Australian literature

My literary week (1), in a sense

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I say “in a sense” because my reading has been slow this week as Mr Gums and I have been getting back up to speed after our Lake Eyre trip. However, in terms of the literary world, much has been happening and I thought I’d share some with you, documenting it at the same time for my own future benefit.

Gillian  Mears

I’ll start with the sad news, the death of the wonderful Australian writer, Gillian Mears, who had suffered from multiple sclerosis for over 20 years. Her disease was so debilitating that she appeared in 2011 before state (NSW) hearing on the Rights of the Terminally Ill. The Sydney Morning Herald quoted from her submission in 2013. Here is part of that submission:

Not a day goes by that I don’t wish that I were dead. It would be so much easier than living in a body beleaguered now by advanced multiple sclerosis. I’m in my 17th year of living with this disease [she was diagnosed at the age of 30] and I’ve very nearly had enough.

Gillian Mears' Foal's bread
Foals’ bread cover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

I had not been aware of her condition until she won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2012 for Foal’s Bread and was unable to take part in the post-announcement panel, which I attended, because she needed to conserve her energy for other commitments. I first read her (The Mint Lawn) with my reading group, and we loved it, but that was way before blogging. However, I did review Foal’s bread, which also won the Miles Franklin award, here. She was a fine writer, and this book, in particular, is one you don’t easily forget.

Her death represents a tragic sad loss for Australian literature, because it was too early – she was only 51. But, given the situation she found herself in, it was clearly for her, in the end, a release. Vale Gillian Mears.

NSW Premier’s Literary Awards

The annual NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were announced earlier this week, as it usually is, to coincide with the Sydney Writers Festival Week. You can read all the winners on the State Library of NSW’s site, so I’ll just share the few that are particularly relevant to my blog’s interests:

  • Christina Stead Prize for Fiction: Melinda Bobis’ Locust girl: A love song (I have reviewed her Fish-hair woman, which I loved, but for a review of this novel you can check out Lisa’s of ANZLitLovers)
  • UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing (Adams being another of our writers who died too young): Sonja Dechian’s An astronaut’s life (also longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award)
  • Indigenous Writer’s (biennial) Prize: Bruce Pascoe’s Dark emu (which is on my radar, but has also been read by that voracious reader, Lisa! as well as by Michelle at Adventures in Biography)
  • Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction: Magda Szubanski’s Reckoning (which I really MUST read). (Interesting that poet Douglas Stewart’s name is used for the non-fiction prize. He did write some criticism and autobiography too but they’re not what he’s known for.)

There are also awards for Poetry, Scriptwriting, Multicultural writing, among others, but I’ll just leave it at these for today.

Sydney Writers Festival

I’d love one day to get to the Sydney Writers Festival, but its timing in May is always tricky for me, so I end up relying on ABC RN and bloggers for my fix. I’ll share just two examples for you to check out if you are interested:

  • Jonathan Shaw of Me fail, I fly has written multiple posts, one for each day, of his experience of the Festival. Start at Day 1, and work your way through from there. I have quickly scanned his posts but will be adding my comments later. Thanks as always, Jonathan, for helping me enjoy this festival vicariously.
  • ABC RN’s Books and Arts Daily program usually broadcasts – live or later on – several events from the Festival, but I’ll just share the link for their live panel session which I listened to live. The topic was to discuss the “pleasure and challenges of writing and reading in a globalised world”. The panelists were Australian comedian Magda Szubanski (author of Reckoning), Dutch author Herman Koch (whose upcoming novel is Dear Mr M), and French writer Marie Darrieussecq (whose latest novel is Men: A novel of cinema and desire). It was a fascinating discussion in which the writers teased out a range of issues. To give one example: they discussed Herman Koch’s The dinner and the idea that even where a book’s themes may seem universal – such as parental love for children – reactions/responses can vary greatly depending on the culture of the reader.

The scandalous Lady W

Joshua Reynolds painting of Lady Worsley
Joshua Reynolds [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

To end on something completely different and not entirely literary is the story of Lady Worsley (born Seymour Dorothy Fleming, 1758-1818) as told in the BBC telemovie The scandalous Lady W, which my local Jane Austen group viewed this weekend. She was apparently the inspiration for Sheridan’s play School for Scandal and was painted by Joshua Reynolds.

Lady Worsley was involved in a high profile adultery (“criminal conversation”) trial brought by her husband against her lover. However, the story was far from straightforward, her adultery being “commanded” by this very husband who turned out to be a voyeur who preferred to watch his wife have sex with others than do so himself. The inevitable happened and she eloped with one of these lovers. This is a story of women-as-property, of women-not-having-access-to-their-own-propety, and of a woman who was brave enough to stand up for herself. She didn’t win, entirely, but my, did she make her point, as the film shows. The story reminded me that although women – western ones anyhow – have more legal rights now, this idea of “you are mine” is surely behind much of the domestic violence that still occurs.

The main reason my group watched this movie was because Lady Worsley lived during Austen’s time (Austen’s dates being 1775-1817) and lived part of her life near Austen’s home. What, we wondered, did our Jane, a keen reader, know of Lady Worsley? It was the talk of the town.

Francis Keany, Follow the leaders: How to survive a modern-day election campaign (Review)

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Francis Keany, Follow the leadersI had a little laugh when I picked up Francis Keany’s book, Follow the leaders, about his experience as a journalist on the 2013 election campaign, because that very day our current leader Malcolm Turnbull formally announced the 2016 election. It’s all a game of course because we already knew when it was to be – the budget had been brought forward a week to accommodate the chosen date, after all – but the formalities had been held off until after said budget had been delivered. The fact that elections and electioneering are largely a game is one of the themes of Keany’s book.

Now, before I tell you more about this book, a little disclosure. Francis (or Frank) Keany is known to me. He has been my son’s friend since they met in high school in the mid-late 1990s. I’ve taken a particular interest, therefore, in following his journalistic career which has included stints in country New South Wales, Sydney and back in Canberra where we now hear his reports on ABC Radio. He’s a radio journalist, and during the 2013 election he was working for the Macquarie Radio Network.

Mr Gums and I went to the launch of the book and were interested to hear in the introductory comments by journalist James Massola that for all the books out there about politics, there are not very many about a journalist’s experience of an election campaign. He did mention one Australian book, Margo Kingston’s Off the rails about Pauline Hanson’s 1998 campaign, but this is not he said about the main campaign, the leaders. Keany’s book is particularly interesting, he continued, because it’s about modern campaigning in which social media is a significant component. As Keany writes:

the so-called 24-hour media cycle has added to the pace and tone of modern election campaigns. The mistakes that are made are amplified and exaggerated in a bid to meet the appetites of media consumers …

In this world, gaffes like Tony Abbott’s “suppository of all wisdom”, he writes, start trending immediately on Twitter. And then there are the interminable attempts by people to get selfies with the leaders, a “ridiculous aspect” of the campaign the journalists agree.

