences as a child had shaped her.

Starford’s analysis of the personal and ethical implications of writing memoirs provides a wonderful grounding for understanding of the other “stories”. There’s a lot of pain here, but there’s also humour, occasionally laugh-out-loud, more often wry. Lee Kofman’s story (“Me, mother and Sexpo”) about taking her conservative Hassidic mother to the Sexpo exhibition is hilarious, but is also a lesson in the assumptions we make – particularly about our parents. Michelle Law’s (“Joyride”), on the other hand, perfectly captures her pain of rebelling only to discover that she’d misread the feelings of the boy in question.

Not surprisingly many of the stories are about tension over boys and sex. Krissy Kneen (“Wundermärchen: A retelling of my grandmother”), whose Steeplechase I’ve reviewed, comes to realise in the end that instead of being the rebellious granddaughter she thought she was, she had taken on her grandmother’s mantle, she’d become a storyteller who likes to shock the innocent. It’s just that her grandmother used death, where she uses sex.  In “Resisting the nipple”, Rochelle Siemienowicz, whose memoir Fallen I’ve reviewed, tells of her struggle against the “good girl” expectations of her strict Seventh-day Adventist family and then of her complicated feelings, particularly regarding her mother, when becoming a mother herself.

In many of the stories, the youthful rebels are shocked to discover things aren’t as they thought they were or would be. Jamila Rizvi (“The good girl”) is confused when she realises that a girl (like her baby sister for example) could be not-good but liked. Jo Case (“Rebelling to conform”), in her desperation to be popular, starts to do poorly at school only to realise, later, that some of those popular girls she was trying to emulate got good grades. And Amra Pajalic (“Nervous breakdowns”) is frustrated by her out-of-touch migrant mother’s nervous breakdowns until she realises the cause is a mental illness.

Not all the rebellions in the book are against mothers – some are against fathers and grandmothers – and not all are resolved but, in most of the stories, age and experience eventually bring rapprochement. That doesn’t mean of course that the daughters capitulate. Rather, they come to understand their mothers (or whomever) a little more and their mothers likewise learn to accept the daughter they have. As Susan Wyndham (“A man of one’s own”) concludes

life is a long lesson and from this distance I prefer to look back with tenderness on those riotous years … And for both of us I say, no regrets.

And that seems the perfect point on which to end my post on this engaging, sometimes shocking, but thoroughly generous and warm-hearted book.

Note: A percentage from the book’s sales is going to the Women’s Legal Service Victoria.

aww2017-badgeMaria Katsonis and Lee Kofman (eds)
Rebellious daughters: True stories from Australia’s finest female writers
Edgecliff: Ventura Press, 2016
322pp.
ISBN: 9781925183528

(Review copy courtesy Ventura Press)

Stella Prize 2017 Longlist

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“I feel like we’re at the Oscars for nerds” tweeted Tracey Spicer, ABC Journalist, at tonight’s announcement of the 2017 Stella Prize Longlist. Love it. Nerds of the world unite!

When the longlist (of 12) was announced last year, I had read and reviewed only one of the books. By the end of the year, I had read 6 which I’m satisfied with given how much I read last year overall. This year I haven’t read any (yet)! Really? Where have I been?

The judges are different again to last year’s, with just the chair continuing. They are writer Delia Falconer, bookseller Diana Johnston, writer/memoirist Benjamin Law, academic/Chair of First Nations Australia Writers’ Network Inc. Sandra Phillips, and writer/chair Brenda Walker.

Anyhow, here is the longlist, including, sadly, two posthumous nominations:

  • Victoria: the queen by Julia Baird (HarperCollins/Biography)
  • Between a wolf and a dog by Georgia Blain (Scribe/Novel) (Posthumous)
  • The hate race by Maxine Beneba Clarke (Hachette/Memoir)
  • Poum and Alexandre by Catherine de Sainte Phalle (Transit Lounge/Novel)
  • Offshore: Behind the wire at Manus and Nauru by Madeline Gleeson (NewSouth/Non-fiction)
  • Avalanche by Julia Leigh (WW Norton/Memoir)
  • An isolated incident by Emily Maguire (Picador/Novel) (Lisa named this as her book of the year last year, so I really should make this a priority)
  • The high places: Stories by Fiona McFarlane (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Short stories)
  • Wasted: A story of alcohol, grief and a death in Brisbane by Elspeth Muir (Text/Biography-Memoir)
  • The museum of modern love by Heather Rose (Allen & Unwin/Novel)
  • Dying: A memoir by Cory Taylor (Text/Memoir) (Posthumous)
  • The media and the massacre: Port Arthur 1996-2016 by Sonya Voumard (Transit Lounge/Nonfiction)

As usual a mixed lot, but a different mix to last year’s. There’s significantly more non-fiction (more than half in fact), including a few memoirs – and fewer short stories. I suppose it’s purely coincidental, but I was surprised at the number of memoirs/autobiographies/biographies I read last year. Are memoirs making a come-back? I note that the list seems to be rather low on “diversity”, but two of the judges could be seen to represent diverse backgrounds, so presumably that issue was canvassed.

