Literary events

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 4, Your favourites: Robbie Arnott

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

In conversation with Karen Viggers

Karen Viggers is no stranger to this blog (my posts), and I have read Robbie Arnott’s previous novel, Limberlost (my review). One of several “Your favourites” sessions with loved authors, this one was described as

Robbie Arnott’s fiction is steeped in the wild: women return from the dead as walking ecosystems; mythic birds circle the skies; the water calls to us. In writing these sumptuous, near-sentient landscapes, he grapples with our most wrenching and necessary questions: eco-grief, stolen land and human frailty. He joins local author Karen Viggers to talk about his new novel, Dusk, a tale of a feral creature loose in the Tasmanian highlands.  

Karen commenced by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people, their generosity and their stories, and spoke with passion about the importance of stories in our lives.

She then introduced herself, explaining that as an animal and landscape person, she relates to Robbie’s books and was keen to conduct this conversation for the Festival. She then introduced Robbie, his four books to date, and his many awards – Flames (2018), Rain heron (2020), Limberlost (2022), and Dusk (2024). Wildness and landscapes feature in all his work.

This was a fascinating but sometimes somewhat anarchic discussion in which Robbie didn’t always quite answer the question being asked, or, perhaps, not in the expected way. But Karen is an expert at going with the flow, so we got great insights into Robbie and his approach to writing – which is what it’s all about.

On how the accolades make him feel and their effect on his writing

It’s nice to be acknowledged, but living in Tasmania, away from the literary scene, they don’t make much difference to his daily life. Career-wise they’re good, but they don’t affect his writing. He is all about his work, to the detriment of his other responsibilities.

On the novel’s origin

Dusk is about twins Iris and Floyd joining the hunt for a feral puma, the titular Dusk, because a bounty has been offered. Karen described it as a story of wildness, freedom, connections, relationships, and asked about its origin. Robbie said it goes back to his childhood, and times in the bush when they would see feral deer which shouldn’t be there. He wanted to write this story.

On the siblings and their relationship to their parents

Iris and Floyd are 37-year-old twins whose parents had been convicts, then bushrangers, and had dragged their children through their life of crime. Now these children want to live straight. They need the bounty cash, but they have no idea about what they are doing.

He wanted two protagonists who have a close relationship, like siblings do. He didn’t make them twins for any particular twin-connection idea, but because he wanted a flatness of hierarchy between them. However, Karen felt that the sort of connection twins have comes through.

Karen wondered about the twins’ outsiderness, and whether it comes from within himself. Robbie, though – and this was reiterated throughout the interview – said he had no idea about himself. He hasn’t had therapy! They are outsiders because we live in colonial landscape. The other characters – except for some near the end (First Nations I’m guessing) – are outsiders too, but don’t realise it.

Later, Robbie talked about the deep trust Iris and Floyd have in each other. They are committed completely to each other, they rely on each other, despite frequently irritating each other.

On Dusk the puma, and wild beast myths

Dusk was not inspired by big cat stories but people are more scared of cats. They are terrifying, and play into our idea of wild landscapes. He is interested in outsiders tracking outsiders, in the strangeness of the colonial landscape. Colonists would bring things to new countries to hunt, also to rid other pests, so he had the idea that someone might bring a cat over to get rid of deer. But his pumas were more interested in easier animals than deer, like sheep. Like the cane toads brought over to eat cane beetles, but which ended up eating other things. (And, to extend this example, before the cane toads, the sugar cane itself was introduced, which then led to blackbirding.)

As for the name, Dusk, he didn’t choose it for any metaphorical meaning, but liked it as a name for a creature which appears at a liminal time of day.

Robbie doesn’t seek metaphor when he’s writing. It feels more like cleverness than openness. Karen suggested that a joy for writers is when readers see things that the writer doesn’t see. Robbie agreed, sharing Richard Flanagan’s advice that the least interesting thing in a novel is the writer’s intention. Flanagan, we learnt, is a friend and writing mentor for Robbie.

Despite this, readers did, said Karen, think about metaphorical meaning of Dusk!

On the wild and dangerous creatures in his novels, their source, relevance, meaning

Robbie has had no therapy, he reiterated, so can’t explain why! But, currently there is a focus in writing on the self and raising mundanity to art. However, he is interested in the world outside humanity. In stories, wild animals are often the impetus for change, but animals don’t work like that. They just are, going about their lives.

The discussion then turned to savagery and brutality. Humans can be as savage and brutal as wild animals, but in urban societies we fear wildness and savagery, and try to keep it at bay. However, we keep bumping up against the edges of it. Robbie has had publishers and readers complain about brutality in his novels, though it’s drawn from reality. For example, Iris and Floyd slaughtering bobby calves with sledgehammers comes from a friend’s experience in 2012. In another novel, his publisher tried to talk him out of a scene involving the skinning of rabbits. Where do they think meat comes from, Robbie asked. Savagery and brutality are part of us.

We have become separated from the bush. We say we love it but is our attitude to it essentially about power and control? For Robbie, taming the wilderness is ridiculous. He shared a scene from Richard Powers’ beautiful novel, Overstory, in which people suggested removing sticks and natural debris from the forest floor.

Staying with the idea of animals, Karen spoke of Iris and Floyd living in a savage world but taking such exquisite care of their horses. She asked Robbie about his thoughts on the human-animal bond. He wanted to show the intensity of the relationship, that it was an unquestioned one, and a necessity.

On what landscape means to him, and how he writes it

Robbie always starts with the landscape, not plot or character, and then thinks about who would be there. Landscape moves him. It offers the greatest way to feel small, the most beautiful form of insignificance. To write about landscape with feeling, the first thing he does is to free it of baggage, like the idea that the forest is green. He describes it as it is, which is not green, and then focuses on emotional reactions to it. For him, the aim of fiction is not to render the world as it is but how it feels.

To write freshly about landscape he gets out into it, and draws on his memory (memory is critical). He searches for the “atmosphere”. He most enjoys a book when he has slid into its atmosphere.

Staying with the idea of feelings, Karen asked him about the feelings he wanted for Dusk, who is omnipresent from the beginning. Robbie said that it wasn’t quite menace but a “hauntedness”. She’s not vengeful. He wanted her to feel alive.

On his novel as Western (and more!)

Robbie has described the novel as being something like a western, in that it is framed like a western, like a quest. It is also a journey novel, which makes it fun to write and enjoyable for the reader.

The discussion got into other aspects of his writing, such as his blurring of the line between realism and the magical in most of his books. It’s about, he said, conveying how the world feels. The magical wasn’t needed in Limberlost which was inspired by his grandfather. He edits a lot out, because it must feel real.

Karen loves the opening of Rain heron, and suggested that cutting out is an art. Robbie doesn’t want to waste anyone’s time. He wants to keep his books vivid, vibrant, alive. He doesn’t write drafts, but writes sentence by sentence, crafting each one carefully as he goes, so that by the end he has his book.

On Iris

Is Iris looking for belonging? Robbie said Iris feels connection to the landscape, and realises she doesn’t want to leave but she also recognises that she has no cultural connection to the place. Does she have a right to stay? This is the unanswered question – for Iris and for us. She does her best but the question is never resolved.

This point, this, above all else, makes me keen to read Dusk.

Q & A

On his becoming a writer, and his influences: He was a bookworm from the start (as soon as he learnt his sister got to stay up later because she could read!) He started writing when he was 11 or 12. There was never a decision, he just started writing. His literary influences are many, but he loves Annie Proulx for her amazing descriptions of the world; he loves Denis Johnston “at the sentence level”. He thinks Kevin Barry’s new novel is excellent, and later he mentioned David Mitchell and Claire Keegan.

On his thoughts about relationships between humans and wild animals (like the seal and fisherman in Flames): He agrees with ecologists who advocate staying away, but narratively he is pulled to these relationships.

On how he manages to keep his unique, glorious style: He can tell when he Is writing like himself, and when he “is wearing his influences too heavily”. When this happens, he writes a description of something he knows – not necessarily related to his current project – to get back to his own style.

On other art forms that influence or inspire his writing: Photography; poetry for its imagery; oh, and when he is writing he often puts on moving image of salmon leaping and grizzly bears trying (and usually failing) to catch them. This live and unscripted action inspires him.

Karen concluded by simply saying that Robbie’s writing is magical. This conversation would surely have convinced anyone not already in agreement.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
Your favourites: Robbie Arnott
The Arc Theatre, NFSA
Saturday 26 October 2024, 2-3pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 3, Get thee to the nunnery

/ Whispering Gums / 5 Comments

Emily Maguire and Charlotte Wood with Kate Mildenhall

I chose this session primarily because of Charlotte Wood, given I’d seen Emily Maguire the day before, but her presence was plus, as was having author Kate Mildenhall conduct the conversation. Here is the session’s description in the program:

Emily Maguire and Charlotte Wood have both written novels of cloisters – of monks and nuns and clerical power-broking. What is it about these reclusive places that makes for such potent and irresistible storytelling? In conversation with Kate Mildenhall.

Kate did a lovely acknowledgement of country, starting by saying we were honoured to be on this land. She thanked the Ngunnawal people for their care and recognised that the country always was and always will be theirs. 

She then said that BeeJay Silcox deserved an A+ for the title of this session “Get thee to the Nunnery”, and did the usual introduction to the authors, Emily Maguire (and Rapture) and Charlotte Wood (and Stone Yard devotional), listing their books and achievements, which includes, of course, Charlotte being listed for this year’s Booker prize.

