Sofie Laguna in conversation with Karen Viggers

November 7, 2025November 10, 2025 / Whispering Gums / 6 Comments

I don’t know how it has happened, but tonight’s conversation between Sofie Laguna and Karen Viggers is the first ANU/Meet-the-Author event I’ve attended this year. I did book one featuring Omar Musa a month ago, but I came down with laryngitis, as did, I believe, his interlocutor. (The show went on, with Karen Viggers, in fact). My problem is a busy schedule combined with regular trips to Melbourne and a couple of holidays. They get in the way of normal life!

Anyhow, the event – which was for Sofie Laguna’s latest novel, The Underworld – started as usual with Colin Steele acknowledging the traditional owners, introducing the participants and thanking supporters, before handing the floor to Karen Viggers. He thanked Karen in particular for turning up because last Sunday, while in Ubud for the Writers Festival, she was run down by a motorcycle and was somewhat bruised and battered!

The conversation

Now, I have seen Karen converse with Sofie Laguna before (back in 2017) and it was one of the most delightful conversations I’ve attended, so, I was looking forward to this one. It didn’t disappoint. Sofie Laguna is a joy and a hoot, in the open way she engages in discussions about her work. It’s a way that manages to feel fresh, as though the conversation is a journey for her, not the same-old same-old. Whether that’s Sofie or Karen or the chemistry they have, I don’t know, but it works.

On coming-of-age and young people

Karen started by introducing the novel as a coming-of-age story, which encompasses violence, love and transformation. She loved that Sofie takes the reader on a journey with Martha. The novel starts in 1973, with her protagonist Martha in Year 9 – at which point there was a little discussion between Sofie and Karen about how old that made her, and whether that was the same as Third Form. Whatever! The point is she’s around 13 or 14, is at an elite private boarding school in the Southern Highlands, and has parents who are ”trapped in a loveless marriage”. Here, there was another little discussion about whether they were in fact “trapped” and whether it really was “loveless”. As you can see, this really was a conversation.

Karen asked Sofie about the dedication, which she suspected implied a spark? It is an In Memoriam to her Latin teacher, who was both dedicated and elitist, but created a dynamic learning space. This led to a discussion about the role of teachers in guiding young people, and the fact that teachers are woven in different ways through most of Sofie’s novels. She doesn’t do this consciously, but realises teachers have had a pivotal role in her books. They have an incredible influence, they can draw out of students who they are. For Sofie, whose home was unconventional, school was a safe place, that gave her boundaries.

On the writing

We then moved on to voice, and the fact that Martha’s voice came to Sofie at a basketball gym where her son was playing. She began writing there and then in the voice of a women in her 50s, a woman who was funny, heartbroken, intellectual. She “knew something had happened”. She felt an urgency, and it was exciting because things were coming out that she didn’t know she knew. This sort of writing is easy to do because it wants to happen, but the book wasn’t easy.

She knew she had to go back and learn what Martha’s life was like at 14. It would be untidy. Puberty is messy, and she’d never properly written about it before. It’s a time of transition, challenging for everyone, as our bodies, ideas, sexuality change.

Karen then returned to why this book had been difficult. Was it because she was closer to Martha? Yes, but it was difficult in many ways – more difficult to get a sense of the whole, more difficult to get a straight line, more nuanced. And then as Sofie does, she asked Karen whether that made sense!

Karen noted that Martha attends a privileged private boarding school, which is a shift from the hardscrabble lives she usually writes about. This resulted in Sofie sharing another difficulty she’d had. Was she was “allowed”, in current times, to describe wealth, privilege? Was it permissible to describe pain experienced by a privileged white person? But, that’s who Martha was! So, she kept on, but she had to work hard to give herself permission to do this.

She wishes she’d kept a diary, that she’d captured this “dance” she’d had between the conscious and the subconscious as she worked through the issues.

On the Underworld

Next was the Underworld, Martha’s place of escape. Sofie explained that the Underworld, which comes from Greek and Roman mythology, is not the same as the Christian idea of hell. Everyone goes to the Underworld. We all know about Charon the Ferryman who takes souls across the river, but what is the Underworld? How did it work? Was it a watery place? There are many interpretations, but nobody knows, which gave Sofie – and Martha – the freedom to imagine it for themselves.

For Martha, suggested Karen, it is layered – mythic, sexual, academic, and more. Sofie agreed. It’s a metaphor for the darker parts of our psyche. Martha is obsessive, which makes it difficult to grow up, difficult to come to terms with her self, so the Underworld is a safe place.

On family and pets

Karen and Sofie then discussed Martha’s family. The opening paragraph describes the distance between mother and daughter. The mother, Judith, is aloof, remote, beautiful, tall, comes from old money, and is largely unavailable, though Martha remembers a time of closeness – underwater in a pool – when she was young.

Martha is more like her father, Andrew, but he is absent physically and emotionally. Her parents shared a love story. He was from the wrong side of the tracks, so why did Judith choose him? Was she rebelling against controlling mother, Babs, a snob who is the third party in the marriage?

They all love Martha, but they all fail her. Yet, Babs could be seen to save Martha. She’s an example of a character who starts as a role or function, but who becomes fully human with good traits and flaws.

