Back in 2019, I wrote a Monday Musings on the Stella judges’ call for more “narratives from outside Australia”. I teased out a little what that might mean, but, a couple of years down the track, I think it worth further exploring the questions it opens up.

Commenting on that post, Lisa (ANZLitLovers) wrote:

What I’d like more of (and I get it sometimes) is Australian literature with an *awareness* of the rest of the world and of the cultures that make up our society. You can see it in the fiction of Michelle de Kretser, Andrea Goldsmith, S K Karakaltsis, and Amanda Curtin, plus the writers you’ve mentioned in your post. It’s also there in the novels of Simon Cleary, A S Patric and Rodney Hall, among others.

You don’t see it in domestic novels with a monotone cast of characters.

We talk a lot in the blogosphere about some of the contemporary issues surrounding literature. In Australia, this particularly revolves around diversity and “own voices”. Enabling more people from our community to tell their stories makes for a richer community, but don’t take it from me … here is an interesting article by Julianne Schultz in The Guardian in 2017 (which is an edited version of Griffith Review 58 piece). Schultz quotes Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole on the importance of stories to nations:

“Nations tells themselves stories … They are not fully true, they are often bitterly contested and they change over time. But they are powerful: they underlie the necessary fiction that is ‘us’. And at the moment, it is not quite clear what the Irish story is.”

She goes on to say that O’Toole’s description could apply equally well to Australia where

the old stories have also become threadbare, and increasingly fail to capture the contemporary reality or the complexity of the past.

She backs this up with facts which demonstrate that contemporary Australia is more diverse and complex, less isolated, more accessible, than before, and yet we struggle, she says, to define exactly who we are and what the values of this new Australia are. We pride ourselves on our “multiculturalism”, supported by old values like “egalitarianism”, but, in fact, we are not particularly unique in these regards. She says:

So when political leaders praise multiculturalism but make citizenship more difficult to attain, or when they talk about preventing desperate refugees from dying at sea but leave them to languish in offshore refugee camps, or when they promise to recognise Indigenous rights but call a measured discussion about first settlement “Stalinist”, the message is clear and hypocritical.

For cultures to flourish, rather than simply survive, she argues, “they need to be tended and nurtured”. Telling stories is one way of doing this, “stories about people and place, about belonging and being out of place, of changing and staying the same, of interrogating history and locating those who were once left out”. Do read the article; her thoughts are cogent, and she makes an important political point about the role our leaders should play. Meanwhile, let’s move on to what those stories could be …

Stories we need

Lisa has a point about “an *awareness* of the rest of the world and of the cultures that make up our society”, and we could add to this the big concerns of our time, including human rights (across the spectrum of gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, age), climate change, and increasing social and economic inequity. These aren’t mutually exclusive, and in fact they make most sense, tell a richer story, when they jostle against each other in the works we read.

Things are changing. We are seeing more fiction and poetry by First Nations Australians, Australians from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, women and non-binary Australians, and so on. However, we are not there yet. During the 2020 pandemic, writer Lin Li Ng decided that she wanted “to only read books written by Black, Indigenous or People of Colour (BIPOC) writers or non-BIPOC female writers”, but when she looked at her TBR bookshelves, she was dismayed to find that only around 10% were by BIPOC writers and 25% by non-BIPOC female writers.

And yet, in her Master of Writing and Publishing studies, Lin Li had written “a thesis on the experiences of Asian-Australian women – writers and publishing professionals – in the Australian trade publishing industry” so she knew the issues. What surprised her, then, was her own choices, that although she “had recognised the systemic barriers and failings of the industry”, she hadn’t realised how much she had absorbed the message that English and Western literature and art are ‘quality’, and had been convinced that works by BIPOC authors weren’t as good as those by non-BIPOC authors. But, she wants to see herself, her experiences and her values in the literature and art she engages with, and concludes that as a POC female reader, she is “part of an audience that deserves diverse stories that appeal to it”.

Yes! So, I’ve highlighted “herself, her experiences and her values” because this is the crux, isn’t it. The question is what does she, and what do we, mean by these?