Kate introduced the conversation by saying that the two books were set more than 1000 years apart but both involved women – one young, one middle-aged – seeking monastic life albeit for different reasons, the former to live a life of the intellect and the latter to retreat from the world. 

On their characters

Emily explained that Agnes starts as child in Mainz, living with a widowed father who makes the shocking-for-the-time decision to keep his daughter. She consequently grows up listening to men. As a child of the era, she believes in God and constantly looks for signs of God.

Charlotte’s character, on the other hand, is unnamed and about Charlotte’s age. Charlotte liked a reader’s description that her character had “unsubscribed from her life”. She had hit an unspecified “wall of despair” so leaves her life as an environmental activist, and goes to a convent to rest. There is also a sort of “homing instinct” because she returns to the region where she had grown up. She initially finds the nuns’ lives embarrassing, all this singing and praying, until she realises that this is the work. After a narrative gap, we turn the page and find she’s been living there for a few years.

On “the heat” or seed for their books

Emily was inspired a decade ago by the legend of a female pope, which was believed through the high Middle Ages. The story thrilled her. It is a great trickster narrative, and she is personally interested in the early church and early Christianity. She started the novel 10 years ago but didn’t have the skills to write it then.

Charlotte can’t remember the beginning, but she was interested in why would a contemporary woman become a Catholic nun. She shared some of her personal background with Catholicism. She had skedaddled from it as a young woman, for all the obvious reasons, but has remained interested. As she thought about her question regarding modern women becoming nuns, she came across the idea of retreat and she got that, the idea of leaving a chaotic world for one of order. Then the pandemic happened. It pulled the rug from under her. The 2019 fires and the pandemic felt like a biblical wave of catastrophe and made her realise that our certainties about our lives were a complete delusion. She had driven through the Monaro – where she had grown up – during pandemic. “Old stuff came up” and “brought unlike things together”, so she invented a nunnery on the Monaro.

On wrestling about faith, religion, church when writing these books

Emily had to buy wholeheartedly into Agnes’ world in which God is the answer to everything, the good and bad. She also plugged into her childhood when Jesus was her best friend. It was easy, but also complicated, to sink into that. She boiled her thinking down to one idea: What does personal faith have to do with organised religion? As Agnes gets entrenched into the life, she starts to question what are her wants versus God’s?

Charlotte doesn’t believe in God but also doesn’t sneer at people who do. She can’t make the step to believe, but dislikes the fundamentalist atheist’s view. Also, as a young person, she loved spectacle of the Catholic Church, the language, rhythm, poetry, metaphor, the imaginative world of Bible, the stories of saints (horror fiction, and crime, interjected Emily!)

On the suffering of women (physical, spiritual, emotional)

Charlotte referred to the church’s idea of the mortification of the flesh. In our you-can-have-everything world, she understands the appeal of asceticism as conveyed in Emily’s novel.

Emily spoke of the saints’ stories involving harm to women’s bodies. But women can also feel that the body is what they have control over, and can accept (or do) harm to it, because it’s the “last site of resistance”. Religion can see women’s bodies as bad, dirty but there are also ideas about cleansing. It’s not either-or.

On deep reading, the idea of “lectio divina” in both works

Charlotte described its use in her book – read, think, read the same again, think, then say what comes up – and Sister Bonaventure’s advice that if you don’t understand something hand it over to God. This idea of handing one’s confusion to God is both disturbing and a relief to her narrator.

Emily said there’s been a long tradition of this practice, which is not Bible study but repetitive reading and thinking. It surprises Agnes. Does this “copying”, as she sees it, this not questioning, mean anything? She is shut down when she tries to argue, but if God made her mind one that could argue isn’t that what she’s supposed to do? Yet, sometimes sitting with ideas offers clarity.

Charlotte suggested that this idea of obedience (versus wanting to argue) is a challenge for the ego in our egotistical world. Emily added that she loved the lectio divina section in Charlotte’s book. She had turned hardline atheist, after her deeply believing youth, but now she is more “I don’t know”.

On research

Charlotte talked about being asked to speak at a conference in Melbourne on “communicating monasticism” run by nuns and priests. She was very nervous, because she didn’t research nuns, didn’t even interview any. It’s all imagined. But the conference attendees were very warm because they saw that she was respectful about their chosen life. And, they asked incredible questions.

Kate commented on the freedom writers of fiction have in this regard, but said there was evidence of extraordinary research in Emily’s book, though it’s held lightly. Emily explained that to make Agnes’ world and choices real she needed to do the research, including very basic levels, such as what is a chair, were there roads, and bigger questions like why didn’t Agnes choose a convent and would she have done this. She talked about how the modesty in monasteries – versus in ordinary Middle Ages life – was a gift to her plot of a woman presenting herself as a man.

On plotting, whether it comes naturally or has to be worked at

For Charlotte the plot alleviates the boredom, provides a change in the rhythm. She wanted quietude, stillness, but also needed an energy spike. She told us about asking a still-life artist friend about how she gets her very still pictures to shimmer. The answer was that she breaks up surface, the texture of paint, making it a bit unstable, though the image remains static. Charlotte said using the diary form gave some narrative movement to her story, but then she included the mouse plague, and the return of the wild-child nun with the bones.

Emily used the journey taken Agnes by Brother Randolph, but also, the legend has built into it the risk of being uncovered. She has learnt that propulsion is in the craft – the language, the sentences. Every sentence must do something. Charlotte added that the voice is likewise critical. If the voice is strong, the reader will follow along. It’s propulsive. That’s the key.

On “devotion” being part of the artistic life

Emily said that you lean into your writing, you just do it (like religion), and constantly check whether you are getting the answer you expected. There is devotion to the art, a communion with the page.

Charlotte agreed saying most writers feel a sense of sacredness when doing their work. For her it’s a vocation, a calling, not a job. (It doesn’t pay like a job!) It taps into something bigger than the self, connects with something outside self. At times you can feel it’s coming through you. Not from God for her, but the unconscious, perhaps. She said that when you leave Catholicism there’s a big hole, a yearning. Writing, for her, fills that.

Q & A

On Rapture not looking down on women, while the character in Stone Yard devotional does: Emily described Agnes as a “pick-me” girl, an imposter. It’s a power move to keep women separate, but Agnes, who separates herself, also feels a loss. Charlotte agreed that her character is an outsider and “judgey”, feels separate. She has ego, but respects Sister Simone, who has rigour, versus the other women whom she sees as embarrassing little girls. Simone picks her as someone who finds obedience hard. Charlotte realises she often writes about women who have disagreements. She’s interested in power dynamics.

On whether Charlotte has a name for her character in her mind: No, partly because the character is partly Charlotte herself. She wanted to risk showing part of her real self (her feelings about her mother, her memories of the town). Also the form of book. Starting as a diary means she’s not going to name herself. Charlotte likes the interiority of that.

On Emily’s relationship with Agnes: yes, she misses her!

There was also a question to Charlotte from a Cooma person whose family had connections with Charlotte’s. They had all read the book, including the men, and found it real. She wanted to know how men had responded. Charlotte said there’d been intense responses, though fewer in number than she’d had for The weekend. People, both men and women, had particularly shared their feelings of grief.

Kate concluded by asking what Charlotte and Emily do when the touring is done, what they retreat to for contemplation: Emily said writing is meditation, it stills the internal chatter, and Charlotte agreed, saying “writing time is home”.

This was another engaging session, topped off by my having a great chat afterwards with Karen Viggers (my posts), who was also in the audience, about our favourite reads of the year.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
Get thee to the nunnery
The Arc Theatre, NFSA
Saturday 26 October 2024, 10-11am

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 2, History repeating

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Another preamble

What I didn’t say in my first post on this year’s festival is that the venue where I attended the sessions today is a favourite of mine – and not only because it’s where I spent most of my working career. This year, some strands of the festival are being held at the National Film and Sound Archive, which has two beautiful theatres – the big Arc theatre and the gorgeous, cosy Theatrette. I love the Theatrette, which was carefully refurbished around a decade ago to meet modern needs but retain its heritage art deco style and fittings.

History repeating

I chose this session because it featured two authors I have read, and was about historical fiction which – I’m going to say it – in its more literary form, interests me greatly. The session was described in the program as:

Catherine McKinnon has woven her new book around Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty – the ultimate nuclear family; Emily Maguire’s new novel is an audacious portrait of an audacious woman – a mystery from the Middle Ages. Rebecca Harkins-Cross joins these dauntless storytellers to discuss the narrative lure of historical legends, and what the past can tell us about our present.  

I have read Catherine McKinnon’s clever Storyland (my review) which took us from the early days of the Australian colony far into a dystopian future, and Emily Maguire’s not-quite crime fiction, An isolated incident (my review). (Interestingly, my 2022 post on an essay by Emily on Elizabeth Harrower’s short story, “The fun of the fair”, is among my most popular posts this year.)

Anyhow, Rebecca Harkins-Cross commenced by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we were meeting, then shared a quote from McKinnon’s book:

When Robert [Oppenheimer] works, there is seemingly no intrusion from the past into the present. But this, he knows, is illusory. The past shapes the present, creates the future. If thoughts are a trinity of past, present and future, losing the past means obscuring the future. (p 21)*

On its own, this idea is not especially new or dramatic, but it nicely framed the discussion we were about to have.

She then went on to briefly summarise Emily Maguire’s and Catherine McKinnon’s new books, Rapture and To sing of war. Rapture is set in the ninth century and tells the story of a young girl who, at the age of 18, to avoid the usual life for a woman as wife or nun, enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and secure a place at a monastery. This story was inspired by Pope Joan.

