Commentary

Monday musings on Australian literature: Where is Australia’s George Orwell?

/ Whispering Gums / 24 Comments
George Orwell, 1933 (Presumed Public Domain, from Wikipedia)

George Orwell, 1933 (Presumed Public Domain, from Wikipedia)

In a comment on my review last week of Kate Grenville’s One life, Lisa (ANZLitLovers) asked “Where’s Australia’s George Orwell?”. This was in reference to the idea that more novelists should write about climate change to help change public opinion. Interesting question, I thought, and one that I could explore in a Monday Musings. You might all be relieved, in fact, to have something different from my recent list-focused musings.

Before I answer the question – and then throw it open to you – it would be sensible to clarify my understanding of the question. (See, I’ve been well-grounded in essay skills: first, define your terms!) To put it simply, I believe Lisa was asking where is the Australian author who is driven to identify injustice, oppose inhumanity, and promote social conscience? That is, an author like Orwell – the man who coined terms like “cold war”, “big brother” and “thought police”, the man who used satire, allegory and other rhetorical devices in his fiction and non-fiction to show us the error of our ways. I hope this is what Lisa meant; this is, anyhow, how I am reading her question.

An Australian Orwell?

Well, a name did pop immediately into my head – Thea Astley. Of course, she’s dead, but so is George Orwell. I suspect Lisa was looking for a living Orwell to speak to us right now on “now” topics”, but, bear with me anyhow.

Astley, like Orwell, wrote in multiple forms – novels, short stories, essays – though Astley didn’t write the sorts of personal experience memoirs that Orwell did in books like Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. And, unlike Orwell who travelled far and wide, physically and with his pen, Astley’s works were firmly based on Australia. But, like Orwell, she had an acerbic eye and a satiric pen, and she used it to good effect.

Ashley was also a wordsmith, albeit of a different sort to Orwell. She used words that frequently sent (and still send) her readers to the dictionary, and her passion was to “carve a good sentence”.

So far so good. However, having considered Astley, I’m now going to, reluctantly, reject her as our George Orwell. Not because she isn’t a satirist because she is, but because her satire isn’t as explicitly political as his. She was interested in the treatment of outcasts and misfits, regardless of the reason for their “otherness”, which could be race, religion, economic status, age, gender, and so on.  She satirised suburban and small town life, particularly in her first novels. She also tackled more political issues such as white Australia’s treatment of indigenous people in A kindness cup and It’s raining in mango. In Coda she satirised the treatment of ageing. And in her last novel, Drylands, issues like gender, power, modern technology, and sport attracted the attention of her sharp pen.

Astley was surely aware of the political implications of the issues she targeted, but she didn’t explicitly focus on the politics. She was, I think, more interested in the social, cultural and personal ramifications of the behaviours she put before us.

We certainly have political satirists, but they tend to be performers rather than authors.

In 2013, the Sydney Writers’ Festival included a panel discussion titled  The Satirists, which asked the question:

If Australians claim to be anti-authoritarian rabble-rousers, where is the canon of contemporary satirical novels reflecting this stereotype? What are the satirical traditions in Australian literature?

The panel included novelist David Foster, actor/novelist/memoirist William McInnes and poet Alan Wearne. I haven’t read Foster (my bad, I know) or Alan Wearne. And, I don’t think McInnes’ brand of humour, entertaining though it is, is quite what Lisa was asking. Contemporary writers I’ve read included Peter Carey and Richard Flanagan who have written some satirical novels but they are not known primarily as satirists.

So, is there anyone else – writing now – who is making it his or her business to tackle the big questions of our time, questions to do with refugees, indigenous dispossession, climate change? In Australia, or elsewhere?

POSTSCRIPT: I had just scheduled this post for publishing when up popped a blog post from today’s The Guardian. Written by Sam Twyford-Moore and titled “Why so serious: does Australian literature have a funny person problem?”, it starts with the following:

Australian authors show off their satirical chops on social media every day. So why doesn’t more of that wit spill on to the published page?