I have read and liked all the Stella Prize winners to date: Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds, Clare Wright’s The forgotten rebels of Eureka, Emily Bitto’s The strays and Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things. I look forward to seeing which of the above books wins this year …

The shortlist will be announced on March 8, and the winner on April 18.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Arnold Haskell on the Arts (2)

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Arnold Haskell, Waltzing MatildaBack in November, I wrote a post on the Arts chapter in dance critic Arnold Haskell’s book Waltzing Matilda and focused on theatre and literature. In this post, I’ll look at his discussion of the press.

“compares … favourably”

Haskell starts by saying that Australia’s press started in a “thoroughly unprincipled and worthless manner”, though he doesn’t explain what he means by this. However, by the time he is writing, he says it “compares, as a whole, favourably with the English and American”, adding that its style is “English and not American”. He describes the press’s treatment of “the abdication” (Edward VIII) and “the September crisis” as “dignified and free from deliberately fostered sensation”.

There were, he admitted, sensational papers, such as Truth and Smith’s Weekly, which “at first glance are not a good advertisement for Australia”. At times their humour is raw and undergraduate, but he comes to admire their humour, even when they targeted him. He praises their writers as “excellent”, and writes:

These papers greatly upset me at first, but I can now appreciate their value as an antidote to wowsing. For all their presentation and methods they are usually on the side of the angels.

Wow, no faint praise here – and rather a long way from today’s “fake news”! Anyhow, he shows himself to be an open-minded traveller.

And then, of course, there’s “Grannie” or The Sydney Morning Herald, which he describes as “the dean of papers” and

the organ of conservative views and amazing respectability. Its very make-up clears it of any suspicion of frivolity. It is a power in the land and it knows it.

Next he discusses the Sydney Daily Telegraph suggesting it might become a rival. It’s owned he writes

by a young man, Frank Packer, a colossus with the figure of a prize-fighter and the flair to do great things. It is brilliant, erratic, out for scoops at all costs, technically well presented.

Packer sold it in 1972 to Rupert Murdoch. And this brings me to Melbourne, which my Melbourne readers will be relieved to read that Haskell doesn’t ignore! He writes:

In Melbourne, probably in Australia, the greatest power in journalism is Sir Keith Murdoch; he has been called ‘Lord Southcliffe’ and also ‘the maker of Prime Ministers’. He looks the part.

Haha … I enjoy Haskell’s references to physical appearances. Haskell praises several Melbourne papers, Murdoch’s Melbourne Herald, as well as The Age and Argus. He’s surprised that they didn’t take sides in Victoria’s “drink referendum”. Of papers in smaller cities, he is similarly positive, saying they “are also of a high standard, and are surprisingly free from parochialism.”

And then he – remember he was an arts critic – says something even more interesting:

The Australian press as a whole gives considerable space to art criticism and treats the artist with far greater respect than our own popular press, though its criticism of local artists tend to be too benevolent to be of the greatest value.

This is interesting on two fronts. One is his praise of the commitment to arts criticism, which suggests too that there was a readership for it. The other is his belief that criticism of the arts can have value – that it is important – but that to have value it needs to be willing to be a bit tougher than it is.

He says Keith Murdoch is interested in art, and that he has “an admirable critic” in Basil Burdett. Haskell describes Burdett as “a man with an artistic background that would be exceptional in any country”. Now, I hadn’t heard of Burdett, so I decided to check him out in Trove. The first hits I got were about his death in an air crash Singapore in 1942. He was Assistant Australian Red Cross Commissioner in Malaya. The Sydney Morning Herald, reporting his death, quoted Australian artist, and President of the Society of Artists, Sydney Ure Smith:

He had taste, knowledge, and that rare quality — enthusiasm … As a writer on art, he was well-informed and progressive without being narrow. He was a valuable art critic.