To sing of war, on the other hand, is a polyphonic story set in December 1944 – in New Guinea, with a young Australian nurse who meets her first love, Virgil Nicholson; in Los Alamos, with two young physicists Mim Carver and Fred Johnson who join Robert Oppenheimer and his team “to build a weapon that will stop all war”; and in Miyajima, with Hiroko Narushima who helps her husband’s grandmother run a ryokan.

These two novels are set far apart in place and time but they have, said Rebecca, some unexpected parallels – plucky women confronting a patriarchal society, an interest in the natural world and the sustenance it can offer, and the lives of ordinary people.

She then asked her first question which concerned the idea that with every novel writers often say they have to start anew. Is this how Emily and Catherine felt?

Emily said yes, because her previous novels are contemporary, so while she wanted to write this story it was a challenge. Her method was to stop thinking about it as historical fiction but to focus on the main character and her experience – because she is living in her “now” – and then sort out the necessary details.

Catherine also said yes, that with every new project you feel like a baby again. She looked to Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, not because it’s the same subject, but for how Barker made her era feel like now.

This led Rebecca to ask Emily whether any historical fiction writers were a guiding light for her? Hilary Mantel looms large, she said, and she loves her work, but she wanted to write something shorter, tighter, something pacy. She turned most to Angela Carter, not an historical fiction writer, for how she handles this and for the carnality of her language. She also looked to Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First, not for her language but for her pacing.

On why their topics

Rebecca, who mixed her questions up for the different authors, then asked Catherine why she’d chosen her particular period and those series of events. Catherine was interested in understanding our governments and the decisions they make. Also in what happens to the land we are on. In World War II, a global war, who were we trusting to make decisions? (This reminded me of Rodney Hall in the morning session and his point about what was being hatched that would affect us later.) She was also interested in who became leaders, in the decisions being made by young people, in the bomb and its impact on the land – and more. Her interest is cultural.

Turning then to Emily, Rebecca wanted to know why she’d chosen the story of the female pope which is now accepted as apocryphal. Emily had come across the story due to her interest in early Christianity, and how it had grown from a small desert cult to a big power. She was interested in this story which most people believed from 1200 to 1600 until the Reformation protestants started questioning Roman Catholicism and its promotion of this story.

But, continued Rebecca, why this particular story? It’s a trickster story, said Emily, and she’s interested in Christianity and the idea of belief vs faith. Her Agnes is a genuine believer. Emily is interested in people’s own beliefs regardless of what the institution is telling them, and in Agnes being in a position where she had to either deny her faith or her femaleness.

At this point Emily did a reading, from early on when Agnes recognises the “bloody service [aka breeding] required of girls”. (This reminded me of Jane Austen who, centuries later, shows, in her letters, acute awareness of what motherhood means for women, including death. She was not impressed or keen!) Emily talked about how she got into Agnes’ character, which included trying to read what she would have been reading – things like the lives of saints. Many of these were violent, including that of her namesake, St Agnes, whose body and purity were deemed more important than her life.

On research

Back to Catherine, Rebecca about her research. She did the common thing – too much! And started by including too much in her book. She went to New Guinea, and spoke to people whose families experienced the war, and researched the botany. She went to Japan – to Hiroshima and the Peace Park and Museum, and to Nagasaki. She read and spoke to people there. She went to America, where she followed the Oppenheimers’ life, and then specifically to Los Alamos and Alamogordo, looking at the desert landscape. She wanted to connect the horror of war with the beauty of the landscape.

She then did a reading, from the opening of the novel.

Rebecca asked Emily how she’d approached research as a novelist, that is, how she balanced doing enough research while leaving space for the imagination.

Emily’s challenge was needing to balance the myth and history surrounding her origin story – Pope Joan. She managed it by keeping tightly focused on the character, on what kind of person is she. She also kept in her head Elie Weisel’s comment that there’s a difference between a book that is 200 pages at the beginning and one that starts at 800 pages and ends up at 200. She started with a much longer draft, which had a lot of scaffolding which she gradually tore down as it was no longer needed. When the novel was well along, she gave it to her first reader, and asked whether there were bits that didn’t make sense because she’d taken too much out, and, conversely, if there was information still in that wasn’t needed.

On their writing choices

Asked about finding Agnes’ voice, Emily said she’d started first person, but it felt right when she turned to “deep third person”. She tried to keep the language to words with Germanic and Latin origins, and she was careful about concepts, metaphors, similes. Something can’t feel “electric”, or can’t “evolve”, for example, in the ninth century!

One choosing her polyphonic structure, Catherine said that the polyphonic or braided novel has been around for a long time. Look at Chaucer’s Canterbury tales. Certain stories call for it, like her interest in small lives in a global world. She wanted a young woman in Los Alamos. She wanted to retrieve New Guinean history because at the time the people were not named. And so on. Her challenge was to find a way to keep the reader interested while jumping from story to story.

And, on history

This led to a question about history and revisionism. What had been written out of the history books that they wanted to return? Emily wanted to show that women could be intellectual forces, be present, be visible, that, just like the present, different women could have different interests and ideas. She wanted to imagine these women into being. I appreciated this response because readers often see such individuals is anachronistic, but I’m with Emily. Intellectual women, feminist women, and so on, don’t pop out of thin air. They have just been hidden.

Similarly, Catherine wanted to bring woman to the fore as thinkers, as scientists, etc, not only as nurses. She wanted to tell of ordinary people, to share queer stories. In other words, she likes finding the hidden stories, and searching out what is kept secret (in societies, and personally). What are the inner emotions, drivers, experiences that frame actions?

Q & A

On Catherine’s inspirations for her characters: Mim was based on a few women who were chemists and mathematicians; Fred was based on a real person called Ted Hall, who worried about America having a monopoly on bomb after war.

On negotiating telling one’s story against big presences like Hilary Mantel’s grand, involving historical novels, and Prometheus Unbound (which was adapted into the film Oppenheimer):

  • Catherine didn’t know the film was coming out, but she did use American Prometheus in her research. However, you look for the story you want to tell now – at what is it about now that you want to speak to, at what is it about humans that is interesting to us now. American Prometheus , she felt, was about how people could be picked up and then dropped, but she is interested, for example, in how decisionmaking can be petty. Writers have control over what they see, over their version of it.
  • Emily said that “anxiety of influence” is part of being an author, but she has a set of touchstones – such as Angela Carter for this book – of things you admire but that aren’t doing what you are doing. Other Pope Joan stories, for example, have “truth” agendas, but that wasn’t her interest/angle.

I enjoy hearing historical fiction writers talking about what they do because it’s a challenging but, worthwhile, endeavour. This thoughtful session was capped off by my having a delightful private chat with author Robyn Cadwallader (my posts), who had also been in the audience, about some of her historical fiction writing experiences.

* Thanks to Robyn for providing this quote.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
History repeating
Friday 25 October 2024, 12:30-1:30pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 1, The most interesting man in OzLit

/ Whispering Gums / 8 Comments

A preamble

The Canberra Writers Festival is back in 2024, with last year’s wonderful Artistic Director, the writer and critic Beejay Silcox. The Festival’s theme continues to be “Power Politics Passion”, although that tagline is not quite so visible on the website. This is good – to my mind at least. Last year, under Beejay Silcox, there was a clear shift in programming away from the heavy political flavour we’d been experiencing to something more diverse and literary. That must have been successful, as this year’s programming has continued this trend, so it has lot to offer the likes of me! So much so that more difficult decisions than usual had to be made about what to attend. Wah! But, that’s better than struggling to find appealing sessions.

The most interesting man in OzLit

Before I tell you WHO this “most interesting man in OzLit” is, I must share that attending this session involved one of those difficult decisions, because overlapping this session was one titled “The power of quiet”. It featured Robbie Arnott and Charlotte Wood discussing “their favourite hushed and gentle books, and the art of less is more”. I am a big believer in “less is more” so would love to have attended this session, but “the most interesting man in OzLit” called, and I will be seeing Arnott and Wood in their own dedicated sessions elsewhere in the festival.

So, who is this “most interesting” man? Well, it’s Rodney Hall. The session was described as follows:

Rodney Hall has stories to tell: he walked across Europe, harboured Salman Rushdie during the fatwa years, and has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award – twice. At 89, Rodney has a new novel to share, Vortex, and it just might be his best. Join Rodney and his devoted publisher, Geordie Williamson, as they discuss his magnificent life on and off the page.

Rodney Hall, A stolen season

To my shame, I have only read three of Hall’s novels, Just relations, The day we had Hitler home, and, since blogging, A stolen season (my review), but – here comes the reader’s plaint – I have always intended to read more. He is one of those writers who, despite a significant body of work, seems to be under the radar, and I really wanted to hear him in person.

The conversation

There was something different about the audience for this session – at least in my experience of festival attendance. First, over 50% were male, and the median age seemed higher than usual too. This clearly says something about the subject of the session.

Geordie commenced by suggesting that with the small audience (though it was larger than the afternoon session I attended) this could be a bespoke session. And, I think this is how it turned out because it seemed to flow naturally in reaction to Hall’s “stories”. Geordie clearly had ideas about what they’d explore, but he handled it with lovely fluidity. Before introducing “the most interesting man”, Geordie apologised to Peter Goldsworthy, another “interesting man”, who was in the audience!