Keany’s book is not an analysis of or treatise about the process, he doesn’t have a theory to push, he simply shares the dogged day-to-day experience of being part of the press pack that accompanies the two leaders over the last 30-odd days of the campaign. Keany spent the first two weeks of the campaign following the Abbott (Leader of the Opposition) camp, and the last two weeks or so with the then Prime Minister Rudd’s camp.

I found it rather eye-opening. Of course, I’ve seen and read and heard the journalists reporting on campaign trails and I’ve comprehended that they travel in a bunch, but just how intense, not to mention exhausting, it all is, I hadn’t fully realised. Keany describes the experience of being herded onto military planes with their crude toilet facilities, of travelling on coaches, of visiting three states in a day, and of plans being changed suddenly. He describes donning hi-vis vests to traipse after a politician in a factory, sharing late night drinks with colleagues, and missing his partner Tess.

He is painfully honest about his personal experience of being a rookie campaign journalist, of the emotional toll of being separated from a partner when a little bit of support is just what you need, and of the physical toll wrought by the sheer exhaustion of the hours, not to mention by the poor nutrition as you eat on the run.  Here he is at Day 16:

The tiredness has set in like a staph infection – it has become incurable. No number of power naps or snoozes can shake off the dull feeling that’s filling my head.

I can’t think clearly – I’m starting to make too many mistakes.

While his prime focus is his experience, he does provide some insights into the campaign itself. He explains – though perhaps we all know this one – that “campaigns have never been just about policy. They are about public relations”. He watches the politicians interact with the public, hears them discuss strategies, and concludes that “I don’t think politicians give the average punter enough credit for their knowledge of the outside world.” He talks of the journalists’ awareness of panic in the Rudd camp with last minute schedule changes, press conference delays, and sudden policy announcements. We glimpse the machinery behind the leaders – how political minders try to control the message by, for example, withholding press releases until the last minute. How tricky it is, we see, for journalists to keep it all together. They have to physically keep up with the leaders, tease out the key issues from the spin and try to get their questions answered, and then find time to prepare and file their stories according to the needs of their bosses.

Next time I start to rail at a journalist’s gaffe, I’ll think first about the difficulties that can be involved in “filing” one’s reports while you are on the run, and risking missing the bus to the next venue!

Keany’s writing is clear and, appropriate to his aim, is informal and chatty in style. He has a sense of humour too, which is conveyed in frequent asides, such as his description of a hotel room which “looks like it was nice back when the Raiders last won a premiership”. Even if you don’t know when that last one was, which I don’t, you get his point. But, I can’t help commenting, pedant that I am, on a recurring and irritating grammar peccadillo. It’s to do with “who” versus “whom”, as in, for example, “a mysterious pilot who we hardly ever see”. Or, is this just another grammar nicety that’s going to bite the dust?

For all the stresses and challenges, Keany is clearly passionate about his career. He writes in his Introduction that he’s aware of debates about the value of the press gallery, but says:

I firmly believe that our political system is grounded in the participation of all Australians, and that the media has a significant role to play in ensuring as much transparency as possible in that system.

I think he’s right – and I also think he has done journalism a service by providing some behind-the-scenes insight into why the media may not always be perfect, while also demonstrating that in this age of spin and control journalists are needed more than ever.

Francis Keany
Follow the leaders: How to survive a modern-day election campaign
Braddon: Editia, 2016
153pp.
ISBN: 9781942189404

Monday musings on Australian literature: Let’s get physical – Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre

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Last week I wrote my fifth “Let’s get physical” post, and chose Adelaide because visiting there was bookending our trip last week to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre. You’ll understand, therefore, why I’ve chosen the subject I have for this week!

Lake Eyre was named for explorer Edward John Eyre, the first European to see it in 1840, but in 2012 its official name was changed to combine its English name with its indigenous one, Kati Thanda. This recognition of indigenous place names is happening around Australia and is so important – not only to help reconciliation, but because these names mean something to the land we live in. 

Lake Eyre aerial view

Lake Eyre Basin aerial view, 2016

Lake Eyre, for my non-Australian readers, is a large shallow lake in remote and very dry South Australia, approximately 700 km north of Adelaide. It contains Australia’s lowest natural point, around 15 m (49 ft) below sea level. When it fills, albeit this is a rare event, it is also Australia’s largest lake.

There are many stories associated with the lake – indigenous ones, of course, and settler ones. It was the subject of intense exploration in Australia’s early colonial days – by those looking for an inland sea – and was where major land speed record attempts were made in the mid 1960s. Importantly, native title over it was granted to the local Arabana people in 2012. There are some tensions, particularly regarding water activities, between the indigenous desire to respect its sacredness and its role as a tourist destination.

Early reports

The first person to write about the lake was Eyre. His writings, Journals of expeditions of discovery into Central Australia and overland from Adelaide to King George’s Sound in the years 1840-1, were published in England in 1845. They can now be read at Project Gutenberg Australia. Here he is writing about the region – very dry one day and then rain the next:

Lake Eyre, aerial viewyre Ba

Lake Eyre Basin aerial view, after 2016 rains

In passing through the plains, which were yesterday so arid and dry, I found immense pools, nay almost large reaches of water lodged in the hollows, and in which boats might have floated. Such was the result of only an hour or two’s rain, whilst the ground itself, formerly so hard, was soft and boggy in the extreme, rendering progress much slower and more fatiguing to the horses than it otherwise would have been. (August 31, 1840)

Crossing many little stony ridges, and passing the channel of several watercourses, I discovered a new and still more disheartening feature in the country, the existence of brine springs. Hitherto we had found brackish and occasionally salt water in some of the watercourses, but by tracing them up among the hills, we had usually found the quality to improve as we advanced, but now the springs were out in the open plains, and the water poisoned at its very source.

Occasionally round the springs were a few coarse rushes, but the soil in other respects was quite bare, destitute of vegetation, and thickly coated over with salt, presenting the most miserable and melancholy aspect imaginable. (September 2, 1840)

Warburton River aerial view

Warburton River aerial view

This is desert, an area, that is, of very low and very erratic rainfall. The problem was that in the early days of settlement, explorers sometimes happened to visit areas like Lake Eyre at a rare wet time and drew conclusions that later, of course, proved false. In 1858 explorer Peter Egerton Warburton thought that “the abundant and sure supply of water” would make the region easy to occupy. The fact that the biggest towns here – Birdsville and Marree, for example – have permanent populations of 100 people or less rather puts paid to that forecast.