Pets also play a role in the novel. They are like teachers. Martha’s grandmother has little dogs, but then Martha meets three big Irish wolfhounds, who ground her, who see her need. This scene at the farm was a joy to write. Sofie tries to write her novels from beginning to end, but if a scene needs to be written she will do it, and slot it in later. She returned to the idea of difficulty, and how surprising it was to find it so easy to write that scene but not the scenes before and after it.

Sofie said that Martha doubted herself, and this was what the writing was like. Some scenes would drag. She has depended all her writing life on her intuition, but with this book she needed an outside eye in a way she never has before. When she got that, she was able to write “with gusto”. That person gave her “permission”, reminding her that certain scenes can happen off the page, which is something she normally knows herself. This book she did the hard way, but she couldn’t give up on Martha!

On the 1970s setting

Sofie said there is some crossover between her life and Martha’s. This was a time when it was taboo to be gay, and feminism was growing but Martha could still cut off. Sofie found the research “thrilling”, and loved it when she found the extant female poet Sulpicia, whose authorship was contested by male academics. This was a great way for Martha to enact her own form of feminist activism.

During the Q&A, there was a brief discussion between Sofie and Karen re trauma, after Karen commented that there is trauma in each of Sofie’s books. Trauma, which comes from the Greek word for “wound” said Sofie, shapes people. All lives have “trauma”. You can’t avoid heartbreak, loss, acute pain. Karen observed, however, that trauma’s impact can depend on how and when it happens.

Before we went to the Q&A, Sofie apologised for being tired and getting tongue-tied, but we didn’t notice.

Q & A

On whether Martha represents Sofie (whom this questioner knew at school as a warm, passionate and curious girl) or a combination of girls: Both, she is a combination but also a “more true me”, said Sofie. She is awkward, prickly, can’t do eye-contact, until she meets horses and dogs. She’s a presence outside of Sofie, but is also “a soul twin’; she is both Sofie and separate.

On whether she had to kill any darlings: No, because whatever she killed were not darlings, as they were not working. Her aim is to find the structure, the shape, so she is always happy to lose things that are spoiling the shape, that are distracting from the story. Sofie laughed that she was using various metaphors – music, forest, sculpture – to answer this question, but essentially, once she has the path it’s a joy filling in the picture.

Vote of thanks

Features editor, Sally Pryor – who wore orange especially to coordinate with the book’s cover – gave the vote of thanks. Martha felt so much like a real person, she said, but is really just words on a page. How does that happen? Sofie replied that those marks on a page go from her soul to ours!

Another great meet-the-author event! We are very lucky, as Sally said.

ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author
MC: Colin Steele
Kambri Cinema, Australian National University
6 November 2025

Brian Castro, Chinese postman (#BookReview)

November 6, 2025November 6, 2025 / Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Serendipity is a lovely word, and is even lovelier when it touches my reading. Such was the case with my last two books, Olga Tokarczuk’s House of day, house of night (my review) and Brian Castro’s Chinese postman. The connections between them are simple and complex. Both focus more on ideas than narrative, are disjointed in structure (or, at least, in reading experience), and draw consciously on their author’s lives. They also seem to be questioning the nature of fiction itself, a question that is true of two other books I’ve read in recent times – Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & practice (my review) and Sigrid Nunez’s The vulnerables (my review). None of these books are fast reads, but they are rewarding ones.

The other thing that connects these books is that, because narrative provides more of a loose structure than a driving force and because they blend that narrative with ruminations, memoir, essay, vignettes, anecdotes, recipes even, they exemplify the idea that every reader reads a different book. This is not only – or even primarily – because we are not all men in our mid-70s with mixed ethnicity, to take Castro (and his protagonist) as an example. Rather, it is because we all think about and weigh differently the issues and ideas these authors focus on.

In The vulnerables Nunez refers to Virginia Woolf (as does de Kretser) and her “aspiration to create a new form. The essay-novel”. She also refers to Annie Ernaux’s nonfiction book The years, describing it as “a kind of collective autobiography of her generation”. I’ve digressed a bit here, but my point is that these writers have things to say about their time, their generation, the state of the world – and they are looking for better ways to say it. They are suspicious of pure narrative, and yet I think they also recognise, to some degree at least, that “story” is a way to reach people. Therein lies the tension that each tries to deal with.

So now, Castro! There is a story, a sort of narrative, running through Chinese postman, and I’ll let publisher Giramondo explain it:

Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine…

The narrative arc, then, concerns this email correspondence with Iryna. It starts when she emails him:

Dear Professor, I am reading one of your books on the doorstep of war. You once wrote about war eloquently, so the critics said. I do not believe anyone can write eloquently about war. If you could find the time, could you please answer that question. (p. 29/30)

He doesn’t reply “of course”, because he suspects it’s a scam. But, the problem is, it’s got him thinking about his ‘”eloquence” in writing about war’. At this point, readers who have read the epigraphs will remember that one of them quotes John Hawkes*, who said, “Everything I have written comes out of nightmare, out of the nightmare of war”.

War – Ukraine, Vietnam, World War 2, and others – is, then, a constant presence in the novel. As is the aforementioned Iryna because, although she’s “probably a bearded scammer”, he does write back. He asks her about the “dogs in the Donbas”, hoping this “will shove aside the irritating accusation of eloquence”. And so a correspondence begins in which war and dogs, among other issues, are discussed. In other words, dogs become another thread in the novel, as do toilets, aging and its depredations, solitude, the writing life and more.