Geordie then did the usual author introduction, listing Hall’s output (which includes 14 novels, poetry, short fiction, two biographies, political polemics, plays, and librettos), his literary achievements (award wins and short listings), literary roles (including on the Australia Council) and political activism (in issues like the Republican movement and Indigenous Land Rights). Rodney – I have been using first names for author events for a while now so will continue – has been a very busy man.

I’m not going to do my more usual blow-by-blow account of this discussion because it seemed to revolve around a couple of main themes. In fact, I’m going to suggest that the way the session went might mirror somewhat Hall’s latest novel, Vortex, which he described as having the structure of a rondo, meaning it keeps returning to the same statement.

The point that kept recurring through the conversation was that Hall sees himself as a classicist. For him, this means that structure is fundamental to what he does, and this structure tends to be musically based. That is, he thinks in musical forms, and these provide the spine for his work. (Music, he said later, speaks to the divine, which doesn’t mean “God” so much as something more generally spiritual, inspirational.) Interestingly, and perhaps contradictorily – on the surface at least – he described himself as a “pantser” not a “planner”, though he didn’t use such informal terms. He spoke, for example, about his good friend Murray Bail who plans his work out meticulously, while Rodney described his writing projects as putting himself “in the way of a blundering machine”. He starts from some sort of interest and sees where it goes, which is sometimes nowhere.

It might be for this reason – for this “classicist”, structural, approach to his work – that Beejay Silcox recently told Rodney that he was “not political but ethical”.

And now, because I have departed from the structure of the conversation, I have to work out where to go next! But, let me see … Geordie started by trying obtain some sort of “origin myth” from Rodney, who had once told Geordie that his memoir was “rubbish”. But we didn’t get there in any straightforward way.

Responding to the idea of an “origin myth” and Geordie’s asking him to talk about his troublemaker mother and their experience of the blitz, Rodney shared a little of his background but then said that he is “deeply suspicious of the notion of stories” because they are “never true”. They leave out “the other bits”, the real or, I guess, true bits. 

He then talked a bit about his approach to writing. He doesn’t, for example, model his books on people he knows. This he feels is an intrusion on their privacy. Later, he talked about Vortex, which was inspired by some portraits he’d written of real people. They were in a book that was nearly published but he pulled it. Then, on reflection – I think I got this right – he felt he could pull out the “material” from these portraits, and us it in another work, without forensically analysing his friends.

Geordie reflected that what Rodney writes is the opposite of the current flavour of the month, autofiction, with which Rodney agreed. His classicism he said is out of step with his colleagues – whom he, nevertheless, likes and admires. They are interested in more personalised expression, because people “want the dirt of what you are yourself”. He, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to write what people want to read. Geordie commented on the sort of experimentation that Rodney likes to do, and asked whether he was conscious that people weren’t reading him!

It was probably around now that we got some of the aforementioned “origin story”. Rodney, who arrived in Australia (Brisbane) postwar, had to leave school at 16. So, unlike his peers, he never did “literary studies” but read what caught his attention. Caribbean literature, for example. He didn’t read Bleak house but did read Wilson Harris’ Palace of the peacock.

So, wondered Geordie, is autodidacticism the key to understanding him as a writer? And the conversation moved on to his formative influences, which included Caribbean literature; the 18th century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (and his book The New Science which teased out the differences between “myths” and “legends”); and Robert Graves. Each of these influences were formative in different ways, but Rodney spoke most about Graves, and a two-hour conversation he had had with him when he was a young man.

In fact, Robert Graves came up several times throughout the conversation, but I’ll try to bring it all together here. In 2011 (I think), Rodney lost his house in a fire – and with it went 30 to 40 unfinished novels, and his correspondence with people like Robert Graves and Judith Wright. (As a librarian-archivist I am aghast at what the literary community – let alone Rodney himself – lost through this.)

Geordie asked Rodney to name the book that was dearest to him, that he would save if he could save only one, and Rodney replied Just relations because in it he found what Robert Graves said was there to find. I take this to mean a sort of essence of things. (My words, not his.) He had a 2-hour meeting with Graves – after landing, uninvited, on his doorstep in Mallorca, and nearly being sent away by his wife. It sounds like Graves was generous with his advice. He talked to Rodney about writing being about “what don’t you know that you need to know”, about tapping into the “collective unconscious”, about finding the “inexplicable thing”. Graves recommended, when writing historical fiction, to write first (to find out what you need to know) and research later (to make sure people believe you). Graves, said Rodney, “was my university”.

There was much more to this session, more anecdotes – including a lovely one about labyrinths – but I’ll conclude with a few things about Vortex. It is set in 1954, the year of the Queen’s first visit, the Petrov scandal, Menzies (who had many years besides this one!) The underlying question for Rodney is that “we don’t know when the things that affect our lives are hatched”. You can call him a conspiracy theorist he said, because he believes there usually is one.

Geordie, who published the novel, believes Vortex is one of great contemporary Australian novels. It offers a long view. It is bookended by Royal Visits (being published just as we’ve just had another), and the nuclear issue is being raised again. Not much has changed, in other words – though maybe one thing has. In a discussion about students being radicalised in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Vietnam War, and whether the same was happening now with Gaza and the October 7 attack, Rodney wasn’t sure. He said, back then, we knew what was being done in our name, but the news is so poor now we cannot be so sure of what we know. He also commented on the fact that no-one asks “why” things happen. When young First Nations people create havoc in Darwin, for example, they are locked up. No-one asks why they are angry.

Geordie shared an anecdote about Rodney pitching Vortex to him as a set of individual chapters that could be infinitely shuffle-able! But Geordie, self-deprecatingly calling himself “an agent of the industrialisation of art” looked horrified, so Rodney changed it!

There was more, including a short Q&A but it essentially built on what we’d heard rather than introducing anything new so, this post being long enough as it is, I’ll leave it here. I am so glad to have seen Rodney Hall in person. He is indeed most interesting!

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
The most interesting man in OzLit
Friday 25 October 2024, 10:30-11:30am

Monday musings on Australian literature: Poetry Month 2024

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

National Poetry Month – in Australia – is now four years old, and once again it is spearheaded by Red Room Poetry, which is described by ArtsHub as “Australia’s leading organisation that commissions poets and produces live poetry events nationally”. ArtsHub adds that this Month is “a festival that celebrates emerging and established writers, as well as public figures with an unexpected passion for poetry”. I don’t know how successful it is at reaching its goal of increasing “access, awareness and visibility of poetry in all its forms and for all audiences” but something must be working. I was thrilled to not only hear the month mentioned on our national ABC radio station but to hear that the ABC would be featuring poems during the month.

Red Room is running similar events and activities to those they’ve run before – their 30in30 daily writing competition with prompts from Red Room commissioned poets, poetry ambassadors, online workshops, showcases, a community calendar, and more. And this year, “more” includes something new which is that they are closing out the month with “the UK’s biggest poetry and performance festival, Contains Strong Language” in Sydney from August 28-31. 

Poetry is beyond time. It’s a way of bringing together the countless generations of humanity. It’s a means of connecting past and present. It’s a way of imagining the future. ~ L-Fresh the Lion (via Red Room Poetry).

National Poetry Gala … and more

This year their National Poetry Month Gala, if I read the website correctly, will happen in Sydney on 29 August at the State Library of New South Wales. It will be hosted by Chika Ikogwe (an award-winning Nigerian born actor and writer) and will feature Julia Baird, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Lorna Munro, Felicity Plunkett, Hasib Hourani, Rob Waters, Dan Hogan and Pascalle Burton, plus guests from the UK, Simon Armitage (their current Poet Laureate) and Princess Arinola Adegbite, and live music from Paul Kelly.

Contains Strong Language is a four-day festival in which local poets and spoken word artists will appear on stage alongside visiting UK poets including Simon Armitage. It’s the first time this annual broadcast festival, founded by the BBC in 2017, has left Britain. Events will be held across Gadigal and Dharug land in Greater Sydney (including one in the Blue Mountains) and will also be broadcast to Australia and around the world, through the BBC and ABC. The events include “performances, masterclasses, panels, galas, slams, live and online workshops, and international writing collaborations featuring 70+ artists”. Sounds like a real coup. The program, which includes free and paid events, can be found here.

Line Break is a new podcast from Red Room Poetry, and is presented in partnership with the Community Radio Network. It will include, over August, their daily 30in30 poetry commissions and writing prompts, plus various special series hosted by our Red Room producers. Some of Australia’s poetry-loving favourite public figures will apparently also share their ‘gateway’ poems. Who are they, and what will they share?

If you would like to know what is happening through the month – in various locations, including online – this Showcase page is a good place to start (or Red Room’s main site which I’ve linked in the opening paragraph).

And, I’ll just add that this might be a good month to check out – on your preferred music streaming service – the Hell Herons’ debut spoken word (poetry and music) album, The Wreck Event, about which I posted recently.

Musica Viva, the Choir of Kings College Cambridge, and a Poem

On Saturday night, we attended the Canberra Concert of the Kings College Choir of Cambridge’s current Musica Viva Australian tour. As regularly happens when this choir comes to Canberra, Llewellyn Hall was packed. It was a wonderful program which included some different programming decisions, but my focus here is the commissioned piece they performed*.