Of course, not all satire is “funny”, but, regardless, he doesn’t have an answer.

Life … sends you detours

/ Whispering Gums / 24 Comments

Love on the road 2015, book cover“Life … sends you detours” is a line I quoted from the short story “Sunrise over Sausalito” in the last review I posted here at Gums. That review, posted on 11 July, was for the short story collection Love on the road 2015. Unfortunately, since then we have experienced our own love-on-the-road detours. This is why, as some of you may have noticed, my posting here has slowed to a crawl – the last three posts were in fact written more than a fortnight ago and scheduled for posting over the last two weeks – and why you have not seen me commenting on blogs that I do try to visit regularly. I have, in fact, not opened a book in the last two weeks, even though I have always had one or two near at hand.

Here in a nutshell is the story. On 18 July we were heading off on a trip through Central and Northern Australia with two friends. However, on 17 July one of those friends found herself in hospital undergoing surgery for a broken hip. In one of those coincidences we’d hate in fiction, at exactly the same time she was under the knife in Canberra, Son Gums was under the knife in Seoul for a badly broken arm. He was in Korea on a brief teacher exchange but a team-building water sport activity went a little awry for him and … life, as they say, sent him a detour!

Uluru, on an unusually grey winter day

Uluru, on an unusually grey winter day, but rather suiting our mood

So, we rather reluctantly set off on our holiday as a twosome rather than a foursome and rather expecting that we’d have to cut our holiday short if our son returned to Australia – which is exactly what happened a week into our trip. So, any spare time during our trip was spent not relaxing with a book but rejigging, and then re-rejigging our travel plans, or communicating with relevant parties about the two patients.

I won’t bore you with more – both patients are on the mend now – but I did want to explain that a) I will get back to visiting your blogs soon and b) I am not in a reading slump. It’s simply that the love of children and friends has taken priority for the moment and detoured us from the road we had planned for this July.

Now, where is that book …

Monday musings on Australian literature: On labelling writers

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Today’s post was inspired by a tweet from Aminatta Forna which led me to an article she’d written titled “Don’t judge a book by its author”. The Guardian led the article with the following pull quote:

I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer …

It’s a fascinating article that raises some meaty issues. It is, I recognise, about writers and writing in general, not just Australian, but I’ve decided to  write about it in my Monday Musings series because it touches on some issues I’ve talked about here before.

But first, Forna’s main thesis … it’s that labelling (or classifying) is “the very antithesis of literature”. She starts with the practice of labelling writers. Now, I admit, I am guilty of this. I have categories and/or tags on my blog for “women writers”, “Australian writers”, and so on. I’m a librarian/archivist by training and I find classification useful to support searches for specific information. Forna would possibly ask why we might want to search by such labels or categories, but I’ll come to that later.

As a librarian/archivist, I also know the limitations of categorising. How, for example, do you categorise Forna herself? She was born in Scotland to a Sierre Leonian father and a Scottish mother. She has lived in several countries but now lives in London, I believe. I decided, somewhat uncomfortably, to opt for British writer. We librarians also know about the implications of categorising, and Forna explores some of this too. The white male writer, she says, is “the only one called simply ‘writer'”. This is all very interesting, but is just the entrée to her main point, and to the main reason I wanted to talk about her article here … so let’s move on.

She argues that labels are the antithesis of literature because “the way of literature is to seek universality”, while labels are limiting. She uses the example of China Achebe who is “often called the grandfather of African literature”. As labels go, she argues, it isn’t the worst that could have been “pinned” on him, but the problem is that he “often found his universal themes overlooked in favour of an ethnographic reading” of his novel Things fall apart. Forna’s point is that

Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places.

This certainly rings true for her own The hired man, which I reviewed last week. She provides very little detail about the particular war it concerns, but focuses instead on its impact on people.

This sense of limitation extends further, however, as Forna explains. She posted, she said, a question on Facebook:

Where did the new orthodoxy arise that writers must only set stories within their own country of origin or nationality?