In 1887, a bore was sunk at the Coward Springs railway siding. A contemporary magazine, Pictorial Australian, reported that:

Acres of nearly level table-land were turned in a few hours to a swamp … it is only a matter of weeks before miles of country will be covered with water. (from an interpretive panel at Coward Springs)

Wetlands were created – and breeding grounds for birds and other wildlife ensued. Indeed Lake Eyre is  famous for its birdlife and its breeding grounds. Ornithologist Captain SA White undertook “an ornithological trip” to the area in 1914 to collect bird specimens. He wrote about the artesian bore at Coward Springs where the pipes had corroded, so that the water

now flows out at the surface and finds its way across the the plain, where for many acres it forms a swamp, mostly covered in green rushes trimmed down by the stock. Amidst this short vegetation many water-loving birds find a home and feeding ground. (from an interpretive panel at Coward Springs)

I don’t pretend to understand how water works here. We saw some water courses/ponds/springs that are permanent, and others that are caused by recent rains and will evaporate or otherwise dissipate very quickly. The critical point is that there is not enough – in quantity and quality – to support regular, intensive farming, though there are cattle stations in the area.

More recent writing

Lake Eyre South

Lake Eyre South (viewed from the ground)

Not surprisingly for such a fascinating place, many non-fiction books have been published over the years about it – by scientists, journalists, and travellers – but not much fiction. Given its remoteness you’d think it would provide excellent inspiration for novelists, but not so it seems. Arthur Upfield who, in the mid twentieth century, wrote crime fiction set in Central Australia did set one in the Lake Eyre region, Bony buys a woman, and another of his, Death of a lake, is about a fictitious lake that could be based on Lake Eyre.

As for non-fiction, I found a useful list of recommendations, including a trilogy by Roma Dalhunty who travelled in the region with her geologist husband. The books are The spell of Lake Eyre (1975), When the dead heart beats Lake Eyre lives (date?), and The rumbling silence of Lake Eyre (1986).

My own favourite work about the area is, however, a movie, the 1954 Shell-sponsored docudrama The back of beyond. It chronicles the trip made between Marree and Birdsville every fortnight, from 1936 to the late 1950s, by mailman Tom Kruse. Scripted mainly by its director John Heyer, the final narration was co-written by Australian poet Douglas Stewart. Marree is described as a “corrugated iron town shimmering in the corrugated air” and Birdsville as “seven iron houses burning in the sun between two deserts”. The drama of life in the region is described through lines like “Who passes or perishes, only the dingo knows”.

I’m sorry I don’t have anything more exciting for you, but at least you now know where I was last week!

Meanwhile if you know of any fiction set in Lake Eyre, please to tell.

Edition de luxe: A collection of short stories

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Edition de luxe: A collection of short stories inspired by our hotelsLast October, I wrote a Monday Musings post on writers-in-residence programs. The first one I listed, because I listed them alphabetically, was Accor Hotels MGallery Literary Collection. This is (or was?) a collaborative program with Melbourne’s The Wheeler Centre. Quoting what I wrote then, ‘it involved providing eight award-winning Australian writers with a short residence in one of Accor’s boutique MGallery hotels and commissioning those authors to write a short story which will be published in a book which will be “presented exclusively to guests at MGallery Hotels”.’ Well, it just so happens that this weekend we are staying in one of these hotels, and what did I find but the book of short stories titled Edition de luxe: A collection of short stories inspired by our hotels. Woo hoo!

It’s a nicely presented little book, with, for each writer, a brief bio, their short story, a brief history of the hotel plus that hotel’s special appeal, photographs, and a “memorable moment” describing something you might be able to enjoy if you stayed at the hotel. This is marketing after all, in addition to offering the treat of a bit of support to writers. The marketing bit comes to the fore when you look at the table of contents. It lists the title of the story, and the name of the hotel at (or about) which it was written, but NOT the name of the writer! Harumph. I’m always irritated when names of authors are not given due recognition in listings.

So, without further ado, I’m going to name the writers, 6 women and 2 men, who appear in the book. They are:

  • Favel Parrett (“Gold”)
  • Graeme Simsion (“Slideshow”)
  • Chris Flynn (“The prophecy, 1931”)
  • Robyn Annear (“Batman’s Hill lives”)
  • Toni Jordan (“Like a kindness”)
  • Debra Oswald (“Dog grooming”)
  • Alison Croggon (“Hello”)
  • Hannie Rayson (“Pip”)

I’ve read the stories – of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this! They are all 2-3 pages, some fiction, some not. They probably, the fiction ones anyhow, qualify as flash fiction, depending on your definition.

The first story, Favel Parrett’s “Gold”, is a little mood piece about what she sees from the balcony of her room at Mount Lofty House, “her” hotel, naturally. It’s non-fiction, and I enjoyed her description of the end of the day:

Time is measured in light. Evening shadows begin to stretch over the valley. The gold moves further and further away towards the horizon, chased by the sun going down.

Nice, peaceful.

The fiction pieces vary in tone from the poignant or sad, like Graeme Simsion’s “Slideshow”, with its little surprise ending, and Alison Croggon’s more worrying “Hello”, to the more lightly humorous, like Chris Flynn’s “The prophecy, 1931” about Walter Lindrum (set in Melbourne’s Hotel Lindrum) and Hannie Rayson’s sperm-donor-inspired final story in the collection, “Pip”. Historian Robyn Annear explores Melbourne’s Batman’s Hill, razed in the 1860s to make way for the railway, in her story “Batman’s Hill lives”, and Toni Jordan, in the Blue Mountains, recounts a chance encounter, which may or may not be real but which makes a sweet story, in “Like a kindness”. But, perhaps, though it’s hard to choose, I most liked Debra Oswald’s “Dog grooming” with its tale of subversion and catharsis.

I won’t say more. These are little pieces, perfect for reading in a hotel at the end of a busy working or travelling day. Quality writers, thoughtful stories. I wonder what, if any, feedback Sofitel/Accor and the Wheeler Centre have had, how the writers found the experience, and whether the project will be repeated.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Let’s get physical – Adelaide

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This will be the fifth in my occasional “Let’s get physical” series, and I’ve chosen Adelaide because this week I’m spending a few days in this city, the state capital of South Australia, bookending a trip to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre.

Adelaide, which was proclaimed as a British colony in 1836, is located in the country of the Kaurna Aboriginal nation. Unlike Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Hobart, it was established as a place of free settlers. That didn’t mean, unfortunately, that indigenous people fared any better. Their culture and language was, apparently, destroyed within years of white settlement there, but it’s a particular story that I don’t know enough about to go into here.