Anyhow, Haskell mentions two other critics, and I’ll share his description of those too. There’s The Sydney Morning Herald’s “well-informed art critic”, Kenneth Wilkinson, whose field, Haskell writes, “is made to cover painting, music, the drama and the films; probably too much for any one man”. Fair point, don’t you think? And there’s “J.S. McDonald, now curator of the Melbourne Museum”. He “was formerly an art critic” and “whether one agrees with him or not” he “is one of the most entertaining and forceful writers on art”. Has anyone heard of these?

Haskell then turns to the social pages, which occupies much space in all papers and which Australia’s intelligentsia describes as “provincial”. However, Haskell again shows his independence of mind when he suggests it probably is, but why “very lengthy accounts of the doings of that small clique known as cafe society in the London and New York press should be worthier of attention I cannot understand”. Why indeed! Further, he comments that Australian gossip columns are “not snobbish”. They are, and this must clearly be a dig at the British equivalents, “written by journalists about people and not by titled amateurs about their friends”! He writes that

Miss Brown of Wagga, Miss Jones of Gundagai, will both find a space when they come to Sydney or Melbourne, and, what is more, their dresses will be described as minutely as the Governor’s Lady’s.

Perhaps this is a good time to remind you of my first post on Haskell in which I quoted his being (initially) “aggressively uninterested” in visiting Australia.

Haskell also talks about “the paper that has represented Australia the most and that has a place in the history of Australian literature … the famous Sydney Bulletin.” He admits it’s “a little tamed today” but still represents “a national way of thinking”. Its goals, which were to encourage Australians to love their own country, have resulted in “the formation of an Australian manner of expression” which is “often crude, never ‘literary’ from the English point of view”, but is “vigorous and creative”.

I love that an English visitor was able to assess Australia, as a place in its own right and not a little England.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The cost of literary awards

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Queensland Literary Awards LogoI must get better at noting who posts links on social media that I later take up and use on my blog. Today’s post was inspired by an article posted on Twitter (I think) early last December last (and I now thank whoever it was who posted it!) The article is by The Sydney Morning Herald’s literary editor, Susan Wyndham, and was itself inspired by an announcement by the University of Western Australia’s publishing arm to not enter books for awards in 2017.

Terri-ann White, the director of UWA Publishing, said that the “expense (of entry fees, books, and postage) and the time involved in entering books for literary awards and prizes” exceeded their resources in 2016. Wyndham explains that there are at least 60 annual awards in Australia, and this is growing. Most require an entry fee of $50-100 plus the provision of up to six copies for each book entered. In addition, as one publisher noted, there’s the rather substantial cost of attending awards ceremonies. Do you or don’t you, she said.

But, don’t awards result in more sales?

Well, not necessarily, apparently. White said that short listings and wins do not, in their experience, automatically translate into increased sales. For example, when Geoffrey Lehmann’s Poems 1957-2013 won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry in 2015, Lehmann received $80,000 but UWA “saw no results whatsoever [in sales].” My immediate response was that this is probably not surprising with less “popular” literary forms. However, White’s argument regarding sales is confirmed by other publishers. Donna Ward of Inkerman and Blunt told Wyndham that “literary prizes are expensive and don’t add to the bottom line of a boutique press trying to build its business.” Giramondo’s Ivor Indyk essentially agrees too, saying that “you don’t do it for sales, you do it for your authors, and for the reputation of the publishing house”.

Allen & Unwin, by contrast, said that sales tripled for Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things after its Stella Prize win. And another big publisher, HarperCollins, said that sales of Stephen Carroll’s novel The time we have taken went from 3000 to 26,000 after winning the 2008 Miles Franklin Award, and Stephen Conte’s debut novel The zookeeper’s war went from 3000 to 13,000 after winning the first Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction.

So, here’s the rub: although over 60 literary awards are offered now, publishers told Wyndham that only the Miles Franklin, the Stella and the Children’s Book Council of Australia awards significantly affect sales. I’m guessing other awards might, like the above mentioned Prime Minister’s Literary Award, but on a more case-by-case basis?

Wyndham interviewed several publishers and found that while most plan to continue to support their authors by entering their books, there is a move, particularly among the smaller presses, towards being more careful, more targeted. Ventura Press, for example, said they are “highly selective”.

What to do?

Wyndham asked publishers how things could be improved. They suggested

lowering the fees, or removing them for small presses; reducing the number of categories to focus attention and cut fees; accepting digital copies, possibly without the author’s or publisher’s name to reduce a perceived bias towards big publishers; announcing shortlists and winners earlier so books are still in shops, and promoting those lists better.