When I say “myself” and my “experiences”, do I just mean, in my case, a middle-class, older white woman? Or, do I mean an Australian moving around in a diverse, multicultural society? I probably mean both. I want to read about people just like me, who are grappling with the specific challenges people like me are confronting, but I also want to read about how we, as Australians, are living in our modern society. What are its challenges and how can we make it work better?

When I say “values”, it gets more complex, and, I think, more interesting, but how to talk about them without getting bogged down. I’m going to be simplistic and suggest there are two types of values – the personal, which is the moral, ethical code by which we live, and the social, which encompasses the values that we believe in as a society or culture. By this latter meaning, liberal western democracies have a certain set of values to do with individualism, progress and freedom, accompanied by an uneasy nod to the common good. By contrast, First Nations people have very different values grounded in community and sharing, and, for want of a better word, an interdependent connection to country. I’m not going to elaborate all the cultures in Australia, but Muslim cultures have their own values, and so on.

This is all a bit simplistic, I realise, but it’s hopefully enough to make my main point, which is that some of these values work well together while others are in direct conflict, and yet, here we are all living together. Platitudes about our being egalitarian and a “successful multicultural society” don’t really cut it – any more, anyhow. This, I think, is where many of us are looking to Australian literature, if not for answers, at least for questions and reflections.

There is literature doing this, writing that tackles head on the challenge of clashing values, like Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (my post), AS Patrić’s Black rock white city (my review) and Claire G Coleman’s Terra nullius (my review). These books are very different in style and form, but each forces us to look at who we are and to think about who we want to be.

There is so much more to say about this, so many angles to explore literature and storytelling from, so many broader and narrower questions to consider, but I’ll stop here for now, and just ask,

What do you think?

Years ago I read a Guardian article titled “Top 10 novels inspired by Shakespeare”. Written by Sally O’Reilly, it started with “Shakespeare famously customised existing plots when writing his plays, and added to them an acute perception of human experience which gave them universal significance.” I thought, then, that it might be fun to share a few Australian novels that customise or are inspired by existing plots from well-known works. There are many, of course, because it is a popular thing to do, so I just plan to get the ball rolling from some of the books I’ve reviewed here, and then throw it to the rest of you to share those you’ve read, Australian and otherwise.

When I started thinking about this topic, I immediately thought of relevant books I’ve read over the last couple of decades, like Jane Smiley’s One thousand acres (Shakespeare’s King Lear), Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip (Dickens’ Great expectations), and, of course, Jean Rhys’ The wide Sargasso Sea (Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre). None of these are Australian, however, but they might clue you into the challenge I had in titling this post, because “re-imaginings” come in many forms. Examples include retelling a story from a different perspective, setting the story in a different place and time, and providing prequels or sequels to a story. Some stick closely to the original story and characters while others are more in the “loosely inspired” or “loosely based on” category. The variations are endless.

Why do writers do this? There’s probably a different answer for every writer, but some reasons do seem to recur. One is the desire to tell a story from a different perspective, such as, for example, a feminist one to redress the problematic views of an earlier time. Another is to bring a story that the writer thinks has something important to say to a modern audience. We don’t always know exactly why writers decide to do this, but, like most readers, I like to have a guess.

And yet, I have to admit that I tend to be anxious about them. Do I know the original, and if not, should I read it first? What if I don’t want to read it first? Should I still read the re-imagining. If I do know the original, will I remember it well enough to understand the author’s intentions? More often than not, it works out fine, whether I’ve read the original or not – but I never learn my lesson, and next time, I go through it all again.

Anyhow, here is a random few that I’ve reviewed on my blog. I’m listing them alphabetically by author. I did consider trying to categorise them – but decided that would take me down a rabbit-hole!

