Kate’s post
Had you told me last year that 2020 would bring months of ‘stay at home and bunker down’ time, I would have thought that it sounded like heaven. No more taxiing children around? No more daily commute and peak-hour traffic? Oodles of ‘free’ time to read? Great, sign me up. And true, at the beginning of lockdown, I thought that I would get so much reading done, and therefore so much blogging done…. But that hasn’t happened. Like many bloggers (and people in general), COVID-19 brought with it a level of anxiety that I have not previously experienced.
At the same time as this feeling of anxiety was creeping in, posts on social media popped up about how ‘industrious’ people were being – “I cleaned out my wardrobe!” and “I painted the fence!” and “I’ve finally knitted that jumper I bought wool for three years ago!” and “I’ve learnt Spanish!” and “I’m making my own sourdough #delicious #nomnom!” Huh.
Then came round two of the ‘maximising time’ posts – “My kids are really getting ahead in maths” and “Look at these macarons Master 6 whipped up for afternoon snack”.
Through the noise of painting, craft, calculus and baking, one thing became very clear to me – I can’t possibly write blog posts and worry about a pandemic at the same time. Great for those that can, although I think that’s a very small percentage of people. For most, the industriousness that they’re putting on social media is their anxiety talking. Specifically, when overwhelmed by uncertainty, some people focus on what they can control (such as their sourdough starter, or memorising conjunctions for Spanish verbs), and others (like me), do nothing. Both are defence responses – our reptilian brain relies on fight/ flight/ freeze for survival.
To understand what was happening with blogging, social media, and my lack of reading, I turned to Maslow’s hierarchy. Essentially, we can’t do the ‘self-fulfilment’ stuff when the ‘basics’ are in doubt (and blogging sits in the self-fulfilment category) – with our ‘foundation’ threatened, no wonder we feel anxious.
This is a Monday Musings post, and therefore needs an Australian literature reference. There are plenty of memoirs by Australian authors dealing with anxiety – this year alone I’ve read such books by Clare Bowditch, Georgie Dent and Nicola Redhouse. Equally, there are plenty of memoirs and novels that deal with anxiety in relation to a particular trauma. But what of stories that speak to those bottom rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy? Certainly stories about ‘pioneering’ fit (I’ll defer to other bloggers, such as Bill of The Australian Legend, who have a thorough knowledge of these books). But my mind turned to a book I read thirty years ago (so my memory is sketchy, but significantly, small details have stayed with me) – Amy’s Children by Olga Masters.
It’s the story of a young woman living in Sydney during WWII. The War is merely a backdrop – instead, the focus is on Amy and her decision to leave her children in the care of her parents in regional New South Wales, while she goes to Sydney to make a life for herself. Amy puts considerable effort into setting up a home. There’s a slow accrual of ‘things’ – a bed, a wardrobe, a kitchen table – and the coveting of the unobtainable (Amy’s fantasies include “…a little glass fronted cabinet containing a bottle of sherry and fine stemmed glasses and a barrel of wafer biscuits. She would put a match to the gas fire ‘to take the chill off the room’, without having to consider the cost…”). She digs a vegetable garden and meets the neighbours. She gets a job, and begins a relationship.
From memory, much was made of Amy’s ‘selfishness’ and lack of maternal feeling, but does the story read differently through a Maslow lens? Are Amy’s attempts to ‘set up house’ representative of her need to feel secure, both personally and in the context of a world at war? I’ll do a re-read and report back.
In my professional life, I spend a lot of time working with people suffering anxiety. Anxiety tends to be a very specific beast – different things trigger different people – however, the starting point for managing it doesn’t change (I call it ‘mental first-aid’). Basically, get some exercise (preferably with fresh air involved); eat well (I don’t mean lavish, I mean nutritious, so redirect Master 6 from macarons to paella); sort out your sleep; maintain social connections; and talk with someone if you’re not feeling great. Hopefully, with those things in order, the space for becoming engrossed in a book will return.
My time is tight right now and my mind distracted, but I did want to continue Six Degrees, which as you know is a meme currently run by Kate, and you can read all the rules on her blog – 
I said, when I introduced this series, that Sue began writing Whispering Gums in May 2009. It seems that once begun she could not stop. There are WG posts for May 2,4,5,6,10,14,15,16,19,21,22,27,28,30,31. The May 31 post is titled, prophetically, “When too much Jane Austen is barely enough”, and is in fact the third Jane Austen post for the month. Today I reprise the second. But there will be more.