This piece was a setting to music of a prose-poem by, coincidentally, the Canberra-based poet and visual artist, Judith Nangala Crispin, who traces her ancestry to the Bpangerang people of North-Eastern Victoria and the NSW Riverina, as well as to Ghana, the Ivory Coast, France, Ireland and Scotland. Titled On finding Charlotte in the anthropological record, the poem won the Blake Poetry Prize in 2020 – read it online here – and was set to music by composer Daniel Barbeler. He says, in the program, that the poem captures “the real-life experiences and reflections” which came from Crispin’s “20-year search through paper records and via physical travels” to find information about her Indigenous Australian heritage. She eventually found “a solitary photograph of her great-great-grandmother, Charlotte”.

Among other things, Barbeler says his music captures the Australian landscape, specifically Lake Moodemere (pictured) in Northern Victoria where it’s likely Charlotte was born and died. Barbeler describes this part of the country as “peaceful but haunting” and, having visited this lake a few times (including earlier this year), I concur. The poem is certainly haunting, and one particular line from it – “Charlotte is a map of a Country stained by massacres: Skull Creek, Poison Well, Black Gin’s Leap” – is repeated a few times in the musical version. I wondered what these (some very) young British choristers made of it. (You can listen to the piece via music streaming services, as a single under the Choir of Kings College Cambridge.)

* A special thing about Musica Viva concerts is that they regularly commission new Australian pieces for the visiting international artists to perform in their program.

Image: I assume Red Room Poetry is happy for their Poetry Month banner to be used in articles and posts about the month.

Thinking about the Line Break program, I’d love to know if you have a “gateway” poem, and what it is.

Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham in conversation with Julieanne Lamond

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

This week’s Meet-the-Author conversation with Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham about their book Hazzard and Harrower: The letters was high priority for me – not only because Hazzard and Harrower are wonderful writers, but because Olubas and Wyndham are themselves significant players in Australia’s literary community.

For those who don’t know them, Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) and Elizabeth Harrower (1928-2020) were both Australian-born writers, but Hazzard spent most of her life overseas, primarily in New York and Capri. She wrote four novels, of which I’ve read her last two (before blogging), The transit of Venus and The great fire (which won the Miles Franklin Award in 2004). Elizabeth Harrower’s trajectory was more complicated. Aside from living in London from 1951 to 1959, she lived most of her life in Sydney. She published four novels between 1957 and 1966 (of which I’ve read two), withdrew her fifth from publication in 1971, and then pretty much disappeared from view until Text Publishing reprinted her works in the 2010s. Text also convinced her to let them publish that withdrawn novel (In certain circles), and they published a collection of her short stories. I’ve read both of these. (My Elizabeth Harrower posts.)

Brigitta Olubas, an academic and Hazzard’s official biographer, instigated the project to edit the letters, and asked journalist and literary editor Susan Wyndham to collaborate with her. Wyndham had, during her career, interviewed both Hazzard and Harrower. For the project, Olubas focused on Hazzard’s letters and Wyndham Harrower’s. It was a big task that included negotiating how to reduce 400,000 words of letters to the final 120,000. During the conversation, Olubas joked that, at one stage, Harrower had five letters in a row, providing some insight into the challenge it had been to choose letters that would make a coherent whole. Julieanne Lamond, who conducted the conversation, is a literary critic and academic in Australian literature at the Australian National University.

The letters begin in 1966 and continue for four decades, though the two writers didn’t meet physically until 1972, and after that only a few more times.

The conversation

From left: Brigitta Olubas, Susan Wyndham, Julieanne Lamond

MC Colin Steele did the usual acknowledgement of country and introductions, before passing the session over to Julieanne, who started by asking Susan and Brigitta to describe the relationship between the two writers. I am going to use first names from hereon. Last names sound just too formal for warm-hearted events like these.

On their relationship: Susan explained that the two writers were introduced to each other by Shirley’s Sydney-based mother Kit, and that their friendship was formed on the page. Although Elizabeth’s friendship with Kit was kind and caring, family problems and Kit’s mental fragility meant that Elizabeth was thrust into an intimacy she wasn’t necessarily expecting. However, although Kit and her needs occupied part of their correspondence, the two women also wrote about their own lives, what they read, the political landscape, and challenges they confronted in writing (including writer’s block). Their correspondence, suggested Brigitta, may have been more important to Shirley, who said that Elizabeth reflected “something eternal in my consciousness”. She also mentioned the brief falling out they had after Elizabeth visited Shirley and her husband in Italy.

For her part, Elizabeth would tell her friends that she didn’t have much time for Shirley Hazzard, and yet her final letters to Shirley express a keen desire (or concern) to hear from her. Susan suggested that Elizabeth’s attitude could be related to the fact that as Shirley became famous, she became grand in her manner, which Elizabeth didn’t like.

Later, Julieanne asked why would someone, like Elizabeth, take on responsibility for someone else’s mother. Susan explained that Elizabeth liked Kit; they had fun together. Also, her own mother had died (aged only 61) soon after Elizabeth had become friendly with Kit. Elizabeth felt some guilt about her own mother, so was perhaps making up for that. Caring for Kit also enabled her to procrastinate her writing! Julieanne suggested the situation created a complicated sibling-like relationship between Shirley and Elizabeth. Brigitta agreed, adding that Shirley had a sister living in Sydney with whom she had a poor relationship, and would call on Elizabeth to do things that one would normally ask of a sister.

On their careers: Elizabeth had a more difficult career. She wrote a lot in London but it became more difficult after she returned to Australia (due to her own mother’s health). Elizabeth moved in Sydney’s literary circles, including Patrick White, Kylie Tennant and Christina Stead. She had good reviews, but didn’t make a lot of money from her novels. The watchtower – described as a “great act of compression and atmosphere” – was particularly well reviewed.

Shirley also had a late career with big gaps, but is now being rediscovered by younger writers. Both, Brigitta said, were writing “outside their time”, making them difficult to market. They wrote what they wanted to write, what they were good at.

Patrick White, who admired Elizabeth’s writing and kept urging her to write, apparently said that “she’s living a novel rather than writing one”! She was a diligent writer early on but needed a day job to pay her way. She was working at Macmillan publishing while writing her fourth novel, The watchtower (1966). She obtained a grant for her next novel, but that was the one she withdrew. Did she write better when she was pressured for time, as she had been with The watchtower?

By contrast, Shirley was lucky, as she was published by The New Yorker, which provided an income you could live on. She also had a much older, well-off husband, Francis Steegmuller. They worked as jobbing writers, honing their craft. Life wasn’t easy though. She was receiving “monstrous letters” from mother, and her husband started developing dementia.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth had her own challenges. Her mother died in 1970 but, besides Shirley’s mother Kit, she took on helping others, like Kylie Tenant. She got “sucked” into Kylie’s complicated life. She was sympathetic to others. She had a “laser vision into other people’s psyches” which was good for her writing, but it impacted her life.

Both writers, too, were sociable, and claimed they had no time to work. All this affected their careers.

On their correspondence: Both writers put a lot of effort into crafting their letters, which shows in the way their letters reveal their insight into character, dark humour, sense of place, and moral compass.

Brigitta answered in the affirmative Julieanne’s question about whether the two were thinking about posterity as they wrote their letters. Infuriatingly, Shirley didn’t keep her manuscripts – she seemed invested in herself as a “perfect first-time writer” – but she kept her letters and diaries. Elizabeth, on the other hand, threw out many letters, including those she wrote to her mother, but she did keep an “organised set of letters”. Susan believes she wanted posterity to find her. This may be why she was discreet in her letters, often not naming people she wrote about. Susan did some sleuthing to unearth some of this information.

Brigitta added that they had no false modesty. They were aware of their value as writers.

On their political views. Both Shirley and Elizabeth had strong political commitments. Shirley worked for the UN for 10 years. She was bound up in the moral seriousness of the project, and likened her own views to those of Milton – his liberal attitudes, and his commitment to becoming involved in political ideas. Later, Shirley became obsessed with Watergate. In 1977, her article “Letter from Australia” (paywalled) was published in The New Yorker. I think it’s here that Shirley writes about Nixon and Republicans, saying something like “each one in his awfulness makes the next one possible”. Hmmm…

As for Elizabeth, she grew up in Newcastle, through wartime. She saw poverty, and she witnessed the Aldermaston anti-nuclear protests in England. She was galvanised by Whitlam and his reform project. She was staying with Christina Stead at University House in Canberra when the Dismissal occurred, and was at Parliament House when Whitlam appeared on the steps. Susan read from Elizabeth’s letter to Shirley on 17 November 1975, but I’ll excerpt her excerpt. Elizabeth describes Stead answering the phone and being told that Malcolm Fraser was now Prime Minister, then writes:

… Horror. Horror and stupefaction. People very nearly fell down in the street with amazement and dismay. Manning Clark (our most splendid historian) said he was literally sick … Everyone was outraged. Our votes meant nothing. Moderate reform is not allowed to take place here. The new leaders came out on the balcony and laughed like Nazis …

We weren’t surprised when Susan said that later, Paul Keating became her new hero.

Despite this, Elizabeth wrote that she wished she hadn’t become so involved in politics.