Some good ideas here. I’d be interested to hear what authors say, particularly regarding the “blind” submission of their works; what the awards managers say about the fee/cost issue; and what booksellers say, particularly about the timing issue.

The timing issue seems tricky because books can be eligible for awards up to a year, and sometimes two years with biennial awards, after publication. I can’t see how timing can suit all books eligible for a particular award. However, it is certainly the case that some awards close their entries long before the process of long and short listing, and then awarding of the prize, takes place. Take the 2016 Prime Minister of Australia Literary Awards as an example. To be eligible books had to be published in the 2015 calendar year. Entries closed in May 2016, but the shortlist wasn’t announced until October and the winners, finally, in early November, making it nearly 2 years after the earliest eligible books could have been published. You can see their point can’t you?

The promotion issue is an interesting one – because it’s something that we bloggers can help with. I must say that I have felt a bit silly just reiterating long and short lists as they’ve been announced, figuring those interested in books will have seen them anyhow. I tend just to do a select few. But perhaps I should rethink this? Of course, my blog is small bickies in the scheme of things, but maybe it all contributes to a useful critical mass.

It sounds like, whatever we do, we need to do something, because, as the above-named Donna Ward told Wyndham:

publishers are very selective and many small and micro publishers don’t even bother. And thus, Australia misses out on hearing about its most extraordinary, vibrant writers.

And that’s a sad thing.

I’d love, of course, to hear what you have to say on this issue (and I do recognise that some readers here would rather there be no awards at all.)

Louisa Atkinson, A voice from the country: January (Review)

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Louisa Atkinson, as I wrote in a post a few years ago, was a pioneer Australian writer. She was a significant botanist, our first Australian-born woman novelist, and the first Australian woman to have a long-running column in a major newspaper. It was a natural history series titled A Voice from the Country which ran in The Sydney Morning Herald for 10 years from 1860. I’ve shared here a few natural history articles/essays written by Americans, such as John Muir, but never an Aussie one. That’s going to change here, now – for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because I can, given the articles are findable through Trove, and secondly because the Australian Women’s Writers Challenge plans to focus this year, among other things, on classic Australian women writers. You can’t be a more classic Aussie writer than our Louisa!

But, which of Louisa Atkinson’s many columns should I do? I read a few and decided on one from her first year. In fact, I think it might have been the very first in the series. It’s titled “January”, which makes it particularly appropriate this month. Atkinson was living in Kurrajong, on the lower slopes of the Blue Mountains, in “Fernhurst”, the house built by her mother.

Monaro region, in January

January in the Monaro, 2010s not 1860s

So, the piece is about what it says, January. She describes the birds and plants in particular that you see in January in her region. Here is the opening sentence:

A WARM drowsy month, without the opening promise of Spring or maturing riches of Autumn.

Beautiful don’t you think, and it perfectly catches the middle of the Australian summer, particularly when you read the next couple of sentences:

In dry seasons the grass is scorched and white, the dust flies along the road before the least puff of wind, much to the annoyance of the traveller. The observer of nature finds his field of observation limited, yet not altogether barren.

In other words, it is dry, more yellow I’d say than white, and there’s nothing much happening, nature-wise. “Much” though is the operative word, because it’s “not altogether barren”, as she goes on to show by describing, for example, the activity of various birds such as the “waterwagtail or dishwasher”, laughing jackasses, lowries. Now, here’s another reason I chose this piece – her language. There’s the obvious fact that Atkinson has an engaging way of writing about nature, but what I want to explore here is its unfamiliarity.

By this I mean unfamiliar expressions and names. Regarding the former, I often find in articles I locate through Trove, language that is more erudite than we see in today’s newspapers. It suggests a higher level of literacy in readers. Take, for example, Atkinson’s use of “ferruginous” to describe the colour of a fungus. We might find that word in a novel these days, but not, I expect, in a general interest newspaper column. Of course, it may also suggest that newspapers were geared more to the elite than to the general populace? I don’t know enough about newspaper history to say any more on this. Sometimes, it’s more that word usage has changed. For example, Atkinson writes that some young birds “essay flight”. We rarely see “essay” used in that sense these days. I love that reading these older articles can give us insight into other times beyond the subject matter of the writing.