This is a “big” book, one that, as I’ve intimated, will be read differently by different people. Those concerned about where the world is heading will engage with the issues that mean something to them. Those of migrant background might most relate to his experience of discrimination and othering. Those of a certain age will relate to thoughts about mortality and managing the aging body. (To test or not to test is one question that arises.) Those of a literary bent will love the wordplay and clever, delightful allusions (and wonder how many more they missed. I loved, for example, the allusions to TS Eliot’s “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, a poem about anxiety and indecision which reflects Quin’s inner questioning about action and inaction. I also loved the wordplay that made me splutter at times.) And those interested in the form of the novel will wonder about where this is all leading!

“the unreliability of reason” (p. 232)

There is so much to write about this book, and I’m not sure I can capture the wonder of reading it, how ideas are looked at from every angle – inside out and upside down – in a way that illuminates and stimulates rather than confuses. It’s quite something.

I’ll try to explain something of this through two of the interweaving motifs – toilets and dogs. Both mean multiple things as Castro is not one to close things off. So, early on, toilets reflect the sort of cleaning work migrants must do to support themselves, as Abe does at University. Later, they are part of the aging person’s concern about bowel health. But, in between they could also symbolise feelings of disorder and helplessness, his “anxiety in the gut”, including just coping with “the difficult things of ordinary life”. Similarly dogs epitomise the instinctual, simple life, but, in stories like their being used for target practice, they could also represent innocent victims of war. Here of course, I’m sharing my personal responses to these motifs. There are many others.

No wonder Quin worries about the writing life. It’s something he, a writer, is driven to do, “it pushes fear into the background”, but does it achieve anything?

I’ve always believed it is the novel that carries all the indirect notes of empathy. It may even be violence that brings empathy to war and its suffering. It may be anything. Yet, the plasticity of the novel bends to all the obtuse emotions and accommodates them. Then all is confined to the scrapheap of having been read, having been experienced, having been second-hand and second-read. Major libraries are throwing out paper books. (p.140)

Chinese postman was my reading group’s September book, and it proved challenging, but that is a good thing. We had a lively discussion during which disagreement was not the flavour, but a genuine and engaged attempt to understand what Castro was on about. Whether we achieved that, who knows, but I am glad I have finally read Castro. I won’t be forgetting him soon.

* Wikipedia des John Hawkescribesa (1925-1998) as “a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended some traditional constraints of narrative fiction”. !

Brian Castro
Chinese postman
Artarmon: Giramondo, 2024
250pp.
ISBN: 9781923106130

Olga Tokarczuk, House of day, house of night (#BookReview)

October 23, 2025October 23, 2025 / Whispering Gums / 37 Comments

About 30 pages into Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, House of day, house of night, I turned to Mr Gums and said, I have no idea what I am reading, which is unusual for me. I certainly don’t pretend to understand everything I read, but I can usually sense a book’s direction. However, something about this one was throwing me, so …

I had a quick look at Wikipedia, and found this “synopsis”:

Although nominally a novel, House of Day, House of Night is rather a patchwork of loosely connected disparate stories, sketches, and essays about life past and present in … a Polish village in the Sudetes near the Polish-Czech border. While some have labeled the novel Tokarczuk’s most “difficult” piece, at least for those unfamiliar with Central European history, it was her first book to be published in English. [Accessed: 1 October 2025]

That made me feel better! I am more than comfortable with “loosely connected disparate stories” but am only generally-versed in Central European history. So, I decided to relax and go with the flow. From that point on, I started to enjoy my reading more, but it was slow going, because the “disparate stories” demand attention. It’s not a book you whizz through for story, but one you savour for thoughts and ideas, and for the connections you find along the way.

Tokarczuk calls it, in fact, a “constellation novel”, which I understand builds on thinking by the German critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). According to academic Louis Klee, who has written on “the constellational novel”, “these novels are recognizable by the presence of a first-person narrator committed to drawing affinities and making connections among disparate things”. They can be non-linear and incorporate various forms of writing from essayistic to lyrical to fragmentary, and encourage readers to find their own connections (like finding patterns in a constellation).

This well encapsulates House of day, house of night. It comprises numerous individually titled chapters (or sections or parts), some just a few paragraphs long, and others several pages. At first it felt disjointed, but it wasn’t long before an underlying structure started to reveal itself, one held together by a first-person narrator, a woman who had come to live in a small Polish village with her partner R – just like Tokarczuk and her husband did – three years before the novel opens. She tells of life in the village, and particularly of the relationship she develops with her neighbour, a somewhat mysterious old woman named Marta, who embodies a wisdom that she sometimes shares but other times must be gleaned from what she doesn’t say.

Interspersed with our narrator’s story, are other stories – some real, some magical, some past, some present – about the region and people in it. There’s a gender-fluid monk named Paschalis who is writing the life of the female saint Kummernis. There’s the unnamed couple who think they have it all, until each is visited by the same lover, a female for “he” and a male for “she”. There’s a religious community called the Cutlers who make knives and believe that “the soul is a knife stabbed into the body, which forces it to undergo the incessant pain that we call life”. There’s the wonderfully named Ergo Sum who had tasted human flesh in frozen Siberia, where he’d been deported in 1943, and believes he is turning into a werewolf. And so on. Some of these stories continue, for several chapters, woven around our narrator’s story, while others stand alone. Some are about people who think they have life worked out, while in other stories, the people don’t have a clue.