Q & A

There was a brief Q&A. By this time I was struggling to keep up with my notes, but here are some of the points discussed:

  • Brigitta and Susan talked about their own, relatively new, literary friendship which has been forged through this project.
  • Regarding gaps in the letters – and things not discussed – they don’t know why. Were they discussed when they met, or over the phone, or?
  • Regarding the brief falling out between Shirley and Elizabeth, this happened in 1984 during a visit Elizabeth made to Capri. She hadn’t wanted to go but had relented after much urging from Shirley. Elizabeth didn’t behave well. Brigitta and Susan speculated on why. Perhaps she didn’t want to let Shirley feel grand (as she was inclined to do), or perhaps, being worried about spending money, Elizabeth didn’t want to feel obliged. An audience member wondered whether the awkwardness came from theirs being primarily an epistolary friendship. Perhaps, was the answer. Speech seemed to be a second language for Shirley. She could be more truthful in writing. She was also, they commented wryly, better at monologues than conversation. Writing gave them both time to consider their thoughts. (I relate to that!)
  • There was also discussion of the history being lost because people aren’t writing letters like this any more. Julieanne commented on the value of letters like these in which time and care have been taken to express thoughts. There is a sort of romance, too, it was suggested, in the time and distance correspondence like this involves.

Brigitta shared some words from a short letter Elizabeth wrote to Shirley on 13 June 2005 concerning a visit Shirley was making to Australia:

You say you hope to be recognizable, and I look much more worn than I feel, but we’ll know each other.

“But we’ll know each other”. Lovely – and what fascinating women.

Vote of thanks

Beejay Silcox, literary critic and Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival, gave the vote of thanks. As eloquent as ever, she was enthusiastic in her acknowledgement of what Brigitta and Susan have achieved and of the conversation we had just experienced. I think I got the gist of her remarks. Describing herself as “a pathological shredder of the past”, she admired these “life-ravenous”, ferocious, flawed and gorgeous women whom we discover through their letters. She described the book as protecting the comradeship of writing, and as a “great and mighty gift” to readers. Our culture tends to praise newness, she said, and bright, shiny things are lovely, but they are not the whole story. Yes! (This is why my reading group aims to include at least one classic/significantly older book in our reading schedule each year. Not only do “good” older works make great reading but they add perspective and depth to all our reading.)

Another very enjoyable, and well-organised, meet-the-author event.

ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author
MC: Colin Steele
Harry Hartog Bookshop, Australian National University
16 July 2024

ACT Literary Awards 2024

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

On Thursday evening, I attended the presentation of the ACT Literary Awards (which I also attended last year when they were called the ACT Notable Book Awards). These awards are made by Marion (the ACT Writers Centre), and this year’s event was MC’d by the CEO Katy Mutton (left) and Board Chair, Emma Batchelor. As last year, the event had a lovely relaxed informality, while still paying real respect to the authors and their works.

The evening opened with a moving (and informative) “rite of passage” offered by local Ngunawal elder, Wally Bell. He explained that granting attendees a “rite of passage” is the correct process – is the one enacted by First Nations Australians across the country when they visit each other’s countries – not the “welcome to country” that we commonly experience at events. We keep learning new things, I’m finding, as different elders talk to us, and it makes these rites or ceremonies increasingly meaningful to us non-Indigenous Australians.

The awards were held, as last year, in the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, which occupies a beautiful building on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin. As our MCs said, when thanking CCAS for its ongoing sponsorship, it is an appropriate venue because there are links between all artists, including the fact that many have interdisciplinary practices. (Other sponsors included Big River Distilling which provided gin for the evening.)

But now, the awards…

Marion notes on the awards webpage, that across all categories they ask judges to consider which entries “stand out in their brilliance” and demonstrate the following:

  • Literary excellence
  • Powerful narrative structure
  • Considered and impactful use of language

They also note that in Children’s literature they received a particularly broad field of entries from picture books through to YA Fiction, so would be awarding winners in both the younger and older reader sections.

It’s worth noting too that Marion accepts self-published entries, in recognition of the fact that this how many writers get started. This year two books were named self-published winners in their categories, and three were highly commended in theirs.

The judges were historian Professor Frank Bongiorno, First Nations author and academic Dr Paul Collis, writer Dan Hogan, children’s writer Krys Saclier, and literary critic/writer/Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival Beejay Silcox.

For full information on the awards, including all the highly commendeds, and judges’ comments, check out Marion’s website.

As I didn’t share the shortlists for these awards, I am listing them, and highlighting the winners in bold.

Poetry

  • Elanna Herbert, Sifting fire writing coast (Walleah Press)
  • Paul Hetherington, Sleeplessness (Pierian Springs Press)
  • Tim Metcalf, The moon the bone: Selected Poems 1986-2022 (Ginninderra Press)
  • KA Nelson, Meaty bones (Recent Work Press)
  • Sandra Renew, Apostles of anarchy (Recent Work Press)

Nonfiction

  • Kristen Alexander, Kriegies: The Australian airmen of Stalag Luft III
  • Ryan Cropp, Donald Horne: A life in the Lucky Country (Black Inc.)
  • Kate Fullagar, Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled (Scribner)
  • Kellie Nissen, What cancer said and what I said back
  • Fred Smith, The sparrows of Kabul (Puncher & Wattmann)
  • Angus Trumble, Helena Rubinstein: The Australian years (Black Inc.)

Kristen Alexander won the self-published award for Kriegies. As with many of the categories, there were highly commended awards. One in this category was the late Angus Trumble’s book on Helen Rubenstein. Trumble’s brother, Hamish, accepted the award, and spoke entertainingly about his brother’s obsession with sussing out Helena Rubenstein’s early years in Australia and argued, pointedly, that it was appropriate for this book to be recognised in Canberra, “the city of facts”! He didn’t need to tell us that facts are important.

Children’s

This was a bit confusing, because there were two Children’s shortlists but three winners, so I am listing the two shortlists and noting what each winner was for. Canberra is rich in children’s writers, and there were, Katy Mutton said, a large number of entries in this category.

Shortlist 1:

  • David Conley, That book about space stuff (Children’s self-published)
  • Tania McCartney, Wildlife compendium of the World (Hardie Grant) (Children’s nonfiction)
  • Kathy Weeden, Kim Drane, Phonobet (National Library of Australia)
  • Rhian Willams, Martina Heiduczek, Surprise at the end of Onkaparinga Lane (Walker Books Australia)
  • Barbie Robinson, Ian Robertson, Phoenix and Ralph

Shortlist 2:

  • Jackie French, Danny Snell, The turtle and the flood (HarperCollins Australia) (Children’s picture book)
  • Gary Lonesborough, We didn’t think it through (Allen & Unwin) (Children’s older readers)
  • Amelia McInerney, Lucinda Gifford, Neil the amazing sea cucumber (Affirm Press)
  • Emma Janssen, Strong little platypus

Fiction

  • J. Ashley Smith, The measure of sorrow: Stories (Meerkat Press)
  • Elisa Cristallo, The last famine
  • Emma Grey, The last love note (Penguin Books Australia)
  • Ayesha Inoon, Untethered (HarperCollins Australia)
  • Kylie Needham, Girl in a pink dress (Penguin Books Australia)

The Marion Halligan Award

The Marion Halligan Award honours the life and work of Marion Halligan, who died earlier this year (see my post), and who, Marion’s website says, “captivated readers with her elegant prose and insightful storytelling. She was an enduring force of creativity, intellect, wit, and wisdom”. The aim of this award is to recognise “works that demonstrate uniqueness, literary excellence, and/or surpass genre boundaries”.

The award was introduced by Alex Sloan (who has appeared several times here). She spoke about our much beloved Marion, and then announced the inaugural winner: Paul Hetherington for his poetry book Sleeplessness.

Other awards

Three other awards were made:

  • The Anne Edgeworth Emerging Writers Award, now in its 11th year, is made to an emerging writer and this year’s was shared between two writers – Jemima Parker and Gill Watson. It is worth up to $5,000 and is used “to advance the recipients’ development in the craft of writing”. The Fellowship is provided annually by the Anne Edgeworth Trust and administered by MARION.
  • The June Shenfield National Poetry Award for an individual poem was won by Cate Furey for Momentum
  • The MARION Fellowship to (TBA as I don’t see it on the website and I didn’t record the name)

Canberra (the ACT) is a small jurisdiction, but, as I wrote last year, it has an active, engaged and warm literary community that was once again well in evidence despite the rather chilly evening outside. After all, it is always wonderful to see writers being rewarded/recognised for their hard work – and, yes, writers, and their readers, do also like, sometimes, to party.

Author Talk: the Craft of Crime, Sulari Gentill & Chris Hammer with Anna Steele

/ Whispering Gums / 26 Comments

This author talk was not one of my usual series – that is, not ANU/Canberra Times Meet the Author or Muse Canberra‘s conversations. Instead, it was presented by the Friends of the National Library of Australia, of which I am a member. Despite the cold, drizzly night, it was a full house, which is not surprising given the topic was crime fiction and the participants two local-ish, successful crime writers.

The event was MC’d by Nancy Clarke, from the Friends committee. After acknowledging country, she introduced the subject of the evening, and pointed us to a recent post on the NLA Blog on Australian crime fiction. She then introduced our authors and moderator:

  • Sulari Gentill: author of 15 novels, including 10 in her Rowland Sinclair series, since 2010, and winner of Ned Kelly and Davitt Awards.
  • Chris Hammer: author of two non-fiction works, and, since 2018, of 6 crime novels. And, winner of several awards.
  • Anna Steele: reviewer of crime and other fiction for local newspapers, including, currently, the City News. Before retirement she was Head of English at Canberra Grammar School. (She is also a friend of mine, through our local Jane Austen group).

The conversation

After also acknowledging country, Anna explained that the focus of the evening was the craft of crime writing, and suggested they start with how and why they became successful crime writers.

Sulari Gentill, A fete right thinking men

The ever-entertaining Sulari – I’ve heard her before – explained that she had been a lawyer, but also loved hobbies. After trying many, including welding, she thought she’d try writing. Very quickly, it “felt just right”, and she knew she wouldn’t stop. She lost interest in law. Her first foray was writing mythic fiction.