My first choice is Sue’s review of Eve Langley’s masterpiece The Pea Pickers. One day Australians will overcome their cultural cringe and realise that in Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life and Eve Langley’s mostly unpublished eleven journals and novels we have writing that should be ranked alongside Ulysses and Rembrance of Times Lost. That’s my opinion and not necessarily Sue’s, but I think she still ranks The Pea Pickers pretty highly, and while she says she might now have written this piece a little differently – it was in fact her first review – I think you’ll agree it stands the test of time.
In the 1870s and 1880s Melbourne was both Australia’s largest and wealthiest city and its literary centre – around figures like Marcus Clarke, George McCrae (son of Georgianna), Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Kendall, Ada Cambridge, Tasma.
Now to May’s starting book, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by America’s Cormac McCarthy – The road. If you haven’t read it, let me tell you that it’s a mesmerising, post-apocalyptic dystopian novel. I loved it, partly because its writing is so spare (see 
Another, very different road trip underpins Australian writer Eve Langley’s The pea-pickers (
While road trips aren’t the backbone of my next book, American writer Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel All the light we cannot see (
Staying in war-time but moving to a different sort of road, I am taking us to the Thai-Burma railroad as told by Australian writer Richard Flanagan in his Booker Prize-winning novel, The narrow road to the deep north (
Having mentioned railroads, I’ll stay with them and link to Australian writer Glenda Guest’s A week in the life of Cassandra Aberline (
Choosing my final book proved a challenge: I had many to choose from, many I wanted to highlight. In the end I decided to stay in Australia, and go a bit lighthearted. The book is English writer Louis de Berniere’s Western Australia-set Red dog (
Now to April’s starting book, the critically acclaimed, multi-translated, award-winning nonfiction book by Australia’s Anna Funder – Stasiland (
Stasiland tells the stories of Stasi officers and collaborators and of those who suffered at the hands of the Stasi in the then East Germany. Largely because of this book, Mr Gums and I made a point of going to Leipzig in 2013 and visiting the Stasi’s Runde Ecke headquarters there. Anyhow, in announcing this book, Kate described it as a “classic on tyranny and resistance”. There are so many books that can link from that, so I’ll be interested to see what my co-meme-players do. I’ve decided to choose a related aspect, surveillance, which was fundamental to the Stasi’s tyrannical practices, and link to Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus lost (
From here it’s a very simple jump to another animal rights book, this one about the live export business, Bidda Jones and Julian Davies’ Backlash: Australia’s conflict of values over live exports (
So, I’m going to stick now with Julian Davies, or, at least, with his publishing company Finlay Lloyd, and link to the latest book of theirs published, John Clanchy’s In whom we trust (
Trust, as Clanchy shows, is in short supply between powerful institutions and those who have no power and who, by rights, should be able to trust those who are not only able to but who morally should protect and support them. Rebecca Skloot had to work very hard to gain the trust of African-American Henrietta Lacks’ poverty-stricken family to write her scientific biography The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks (
I am going to stay in America for last book, albeit the author is Australian, Elliot Perlman. The street sweeper (
Andrew Croome’s 
Carmel Bird’s 
Bernadette Brennan’s 
Anton Chekhov’s 
As with translation above, I have aimed here to traverse the globe.
Jane Austen’s Emma (my posts, 
Joyce Carol Oates’ 
I think I can interpreted this to mean anything not my contemporary Australia, so I’ve chosen a wide variety of worlds, from the mythical past to dystopian futures.
Coincidentally, we are currently watching and enjoying the new Australian television series Stateless, which is also about our cruel mismanagement and mistreatment of asylum-seekers. It, though, is drama, and so quite different to Williamson’s satirical approach. All of this has reminded me that I need to read Behrouz Boochani’s No friend but the mountains, which will give me a first person account of what it’s like to be an asylum-seeker to Australia.
Having included a Quote of the Week in my last two literary week posts, I’m continuing the tradition. This post’s quote, coming from Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the bodies (
Whispering Gums 