St Peters Anglican Church, 1880s

St Peters Anglican Church, 1880s

Adelaide has many reputations, including being the city of churches, the home of one of Australia’s best-loved arts festivals, one of the world’s most liveable cities and, oh dear, the city of corpses. Stephen Orr, whose rural novel The hands I reviewed recently, has written a non-fiction book called The cruel city. He apparently reports that author Salman Rushdie once suggested Adelaide was “the perfect setting for a Stephen King novel or horror film”. Poor Adelaide. This is not based on the number of murders, but on the fact that for two or three decades in the mid to late twentieth century it had more than its share of “gruesome or distressing murders”, starting with the still unsolved disappearance of the Beaumont children in 1966. They have never been found and their story was used as a cautionary tale for all Australian children growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Stephen Orr’s Time’s Long Ruin, which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2011, was inspired by the case.

South Australian Museum roofs

Roofs, 1850s, in the old Police Barracks and Armoury courtyard

But, my main point of this series of posts is meant to be “the physical” – and I’ll start by saying that I like Adelaide, and the reasons are partly physical. It’s a small city, and I like small cities, and it has my favourite style of climate, a Mediterranean style featuring warm to hot dry summers and mild damp winters. It can get hot there, very hot occasionally, but that would be a small price to pay to my mind.

Jane Jose writes about Adelaide in her book, Places women make, which I recently reviewed. She describes the city as follows:

Adelaide, in settled south Australia, has its circle of green hills around the city, its expansive pale-blue desert skies and an inheritance of parklands and colonial architecture.

That was then

But now, let’s flash back to those early colonial days, to 1859, and the first novel by a woman to be published in South Australia, Marian by Maud Jeanne Franc (pen-name of Matilda Jane Evans). Early in the book, Marian’s future employer comes to Adelaide to interview her. Here he is arriving at the house:

He reached it, and a moment after was shown into a little parlour, half-dark it appeared to him, for the blinds were let down to exclude the sun, and everything appeared bleak as he entered.

It was typical of those days that people would draw curtains or blinds against the sun. Wise of course in high heat, but my understanding is that it was done against most sun. And the result? Bleakness!

Jumping to the mid-late twentieth century, we have Adelaide-born authors Barbara Hanrahan (b. 1939) and Murray Bail (b. 1941). Hanrahan, who wrote the gorgeous autobiographical novel The scent of eucalyptus (1973) (my review), worked hard to find her Australia. As a child, she writes in her novel, she struggled to find “the sunburned land” of her reading and history in the town where she lived, and only really found her “place” after she left:

l feel it’s of value to divide my life between England and Australia . . . Two places, so different that one illuminates the other. London so large that I may lose myself, which means find myself because I can be anonymous. Adelaide – smaller, strange, this place where I began from, the place of childhood, of legend. (personal papers, n.d. 1978?)

Murray Bail found it a provincial place – “overwhelmingly reactionary, Protestant, and fiercely defensive of time-honoured standards” – and he, too, escaped, first to India in 1968, and then to London in 1970. This, presumably primarily inspired by Adelaide, comes from his Notebooks 1970-2003:

When I think of ‘Australia’ I first see its shape. It is quickly followed by scenes of slow-moving dryness, muted colours, and some of the great white trees. Of people in general, it is often the young, flushed mothers in sleeveless cotton dresses yanking or carrying children on the hot city asphalt.

Homesickness: habits of a landscape acquired over time. (London June 1970 – November 1974)

His first novel, Homesickness, was published in 1980. It is on my TBR.

This is now

Born ten years after Bail, and in the tiny South Australian town of Minlaton, novelist-poet-librettist Peter Goldsworthy set his  2003 novel Three dog night partly in Adelaide and partly in central Australia. In it, Martin brings his English wife back to Adelaide. Here they are driving into the Adelaide hills:

The day has taken its name to heart: a Sunday from the glory box of Sundays, a luminous morning saturated with sun-light and parrots. Happiness rises in my throat, thick as cud; the world outside the car, wholly blue and gold seems almost too much for my senses, too tight a squeeze.

‘Paradise’, Lucy murmurs, smitten.

At last, the “real” Adelaide – blue sky, gold sun and birds! Of course, this is a novel, and “paradise” is not that easily attained. Indeed, the novel (which I read long before blogging) is really rather dark.

I will end here, but I must first defend Adelaide against those charges of provincialism, because in 1970, after Hanrahan and Bail had left, reformist politician Don Dunstan became Premier of South Australia, and things changed. Pretty soon Adelaide (and the state) became one of Australia’s most socially progressive places. Just goes to show what a visionary leader can do!

PS I haven’t read it, but JM Coetzee’s Slow man is set in Adelaide.

Jane Jose, Places women make (Review)

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Jane Jose, Places women make“Places”, Jane Jose writes in her book Places women make, “can lift our spirits and be inclusive, and add surprise, excitement, wonder or some beauty to day-to-day life in the city.” These sorts of places, which are essential to making our cities liveable, rarely just happen. They take planning, and who does this planning? Men. At least, it’s men, says Jose, who have been the “hero architects of most of Australia’s city buildings, leading the design, even if women were invisibly designing the detail behind the scenes.” So, in Places women make, she aims to right this imbalance, to bring to the fore the work women have done in making cities better. This is not, however, a feminist rant. She does not undermine the work done by men. She simply wants women to receive their share of recognition, not just because they deserve it but because it is important for other women – particularly young women – to know.

I had not heard of Jane Jose before reading this book, which proves her point rather because, in fact, she, a self-described urbanist, has been involved in urban planning for well over two decades. She has done this through many roles, including, at one point, Deputy Lord Mayor of Adelaide, her home town. Indeed, one of the fascinating aspects of the book is just how many ways people can contribute to urban planning and improvement. She tells of the obvious people – the architects and town planners – but there are others too, such as the civic leaders and politicians, the landscape designers and gardeners,  the heritage and environmental activists, and the philanthropists. Women – many of them – have performed all these roles, and she shares some of their stories. It’s inspiring reading.

The book is structured thematically, starting with her overall thesis about what women can offer to urban design. This is probably a good place to mention two – hmmm – mantras, I’ll call them, which pervade the book. One is straightforward, and that is, to (mis)use EF Schumacher’s phrase, “small is beautiful”. Although women have been, and are, involved in big projects, it is often in the “small” projects that they make their biggest impacts. Early on, she repeats a leading architect’s criticism of Sydney’s Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore. Jose writes that he

once criticised her to me for having paid too much attention to the small public places and parks in the city rather than driving major projects. He described the small projects she is promoting in the city as being “like tatting”. To my mind this shows a lack of understanding of how women see the small things adding up to a greater whole.

Jose goes on to discuss the projects and ideas Clover Moore has driven, arguing that Moore “understands that community places and activities are the glue in the community” and further, that beautiful, liveable cities “bear the fruit of a strong economy”. I’m not an economist, but there must be some truth to this argument I think. Anyhow, throughout the book, Jose describes many, many small community-focused projects initiated by women, from Wendy Whiteley’s magical Lavender Bay garden to Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Foundation, from Jane Lomax-Smith’s work on protecting Adelaide’s parklands to Tess Brady’s involvement in the creation of Australia’s first booktown at Clunes. Some of these, as you can tell, started small but ended much bigger, which is what happens to good ideas. From little things, big things grow (as Australia’s Paul Kelly sings).