• Janet Turner Hospital’s Orpheus lost (2007) (my review): reimagines the Orpheus story, with a feminist perspective, making the woman the would-be rescuer.
• David Malouf’s Ransom (2009) (my review): re-visions the section of the Iliad in which Priam visits Achilles to ask for his son’s body back. Malouf said he wanted to suggest a new kind of human, non-heroic consciousness, by having Priam “do something extraordinary”.
• Mirandi Riwoe’s The fish girl (2018) (my review): a “post-colonial response” to Somerset Maugham’s short story “The four Dutchmen”. She gives the girl a backstory, and explores it from the perspective of the colonised, particularly colonised young women. She shows that young women were pawns in both the hands of colonial powers and of their own men.
• Roslyn Russell’s Maria returns: Barbados to Mansfield Park (2014) (my review): an imagined sequel to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in which Russell redeems the banished adulteress Maria Bertram and “runs with” the hints regarding slavery in Austen’s novel.
• Danielle Wood’s Mothers Grimm (2014) (my review): re-visions some Grimm Brothers’ fairytales – “Rapunzel“, “Hansel and Gretel“, “Sleeping Beauty“, and “The Goose Girl“ – to reflect on and question contemporary motherhood.

Geraldine Brooks’ March (2006), which I read before blogging, is another well-known Australian example. She takes the absent father from Little women, Mr March, and creates story about him, focusing on his role in the Civil War.

Not surprisingly, classics (in both senses of the words), myths and fairy-tales feature strongly in these re-imaginings because they provide a springboard that doesn’t have to be explained to the reader. The exception, in my list, is Riwoe’s The fish girl which takes a Somerset Maugham short story. Maugham is well-known, of course, but not necessarily the short story used here. We could, however, call it the exception that proves the rule, in that in the end these works do need to stand on their own, with the original work adding depth for those who know it, rather than being a prerequisite.

What do you think? And, have you read novelistic re-imaginings? Do you like them, and why or why not? We’d love to hear from you.

With the 20th anniversary of 9/11 having been commemorated on the weekend, I thought I might explore how 9/11 affected – if at all – Australian fiction. Before I start, though, I have two provisos: one is that my focus will be fiction, not literature, or culture more widely; and two is that, like many of my Monday Musings posts, this will not be a comprehensively researched post, but one intended to throw out some ideas that we all might like to think and share our ideas about.

So, here goes, starting with …

What, if anything, is the 9/11 novel?

I didn’t find a definitive answer, but I’d say the “genre” encompasses novels which speak directly of 9/11 and those which are (or which seem to be, even) inspired by it.

Arin Keeble, from Nottingham Trent University, discussed these novels in The Conversation back in 2016, in an article titled “Why the 9/11 novel has been such a contested and troubled genre”. Keeble discusses the intense debate that these novels engendered, including the concern by some that the focus on 9/11 has “undercut the complex prehistories and aftermaths of 9/11, giving it inflated importance in the world narrative”. He notes that the novels that came out around 2006/7, by Don DeLillo, Claire Messud, Jay McInerney and Ken Kalfus, all explored the event through marriage and relationship narratives. He quotes from a critique by Pankaj Mishra, who wondered whether we are “meant to think of marital discord as a metaphor for post-9/11 America?” Keeble writes that Mishra and others criticised these novels ‘for their “failure” to engage with otherness and the geopolitics of 9/11’. Other critics and commentators weighed in, disagreeing. Read the article – it’s short – if you are interested.

The point that Keeble makes is that, regardless of how “polarised” the debate became, the impact was to ascribe “great importance to the 9/11 novel” and, as a result, to reinforce “the idea of 9/11 as a defining moment”. Writers like Zadie Smith, however, saw this emphasis on 9/11 as an example of “American exceptionalism”.

Other novels did come out with a more political and/or international bent, like Mohsin Hamid’s powerful The reluctant fundamentalist, but marriage and relationships are still at their centre, and they “continue to explore the way privileged Americans absorb and respond to trauma”. Keeble concludes on a book that he believes most aligns with Zadie Smith’s views, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding edge which “goes the furthest in challenging the singular importance attached to 9/11 in its intertwined historical narrative, weaving in the significance of the collapse of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and a history of the internet’s transition from an anarchic to a completely corporate space”.

I have read several non-Australian books “inspired” by 9/11, from Don DeLillo’s Falling man (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud and incredibly close (2005) to Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and the aforementioned The reluctant fundamentalist (2007). Each is quite different, but Hamid’s is particularly memorable because of its point of view and the tone he sustains throughout.