There’s more though, because scattered through the stories are ruminations on disparate things like dahlias, nails, comets and grass allergies. And threading through it all are various motifs, usually providing segues between chapters, encouraging us to see links and to ponder their meaning for us. These motifs include dreams, names, time, death, borders, mushrooms (potentially deadly), and knives. The more you read, the more connections you see between them and the stories. Many are philosophically-based, but are not hard to understand. In other words, the challenge is not in understanding, but in how we, individually, process the links we see. You might have already noticed some in my examples above, such as the idea of identity. Even the mysterious Marta, who disappears every winter, is unsettling. Who is she really?

“people are woefully similar”

This is the sort of book you would expect of a Nobel prizewinner. The writing is simple but expressive, and is accompanied by a rich, dark, and often ironic humour. We have border guards who don’t want to deal with a dead body so they quietly shove it to the other side of the border. And Leo the clairvoyant who says “Thank God people have the capacity for disbelief — it is a truly bountiful gift from God”. That made me splutter.

Underpinning all this – the thing that gives the book its heft – is a quiet but somewhat resigned wisdom. It interrogates some big questions – our willingness (or not) to see what is happening in front of us, our relationship to place, how we comprehend time, and who we are. These are explored through universal binaries, not only the night-and-day contained in the title, but life and death, change and stasis, ripening and decay. How do we live with – and balance – these parts of ourselves, of life?

But, House of day, house of night is also set in a particular place and time, southwest Poland, just post World War 2. This area, explains the Translator in her note, was part of the German Reich until 1945, when the Allies agreed to move Poland’s borders west. Many Poles left their old lands of the east (now part of the USSR), and resettled in this once German area in the west, occupying homes left by the evacuated Germans. This specific history is also found in the book, with Polish families hopefully, greedily, digging up German treasures, for example, and Germans sadly returning to see their old places.

House of day, house of night offers no answers, but it sure asks a lot of questions – about how, or whether, we can move forward into more humane, and hence more fulfilling lives.

This brings me to the ending. I won’t spoil it – it’s impossible in a story like this anyhow – but we close, appropriately, on the idea of constellations and finding patterns, and a hope that it is possible to find a pattern that explains it all. It is deliciously cheeky. And, on that note, I will end.

Olga Tokarczuk,
House of day, house of night
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Melbourne: Text publishing, 2025 (Orig. pub. 1998; Eng trans. 2002)
298pp.
ISBN: 9781923058675

Review copy courtesy Text Publishing

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1925 in fiction

October 20, 2025November 8, 2025 / Whispering Gums / 31 Comments

Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This week, it is 1925, and it runs from today, 20 to 26 October. As for the last 8 clubs, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

The 1920s were wild years, at least in the Western World. The First World War was over, and neither the Depression nor Second World War were on the horizon. It was a time of excess for many, of the flappers, of

A brief 1925 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1925:

Martin Boyd (as Martin Mills): Love gods
Dale Collins, The haven: A chronicle
Erle Cox, Out of the silence
Zora Cross, The lute-girl of Rainyvale : A story of love, mystery, and adventure in North Queensland
Carlton Dawe, Love: the conqueror
Carlton Dawe, The way of a maid
C.J. de Garis, The victories of failure
W. M. Fleming, Where eagles build
Nat Gould, Riding to orders
Jack McLaren, Spear-eye
Henry Handel Richardson, The way home (the second book in the The Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy)
M. L. Skinner, Black swans: Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno
E. V. Timms, The hills of hate
Ethel Turner, The ungardeners
E. L. Grant Watson, Daimon
Arthur Wright, The boy from Bullarah

EV Timms had a long career. Indeed, he also appeared in my 1952 Year Club list. Zora Cross has reappeared in recent decades due to renewed interest in Australia woman writers. Both Bill and I have written about M.L. (Mollie) Skinner, a Western Australian writer who came to the attention of D.H. Lawrence. And then of course there are those writers – Martin Boyd, Henry Handel Richardson and Ethel Turner – who have never “disappeared” from discussions about Australia’s literary heritage.

While my focus here is fiction, it’s worth noting that many of Australia’s still recognised poets published this year, including Mary Gilmore, Henry Lawson, Dorothea Mackellar, Furnley Maurice and John Shaw Neilson.

The only well-recognised novelist I could find who was born this year was Thea Astley.

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove to see what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. Because 1925 is a century ago, I had already started researching the year for the little Monday Musings Century ago subseries I started in 2022. So far, I have written just one post on 1925. It focused on two literary societies which were active at the time, the Australian Literature Society and Australian Institute of the Arts and Literature, so I won’t repeat that here.

I found a few interesting tidbits to share, including, in a couple of newspapers, a brief report of a talk given to Melbourne’s Legacy Club by local bookseller, C. H. Peters, manager for Robertson and Mullens. He reported that the English publisher, John Murray the Fourth, said

that the Australian consumption of fiction was enormous, compared with the English market, and that, making allowances for differences in population, the Australian read five novels to every one read by the Englishman.

Some of the other items of interest I found were …

On a cult classic?

One of the surprising – to me – finds during my Trove search was the book Out of the silence by Erle Cox. It was, says The Argus (9 October) and the Sydney Morning Herald (28 November), first published in serial form around 1919, but there were many requests for it to be available in book form, which happened in 1925. The story concerns the discovery of a gigantic, buried sphere, which contains the accumulated knowledge of an ancient civilisation. The Argus’ reviewer says that the sphere’s aim “was to exemplify the perfection attained in a long past era and to assist the human race of the time of discovery towards similar perfection”, with the finder being helped in this goal by the “dazzling Earani”, a survivor of that civilisation.