The other mantra or thread is perhaps a little more problematic. It relates to what Jose calls a “feminine sensibility”. She defines this in terms of “creativity … intuition … lateral approach”, as having “a special relationship with community and village life”, and as taking the “long view”. She writes that “we know a female perspective is different from that of a man”. Intuitively – ha! – I understand what she is saying, but from a gender studies or feminist point of view this feels like dangerous ground. However, I’m going with her because her stories are powerful enough to argue her case. Women’s contributions have in general been overlooked or underplayed. Take for example Marion Mahony Griffin, wife of Walter Burley Griffin, credited as Canberra’s designer. It took decades for her part in what was clearly a partnership to be recognised.

What I enjoyed most about the book are the stories about projects, big and small, that women have initiated, some known to me, but many not. I enjoyed reading about Australia’s cities and what local women have fought for in them. This coming week I’ll be in Adelaide, the city where Jose cut her urban planning teeth. She writes about her involvement in the re-visioning of North Terrace and more specifically in activism to save Adelaide’s heritage architecture. I have visited Adelaide several times over the years, but on my visit last year, I was thrilled by how beautiful – and welcoming – it is, particularly North Terrace. We have Jane Jose, forensic pathologist Jane Lomax-Smith, architect Jackie Shannon Gillen, among others, to thank for that.

While her main focus is contemporary Australia, Jose also tells stories from the past. She describes how wives of Australia’s early administrators strongly affected the design of the cities they were in, women like Mrs Macquarie, wife of governor Lachlan Macquarie, and the energetic Lady Jane Franklin, wife of explorer and lieutenant governor of Van Dieman’s land, John Franklin. It is this Jane, in fact, who graces the book’s cover. (I have written about her before on this blog). These women are just two examples of women who, married to influential men, used their influence to affect city planning and design.

In addition to casting her net historically, Jose also crosses the seas. She ends her book with a special tribute to the influential American urbanist Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), who inspired her belief that cities can be villages or communities. But she also refers to other international women, such as American landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, Chilean landscape architect Teresa Moller, and London-based Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.

What more can I say? Places women make is a fascinating book written by a woman passionate and clearly knowledgeable about her subject. If I have any complaints they are minor, and yet I do need to say them. One is that while she provides a wonderful list, at the end, of the women whose stories she tells, there is no index. I’d love an index. The other is that there are no foot-notes or end-notes documenting her sources, just a brief reading list. These don’t affect the book’s worth as a popular introduction to her subject, but they’d be much appreciated by those of us interested in a little more!

And now, since you can’t really “spoil” a book like this, I’ll end with Jose’s conclusion because it says it all:

Cities matter. They are alive and they change, they are the places we live our lives and make our memories. It takes commitment, imagination and passion to make even the smallest idea for change blossom from an idea into a park, a playground, a library or a shaded street. With the influence of women, cities can be better places. Tomorrow’s children need the places women make.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also enjoyed the book.

awwchallenge2016Jane Jose
Places women make: Unearthing the contribution of women to our cities
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2016
213pp
ISBN: 9781743053942

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Ideal books for newcomers, 1965-style

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Another treasure from Trove! Just over 50 years ago, on 1 January, 1965, an article appeared in a journal titled The Good Neighbour, which was published from 1950 to 1969 by the then Department of Immigration.

The article is called “Ideal books for newcomers” and opens with:

Following Mary Durack’s articles on “The Old Australia” which appeared in the October and November issues of The Good Neighbour, the author has compiled a list for some suggested reading.

I assume “the author” is Mary Durack? If so, I must say that I’d have written it as ‘Following her articles on “The Old Australia” which appeared in the October and November issues of The Good Neighbour, Mary Durack has …’. Anyhow, the article continues that:

The books named are not necessarily the best or most profound, the author states, but would seem to provide the readiest introduction to Australian literature and history. Many of these books would make useful presents for newcomers to Australia.

So, what does this “author”, let’s presume Mary Durack, recommend? I’m not sure about copyright* on this, so I won’t reproduce it all but the full list is available at the link I’ve provided above. Durack produces her list under headings, such as Australian History, Australian Aborigines, Early Colonial Novels (before 1900), and so on. As you will see, there’s no playing to the lowest common denominator here. The list assumes a good facility with English, and decent concentration levels.

History and culture

Two books are recommended on “Australian Aborigines”. One is AP Elkin’s The Australian Aborigines: how to understand them (Angus and Robertson). An unfortunate subtitle by today’s standards, but this was first published in 1938. A much later edition was a set text for me when I studied Anthropology, Elkin having been Professor of Anthropology at Sydney University. I might be wrong, but I’d be surprised if many Australian citizens had read this book in 1965. Still, in the first edition’s preface, Elkin does suggest that the book has three audiences: the general public, administrative officials and missionaries, and university students and scientists. He suggests that those with a more general interest could skip the chapters detailing relationship systems.

Another category is “Documentary, Travel and Biography”. There’s a strong focus here on the rural, with books about Cobb and Co, the Overland Telegraph, and the Outback (including her own, now classic, Kings in grass castles) being recommended.

Bill Harney, Grief, gaiety and aboriginesWith her outback experience, Mary Durack was familiar with Aboriginal people, and so in this, and other categories, she makes sure to include books about (though not by, given the time we are talking about) indigenous people. I was intrigued by one, unknown to me, Bill Harney’s Grief, gaiety, and the Aborigines. My link here is his Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) entry. He had close connections with indigenous people, and is described by ADB as “gregarious and generous person who regarded everyone as equal”. This ABC News item supports this assessment. It would be interesting to know how he managed the difficult role of government patrol officer and protector of Aborigines, which he did from 1940 to 1947.

The last category I’ll mention in this group is “Critical and Interpretive Studies”. Among the three books listed here is Russell Ward’s classic, ground-breaking history of Australia, The Australian legend. Last year I reviewed his daughter Biff Ward’s memoir, In my mother’s hands. (And, blogger “wadholloway” who regularly comments here has named his blog for this book.)

Novels

The lists of novels are divided into three categories: early colonial (before 1900), early colonial and pioneering days (post 1900), and later Australian life.

Only two are recommended in the first group, Henry Kingsley’s The recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (on my TBR) and Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under arms. Not, I notice Marcus Clarke’s classic For the term of his natural life which would perhaps be the first of the early novels that people would think of today. Was she wanting to avoid the convict stain?