If you’re a regular reader here, the penny might now have dropped regarding why I am writing about this article here. It relates to my discussion last year concerning white Australians writing about indigenous Australians. I quoted Margaret Merrilees expressing concern about non-Aboriginal writers fearing “‘appropriating’ Aboriginal experience”. Forna reports that one respondent to her Facebook post, British (ha, she labels this writer!) writer Linda Grant, suggested

it’s about authenticity … And probably came in with post-colonial studies. If white people can’t appropriate the experiences of the oppressed for fiction then it no longer becomes possible for anyone to write outside their own experience.

Forna then quotes another writer, the Pakistani-British writer Kamila Shamsie, continuing this point:

What started as a thoughtful post-colonial critique of certain types of imperial texts somehow became a peculiar orthodoxy that essentially denies the possibility of imaginative engagement with anyone outside your little circle.

I think you get the drift without my going on. The political issue, as we’ve discussed before, has a lot to do with power. It requires sensitivity and awareness, if you’re the majority, but it should not deter writers from exercising their imagination. Forna talks about “authenticity” – and some writers’ fear that they can’t authentically write about a “culture” not their own. But what is authenticity, she asks, and who’s the judge.

I’m not going to continue with Forna’s argument here, because you can read it yourself, except to say that Forna concludes that “a novel is a work of imagination” in which the writer offers to take the reader on a journey. It’s a journey, she says, in which the novelist uses imagination to show readers something they have not seen before, and in which, readers, in return, bring their own experiences and imagination. I like it …

We have though moved quite a long way from the initial point regarding labelling and classification. Forna does return briefly to it suggesting that “sometimes we need labels just to describe the thing we are talking about”. I’d agree. I’d also say that sometimes we need labels for practical reasons, such as to identify issues or problems and right them. We Australians, for example, need to hear indigenous stories, but if disadvantage, prejudice and/or the commercial imperative mean these stories don’t get out, then we need to find those writers and support them. To do that we need to label them – don’t we?

Sparrow-Folk and Tara Moss want to Ruin Your Day

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This year, as I like to do, I went to the National Folk Festival, albeit for only one day instead of my usual two. I love the music, but I also love the singer-songwriters for whom the lyrics are at least as important at the music. I came to folk through the protest songs of the Civil Rights era and so love to hear songs addressing contemporary concerns – political, social, global, local, they all have a place in the folk singer-songwriter repertoire.

For this post I’m just going to talk about one song, because it illustrates the point and it enables me to refer again to a book I read and reviewed earlier this year, Tara Moss’s The fictional woman. But first, the song. Seems like I’m late to the party, because it apparently made quite a splash early last year, not only in Australia, whence it originates, but overseas. It was even picked up by Huffington Post. The song’s title is “Ruin your day” and it satirises those who frown upon/are disgusted by/want to ban mothers breastfeeding in public. I must say, I’ve been astonished recently to realise that instead of breastfeeding in public becoming more acceptable since my time in the 1980s, it’s actually become less so. We 1980s mothers did not furtively cover ourselves with shawls or disappear into some dark nether regions of wherever we happened to be. No, we did what comes naturally, not brazenly but naturally. Well, at least my friends and I did, and while there were some demurs from some quarters, we fully expected the world to become more enlightened and tolerant as time moved on. Not so, it seems.

Anyhow, here’s the video:

As I listened to the gorgeous, locally-based “glam-rock” duo, Sparrow-Folk, perform this song over Easter, I was reminded of Tara Moss’s chapter on the topic. As you can imagine, she, a new mother in her late 30s, and a card-carrying feminist, had plenty to say on the subject. Her chapter, “The Mother”, is the longest chapter in the book, because there are many “fictions” attached to motherhood – and several have to do with breastfeeding, with the can-and-can’ts, the for-and-againsts, and of course the hide-or-go-publics. These “fictions” tend to be accompanied by a lot of either-or discussions which put women in boxes, and, worse, pit women against each other, creating what she calls “false divides”. I’m not going to go into all that now, but I will briefly discuss her section on public breastfeeding.