The reviews at the time were positive. The Argus says that “the story is carried on with much ability”, while The Age (17 October) describes it as “brilliantly conceived and charmingly written … original and weird, maybe a little far-fetched”. Edward A. Vidler writes for the Sydney Morning Herald that “Mr. Cox is to be congratulated on a story of rare interest, which holds the attention from beginning to end”.

It has been republished more than once since 1925, including in other countries. For example, in 1976, it was republished in a series called “Classics of Science Fiction” in 1976, by Hyperion Press, and in 2014 an ePub version was published “with an Historical Afterword by Ron Miller”, who featured it in his “The Conquest of Space Book Series.” The promo for this edition describes it as “the classic lost race novel” in which a pair of amateur archaeologists “inadvertantly revive Earani, the survivor of an ancient race of superbeings”. But this is not all. It was also adapted for radio, and turned into a comic strip. You can read all this on Erle Cox’s Wikipedia page.

On reviewing

I enjoy seeing how reviewers of a different time went about their business. Some reviews in this era – the 1920s – tell the whole story of the novel, and do little else. Others, though, try to grapple with the book, finding positives as well as negatives, and sometimes discussing the reason for their criticisms.

Reviews for Dale Collins’s island adventure The haven are a good example. It seems that Collins had decided to have the main character – the male protagonist – tell his story. The reviewer in The Age (31 October) didn’t feel it worked, writing that Collins

repeats the experiment of blending psychology and sensation which he caried out so successfully in ‘Ordeal.’ It is a very clever and original story, but the reader who wants sensation will find there is too much psychology in it; and the reader who is interested in psychological studies will discover that the author has handicapped himself by making the central figure tell the story. As a result the psychology becomes monotonous …

The Argus (6 November) on the other hand was positive about the technique of Mark telling his own story:

Mr Collins has skilfully worked out the effect of the situation on each one of his characters, but especially on that of Mark, who reveals himself through a diary of their life on the island … The author has set himself a very difficult task in the carrying out of which he has been remarkably successful.

The reviewer in The Age (25 July) – the same one? – was disappointed in Zora Cross’s The lute-girl of Rainyvale, seemingly because of its supernatural subject matter concerning Chinese vases and curses, after the quality of her previous novel Daughters of the Seven Mile, but ended on:

The story has some vivid descriptive writing, which serves to emphasise that Zora Cross’s real gifts are wasted on fiction of this character.

Mollie Skinner’s Black swans was reviewed twice in the same column in The Age (12 September) with slightly different assessments. The first writes that it is “a very readable story founded on historical events in the convict days of Western Australia” and goes on to say that she had collaborated with D. H. Lawrence on The boy in the bush but that “her unaided work is preferable”. The review concludes that Skinner had “drawn her picture strongly and produced a good novel”.

Later in the same column, the reviewer (presumably a different one?) references Skinner’s work with Lawrence and then says of this new book that the story begins in Western Australia’s Crown colony days of 1849. Skinner “sends her childish heroine and hero on adventures amongst blacks and Malays, in company with an escaped convict” then “takes them to England for the social and love interest”. The reviewer concludes that

Miss Skinner writes well, with a special anxiety to set down striking phrases and epigrams. To quote a common, phrase, she is more interesting than convincing.

Hmm … there’s a sense between the lines here that the story doesn’t hang together, but that Skinner, like Cross, has some writing skills.

As for Henry Handel Richardson, although her novel came out in mid-1925, I found only a couple of brief references to it. Martin Mills (Martin Boyd), on the other hand, fared better with some quite detailed discussions, including in the West Australian (4 July). The reviewer explored it within the context of being part of a rising interest in the “religious novel” and ended with:

Love Gods, with its old story of the unending conflict between the Pagan deities and the restraining influences of Christianity, is a novel of unusual insight, and most uncommon power of literary expression.

There’s more but I’ve probably tired us all out by now! I will post again on this year.

Sources

(Besides those linked in the post)

1925 in Australian Literature (Wikipedia)
Joy Hooton and Harry Heseltine, Annals of Australian literature, 2nd ed. OUP, 1992

Previous Monday Musings for the “years”: 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1952, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1925 Club – and if so how?

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sister Josepha (#Review)

October 16, 2025January 15, 2026 / Whispering Gums / 9 Comments

It’s a year since I’ve posted on a Library of America (LOA) story, but I was driven to post on this one for two reasons. I have just posted a review of “The scapegoat” by Dunbar-Nelson’s first husband, Paul Dunbar, and, earlier this year, I reviewed “A carnival jangle”, written by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, before marriage when she was Alice Ruth Moore.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

In my post on “A carnival jangle”, I provided a brief biography of Dunbar-Nelson, so I won’t repeat that here, except to remind us that she was a poet, journalist and political activist, born to a black mother and white father. She was prominent in the Harlem Renaissance, and lived in New Orleans for 21 years, as well as Boston, New York, and elsewhere.