Katharine Susannah Prichard

Katharine Susannah Prichard, by May Moore (Presumed Public Domain, State Library of NSW)

Her next group – her post-1900 date referring, it seems, to the date of publication not of the content of the novels – contains the usual suspects: Joseph Furphy’s Such is life, Miles Franklin’s All that swagger, (not My brilliant career), Henry Handel Richardson’s famous Richard Mahoney trilogy, Eleanor Dark’s The timeless land, Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Roaring Nineties, Ernestine Hill’s My love must wait, and Patrick White’s Voss. These seem fair enough, though every Australian literature lover would probably tinker with this. She also includes a book unknown to me, Brian Penton’s Landtakers. According to Wikipedia he was a novelist and journalist, and this novel featured pioneering life in Queensland from 1824–64. Given the Durack family’s story (see my review of Brenda Niall’s biography of the Durack sisters, True north) it’s not surprising that she’d recommend a book on this subject. Interestingly, women writers feature well in her list!

The final group focuses on “later Australian life” – in other words, they’re mostly about life in the 1930s to 1960s. It contains many books I know, some authors I know but not the particular book, and some I’ve never heard of:

  • Katharine Susannah Prichard: Coonardoo
  • Louis Stone: Jonah
  • Xavier Herbert: Capricornia
  • Kylie Tennant: The battlers
  • Patrick White: Riders in the chariot
  • A. G. Hungerford: Riverslake
  • Donald Stuart: The driven
  • Tom Ronan: Moleskin Midas
  • Frank Dalby Davison: Man Shy
  • B. Vickers: First place to the stranger
  • Judah Waten: Alien son
  • Gavin Casey: Snowball
  • Randolph Stowe: To the islands
  • Elizabeth Harrower: The long prospect
  • Nene Gare: The fringe dwellers
  • Eve Langley: The pea pickers (my review)

An interesting and probably reasonable list, given the 1965 date. I’m impressed to see Elizabeth Harrower’s second novel, The long prospect, here. It suggests the regard in which she was held at the time she was being published. An obvious omission is George Johnston’s now classic My brother Jack. However, it was only published in 1964, and perhaps Durack didn’t know it.

Again, there are a few authors I don’t know at all: Donald Stuart, Tom Ronan (who appears in other categories too), B. Vickers, and Gavin Casey (who also appears in other categories). That’s 25% of the list! Stuart, Wikipedia says, “attempts to view the world from the aboriginal point of view, making him one of the few Australian writers, along with anthropologists … to even attempt to come close to a personal knowledge of the aborigines”. It would be interesting to read him now – such as his first novel, Yandy – given current thinking on this..

Overall, these books, as in the non-fiction categories, tend to be country rather than urban based. This probably partly reflects what novelists at that time were writing about, but could also reflect Durack’s background and interests. Would this focus have addressed the likely interests of newcomers?

Durack also recommends some verse and short stories, but you can read them at the link.

Meanwhile, I’d love to know what you think about this list (from any point of view you choose!)

* If the government holds copyright on the article, then it is now, just, out of copyright I believe.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Miles Franklin Award, the second decade (1968-1977)

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Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin, c. 1940s (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Three weeks ago, I published a post on the first decade of the Miles Franklin Award. That seemed to interest some of my readers, so I’m back again with the next decade. I hope it’s equally interesting.

Again, I won’t be describing all the decade’s winners. You can check the Award’s official site to see a complete list of winners. Rather, I’ll be sharing some interesting snippets, inspired by my roving around Trove.

Money, money, money

Money, how authors support themselves, comes up in a few articles from this decade. Colin Simpson, Vice-President of the Australian Society of Authors, wrote a letter to the editor of the Canberra Times in December 1971, asking readers to buy Australian books as Christmas gifts. He probably wrote to other newspapers too. He comments that many people read Australian books, but via free libraries. Libraries are “great”, he says, but reading this way is “at the expense of authors, publishers and book sellers”. He continues:

The novelist’s position has become particularly sub-economic. As an example, the novel that won this year’s Miles Franklin Award has sold in Australia, in 12 months, less than 1,000 copies. This would earn its author, in royalties, under $400. Such books are read by tens of thousands of people who never go into a bookshop to buy books, but get them from the local library.

He looks to the future implementation of Public Lending Right (which happened in Australia in 1975) but in the meantime

If all those families of avid borrowers would make just one of their Christmas gifts a book, it would help keep booksellers in business. If the book they bought was an Australian one it would help to keep our authors writing books …

Some six months later in May 1972, The Canberra Times literary contributor, Maurice Dunlevy, wrote an article headed “No millions for our novelists”. His aim was to correct ideas that novelists are well-remunerated. Not everyone, he writes, is an Arthur Hailey or Harold Robbins. He calculates the likely royalty for the average Australian author, and says that, for a reasonably successful book, he (always a “he”) might earn $1,500. This means that such a novelist

would have to write at least five successful novels a year to make as much as a middle-ranking public servant — a prospect which might daunt even the most dedicated novelist.

Not surprisingly most authors, he says, write in their spare time. He then refers to the 1972 Miles Franklin Award Winner, David Ireland (for The unknown industrial prisoner). Ireland had a cultural grant from the New South Wales government (their first such grant) and the publisher, Angus and Robertson, received assistance from the Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) for publication. Ireland’s prize was $1,250. Dunlevy continues:

Now $1,250 doesn’t buy much time for anyone these days and even though it might seem a big sum to a novelist who has been earning his living tending a golf course, Ireland probably welcomed his 1972 CLF fellowship even more than the prize.

After discussing the huge differential in payments for authors in the US (appearances, articles) compared with Australia, he suggests that readers

think about the ordinary Australian writer who more than likely is knocking out his novel at night on the kitchen table, knowing that he will make no more than a few hundred dollars from it and that he will be lucky to get it published anyway, as fewer than three dozen are published in Australia in any one year.

Fewer than three dozen Australian books published a year? I think the rate of publishing, per capita, is higher now. But, I’m not sure that remuneration for the “ordinary Australian writer” (that is, not bestselling ones like the late Bryce Courtenay or Di Morrissey) has improved much?

A couple of characters

For this decade, I found a couple of articles in The Australian Women’s Weekly. They are very different in style to those in the major newspapers – chattier and focusing more on the personality and lives of the authors.

Dal Stivens

One of the Miles Franklin Award winning writers featured by the Weekly was Dal Stivens, who won the 1970 award with A horse for air (see Lisa of ANZLitLovers’ review).

The Weekly tells us little about Stivens’ literary life, focusing instead on his “obsessions” – his love of azaleas and natural history, for example, and his taking up painting at the age of 59, around the time he won his award, in fact. The Weekly’s Lorraine Hickman writes that

Mrs. Stivens will get a nice surprise when she arrives back home from London and discovers Dal’s abstracts throughout the house. Her home does not wear an art image. It is a cosy old timber place, minding its own business in a silent street of shrub-shrouded houses doing the same.