Moss beautifully unpacks society’s ongoing discomfort with breastfeeding, with the fact that “the very sight of breastfeeding remains inexplicably controversial”. “Images of breastfeeding”, she writes, “are still routinely flagged as offensive on Facebook and banned, accompanied by this message: ‘Shares that contain nudity, pornography, or sexual content are not permitted on Facebook … refrain from posting abusive material in future'”. Breastfeeding, pornographic? abusive? What is all this about? There has been some official relaxation of the “rule” she says, but reports still come in of photos of breastfeeding being banned on Facebook.

Confirming my 1980s memories, she writes that it wasn’t always like this. Sesame Street “once routinely showed breastfeeding, but since the 1990s it has reportedly only shown babies being fed by bottle”. These days, it is ok for magazines and advertising to feature “a sea of exposed female upper body flesh” but not ok for that breast to be seen doing what it was designed for. She argues this is “learned bias [and asks] since when did the natural way of feeding your child come to be seen as offensive or controversial?”

Moss continues:

Our choices are influenced by what we see and what society portrays as normal or aspirational. In a very real way, visibility is acceptance. Unfortunately, while we have become accustomed to seeing the fertile female body used to sell us all kinds of products, we are not longer accustomed to seeing it perform this most natural task. But though anti-discrimination laws protect women’s right to breastfeed in all public places, without normalising the sight of breastfeeding in our society we have little hope of making more mothers comfortable enough to engage in the practice of publicly feeding their children naturally.

I love that Sparrow-Folk’s you-tube went global:

I’m not going to retreat
To the comfort of a toilet seat
No, no, I’m happy to stay out here where everybody else eats
…
Everyone knows new mothers are exhibitionists
Taking every chance they get to ruin your day with tits.

Go Sparrow-Folk, go Tara Moss – and go all you breastfeeding women brave enough to stare down pursed-mouth looks and abuse. This regressive tide must be turned.

On understanding the arts

/ Whispering Gums / 42 Comments

Earlier this year I wrote a post about reading difficult literature. I said that I like to be challenged by literature, and discussed the features that define “difficulty” for me. Since then I’ve come across various statements, some contradictory, about the role of “difficulty” in the arts – and I thought I’d share them with you as part of a continued discussion.

Australian art critic Robert Hughes (quoted from the recent documentary series, Brilliant creatures):

You have to realise, of course, that no painting that’s of any quality is really very easy to understand because the function of a painting is always to expand one’s experience and so if it were easy to understand, then it would fall within what you already knew.

I’m not sure I agree with this. Surely art, and here I’m extending Hughes’ statement to all art forms, doesn’t have to be difficult to introduce a new idea or experience way of seeing things? Difficulty can be useful because it can force us to think, but I don’t see it as essential. Am I reading this statement too simplistically?

In Tolstoy’s book, What is art (which I admit to not having read, so I may be taking this out of context), he says that:

The business of art lies just in this, — to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.

Here Tolstoy seems to be saying pretty much the opposite to Hughes, arguing that the aim of art is to make an idea accessible, which I read, in my simple way, as “easy” to understand.

I’ve read similar contradictory statements about poetry.

Methinks the difference relates to their ideas about the role of art. Hughes, I suspect, saw art as expanding our experience and, perhaps as a result, leading to new thinking, wheras Tolstoy saw art, I believe, as having a moral purpose. It can’t just be for its own sake. If you see art in those terms it must be comprehensible, eh?

I’d love to know what you think about these two ideas. Are they totally contradictory, or can we encompass them both! I know I’m being somewhat wilfully simple here, but sometimes that is the place to start?

Books given and received for Christmas

/ Whispering Gums / 31 Comments

Here at the Gums, we like of course to give and receive books for Christmas. Like you, I’m sure, I love choosing books for those I love, albeit tinged with a little anxiety. Have they read it? Will they like it? That doesn’t stop we readers giving it a go though does it? Anyhow, just in case you’d like to hear what decisions I made this year, here goes.