The other unfamiliarity relates to her naming of things. I know what laughing jackasses and lowries are – kookaburras and crimson rosellas*, respectively – but these names aren’t commonly used now. However, I have no idea what a “waterwagtail or dishwasher” is. Is it the willie wagtail and nicknamed dishwasher because its tail swishing back and forth reminded people of a dish mop? So, I did a Google search, and found an article titled “21 Facts about Pied Wagtails” from UK’s Living with Birds website. Facts 6 and 7 are:

6. Few birds have as many country names as the pied wagtail. They range from Polly washdish and dishwasher to the more familiar Penny wagtail, Willy wagtail and water wagtail.

7. The origin of the washer names is a mystery, but it may be because women once washed clothes, as well as pot and pans, by a stream or village pump, the sort of place that pied wagtails also frequent.

So, not the action of their tail perhaps but the places they frequent? I’m not a bird expert, but my understanding is that this White or Pied Wagtail is a “vagrant” in Australia, and that what we call the willie wagtail is from a different family. Which one – if either of these – is Atkinson talking about? Regardless, my point is that reading past writing can trip us up when the writers described plants, animals or objects using terms or names we don’t use now. We have to be careful – particularly those of us not expert in subjects – about drawing wrong conclusions from our reading.

POSTSCRIPT, 31 Jan 2017: Pam (Travellin’ Penguin) checked out “dishwasher” through her bird contacts, and was pointed to the book Austral English, which says that it’s “an old English bird-name for the Water-wagtail; applied in Australia to the Seisura inquieta … the Restless Flycatcher”. It quotes from the 1827 Transactions of the Linnæan Society, that the bird “is very curious in its actions. In alighting on the stump of a tree, it makes several semi-circular motions, spreading out its tail …”.

Crimson Rosellas

Crimson Rosellas by Kevin Tostado, using CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Enough of that, though. Let’s get back to Atkinson and her description of the lowries (i.e. crimson rosellas).  They are common to my garden – and her writing captures them perfectly:

A flock of lowries, young and old, frequent the fields, whence the oaten hay was gathered, nor confine their depredations there, assisting themselves liberally to the ripening peas and beans, which the gardener intended for seed, and even pursuing these favourite morsels into a verandah where they are spread to dry. The flock presents a brilliant appearance ; the full plumaged birds are vivid crimson, blue, partially pied with black, whilst the nestlings are variegated with green.

And now to conclude I’m going to jump five years to a report in the The Sydney Morning Herald in January 1865 of a meeting of the Horticultural Society of Sydney. It reports on various attendees bringing all sorts of plant specimens to the meeting, most of them exotic, and then, towards the end, there’s this:

Miss Atkinson, of the Kurrajong, sent a jar of jam, of the Lisanthe sapida, with the following remarks –

“LISANTHE SAPIDA – A small shrub of the Epacris family, bearing a crimson fruit, enveloping a single stone; good bearer, crop lasts about two months or more, coming in in November. To make jelly—boil the drupes, adding a few spoonfuls of water; when soft strain the juice off, add one pound white sugar to a pint, and boil to jelly. The fruit makes a pleasant tart—the Lisanthe Sapida grows in poor sandstone ranges. If any member of the societv would like to cultivate the shrub, and cannot procure the fruits in their locality, it is to be met with in the Kurrajong.”

A vote of thanks was given to the exhibitors, and more especially to Miss Atkinson, who it was remarked had made herself most remarkable for her endeavours to bring colonial productions into notice.

The lisanthe (or lissanthe) sapida, aka native cranberry, is, as you might have guessed, a plant native to Australia. Lovely to see recognition, by her peers, of a woman, and one who clearly loved and promoted the natural environment in which she lived.

* Mountain lowry is an alternative name for the Crimson rosella but is not, I believe, the most common one, particularly in New South Wales, but readers can correct me if I’m wrong.

aww2017-badgeLouisa Atkinson
“A voice in the country: January”
in: The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 March 1860
Available: Online

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some Australian adventurers

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Enid Moodie Heddle, Some Australian adventurersRegular readers here may remember that last year I wrote a few posts (this, this and this) inspired by books I found while clearing out my late aunt’s house. Well, here comes another. It’s inspired by a book that was probably a school text because my aunt wrote her name and her school in the front cover. The book is Some Australian adventurers. It was first published in 1944 by Longmans, Green and Co., and was edited by Enid Moodie Heddle.

I’ve never heard of Heddle but she has a Wikipedia page so is clearly of some note (given Wikipedia’s notability requirement). It describes her as “an Australian poet and writer for children”. She moved around somewhat. She was born in Melbourne (in 1904), went to high school in Sydney and university back in Melbourne. AustLit contributes that “As an infant Enid travelled around the world under sail with her Orcadian sea-captain father …”. She taught in South Australia, Victoria and England where she also researched child libraries. She then worked for publishers Longmans and Collins, becoming, after World War 2, Education Manager (for whom?) overseeing the publication of textbooks for schools and universities. So there we have it, the book probably was a school text!