That was the how, more or less. As to why crime, she said that her main reader, her English history teacher husband, found mythic fiction a challenge. He suggested she write “something with names you can pronounce”, and that including a murder might be good. Now, writers, she said, are obsessed, and often “absent”, so living with them can be hard. Given she didn’t want to give up writing or her husband – see what I mean about ever-entertaining – she had to make these two worlds work. So, she looked at her husband’s history thesis on 1930s Sydney and found her subject.

Chris started by quoting Balzac’s “behind every great fortune is a great crime”*. He jokingly said that turning to crime writing was easy because he got sacked! Actually, though, the trajectory was a little more complicated, but the gist is that after writing two low-selling non-fiction works around 2010, he returned to his journalism career. But, he missed writing, so decided to “have a crack at making things up”. He wrote Scrublands (2018) and got a publishing deal after an exciting auction process. His timing was perfect, as he wrote it just after Jane Harper’s huge success with The dry.

As to why crime for him, it was because he didn’t feel he was a good enough writer for literary fiction (his main reading go-to) and he didn’t have an idea. Also, he added – only partly joking – having been a journalist he really “wanted to kill someone”! He liked American hard-boiled writers like Dashiell Hammet, the Australian Shane Maloney, and, in particular, Peter Temple, who had shown the way in terms of combining plot, character, human drama, action.

Anna then asked, Where did their great characters come from?

Chris replied that Martin Scarsden was not based on himself. But, not knowing anything about police work and detectives, and given journalists are experienced investigators who poke their noses into things, he decided to make his protagonist a journalist. Martin, then, is based on his knowledge and experience, but not on his character. However, through his career as a journalist he had met many career war correspondents who were messed up. Scrublands is a redemption story for Martin.

Sulari talked about the challenge of deciding on her character. 1930s Sydney was highly class-based. She needed a character who came from a comfortable background, but who could walk easily among all classes. Then she had an epiphany, he could be an artist, as artists tend to accepted across the social spectrum. Also, she paints, and although she is not a painter, she understands how a painter looks at the world. Authors don’t need to be the same as their protagonist but it is useful to have some link with the character (like Hammer and his journalist.) She talked about some of the other ongoing characters, and why she created them. For example, she didn’t want to write sex scenes, but Martin needed romance, so she created an unrequited love for him.

Are they plotters or pantsers? (Some audience members didn’t know these terms, so for those here who don’t, plotters plan their plots out in advance – albeit to different degrees – while pantsers write “by the seat of their pants”.)

Both laid claim to being pantsers, though there was a little repartee about this at one stage with Sulari suggesting that someone who writes multiple drafts, as Chris does, can’t be a pantser. Chris retorted that if you only write one draft, as Sulari does, you must be a plotter! As Chris said later, if you get 12 writers together in a room together you’ll have 14 different ways of doing things!

Anyhow, back to the question. Notwithstanding Chris’ dig (and I’ll add here that these two get on very well), Sulari claimed to be an “extreme pantser”. She does no plotting at all; she has no idea who is going to die, let alone who did it. She writes while in bed, watching television shows like Midsomer murders, Lewis, etc. She believes, as author Kylie Ladd suggested, that this distraction enables her prefrontal cortex (our creative centre) to come up with the words. She’s not sure if this really is how it works, but she’s been writing this way for so long she doesn’t want to “poke around” in case it breaks the magic! So, things pop into her mind as she’s writing, and they will “suddenly” drive the narrative. Her novels are conversations with the reader about things she’s thinking about.

Chris is also a pantser, though not quite so extreme. For him setting is the critical thing – it’s how you cast a spell and invite the reader in. He might have a murder in mind, and a framing idea, but he won’t know who did what. He couldn’t be a plotter, because he would find it boring to know all in advance, and just have to “get on with it”. That Hollywood image of a book appearing to authors fully formed rarely happens.

Why leave behind successful characters? (As Sulari did with her metafictional Crossing the lines, and Chris in his shift to a police procedural series.)

Sulari said that her first book had been seen as literary fiction, but from then on they were slotted as genre. This separation of “serious” and “elite” from “just enjoyable” irritated her, so she wanted to try literacy fiction; she wanted to write a novel that explained how characters take on agency, and that explored the line between imagination and reality. Ironically, the book ended up including a crime! She sees this book, Crossing the lines, as her truly “novel” book, because there’s not other like it. She needed to do something different.

Chris was aware that booksellers need to know where to shelve your books. A police procedural is easy in that regard. Hence, Treasure and dirt, which was intended as a stand-alone, but has ended up not being so! Also, by end of third Martin Scarsden book, he could think up more crime but didn’t want just “mechanistic investigators”. He likes them to have “skin in the game”. Martin does appear in this new series, and he will probably return to Martin and Mandy in the future.

Then, Anna just had to ask him about his amusing character names. He said he got bored with plain names; he likes Dickensian names; and his editors didn’t complain! One reader has told him that his distinctive names help her keep track of who’s who in his complex plots.

Q & A

On how their “first readers” and drafting process works: Sulari’s husband – her first reader – sometimes sees a chapter at a time, sometimes sees the whole in a “last minute flurry”. He helps with plausibility. As a historian he can advise on the right tone in the language for her period, but as a grammarian and English teacher he will fuss over grammar and want to add adjectives! For Chris, journalist friends read his first book, but now, with the best editors in Australia, they are his first readers.

On their writing schedule/fitting writing into life: Sulari would rather write than do anything else so it’s easy. She does other things first, then settles down to her writing. She writes 1000 words a day, which results in a novel in 3 months. (Writing is like a relationship: you are passionate at the start; then it’s like a long-term marriage and you have to work. By the end you hate the “damn thing”, but when you come back to it you love it again.) Chris is at the stage where he has no kids, and no other job, so he has time. He is addicted to writing, and writes anywhere, including trains and noisy cafes. In the first part of the year he runs out of steam by lunchtime, but as year wears on, the book captures him and he thinks about it all the time.

On getting started, and what they wish they’d known: Chris said the best thing is to enter unpublished manuscript competitions, many of which are for debut authors. Also, try to find an agent, particularly for fiction. Read the acknowledgements at the end of books to get useful names of publishers, agents, editors. And get used to being rejected! Sulari said that it can be hard to get an agent, and they don’t guarantee getting published, but they can mitigate your gratitude to publishers when it comes time to sign the contract!

Conclusion

This was an excellent conversation because Anna used just a few well-targeted questions which kept it closely to the brief, the craft of crime writing.

Anna concluded by quoting Canberra thriller writer, Kaaron Warren, who recently said at the Bristol CrimeFest:

“I have a theory that people who deal with murder and death are always jolly in person … I mean have you ever met a miserable butcher?”

We all laughed and went off into the cold Canberra night feeling well-pleased with the effort we’d made to come out. Big thanks to the Friends, Anna, and our two writers, Sulari and Chris.

* The actual quote is, apparently, “Behind every great fortune is a crime”.

Author Talk: the Craft of Crime, Sulari Gentill & Chris Hammer with Anna Steele (Friends Event)
MC: Nancy Clarke (Committee of the Friends of the National Library of Australia)
National Library of Australia
Wednesday 5 June 2024

Shankari Chandran in conversation with Karen Viggers

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

Shankari Chandran’s conversation with Karen Viggers is the second Meet the Author event I’ve managed to attend this year, and it reminded me how much I wish I could get to more of these sessions. This one featured Shankari Chandran, author of the Miles Franklin winning novel, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (my review), in conversation with Karen Viggers, who was on the other side of the table at the last session I attended. Karen has appeared several times on my blog, most recently for her novel Sidelines. And Shankari was appearing at this session for her latest novel, Safe haven.

This was a wonderful session, which featured intelligent questions and thoughtful answers from two writers who care deeply about justice and how we find and express our humanity. Their backgrounds might be different, but their hearts not so.

The conversation

MC Colin Steele opened proceedings by acknowledging country and introducing the speakers. He then introduced the conversation, describing Safe haven as appearing to be about displacement and seeking refuge, but in the end, he said, it’s about finding home.

Karen started by congratulating Shankari on winning the Miles Franklin award last year. She wanted to know how Shankari felt the moment she heard she’d won, and its impact on her life and career. Shankari told a funny story about not answering the phone at first – because it came from an unknown number – and then not believing it when she finally answered and got the news! However, of course she was thrilled, and it has been extraordinary for her career. It has affected sales, and it created a spotlight on all her works, not just the winning book, and on her ongoing themes of injustice and dispossession. She also hopes that her win has helped and encouraged other writers of colour.

Shankari also made the point that it was great to win such a prize for a diasporic migrant story, one that is not only set partly elsewhere, but that interrogates who gets to define identity to the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others.

Sticking with the getting-to-know-you theme a little longer, Karen wanted to know how Shankari manages her busy life with four children, a law career, and writing. “Very badly” was the response, accompanied by some self-deprecating humour, followed by a recognition that she has a great team in all aspects of her life.

Karen then moved onto Safe haven, using descriptors like “moving”, “confronting”, “shines a shaming light” on detention, and creating “humans we come to care about”, and noting that the book contributes to an ongoing discussion about racism and exclusion in this country. Shankari talked about the approach she’d chosen, which was to write a romance and murder-mystery set in an off-shore detention centre. Her two main characters are the nun, Sister Fina, who seeks asylum, and special investigator Lucky, sent to investigate the death of a detention guard. Was it suicide, or was it not? Shankari described her book as being about the lengths people will go to to find safety and home.