In that bio, I also wrote that racism was an important issue for her, but that she also took a wider view of human rights. It is this point that I would like to explore further in this post, due to some ideas raised in LOA’s introduction to her story. They focus quite a bit on her relationship with Paul Laurence Dunbar, noting that the two communicated with each other by letter for a couple of years before meeting. Dunbar asked for her opinion on using “Negro dialect in Literature”, which he sometimes did. LOA shares her response, which was that she saw no problem with using dialect if you knew it and had “a special aptitude for dialect work” but that she saw no necessity to do so just because “one is a Negro or a Southerner”, and if, like her, you were “absolutely devoid of the ability to manage dialect“. This makes good sense, but the main thing I want to share is what she says next:

Now as to getting away from one’s race—well I haven’t much liking for these writers that wedge the Negro problem and social equality and long dissertations on the Negro in general into their stories. It’s too much like a quinine pill in jelly—I hope I’m not treading on your corns. Somehow, when I start a story, I always think of my folks (characters) as simple human beings, not as types of a race or an idea—and I seem to be on more friendly terms with them.

After detailing more of Dunbar-Nelson’s biography, LOA returns to the issue of subject matter, saying that “the ambiguity of racial identity for the Creole characters” in her stories resulted in several critics in recent decades arguing that

she “camouflaged the issue of race,” that she “spurned that racialized element of her identity,” or that she “shaped her tales of Creole life for white audiences.” In “Sister Josepha,” which we reprint below as our Story of the Week selection, the reader realizes that the lead character is not white only through descriptive hints (“brown hands,” “tropical beauty”) and by what the other nuns do not say about her.

However, continues LOA, another commentator, Caroline Gebhard had noted in a recent article that Dunbar-Nelson

“presumes that readers already read her work as ‘black.’” In the 1890s and early 1900s, most of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, essays, and poems appeared in Black newspapers and magazines; The Monthly Review, for example, advertised itself as “the only illustrated periodical published by Negroes in this country.” … “Dunbar-Nelson knew she would be read as a Black author and never tried to pass in print,” Gebhard concludes. “To read Dunbar-Nelson’s fictions as addressing only white readers, which the accusation of passing implies, is to dismiss the fact that Dunbar-Nelson’s first and most loyal readers were African Americans.”

This point reminded me of the discussion my American friend Carolyn and I had about “The scapegoat” concerning the fact that it is almost completely set in the black community. White people are not identified, except for the Judge, so we have to work out, between the lines, who else might be white in that story. I think Paul Dunbar assumed we’d know – just as Alice Dunbar-Nelson did, according to Gebhard. It’s a lesson in how difficult it is to read out of one’s own time and culture.

It also reminded me of something more contemporary, a post I wrote in 2021. The focus was memoir, but the point was that ‘diverse writers’ are expected to write narrowly about their diversity, and their frustration that they are not encouraged to write, as Dunbar-Nelson explained, about “simple human beings, not as types of a race or an idea”.

“Sister Josepha”

“Sister Josepha” appeared in Dunbar’s 1899 short story collection, The goodness of St Rocque and other stories, and can be read at the link below. It tells the story of a young three-year-old orphan named, Camille, who was left at a convent orphan asylum. The story opens 15 years later when this orphan has just finished her novitiate and is a fully-fledged sister, but she’s unsettled.

Dunbar tells us that when she was 15, and still Camille, she had “almost fully ripened into a glorious tropical beauty of the type that matures early” and had attracted the attention of a couple who offered to take her in. Her Mother Superior calls her in and makes the offer:

Camille stole a glance at her would-be guardians, and decided instantly, impulsively, finally. The woman suited her; but the man! It was doubtless intuition of the quick, vivacious sort which belonged to her blood that served her. Untutored in worldly knowledge, she could not divine the meaning of the pronounced leers and admiration of her physical charms which gleamed in the man’s face, but she knew it made her feel creepy, and stoutly refused to go.

To justify her decision to Mother Superior, who did not force her to go, she announces that she loves the convent and sisters, and would like to be one too. However, three years later, the life is palling for this lively young woman. She’s tired, and bored, and plans her escape, but this is a story about the few opportunities available to a young woman in her situation. Should she live the confining but secure life of a nun, or could she make it out in the world where she has no identity, no name other than Camille, and “a beauty that not even an ungainly bonnet and shaven head could hide”.

What lifts this story out of the large body of often cliched stories about young nuns like Camille/Sister Josepha is the situation and Dunbar’s expressive writing that subtly conveys the reality of our sister’s position. Race is never mentioned but there are hints regarding Camille’s background. This is a different story to “A carnival jangle” but no less powerful.

Alice Dunbar Nelson
“Sister Josepha” (1899)
First published: in The goodness of St Rocque and other stories
Available online: Library of America

Paul Laurence Dunbar, The scapegoat (#Review)

October 9, 2025January 15, 2026 / Whispering Gums / 16 Comments

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s short story “The scapegoat” is the fourth in the anthology Great short stories by African-American writers, which my American friend Carolyn sent me. Compared with the previous author, Gertrude H. Dorsey Browne, Dunbar is much better known.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Dunbar c. 1890, from *The African-American Experience in Ohio*, 1850-1920, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The biographical note at the end of the anthology provides good background, and Wikipedia has a detailed article on him. Dunbar (1872-1906) was, says Wikipedia, “an American poet, novelist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries”, and “became the first African-American poet to earn national distinction and acceptance”. In fact, it is through his poetry, which is frequently anthologised, that I recognised him when he popped up in the book. He was born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been slaves. Indeed, his father had escaped slavery before the Civil War ended, and fought with the Union Army.