From the title I thought it might comprise mini-biographies of – obviously – some Australian adventurers but, in fact, it’s an anthology of writings by Australians. Its aim, the Introduction explains, is not

to give a comprehensive idea of Australian prose, nor even to picture with any sort of completeness the country, its people, customs and history, but rather, to catch something of the spirit of adventure and joy in discovery which seem to us [who is “us”?] to be not only characteristic of the majority of the writers here represented, but also of Australians as a race.

Hmm … moving right along, the Introduction goes on to tell us that the book doesn’t contain the full stories and is “but a prelude to adventure.”

The book is divided into six sections:

  • In the land of Mirrabooka;
  • The white intruders;
  • Animals and men;
  • Further afield;
  • Strange encounters; and
  • Story and character.

Most sections, except the first one, contain more than one excerpt. Brief biographical details are provided for each writer, plus suggestions for further reading. The authors include those I know, such as Eleanor Dark, Ion L Idriess, Frank Dalby Davison, Vance Palmer and Henry Lawson, and many I don’t such as Elizabeth Bussell, William Hatfield, Hendley Herbert Finlayson. The writings include fiction and non-fiction, including letters. And the non-fiction writers include the famous adventurers, antarctic explorer Sir Douglas Mawson and aviator Charles Kingsford Smith. So, a varied bunch.

“infinite variety” (Parnassus)

I will write later about the content, but first I’ll share some contemporary reviews, though “review” is a generous name for what were mostly a paragraph or two. I found them through Trove of course. Although my copy is dated 1944, the book ran into many editions/reprints, and the earliest review I found came from 1946. The reviewer, “Parnassus” of Western Australia’s Western Mail, heads his/her piece with “there is keen interest just now in works of Australian writers”, which is good to hear given the cultural cringe which commonly typified Australian response to cultural fare. Parnassus has a rather funny formal style, commending the book with the following:

One likes the editor’s selection. It is of infinite variety, and while including extracts from recent publications she has given us a timely reminder that Australian writers have not by any means confined their writing to bush lore and descriptions of the inland …

One does, does one!

I am indebted to Parnassus, however, because s/he paid the book more attention, giving it about 6 paragraphs, than most I found. Victoria’s  Argus called it “a handy little volume” and briefly described the breadth of its contents, while Book News, in 1947, found the excerpts “wisely chosen” but said they were “spoiled by an unworthy cover jacket and frontispiece”. I can’t comment on the cover jacket as Google displays many different editions of the book, but my title page does say “with a frontispiece” without identifying who it is. Strange. Queensland’s Courier-Mail, probably describing the same edition, starts its little paragraph with “Once past an excellent, yet misleading, dust jacket to this bright little compilation, you’ll find here a book true to title”. I’d love to know which dust jacket they are talking about. Finally, one more, this time from South Australia’s Advertiser. It is also generally positive but makes this observation:

Although all of the foremost authors of this country are not represented, and the stories themselves are not indicative of the best their writers can produce, the collection as a whole can be said to be a cross-section of Australian literature.

Interesting point about not being “indicative of the best” but perhaps the best don’t represent the “adventurer” theme well. Overall, though, not a bad recommendation for a volume of less than 180 pages.

“riches in experience” (Introduction)

I like that the book starts with an Aboriginal legend. The bio for the first piece’s writer, K Langloh Parker, commences by recognising that “the first adventurers of whom we know in Australia, the land of Mirrabooka, the Southern Cross, were the Australian aboriginals”. Parker, we are told, “did us a great service by collecting their legends and retelling them in English in a way as near as possible to the original”. How did they know I wonder? Langloh Parker started doing this in the late nineteenth century. The legend included in Heddle’s book, “Beereeun the mirage maker”, came from her 1898 book, More Australian legendary tales, which was, we’re told, illustrated by an aboriginal artist.

This recognition of indigenous Australians continues in the book’s second section, The white intruders, which contains excerpts from four writers, beginning with Eleanor Dark. Her excerpt comes, as we’d expect, from The timeless land. In this excerpt, “Breaking the flag”, Dark imagines first contact from the indigenous point of view, something white writers would be unlikely to do today – and rightly so – but Dark must be admired for what she tried to do in her time.