“Her” home, eh?

Hickman does tell us that he was the foundation President of the Australian Society of Authors, but not that he was one of the authors involved in the creation of the above-mentioned Public Lending Right.

StivensHorseStivens’ award-winning book sounds interesting. He says it is about who the hero, Harry Craddock, is and what he is “really after when he takes this expedition off to Central Australia in quest of the rare night parrot”. His next book is different again, he says. He’s interested in “the story that makes the reader do a good deal of the work.”

The article returns to one more of his interests, boomerang-throwing. He took it up to please himself:

It’s the same with writing – a compulsion. You should never write for the market or the publisher.

Thea Astley

Four-time Miles Franklin Award winning writer, Thea Astley, was also featured by the Weekly, though the article I read, “The top writer who won’t go popular” by Jacqueline Smith, was not about any of these wins. It was inspired by the publication of her collection of short stories, A boat load of home folk, and starts by reporting that Astley didn’t want the Weekly’s photographer to come, because she’d already provided a publicity shot. Responding to a request for a photograph of her at work, she says:

What do you mean at work? My typewriter isn’t here, and, anyway, I always write in a blue-ruled exercise book sitting up in bed. In a negligee!

It’s pure, quirky Astley – the Astley so beautifully conveyed by Karen Lamb in the biography I reviewed last year. If you are interested in Astley do read the article at the link I’ve provided, because it presents the same paradoxical, funny, self-deprecating but sometimes also self-pitying writer Lamb presents.

For example, she says that her books don’t sell:

I write mainly for myself . . . selfish to the end … Only when one writes consciously for a public — like Morris West — will the books sell … All my books are about misfits and generally unhappy people.

And here is the perfect place to segue to a 1973 article in The Canberra Times that is about her winning the award, her third, for The acolyte (which Lisa has reviewed!). The writer, Maurice Dunlevy again, doesn’t much like Astley, titling the article, “Award winner is a cynical novelist”. Oh dear, one of those who would have upset Astley, no doubt.

He gives a brief biography and then, for some reason, describes her first novel, A girl with a monkey. He praises it:

It contained the essential Astley: a fast-paced narrative, highly concentrated scenes, sharply observed details, a telescoped time span and a professional touch with flash-backs. She told her story by assembling a mosaic of recollections and telescoping them into a very short space and time – a technique she was to use more effectively in later books. Perhaps the most distinctive thing in the book was her sensitivity to landscape.

That’s one paragraph. He then spends several paragraphs describing her faults. There’s “overstraining for effect in the prose” and her “cynical detachment”, but the real kicker is that “all of her books lack a substantial theme, or unifying vision of the world.”

Perhaps Dunlevy should have read The Women’s Weekly, where she explains that misfits are her subject. Her overall theme is society’s treatment of outsiders – the poor, the indigenous, the women, the sick. Anyhow, Dunlevy continues, quoting Astley’s statement that:

I’ve always been staggered when critics charge my novels with cruelty … I swear it must come out wrong, for in books like The slow natives and A boatload of home folk I was trying to wring those trachyte-reviewing hearts with my sympathy for misfits.

Dunlevy is unrepentant, stating that his heart “was one of the many that remained unwrung”. He describes The acolyte as “a tough detached book”. He admits that

it is a very readable book, full of technical brilliance, but again you look in vain for the broad view, the wide perspective and the old question crops up: So what?

Hmmm … I think Dunlevy is not the reader for Astley! His prerogative, of course, but I wonder whether he let his reaction to her self-defensive “cynical self-disparagement” affect his assessment of her work.

No award

And my last point is that in March 1974, The Canberra Times reported in a brief article that no award was to be made for 1973 “because the judges said none of the six entries was good enough”. Novels published in 1973 included Patrick White’s The eye of the storm and Barbara Harrahan’s The scent of eucalyptus (My review). Not good enough?

Sarah Kanake and Down syndrome in literature

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Sarah Kanake, Sing Fox to meIn the media release accompanying my copy of Sarah Kanake’s Sing fox to me (my review), we are told not only that Kanake’s brother has Down syndrome but that she has a PhD in creative writing from the Queensland University of Technology “on the representations of Down syndrome in Australian literature”.

As far as I know her thesis hasn’t been published. However, she has written about her interest elsewhere, including, most accessibly for us, at The Conversation. Her essay, which I’ve just found today, is titled “On telling the stories of characters with Down syndrome” (and you can read it online.) It’s an excellent essay, and I’ll come back to it in a minute.

When I wrote my review of Sing fox to me, I referred to Samson’s Down syndrome but I didn’t feature it. I chose to focus on other elements of the novel, namely the Gothic aspect, and the theme of loss. However, I did note that I’d like to come back to her characterisation of a person with Down syndrome, so I’m very pleased to have found her essay, which was published, in fact, the same day I published my post.

In the novel, Samson is presented as being very aware of his difference. He feels weighed down by his “heavy extra chromosome” which is how he characterises the impact of the syndrome on his life, particularly when he feels that impact is negative. It’s negative when his movements are limited (you can’t go beyond the fence, your brother must hold your hand when you cross the road, you can’t make toast for yourself); when people talk about him, in front of him, as though he isn’t there; when people ignore him, assuming he’s got nothing to contribute. All these happen in the book. But Samson does think, feel, know things. Just because he’s disabled doesn’t mean he’s stupid; it’s just that “the extra chromosome … sometimes slowed him down.”

By using multiple (third person) points of view, Kanake also portrays the responses of others to Samson. Jonah is resentful of his parents’ expectations that he’ll care for and be responsible for Samson. Mattie’s mother Tilda, kind as she is, doesn’t want Mattie to be introduced to Samson, she doesn’t want Mattie to be “stuck with disabled kids just because she’s deaf”.

In her essay, Kanake discusses our culture’s low expectation of people with Down syndrome, and how this translates in literature depicting them. She talks about how literary representations too often use characters with Down syndrome as plot devices, as points of conflict for the narrative. Indeed, she quotes Mark Haddon, author of that book featuring a character with autism, The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, as saying that he uses disability “as a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation”. Kanake also discusses how narratives involving characters with Down syndrome are mostly told through the perspective of the parents not the person him/herself. Characters with Down syndrome, in other words, rarely have “a voice and agency within the narrative”.

Consequently, in writing Sing fox to me, Kanake says

I was extremely conscious of representing and dissolving boundaries around my protagonist with Down syndrome, Samson Fox, in order to create a narrative where Samson was free to move, evolve and change.