Wanting to explore the romance-and-mystery approach a bit more, Karen commented that it was a surprising decision. And here a major theme of the discussion came to the fore, Shankari’s belief in storytelling. She wanted to elevate the lived experience of marginalised people, and likes to use fiction/storytelling to take readers into a place of discomfort but one where they can feel safe to reflect and think about the ideas. She wanted a storytelling mode that is compelling, entertaining, interesting. John Le Carre used the literary thriller model to explore macro themes of injustice, so she “wanted to give it a go”.

This led to continued discussion about using fiction to draw people and explore themes, and to the specific question of what Shankari wanted readers to take away from the book. She wants people to not forget the detention centres and what is happening to people in them. Politicians – and the media – too easily appeal to our baser instincts and encourage moral panic. But, she says, there are Australians who see the situation differently – like the people of Biloela for example, people who understand why others get on a boat, risking everything, to seek safety in another country. She wanted to elevate that aspect of what it means to be Australian. (Shankari used the word “elevate” several time during the conversation, and I like it. It’s powerful, and conveys something active and positive, active.)

Shankari talked about her two main characters, and what inspired them. Sister Fina stemmed from her admiration of people whose faith calls them to the sort of bravery seen in religious people during the terrible last days of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Special Investigator Lucky, on the other hand, was fun to write, because she could have Lucky do the sorts of investigation she’d like to do. Of the friendship that develops between these two, Shankari wanted characters who help each other, not one being saviour and the other the saved.

The conversation then moved onto the book’s tougher sections, and how Shankari researched and handled writing them – the scenes at the detention centre, for example. Here, we got a clear sense of Shankari’s ethical and compassionate approach to her work. She set herself some parameters. For example, she would not try to go to a Detention Centre, because she dislikes the voyeurism involved. For this same reason, she did not want to speak to the Biloela family whose story had provided inspiration for the book. At the time of writing they were still in a difficult place. It was not her place to draw fiction from their specific experience. So, she used research undertaken by civil organisations and activists; she read memoirs; and she used her experience of working in justice. If she had a superpower, she said, it would be that through her life people have given her their stories. These recorded truths, she’s been privileged to hear.

But, obtaining these stories, including those she needed for the brutal Civil War flashbacks, requires sensitivity. Interviewing people about their trauma can re-trigger that trauma. When people do want to tell her their story, she is careful about process because they don’t aways know how telling the story will affect them. She is careful, also, to ask whether they want their “lived experience to be conveyed in fiction”. Most respond that there are few safe places in our culture for the truth except in fiction! That feels like an awful indictment on our nation, but a powerful argument for the role of fiction/storytelling in our lives.

Indeed, a strong message I took away from the conversation was absolute belief in fiction being a way to tell important truths, but awareness that those whose truths are being told may not like them fictionalised.

The novel is not all grim, however. Karen turned to the scenes in Hastings (which were inspired by Biloela). What did Shankari want people to glean from them? That strangers can become family, she said, and that we should celebrate that capacity in us. Rural communities are often remote. They only have each other, and can develop an incredible ethos. Hastings offers a moral counterpoint to the other parts of the novel, but also offers readers a place of fun and joy.

Karen raised Australia’s policy regarding asylum seekers, and our use of privatised services to manage detention centres, particularly given these companies can employ people who “have done terrible things”. And why do we not have compassion for asylum seekers? The government’s arms-length management of asylum seekers, said Shankari, erodes accountability and transparency. Her novel asks the questions. It doesn’t provide answers.

As for our lack of compassion, Shankari said she struggled to understand the high level of xenophobia she found in Australia regarding migrants. She was horrified when she returned to Australia with her children – telling them it was “home” – only to find strong racial profiling of “friend” and “foe”. It’s disturbingly easy for politicians and media to trigger xenophobia – and not just in Australia. But she believes we are capable of integrity and intellectualism. This experience, and talking with Aboriginal activists, led her to think about the creation of nation, about the mythology of a nation’s founding and how we construct identity from this, one that involves the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others. She saw a link here with Sri Lanka’s founding mythologies. Does our concept of being Australian really need us to create “other” to maintain it?

Shankari believes that we have a choice in how we want to be – to face the future with fear, or with compassion!

Finally, Karen asked Shankari about how, with such a serious subject, she manages to achieve her light touch. It’s not conscious, but she’s a funny person, said Shankari – and life is tragic and funny. There’s irony too, including in the title. As to whether humour helps keep her sane, Shankari said that a lot of her work deals with trauma. She relies on humour to enable her to keep writing and her readers to keep reading. Writing trauma is traumatic, but she’s writing about the experience of people who have suffered but have survived, who are resilient. Their lives need to be elevated and remembered.

Q & A

On how children of disaporic migrants can broach their background with colleagues and friends. Books and stories, said Shankari, offer a good way in. Also, curiosity and questioning, and trying to meet people where they are. She shared advice she once received from a First Nations Australian, which was to “listen in order to listen, not to react and respond”. (What great advice.)

On how she, not Sri-Lankan born, knew all the details she used in her book, and how she decided on the Cook issue in Chai time in Cinnamon Gardens. For the first, Shankari laughingly credited the talkativeness of her extended family, but regarding the second, she reiterated her point about the creation mythologies in Australia and Sri Lanka and the role they play in forming national identity.

Vote of thanks

Sally Prior, literary editor of The Canberra Times offered a brief but heartfelt vote of thanks. She commented on the lack of curiosity in Australians regarding asylum seekers – who they are and why they want to come – and said she was inspired by Shankari’s persistence. She thanked all involved for an excellent conversation, to which all the audience could say was, hear, hear.

ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author
MC: Colin Steele
Australian National University
13 May 2024

Monday musings on Australian literature: Stella Prize 2024 Winner

/ Whispering Gums / 27 Comments

The 2024 Stella Prize winner was announced last Thursday, the 2nd of May, but that was the also the day my blog turned 15, and I didn’t want to flood cyberspace with too many posts. Then this weekend was the SixDegrees meme which meant another post coming at you. So, I decided to do my Stella 2024 post, this year, as a Monday Musings. It makes sense to do so, in fact, because it’s an historic win. First though, the winner, for those of you who haven’t heard yet:

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy

Why historic? Again, some of you will already know this, but Alexis Wright, one of our leading First Nations writers, is the first writer to win the Stella twice in its 12 year history. An impressive achievement by any measure. I am embarrassed to say, however, that of the now four Stella winners I haven’t read, Wright’s two are among them. This is not because I don’t want to read them, but because they are big tomes, and my life doesn’t seem to lend itself these days to chunksters. I read and loved her multi-award winning novel Carpentaria (my post), which was big enough – at over 500 pages – but that was before blogging when time pressures felt different! Clearly, though, I should make time for this because, from what I can tell, its subject matter is something I care about and it has the wit and playfulness, passion and imagination, that I loved in Carpentaria.

Praiseworthy has already been recognised by the literary establishment. Last year it won the Fiction Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. Further, as publisher Giramondo shares, it has been shortlisted for many other awards: The Dublin Literary Award 2024; the People’s Choice Award, the Christine Stead Prize for Fiction and the Indigenous Writers Prize in the 2024 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award; The James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2024; and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance in the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards.

The chair of the judging panel said this about the book:

Praiseworthy is mighty in every conceivable way: mighty of scope, mighty of fury, mighty of craft, mighty of humour, mighty of language, mighty of heart. Praiseworthy is not only a great Australian novel – perhaps the great Australian novel – it is also a great Waanyi novel. And it is written in the wild hope that, one day, all Australian readers might understand just what that means. I do not understand. Not yet. But I can feel history calling to me in these pages. Calling to all of us. Imagine if we listened.

Giramondo’s (above-linked) page for the book, includes excerpts from other critics and reviewers. Samuel Rutter of the New York Times Book Review describes it as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, while Jane Gleeson-White wrote in The Conversation that “Praiseworthy is Alexis Wright’s most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet…a hero’s journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty”. More than one references Ulysses, such as Ruth Padel, who describes it in The Spectator as “an impassioned environmental Ulysses of the Northern Territory… Playful, formally innovative, multi-storied, allegorical, protean and dizzyingly exhilarating, it is long, lyrical and enraged”. Several, in fact, praise the language; and many comment on its satirical aspect, its lyricism, its comedy. Lynda Ng, in Meanjin, calls it:

The finest distillation yet of Wright’s themes – a bold assertion of Aboriginal sovereignty that successfully encompasses all areas of life: culture, economy, and jurisprudence.

Of course, Giramondo has selected excerpts that praise, but the sources of that praise are impressive.

There are those who think that she should/may/will be Australia’s next Nobel Laureate for Literature.

Returning to the Stella, you can read more on the Stella website, including a link to Alexis Wright’s acceptance speech, and an expressive video performance of a brief scene from the novel by Boonwurrung actor Tasma Walton.

Just to remind you, this year’s Stella judges were writer, literary critic, Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival and this year’s chair, BeeJay Silcox; Filipino-Australian poet, performer, arts producer, and advocate, Eleanor Jackson; First Nations award-winning poet and arts board member, Cheryl Leavy; novelist, occasional critic and full-time dad, Bram Presser; and writer and historian, Dr Yves Rees.

Wikipedia offers a well-presented complete list of the winners and all the short and longlisted books.

Thoughts anyone?