Another excerpt in this section is from a writer I don’t know, William Hatfield, and his 1933 book, Desert saga. It’s about an indigenous man, Grungunja. Hatfield may not be well-known now, but he clearly was in 1930s  and 1940s Australia, particularly among socialist circles in which the rights and plight of indigenous people were being discussed. The last sentence of the excerpt is uncompromising. It occurs after a confrontation with white pastoralists and police. Remember, we are in Grungunja’s head:

All his generalship, all his valour had availed him nothing, then. True, his tribesfolk were unharmed, they were to be left in possession of their country, but only as a subject people.

Hatfield was, I understand, largely a polemical writer. It’s probably why he’s faded from view, but it’s also something that makes him relevant to those of us interested in the past.

Now, my aim was not to review this book but to use it to add to my project of increasing my knowledge about the history of Australian literature: who was around at different times, what were they thinking and what did others think of them? This book – and my related research of Trove – has furthered that. I could very well return to it to explore some of the other authors and topics it covers.

 

Monday musings on Australian literature: Angela Savage and setting in fiction

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Angela Savage, The dying beach

I have several ideas for my next few Monday Musings, but another one popped up on the weekend as I was perusing my Twitter feed. I don’t check Twitter regularly enough – it’s impossible to keep up with all the social media sites don’t you think? – but when I do I regularly find a treasure or two. Anyhow, this tweet was from Angela Savage promoting the short piece “Take me to a different land” that she wrote for the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference being held next month at the Virginia G Piper Centre for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. This is an annual conference for “writers, readers, and lovers of literature”, though it seems to me that the main focus is on writers, as it describes itself as devoted to “the science and art of creative writing, including world building, plot/narrative structure, and character development to more specialized topics like writing about climate change, working with different cultures, and pulling material from fairy tales and myth”.

Saguaro, near Tucson

Beautiful saguaro, near Tucson. (Just because I can!)

I was inspired to delve further for a few reasons: I’m interested in anything to do with the process of writing fiction; I wanted to know what Angela Savage had to say having enjoyed her crime novel The dying beach (my review); and, less relevant to this post, I love Arizona!

Now, setting is one of those aspects of fiction that readers often discuss. And, in fact, Savage starts her piece by quoting a reader from a rejection letter she received for her first Thailand-set novel, Behind the night bazaar:

I didn’t really feel that I had been taken to Thailand… I think there needs to be more of a sense of the sights and smells of Thailand, of being taken to a different land.

Savage says that at the time she was writing the novel she’d been living in SE Asia for six years, including 18 months in Thailand. She realised that it had become too familiar to her. She needed, she said, to step back and remember what it was like when she first arrived, and “try to conjure the little things that made the place unique”. She describes the process she went through to give that first novel the feeling of Thailand, and then says that for her later Thailand-set novels she’s returned to the country “with the express purpose of conducting fieldwork to inform my fiction”.

She goes on to say that as well as working on conveying “the sensory texture of different locations—the sights, smells, sounds, tastes and touch”, she “walks the streets in the shoes” of her characters, “imagining the landscape as they would see it, based on their state of mind.” Her aim in doing this is to closely relate the setting to the character. She recognises that a “strong sense of place” can transport readers, “adding to the pleasure and excitement of reading” but that the writer’s challenge is to ensure place enhances the story, rather than be a distraction.

I’ve written about setting and place a few times on this blog. In one post, I talked of this sensory aspect, saying that “my favourite descriptions are sensory, enabling me to feel and see the place and its impact on the characters”. This is largely what Savage is talking about here, isn’t it?

In another post I reported on a panel with the 2011 Prime Minister’s Literary Award winners. The chair, Caroline Baum, asked fiction winner Stephen Daisley about writing on place. She said that roughly 50% of authors writing about foreign places say they must visit a place to write about it, while the other half argue that this isn’t necessary. Daisley admitted that he’d not visited all the places he’d written about in Traitor, resulting in Baum asking how one can write about a place without visiting it. Daisley’s answer was Google!

Author Nigel Featherstone, was asked, in an interview he offered to my blog, about his writing on landscape in his novel, Remnants. He said

Even today, as I drive around the Southern Tablelands, I’m struck by the character of the landscape, its moods, its reticence, but always the amplification of self. As a writer, I’m interested in place as character as much as I am in human beings as character.

So, that’s what some authors say. What do readers say?

Commenting during a discussion of my 2011 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards post, Louise (A Strong Belief in Wicker) wrote:

But if an author chooses to set a story in a real place, and they name it, then I think they should get it right. I want the details to be right, and if they aren’t (and I notice that they’re not, that’s another big step) then it spoils my enjoyment of the rest of the story. I don’t necessarily mean it to, but it just does.