At the end, without giving anything away, Samson, overlooked by others, decides, quietly but determinedly, to take matters his own hands:

Quietly, and without asking Murray or his granddad, he gathered up everything he would need and packed it carefully into his school port […]

Samson crossed the lawn to the gate. He was going to find his brother. No one would stop him or tell he couldn’t. Not Murray or Clancy. This time Samson could choose, and he chose to go beyond the house and beyond the fence and beyond the gate …

Breaking down barriers in other words!

While the novel resolves some of the challenges faced by its characters, the ending is not simplistic and much is still left unresolved on the mountain (as you’d expect in a “true” Gothic novel, I think.) Samson is just one part of this. Down syndrome does, yes, define, and sometimes limit, him, but it is not the crux of the novel – which is why, really, it was not the focus of my review. I think that means Kanake has achieved her goal?

Sarah Kanake, Sing fox to me (Review)

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Sarah Kanake, Sing Fox to meBack in late 2011, I wrote a Monday Musings post on 19th century Australian Gothic. I’ve always intended to post more on the topic, including one on Tasmanian Gothic. Well, here’s a start, because Sarah Kanake’s debut novel, Sing fox to me, is a good example of modern Tasmanian Gothic. I wrote in my first post that “Australia had (and has) plenty to inspire a Gothic imagination: strange unforgiving nightmarish landscapes, weird vegetation and imaginary creatures”. I was referring then primarily to the outback, but Tasmania, while not exactly “the outback”, has plenty to excite the Gothic imagination.

Why does pretty, verdant Tasmania work so well for a Gothic sensibility? To start with it has some forbidding (albeit beautiful) landscape – remote mountains, dense bush, mist and cold – and it’s an island, which provides an added layer of isolation. Then, there’s its violent history. Tasmania had some of Australia’s most brutal convict prisons. Many escaped, many died, and there are all sorts of horror stories, including those concerning the alleged cannibal, Alexander Pearce. It’s also infamous for the near-genocide of its indigenous population. It’s a place, in other words, in which ghosts and spirits are easy to imagine. But this is not all. Tasmania is home to the world’s only carnivorous marsupial – the small but ferocious and appropriately named Tasmanian devil. And, particularly relevant to this book, it was the last home of Australia’s most famous, most controversial, extinct animal, the Thylacine aka Tasmanian tiger.

Sarah Kanake calls on these, together with the archetypal Australian lost-child story, to write a novel that’s fundamentally about loss. All sorts of loss – people, animals, homes, and love. The novel commences with a brief unlabelled prologue describing the disappearance of 14-year-old River Snow Fox on a rainy night (of course!) On the same night one man’s home is lost, another man’s leg is permanently injured by a falling tree, and the kookaburras cackle. We then jump twenty years. It’s 1986, and River’s older brother David Fox is returning to his childhood mountain home – Fox Hill or Tiger Mountain, take your pick – with his twin sons, the biblically named Jonah and Samson. He plans to leave them with his father Clancy Fox – the man with the injured leg – who is still grieving, still looking for his missing daughter. Relationships are fraught. Clancy and his son don’t get on; angry, hurt, lonely Jonah is resentful of his loving Down syndrome twin Samson; Samson, with his “extra heavy chromosome”, often feels overlooked; and Clancy doesn’t know how to be a grandfather. The scene is set …

There are three other people on the mountain: Murray, son of the indigenous George, who was Clancy’s friend and the man who lost his home; Murray’s partner, the pregnant Tilda; and Tilda’s daughter Mattie, who is deaf. Depending on how you look at it, there could be a fourth person on the mountain, because George, now dead, regularly appears to Clancy.

Now, I wouldn’t blame you if you were starting to think this is all laid on a bit thick – gothic setting, a hermitic old man, a ghost, a missing girl, unhappy twins, a Down syndrome boy and a deaf girl, a pregnant woman and an indigenous man. What I found though was that while my mind (my rational self) was questioning this, my heart (my emotional self) was becoming more and more engaged. It works, I think, because Kanake doesn’t play to melodrama, as the original Gothic novels did. She keeps it psychologically real, even when unexplainable things happen. She also knows of what she writes. The brief biography provided by Affirm Press says that Kanake grew up with “a brother with Down syndrome and two Aboriginal foster brothers”. This reassured somewhat my modern concern about dominant-culture writers presuming to write for “other”.

“We love a version of the tiger, and it’s not real”

So Jonah remembers his father once telling him. What’s real is, in fact, one of the book’s underlying challenges. Readers have to make a leap of faith and accept that what we read is “real” for the characters. The characters, on the other hand, need to work out their “reality” and come to terms with it.

Sing fox to me is one of those books where the structure, the narrative form in particular, supports the meaning. In other words, Kanake’s use of alternating points of view for the three main characters – Clancy, Jonah and Samson – mirrors the separation of their lives. Of course they are together sometimes, physically, but there’s little meeting of minds and hearts. Meaning is also supported by strong, sustained imagery. Nature works on both physical and metaphorical levels. Clancy’s tiger pelt, worn by Clancy and then stolen by Jonah, seems to live and breathe. The mountains, rivers and trees are similarly active.

… he [Clancy] wanted to tell Murray that something had changed on his mountain. The boys were waking things up, stirring life back into old death. (Part 3)

The trees relaxed and the leaves swayed, almost as if they could finally breathe. The creek rushed, not because it was chasing anything, but because it longed to feel the smooth and stable rocks underneath … (Part 6)

Kookaburras act as a sort of malevolent chorus. Their “cackling” laughter resounds throughout the book as a commentary on the misguided quests going on below them. They are there in the beginning when Clancy realises River is lost – “the laughter turned to cackling as the kookaburras gathered in the branches overhead” – and they are there when he realises the futility of his obsessive twenty-year long obsessive quest:

Finally he understood the kookaburras, those buggers at the end of their fucking tethers. Those damned birds knew he should have been laughing with them all along.

“Feeling sorry was in every real Tasmanian’s blood”

Kanake packs a lot into her imagery – and I haven’t begun to tease out all the permutations. I haven’t talked about Jonah’s love of another tiger, Shere Khan, for example, or of the fox motif. There’s also a lovely portrayal of disability in the novel, which I might explore another day. Most of it does, however, come back to loss. Children go missing, parents leave, a friend and a wife have died; animals are lost or killed or extinct. These losses are personal, but there could also be a political reading. Am I being too fanciful to suggest that Clancy’s loss of River, the girl who “said she could sing the tigers to her”, and his futile, obsessive search, could be read as Tasmania’s loss of the Tiger, and the desperate hope that the next claimed sighting will be real? Or that through telling a story about loss and personal ghosts, Kanake is also calling attention to the ghosts of Tasmania’s past?

A step too far? Perhaps. But this book is such a rich read that it invites a very personal response. I’d love to hear from others who have read it.

awwchallenge2016Sarah Kanake
Sing fox to me
South Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2016
266pp.
ISBN: 9781922213679

(Review copy courtesy Affirm Press)