Dunbar, says Wikipedia, wrote his first poem when he was six, and gave his first public recital at nine. Both sources say he was the only African-American in his high school. He was apparently well-accepted, being elected president of the school’s literary society, as well as being the editor of the school newspaper and a debate club member.

Wikipedia provides much detail about his work and publishing history, his health issues (particularly with tuberculosis which killed him), and his failed marriage to Alice Ruth Moore, whose story, “A carnival jangle” (my review), opened this anthology. He was a prolific writer, and was famous for his use of dialect, although he also wrote in standard English. Recognised in his own time, his influence and legacy continues. Maya Angelou titled her book I know why the caged bird sings, from a line in his poem “Sympathy“. But I will conclude with an assessment from his friend, the writer James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), who wrote in his 1922 anthology, The book of American Negro poetry:

He was the first to rise to a height from which he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was the first to see objectively its humor, its superstitions, its short-comings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds, its yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary form.

We see some of this in the short story chosen for this anthology.

“The scapegoat”

“The scapegoat” is the opening story in Dunbar’s 1904-published collection The heart of Happy Hollow. My anthology describes it as “Dunbar’s story of an ambitious and intelligent young man who sees no reason to sell himself short or accept defeat”. This is accurate, but only half the story.

It is told in two parts, the first before the protagonist Mr Robinson Asbury goes to prison, and the second after his release. The opening paragraph, after referencing the saying that the law is “a stern mistress”, chronicles young Asbury’s fast rise from a bootblack, through porter and messenger in a barber shop, to owning his own shop. The second and third paragraphs describe the story’s setting, the “Negro quarter” of “the growing town of Cadgers”. Here Asbury sets up his barber shop, and attracts customers with his ‘significant sign, “Equal Rights Barber Shop”‘, which our third person narrator says

was quite unnecessary because there was only one race about to patronise the place but it was a delicate sop to the peoples vanity and it served its purpose.

Whatever the reason, he was successful, and his shop became “a sort of club”, where the men of the community gathered to socialise and discuss the news. As a result Asbury soon comes to the notice of “party managers” who, seeing his potential to win them black votes, give him money, power and patronage. This Asbury accepts, and his power and status in the community grows. He then decides he’d like to join the bar, which, with the help of the white Judge Davis, he does.

And so the story continues. With success, he does not “leave the quarter” to “move uptown” as expected, though Judge Davis is prescient:

“Asbury,” he said, “you are–you are–well, you ought to be white, that’s all. When we find a black man like you we send him to State’ prison. If you were white, you’d go to the Senate.”

By now, Asbury’s success is arousing jealousy among his peers, particularly at a local coloured law firm. Two, Bingo and Latchett (great names eh?), are alarmed by Asbury’s fast rise to the top, but his putting out his shingle is “the last straw”. They plan to pull him down, and engage the services of another to lead an opposing faction in the community. However, with the continued help of the “party managers”, Asbury holds the day.

Now politics is messy, and allegiances switch. Along the way Bingo comes over to Asbury’s side. There’s an election, and Asbury’s side wins, but our narrator says:

the first cry of the defeated party was, as usual, “Fraud! Fraud!”

Was there fraud? Certainly there’s intimation of skulduggery, but without evidence it’s decided a “scapegoat” must be found – a big man – and so Asbury is deserted by the party “Machine”, and by his peers including Bingo, and charged. After the jury finds him guilty, Asbury seeks leave to make his statement, which Judge Davis allows:

He gave the ins and outs of some of the misdemeanours of which he stood accused showed who were the men behind the throne. And still, pale and transfixed Judge Davis waited for his own sentence.

It doesn’t come, because Asbury recognises Davis as “my friend”, but he exposes “every other man who had been concerned in his downfall”. He is sent to prison, for the shortest sentence the Judge can give, and is away for ten months, just long enough for him not to have been forgotten and, in fact, to be recognised as “the greatest and smartest man in Cadgers”. (This rehabilitation of Asbury in the eyes of the community while he is absent is just one of the many astute insights Dunbar makes about the way humans think and behave.) Part Two details Asbury’s revenge, but you can read it for yourself at the link below.

“The scapegoat” is a well-written, well-structured story set primarily within the black community, though the “party managers” who want the “black vote” are clearly white. Its main theme concerns political ambition and corruption, and racial oppression. It shows Asbury’s peers working to bring him down, putting their own ambition ahead of the good of the community, and overlays this with oppression by the string-pulling “Machine” uptown. I particularly liked the measured, neutral tone Dunbar employs which, together with his frequent insights into political behaviour and human nature, enables this story to read almost like a fable, a morality tale that says something in particular about this community, about the unfortunate behaviour of people who should support each other, but also something universal about politics and oppression.

It’s unemotional, clever, true – and, unfortunately, still relevant.

Paul Laurence Dunbar
“The scapegoat” (first published in The heart of Happy Hollow, 1904)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 45-56
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online (you can find the whole collection at this site)

Louise Erdrich, The night watchman (#BookReview)

October 3, 2025October 3, 2025 / Whispering Gums / 30 Comments

Louise Erdrich’s Pulitzer Prizewinning The night watchman is historical fiction about a community fighting back against a government set on “terminating them”. Erdrich, whom I have reviewed before, is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota and it is the story of this community’s response to something called the House Concurrent Resolution 108 that she tells in The night watchman.