Unfortunately, none of this furthers my 9/11-in-Australian-fiction topic. My excuse is that it was in The Conversation and it provides a good introduction.

And, in Australia?

However, some Australian novelists have contributed to the genre. This 2010 article published in JASAL by Jen Webb sounds interesting, from its abstract:

Australian fiction is, arguably, as diverse as the fiction of any other culture or era. But in a globalised world, though the stories we tell may remain inflected by the local context, they will necessarily be informed by transnational relations and geopolitical events. Like writers in the USA, UK, Afghanistan and elsewhere, some Australian novelists have taken arms against a sea of troubles, and produced work that directly and consciously engages that new genre, the post September 11 novel. Only a small number of Australian novels have been published in this genre – perhaps inevitably, given our distance from the scene – and they can be read as relying on the familiar features of the thriller, the detective, or the citygrrl genres that readers find attractive. However, I will suggest that they do more than this. In a reading of Andrew McGahan’s Underground, and Richard Flanagan’s The unknown terrorist, I will discuss the ways in which a very local ‘accent’ is coloured by broader forces, and what contributions we can offer, here at the foot of the world, to the ongoing conflicts and human rights abuses in the hemisphere above us. 

Regrettably, I don’t know what ways and contributions he discusses, so we’ll just have to guess. Meanwhile, I have read Flanagan’s novel, and will throw two other novels into the mix, though they’re not set in Australia, Janette Turner Hospital’s Due preparations for the plague (2003) and Orpheus lost (my review) (2007).

Richard Carr, in ‘”A world of … risk, passion, intensity, and tragedy”: The post-9/11 Australian novel’ (Antipodes, 23 (1), June 2009), mentions the novels by Hospital, Flanagan (2006) and McGahan (2006), but adds two I didn’t know, A.L. McCann’s Subtopia (2005) and Linda Jaivin’s The infernal optimist (2006). He says that all these novels:

entered a world attuned to the destructive potential of the terrorist and wary of the terrorist desire to wreak havoc.

In fact, the terrorist as a symbol of a New Australia defined against an older, safer country is a recurring thematic pattern.

Carr discusses the novels, individually, and, while they are all different, they express some commonalities regarding our “contemporary obsession with terrorism”. To simplify muchly, these include fear of other (often encouraged by government) and lying about other, which result in actions like the scapegoating or oppression of innocent people and increasing reduction in liberty.

Carr also draws some broader conclusions – remember he was writing in 2009 – that I found interesting, and still relevant. He proposes that this obsession

sublimates long-standing sources of guilt and fear: the taking of the land from its rightful owners, the cruelty of the founding penal system, the inhumanity of the treatment accorded Aborigines into the present-day. Whatever the reason … Australian has followed America’s lead in assigning national security its highest priority and identifying the terrorist as the primary threat to that goal.

Do you have any thoughts about this and/or the 9/11 novel?

These are grim times, so you might have assumed that our current predicament is today’s topic, but no, we are going back to 1929. My, if there was a grim time, 1929 heralded such a one. However, it’s not the Depression I’m going to either. In fact, the article I found in Trove, which inspired this post, was written in July 1929, and published in Adelaide’s The Advertiser on 31 August, that is, before the big crash.

What, then, was the grim continent – and why? You’ll have realised, given this is my Monday Musings on Australian literature, that it’s Australia – and you’d be right. The article was written by “a Special Correspondent London” and it discusses three recently published novels: James Tucker’s The adventures of Ralph Rashleigh, M. Barnard Eldershaw’s A house is built, and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo. 

As an aside, would you believe that the authors of these books were not named in the article. Moreover, the first book’s author, whom I didn’t know so had to go looking, wasn’t named in an article announcing its serialisation. I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: the author is the important thing! Books don’t appear out of thin air. They come out of darned hard work, and the author should be noted and remembered.

Anyhow, back to the “grim continent”. The article focuses mostly on the outback, so I’ll deal first with M. Barnard Eldershaw’s urban novel, which, as many of you know, shared the inaugural The Bulletin prize, in 1928, with Prichard’s Coonardoo.