Regular commenter on my blog, Meg, agrees, commenting on my recent Spotlight on Georgia Blain post that:

I do prefer factual detail about people and places. When I read fiction I want to believe what the author is telling me. I don’t want to have to question something I know to be different.

And then just a few days ago, John (Musings of a Literary Dilettante) commented on Lisa (ANZlitLovers) post on Bernhard Schlink’s latest novel, Woman on the stairs. He agreed with Lisa’s criticism of the book, saying:

Thank God – I’m not alone! I found this dull too, and very poorly edited. For example: when the narrator says he loves the botanical garden in Sydney, he says it is bordered by a cathedral to the north and by the Opera House to the south. Wrong! It’s the Opera House to the *north*, the cathedral to the *south*…

And finally, Cally73 (a GoodReads reviewer) commented on the abovementioned Stephen Daisley’s Traitor that:

A little more explanation of the New Zealand setting would have been beneficial – as a New Zealander, I was able to work out where it was set, but those unfamiliar with the geography of NZ may find it difficult.

Oh dear, and that’s a place he has been to!

What I sense here – based on both the few examples here and more conversations over the years – is that readers can be very critical if they think authors have got the “facts” about place wrong, whilst for authors, the focus is more on the “sense” of the place and whether it serves their purposes. Many know they will be picked up if they get the “facts” wrong, but that’s not their focus. For authors who like doing research, it’s not a big issue, but for those who don’t it’s probably safer, as Louise above implies, to create a fictional setting, even if it’s based on a real place. Call Canberra by another name, and readers can go with the flow – but that doesn’t help of course if the issues the author wants to explore are place-centric (such as the shrimp-farming industry in Angela Savage’s The dying beach.)

I’d love to be a fly on the wall when setting is discussed at the conference. What issues will concern the authors most?

Delicious descriptions: Louise Mack’s dialogue and satire

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Over Christmas, during one of my conversations with Son Gums, he commented how he tires of meaningless conversations, conversations, for example, in which people discuss a television series they’ve seen but say nothing of note. He mimicked the sort of conversation he meant … well, imagine my surprise when, in one of those surprising synchronicities, I came across exactly that sort of conversation a few days later in Louise Mack’s The world is round (my review). Here is part of it – the two speakers are at a social gathering, and published author Musgrave is eavesdropping:

It was the girl who pushed the ball this time. ‘Have you ever read a book called Lost in the Zodiac?’
‘No, never read it. Who’s it bai?’
‘I don’t know. I never look who a book’s by. Do you?’
‘No. Tell you an awfully naice book. Read it on board coming out, Miss Nobody of Nowhere.’
‘I haven’t read it. Is it good?’
‘Very good. Very er–er–interestin’.’
‘Is it? I must get to that. Do you know who it’s by?’
‘One of those French fellows, I think. Sounds like  a Frenchman. One of those detective plots, you know.’
‘Oh yes, I know. Like that book everyone was reading the other day, I forget the name of it.’
‘Yes. Sort of detective yarn you know. Very good.’
‘There’s a book called A Painted Polyanthus’ – Musgrave gave a sigh for a man he knew who would have revelled in this with a joy as keen as his own. ‘They say it’s very good. I haven’t read it yet.’
‘Neither have I.’
Musgrave was disappointed.
‘Have you read Speech in Passing?’
‘Oh yes, I read that. I cried over it.’
‘No? Did you? Bai Jove!’ leering sentimentally.
‘Yes, I couldn’t help it.’
‘The “sulky man” – he was a rum cove, wasn’t he? He was funny wasn’t he.’
‘I don’t think he was a sulky man at all.’
‘Neither do I. The only called him that,’ boldly.
Her voice changed.
‘”And Ida died,”‘ she quoted, in tones that suggested to you that she was just going to burst into tears.
Musgrave turned his head to see how she was looking. Just as he thought. Her head was a little on one side, her eyes were staring sadly straight back in front of her, and her mouth was doing its best to look pensive and full of feeling.
‘”And Ida died,”‘ she said again.
That was evidently the one point about the story that had struck her most impressively. Unfortunately hers was not the face to express the feeling she would fain have conveyed …

You can see why those early critics praised her dialogue and satire, can’t you? It’s quite delicious.

Note: The strange spellings, like “bai”, are attempts to phonetically capture the Australian accent – and is clearly being satirised.