  • For Ms Gums Jr, who loves poetry: Owen Musa’s Parang
  • For Mr Gums Jr, who enjoys humour: Simon Rich’s Spoiled brats (with thanks to one of those end-of-year lists, in The Guardian I think!)
  • For Ma Gums, who has worked as a lexicographer: Paul Dickson’s Authorisms: Words wrought by writers
  • For Aunt Gums, who likes a nice English writer: Joanna Trollope’s Balancing act
  • For Brother Gums, historian and lover of good writing of all kinds: Best Australian essays 2014 (but unfortunately, as I feared, someone else had a similar bright idea so it’s back to the drawing board for this one!)
  • For Sister-in-law Gums, who’s always up for something different: Jane Rawson’s (recent MUBA award-winner) A wrong turn at the office of unmade lists
  • For Gums’ Californian friend, who teaches Japanese: Mark Henshaw’s The snow kimono (and I hope she doesn’t read this before she opens her parcel)
  • For Gums’ Californian friend’s daughter, who likes a good mystery: Mark Henshaw’s In the line of fire
  • For Gums’ Californian friend’s daughter (yes she has two), who reads widely and, I believe, also enjoys a bit of commentary: Kill Your Darlings #19

POSTSCRIPT: I returned Best Australian Stories 2014 and decided to go more local for Bro Gums – Julian Davies’ Crow mellow.

And while we are at it, I also gave copies of Australian love stories edited by Cate Kennedy for two late-in-the-year birthdays.

As for what I received, well, they are an intriguing and wonderfully eclectic bunch:

  • From Ma and Pa Gums: Don Watson’s The bush: Travels in the heart of Australia. Woo hoo – I was hoping Santa or someone would bring this!
  • From Mr Gums Jr, who knows I’ll give something new a go: Vivek Tiwary and and Andrew Robinson’s graphic novel The fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein story. Love the out-of-left-fieldedness of this.
  • From Bro and SIL Gums, who live in Tasmania and can be relied upon to give me something by a Tasmanian writer: Danielle Wood’s Mothers Grimm, which reworks four fairy stories from the point of view of mothers and sounds right up my alley!

Who’s watching our e-reading behaviour?

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I was intrigued to read in The Guardian app this morning that Kobo has released a report on patterns in e-reading that they have gleaned from more than 21 million Kobo readers (the devices and, therefore, the readers!) across the world! The report says that retailers had been reluctant to share the data they had been gathering for themselves – but Kobo has apparently come clean. And how interesting it is. But first, the main issue implied by my subject line …

I’m not sure what to think about the fact that this data is being gathered. I find data about human behaviour fascinating but, as a librarian/archivist, I ascribe to the principle of reader/user privacy or confidentiality. Librarians don’t tell others what individual people are borrowing or researching, but they do gather data. Librarians running public libraries want, need in fact, to know what their users like. Do their readers prefer crime novels to classics, cookbooks to self-help, and so on? Librarians seek this information via such sources as borrowing statistics, surveys and just by chatting with their users. The public, presumably, thinks this is ok. After all, it is their/our money (our taxes) that is being used to buy the books – and we want that money spent sensibly.

Kobo, though, and all those other e-reader companies are in business. They also want to know what we like to read – because they want to make money. Fair enough. All retailers want to know what their customers want – at least, they should if they want to stay in business. The question is, in our electronic data driven world, what data is collected, how is it collected, and where is it kept? Is it anonymous, is it encoded, how is it used? There’s an interesting discussion about the collection of reader data at Scholarly Kitchen, particularly in relation to a recent discovery that Adobe Digital Editions was not only gathering information about users’ digital libraries and reading patterns, but sending it back to their servers in the clear (unencrypted). You can read more about this (with links to even more articles) at the Digital Reader. Adobe, of course, is not the only company gathering reader data. Amazon, says Scholarly Kitchen, “is notoriously silent about its activities, but it is well known that their use of big data gathering and analytics is profound”.