The article commences by telling us that “because of its unusual character and the starkness of its pictures of Australian life in the convict days”, The adventures of Ralph Rashleigh was receiving the most attention by the reviewers. However, Mr. Arnold Bennett, “who reviews books in the intervals of writing them, prefers to lavish his praise on A house is built“. He wrote in the Evening Standard that Barnard Eldershaw’s book is

“beyond question, a very notable novel … an extraordinary book … a major phenomenon of modern fiction. Not one scene not three scenes, but many scenes in it are magnificent.”

Bennett apparently spent a whole column praising the book. Our Special Correspondent says:

“It is Mr. Bennett’s pleasant habit to describe with gusto the things he likes; nevertheless, the joint authors of A house is built should be gratified by such commendation from such a quarter”.

I reckon! (I do like the “describe with gusto”, and the little hint that this is perhaps not proper critic style!)

The article’s main focus, however, is a column in the Evening News by another novelist-critic, J. B. Priestley, “a sound critic of the younger school”. Priestley wrote about all three books in his column, which he headed “The grim continent”. Our correspondent wrote that he concluded his piece:

with the interesting confession that all the stories he has read about Australia and the Australian bush have succeeded in depressing him. He quoted with approval the complaint of a character in Coonardoo, that “it’s all so ugly and empty,” and added that there must be something desolating about the raw emptiness of the bush, a something not friendly to literature. 

Our correspondent, however, suggests that this sense of the bush is “an emanation of literature rather than of the bush itself”. S/he suggests that many of those who know the bush do not find it ugly, cruel and cheerless:

Mr. Priestley writes from a purely literary knowledge of Australia, and if he feels so depressed about the country, his range of reading must have been restricted to the authors who, in Marcus Clarke-Henry Lawson tradition, have emphasised the more sombre aspects of pioneering and bush life.

S/he goes on to suggest that Priestley and his ilk could try other authors who offer “authentic” accounts of the outback, like “Mrs. Aeneas Gunn’s We of the Never Never in which the humor and beauty, as well as the tragedy of the bush are admirably brought out.” S/he also disputes the evocation of the bush in Coonardoo:

The bush, comprehending in that vague term the vast pastoral spaces of inland Australia, is far from being the perennial abode of misery and despair: a region inhabited by sullen despairing people who are for ever yearning (in the words of the woman in “Coonardoo”) to “get away from it all.” 

S/he romanticises, somewhat, the “folk” who “fight the stern and sometimes losing battle with Nature”, arguing you can’t help but “admire their courage, cheerfulness, and steadfastness of character”. We don’t know who this “special correspondent” is, or what experience they have had. However, s/he does make the point that the “bush,” is not all of Australia, that there are “millions of people living in the Australian towns and cities” who know little or nothing of the bush.  

Finally, s/he turns to “the convict tradition” which is the subject of James Tucker’s The adventures of Ralph Rashleigh, and which

survives in Australia for literary purposes only; a fading echo of old, unhappy far-off things. The bad old days provide excellent material for novels of the romantically historical type, or for grim pieces of literature like “The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh.” 

S/he concludes by applauding the fact that “good Australian literary work” is being appreciated in London, but says

It is not so agreeable to find one or two sombre aspects of Australian life stressed as if they were representative of the whole. 

S/he suggests that should J.B. Priestley ever visit Australia, he would find “a land, not of grimness and gloom, but of color and sunshine”. Moreover, s/he asserts

contact with its people and conditions will provide an effective antidote to the depression with which some of its literature seems to fill him.

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at that.

Anyhow, I enjoyed the article for revealing that Australian literature was being read and paid significant attention in 1920s England, and for its perspective on our ongoing discussion about the “the bush” and Australian literature. There’s a defensiveness, and a romanticisation, that you often find in expats, as I presume “special correspondent” is, but s/he makes some important points too, one being a disconnect between what people were writing and/or reading, and the reality of contemporary Australian life.

For Aussie readers in particular: whether you agree or not that there was such a disconnect, do you think we have matured to the point now where there is more alignment between who we are and what we are writing?