Today’s post is the third in my little sub-series of posts looking at the Miles Franklin Award by decade.

As before, I don’t plan to list all the decade’s winners, as you can find them on the Award’s official site. Instead, I’ll share some interesting snippets, inspired by my Trove meanders.

Women writers on the rise?

The late 1970s and 1980s saw, I believe, a flowering of Australian women writers, similar to that we saw in the 1920s-1940s with the likes of Katharine Susannah Prichard, Marjorie Barnard/Flora Eldershaw, Eleanor Dark, and Christina Stead, not to mention Miles Franklin herself. This flowering is partly evidenced by the fact that while just five awards were made for books by women in the first two decades, another four were made to women in this third decade. These were Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the river (1978) and her The impersonators (1980), Elizabeth Jolley’s The well (1986), and Glenda Adams’ Dancing on coral (1987).

In 1979, The Australian Women’s Weekly announced Jessica Anderson’s win under the headline “Women take honours in literature, fashion”. It seems the awards were handled differently then, with the winner being advised before the presentation. The Weekly describes Anderson’s reaction:

“I was thrilled,” she said. “Like all Australian writers, I think we owe a tremendous debt to our predecessors. The award does encourage writers. You feel someone out of the past has spoken to you.”

One of the Award judges, the well-known and successful publisher-editor, Beatrice Davis, said of Anderson’s book that “It has an unpretentious elegance, an individual quality so different from the realistic documentary that still dominates the field in Australian novels.” But Jessica Anderson told The Weekly that, the book’s content annoyed a lot of people, particularly men:

“I didn’t mean it to be a liberationist gesture,” she said. “Men recorded their experiences for hundreds of years and women read them with admiration.”

Hmmm … this is fascinating, and an issue that we still confront, I believe. Meanwhile, if you haven’t read Tirra Lirra by the river, add it to your list. It’s a great read. I read it before blogging, but Lisa has posted her thoughts on her blog.

Incomprehensible or outstanding?

David Ireland won the award in 1980 for the third time with A woman of the future. Ireland said at the time that it had been initially rejected by Macmillan because it was “too incomprehensible”. The judges called it “outstanding”. Well, four of them felt it was. The fifth, Colin Roderick, called it “literary sewage”, The Canberra Times reported.

A few months after it won, a long article giving “a feminist perspective” appeared in Woroni, the ANU’s student paper. The writer, Andrea Mitchell, starts by discussing Ireland’s previous novels in which women appear as “domestic or sexual adjuncts”. Ireland, she argues, does not dissociate himself in these novels from his male characters’ poor treatment of women, but, she writes

A Woman of the Future offers a different and more rewarding perspective on women in society. A complete turnabout, Ireland presents a woman’s life and experience in the first person.

It’s an in-depth analysis, but I’ll just share her assessment of what she thinks he is doing, because I love it:

I would suggest that Ireland is not only satirizing sexism, but levelling criticism at a certain style of feminism epitomized by German Greer’s A Female Eunuch: That is, that in order to change the subservient position of women, women must become as ruthlessly self-oriented and competitive as men have traditionally been. Ireland reasonably sees the same danger for women as for men who pursue social power: a less than full human existence, and alienation in their personal lives.

Here come the men!

If this decade saw a flowering of Australia’s women writers, it was also when some of the men who are now among Australia’s top male writers won their first awards. I’m talking Peter Carey, who won the first of his three Miles Franklin Awards with his debut novel Bliss, and Tim Winton who won the first of his four awards with his second novel Shallows.

The Canberra Times reported judge Beatrice Davis as saying that

Carey was an “effortless stylist” who “gives a sense of immediacy to every vivid scene and compels belief in every character no matter how bizarre”.

While I haven’t loved every Carey I’ve read, I do love the fact that you never know what form or “style” he’s going to produce next. He is exciting to read.

Tim Winton won the 1984 award with his novel Shallows. The award was not made for 1983 (see below) so I was intrigued to read the following statement by the judges quoted in The Canberra Times report:

The merit of Winton’s novel is reflected by the high quality of the 29 books considered this year for the $5,000 award … Among the other books entered were David Malouf’s Harland’s half acre, Elizabeth Jolley’s Milk and honey, Thomas Shapcott’s The white stag of exile, Nicholas Hasluck’s The Bellarmine jug (The Age Book of the Year), David Ireland’s Archimedes and the seagle, Alan Gould’s The man who stayed below and Olga Masters’s Loving daughters.

Interesting.

Now, I’m a Winton fan but when I read Shallows not long after it came out I clearly remember feeling it overdid the imagery a bit, that it was a little “overwritten” (which is something I’ve just read Helen Garner felt about his first novel). Still, the judges saw “ample proof of a developing talent” and I certainly wouldn’t disagree with that. The judges also said:

The merits of this novel are perhaps most evident in the strength of the characterisation — these characters stand on their own — and in Winton’s ability to bring the early history of whaling into an intelligible relationship with present-day attitudes to the whaling industry.

Fair enough. Winton is great at writing character, and setting. He, like, Carey, is always exciting to read.

Another interesting winner this decade was Rodney Hall, with his wonderful Just relations, but I just don’t have time to share everything I found.

No award (again)

As happened in the second decade, there was a year in this third decade, 1983, in which no award was made. The Canberra Times reported that most of judges for the 1983 Miles Franklin Literary Award “felt the standard too poor to justify presenting it”. The report continued that “if no novel of sufficient quality is available, the author of a play for stage. radio, television ‘or such other medium as may develop’ can be the recipient but few scripts are received”.

In 1983, novels were published by people like Brian Castro, Sara Dowse, Elizabeth Jolley, and Peter Kocan. Interestingly Peter Kocan’s The cure won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award and Elizabeth Jolley’s Mr Scobie’s riddle won The Age Book of the Year Award. There were also short story collections – but these, unlike plays and scripts, are not eligible it seems – by Carmel Bird, Robert Drewe, Beverley Farmer, amongst others. I’m not saying any of these should have won, but in the light of what the judges said the following year – including highlighting The Age Book of the Year as indicative of quality – it does make me wonder.

Past posts in the series

• First decade
• Second decade

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.

Stivens’ 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?