I’ll leave the discussion here … I have no solutions. In the end, we have two main options – opt out of the electronic world (if that’s at all possible) or trust providers (and do our best to be aware, careful consumers). Oh, and we can support the watchdogs who do their best to protect us and our information, and we can try to use trusted third parties (like, says Scholarly Kitchen, libraries and scholarly publishers).

I will end, instead, where I began – with Kobo’s recent report, and its finding that there is quite a discrepancy between what we buy and what we actually read. Hmm, let me put that more clearly: they found that the books at the top of the bestseller lists are not at the top of the “most completed” lists. Indeed, not one of the top 10 UK bestsellers (such as Gillian Flynn’s Gone girl which ranked 4) appears in the top 10 most completed. (You can see the two UK lists in The Guardian link I provided at the beginning of the post).

What does this say about bestsellers? Clearly promotion (and word of mouth) is extremely powerful – something we surely knew, but this data adds another whole angle to it. An interesting example is Northup’s Twelve years a slave which is ninth on the British bestseller list, due presumably to the  recent film adaptation, but which only 28.2% of British readers finished (or had, by the time the data was gathered). The book that topped the UK’s “most completed” list was

Casey Kelleher’s self-published thriller Rotten to the Core, which doesn’t even feature on the overall bestseller list – although Kelleher has gone on to win a book deal with Amazon’s UK publishing imprint Thomas & Mercer after selling nearly 150,000 copies of her three self-published novels.

Good news for Casey Kelleher.

Besides my intrinsic interest in what people buy versus what they read, my main question is how will Kobo (and other publishers) use this information? They probably don’t care greatly if people don’t read “bestsellers” – after all, they’ve got the money – but, getting their marketing machine behind smaller selling books that people are completing is another whole ball-game. Is this a scary thing or is there a wonderful potential here? For we general-cum-literary readers, it is scary, because the risk is they will start to skew their publishing activity (even more) towards the genres people most complete – which, in the UK, is romance – rather than taking a risk on something new. Sometimes, too much data can be a bad thing.

Thanks be to all those lovely small publishers who hang in there publishing different books. Once more, I “dips me lid” to them.

 

What do you say when you order food at a restaurant?

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This post is not quite on my usual topic. It’s about a little linguistic issue that’s been bothering me of late – though it’s been around for a little while now. It’s this …

Cake with Cream

Albion Hotel, Braidwood

When you order food at a restaurant or cafe, what do you say? “May I have a long black please” or “I’d like the steak, medium rare, thanks”? Both of these sound reasonable to me, with the former being more formally correct. I did a little Google search, as you do, and I found English lessons for ordering in restaurants. At maltalingua.com, the recommendation is “I’d like the …” or, perhaps, “I’ll have the …”. Another site, elementalenglish.com, also suggests “I’ll have the …”. A third site, speakenglish.co.uk, suggests “I’ll have the …” too. “I’ll have the …” sounds a fair enough response when a server asks you what you’d like from a menu, though I’d prefer “I’d like the …”. But …

Where do the expressions that I seem to be hearing frequently now come from? The expressions I’m talking about are “Can I get …”, “Can I grab …”, or, less common, “I’ll take …”. Who is going to do the “getting”, “grabbing”, and “taking”? The customers? No, they are going to be sitting at the table or standing at the counter waiting for the staff to bring the items to them. So, why this form of ordering? It sounds less polite to me (though tone of voice can modify this). Does it matter? Am I being too pedantic?

Australia’s first Arbor Day

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Frank Lloyd Wright tree quote
At the National Arboretum, Canberra

Do you ever wonder what a few generations hence will think about the way we do things? About how we put on our festivals and celebrations? Whether they will think how silly we look – and, I don’t mean “silly” in the ways we may have intended but “silly” in the sense of “cute” because, well, we just weren’t sophisticated like they are? I often do, and it came to mind again when I read last week about Australia’s first Arbor Day.

This post is a little out of the ordinary for me. It’s not (really) about a literary work and neither is it about a cultural event I’ve attended, but it is inspired by the Library of America story “About trees” that I reviewed last week. As I read that story, I was reminded of celebrating Arbor Day when I was young. So I did some research in the National Library of Australia’s Trove and discovered an article titled “Our first Arbor Day” in the South Australian Register of 20 June, 1889. What a little treasure it turned out to be!

First though, a brief history. While J Sterling Morton instigated Arbor Day in the USA, in Nebraska, in 1872, the first Arbor Day actually occurred, according to Wikipedia, in Spain in 1805 in a little village called Villanueva de la Sierra. It was the brainchild of a local priest who believed in “the importance of trees for health, hygiene, decoration, nature, environment and customs” (Naturalist Miguel Herrero Uceda). It came to Australia in 1889, though I was entertained to read in Prime Facts, published by the NSW Department of Primary Industry, that Australia’s first Arbor Day occurred 1890. Not so! That may have been the first in the east of the continent, but our first one did take place a year earlier.

The author of “Our first Arbor Day” tells us a bunch of interesting things about trees – about liberty trees and memorial trees in France and the USA, about the tree of knowledge and tree worship, and about the Town Clerk of London who created an avenue of trees in memory of the criminals “at whose executions he had assisted”! Our author continues that no encouragement to plant trees is needed in South Australia as:

The forestry influence is happily strong upon us in South Australia, and we are inclined to regard the man or boy [this is the nineteenth century I suppose!] who plants a tree in the light of a benefactor of the human race.

Good to hear! What’s interesting though is the type of trees named:

It would be a good thing to have the waste places of the colony covered with planes, or oaks, or pines, or whatever trees are best adapted to the condition of the case.

Hmm … it seems as though native trees weren’t considered as being “best adapted” for the place! Who said we were anglo-centric?

Our writer, like J. Sterling Morton, also recognises the relationship between trees and climate, stating that “the presence of trees tends to modify the climate”. S/he therefore approves of Arbor Day, and particularly of involving children, as it will “inculcate in them a conviction of the importance of the science of forestry.”

And this brings me back to the beginning of this post and, in fact, to the beginning of the article I’m discussing, because the article opens with a description of the tree planting ceremony in Adelaide. It went like this:

The Adelaide children start with a great flourish of trumpets from Victoria-square. Each school will be preceded by its band. The singers go before, the planters – who are to be decorated with rosettes – follow after. When the procession arrives on the ground the elect children, who are to plant trees, will be separated from their less favoured brethren. The schools will be divided into ‘squads’ — the planting squad and the non-planting squad. The planting squad is to be arranged with due care — one child to each hole. It may be hoped that a certain amount of fitness will be observed, and that every square hole will command the attendance of a square child. When the word is given, the trees will be planted, a great celebration will be over, and the children of the schools will have received a lesson on the value of arboriculture.

Can’t you just see it? The band, the singers and all those rosette-wearing, favoured, square children next to their square holes? The pride is palpable – just as we are proud today of our public events and ceremonies. Will we look as earnest and quaint to our descendants, do you think? Probably!

 

Canada’s Group of Seven

/ Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

You’ve seen me write about Canberra’s Seven Writers, a group of seven women who got together to share their writing and support each other. All of them published well-received books – novels, short stories, poetry. Well, I was amused – I’m easily amused – to discover  the other day as we explored the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) that Canada has a Group of Seven.

However, Canada’s Group of Seven – as you’ve probably guessed – is not a writers’ group but one of artists. It comprised seven men who had been painting for many years before they formed this group. They first exhibited together in 1920 at the Art Gallery of Toronto, now the AGO. According to signage at the Gallery, they believed that to develop a sense of nationhood, Canada needed to find its voice in art – and they saw this voice as coming through nature and landscape. The group operated – is that the best word? – until 1933, but, the Gallery says, their work “continues to influence national identity”.

The seven artists are men I’ve never heard of: Franklin Carmichael (1890–1945), Lawren Harris (1885–1970), A. Y. Jackson (1882–1972), Frank Johnston (1888–1949), Arthur Lismer (1885–1969), J. E. H. MacDonald (1873–1932), and Frederick Varley (1881–1969). Apparently the Seven did become bigger when A. J. Casson (1898–1992) joined in 1926, Edwin Holgate (1892–1977) in 1930, and LeMoine FitzGerald (1890–1956) in 1932. Mr Gums and I were particularly attracted to the stylised, almost abstract landscapes by Harris, though, really, we didn’t have enough time to explore all the artists in depth.

The Gallery has an impressive collection of their work, due largely to its major benefactor, the collector, Ken Thomson. Because we had limited time, though I’d happily go back to the gallery, we focused the second half of our visit on this collection, and some of the rooms near it. (In the first part of our visit, we checked out the special exhibition which featured Henry Moore and Francis Bacon.) Ken Thomson’s philosophy on collecting art was quoted on the walls:

If your heart is beating, you know it was made for you.

The hanging of the Ken Thomson Collection was interesting – and different to that in many other parts of the Gallery – in that the paintings were hung without individual labels. Instead, in each room there was a large introductory label and a spiral bound book with thumbnails of the works and the needed identification. I had mixed feelings about the approach: it enabled the works to be shown, rather as they would in a home, unadulterated by any immediate mediation, and yet in a gallery I do want to know what I’m seeing. I suspect, though, we are all different in how we want to interact with art. I have seen this sort of approach before – that is, not identifying the picture with a label next to it – in some of the galleries and art exhibits we visited in Japan, but in those places there tended to be very few works on the walls, sometimes just one big work on each wall.

Tom Thomson landscapes at AGO

Note the hanging of Tom Thomson landscapes at AGO

Interpretive sign re Group of Seven, AGO

Interpretive sign re Group of Seven, AGO

As I’m still travelling, I don’t have time to write too much more, but I wanted to mention the room that was devoted to displaying works by both the Group of Seven and artists contemporaneous with them. The latter were hung on sections of walls painted in a darker grey colour to identify them more easily. These non-Group of Seven works, some of which were by women like Emily Carr, expressed a more diverse, less romantic, perhaps, view of Canada. They included figurative works, which contrasts significantly with the Group of Seven’s pretty much exclusive focus on landscape. One that I particularly liked was the naive style “In the Nun’s Garden” (c. 1933) (see below) which, from a distance, gave the impression of penguins. It’s easy to see how their association with nuns works!

Works by Lilias Torrance Newton (top) and Sarah Robertson

Works by Lilias Torrance Newton (top) and Sarah Robertson, contemporaneous with the Group of Seven

Emily Carr, in fact, is one of the few artists I’d come across before, in my visit to the Canada’s northwest in 1991, where we saw her art at the Royal British Columbia Museum. She was particularly known for painting indigenous Canadians and their culture, though moved into “forest scenes”. She met the Group of Seven, and was apparently encouraged and supported by their “leader”, Lawren Harris. She was also a writer, which, really, is the main reason I know her – through her autobiographical book Klee Wyck.

Another artist associated with the group was Tom Thomson (1877–1917). He died young, before the group’s official formation, but his landscape paintings of the west belong very much to the group’s ethos. The introductory signage described his landscapes as “boldly expressive and passionate”. According to Wikipedia, group member and recognised leader Lawren Harris wrote in his essay “The Story of the Group of Seven” that Thomson was “a part of the movement before we pinned a label on it”. The room dedicated to Thomson’s painting was rather poignant.

One of the great things about travel is getting a sense of how a nation views itself. I think Australians find visiting Canada particularly interesting because we have quite a lot of similarities as well as, of course, our differences. This art exhibition, with its discussion of landscape and nationhood gave me another insight into a country which, like ours, has immense space and dramatic, defining landscapes.