Passed by Congress on August 1, 1953, this Resolution would, says Erdrich in her Afterword, “sever legal, sacred, and immutable promises made in nation-to-nation treaties”. Or, as Wikipedia explains, it would “end reservations and tribal sovereignty” and “integrate Native Americans into mainstream American society”.

As it happens, Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was Chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Advisory Committee at the time and recognised this resolution for what it was. He is the inspiration for Thomas Wazhushk, one of Erdrich’s two protagonists. Thomas is a man of two cultures:

Watching the night sky, he was Thomas who had learned about the stars in boarding school. He was also Wazhashk who had learned about the stars from his grandfather, the original Wazhashk. (p. 17)

Throughout the novel Thomas strategically draws on these two selves in order to perform his role, which is to keep the community safe (or, at least, safer, than they would be if the Government’s plans came to fruition).

This is both a sophisticated and a grounded novel. Grounded in the way Erdrich uses her storytelling ability to create a compelling narrative peopled by a large cast of wonderfully individuated characters. We are interested in them all, and this makes the novel a darned good read. Sophisticated in how Erdrich subtly layers her story to enrich its meaning. The overall structure comprises two parallel but related stories or journeys: Thomas’s fight for his community’s survival, and his niece Patrice’s journey to find both her missing sister and her own path in life. Erdrich’s writing is simple, plain, but also imbued with gorgeous lyricism, metaphor and symbolism. The novel is threaded, for example, with physical holes, wells, caves, ship holds, and falls, which never let us forget the precariousness of these people’s lives.

She also peppers the story with humour, which reminds us no matter how serious things are, people can still have a laugh. There are many laugh-out-loud moments, alongside a recognition of humour’s role in how we navigate the things we confront. In Minneapolis, Patrice finds herself in a strange and potentially dangerous situation, and has

the sort of feeling and thinking that could only be described in Chippewa, where the strangeness was also humorous and the danger surrounding this entire situation was of the sort that you might laugh at, even though you could also get hurt… (p. 131)

“Survival is a changing game” (Biboon)

Overlaying all this is Erdrich’s exploration of how language works, how it can be used to clarify or obfuscate, to inspire or deflate. Her writing embodies this knowledge. So, for example, Thomas receives the Resolution papers and reads them carefully. He sees

their unbelievable intent. Unbelievable because the unthinkable was couched in such innocuous dry language. Unbelievable because the intent was, finally, to unmake, to unrecognize. To erase as Indians … his people, all of us invisible and as if we never were here, from the beginning, here. (p. 79)

His people were being targeted, the papers said,

for emancipation. E-man-ci-pation. Eman-cipation. This word would not stop banging around in his head. Emancipated. But they were not enslaved. Freed from being Indians* was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas’s father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. (p. 80)

Later, the once dapper but now frequently drunk Eddy Mink cuts to the chase, stunning officialdom with his plain language statement:

The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States. (p. 200)

Meanwhile, as Thomas builds his case, Patrice, who works in the Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant where Thomas is the titular night watchman, sets off for Minneapolis to look for her sister. Vera had gone there with her new husband but had not been heard of since. What Patrice finds in the city, how people can be exploited, is shocking, and she returns home somewhat wiser but with more to learn about herself and the ways of humans.

Surrounding Thomas and Patrice is a large community of people – family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues, teachers, coaches, visiting missionaries, and even a ghost. The interactions between these people build up a picture of a community that functions despite external stresses and the usual internal disagreements. This makes engrossing reading because these characters are so real, including the two Mormon missionaries who not only add humour and pathos but also represent the naiveté of supporters of a faith – in the form of Utah Senator Arthur V. Watkins – that was driving the Resolution.

Similarly, our protagonists’ interactions with specific individuals make great reading while also advancing the narrative and the ideas. When Thomas is with his father Biboon and Patrice with her mother Zhaanat, we feel their spiritual connection with their culture, and their desire to learn from their elders. When Thomas is with the white teacher and boxing coach, Barnes, we see how little non-Indian society understands the existing situation and the implications of the Resolution. Thomas patiently – and generously – explains to the clueless Barnes why Indians are not, and can never be, “regular Americans”. And, why he, Barnes, cannot be an Indian! Just look at this writing:

“If I married an Indian woman,” said Barnes, “would that make me an Indian? Could I join the tribe?”
He was awed at the possible sacrifice he could be making.
Thomas looked at the big childish man with his vigorous corn-yellow cowlicks and watery blue eyes. Not for the first time, he felt sorry for a white fellow. There was something about some of them—their sudden thought that to become an Indian might help. Help with what? Thomas wanted to be generous. But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire.
“No,” he said gently, “you could not be an Indian. But we could like you anyway.”

In statements like “he was awed at the possible sacrifice he could be making”, Erdrich conveys more about cultural superiority than just this man’s thoughts.

When Patrice is with her girlfriends and workmates, Valentine and Doris, we see how her goals diverge from their more girlish ones, and when she is with Wood Mountain we see her inner conflict about her chosen direction. As a young person, her journey is more personal than Thomas’s but they coalesce when it comes to saving the community.

“Assimilation. Their ways become your ways.” (Roderick)

I loved spending time with these characters. In fact, so did most of my reading group, as this novel was our September read. We enjoyed her vividly drawn characters – and their perfect names, like Juggie Blue, Wood Mountain, Louis Pipestone, Millie Cloud, and Patrice not Pixie. We teased out the complexity of the storytelling, the way Erdrich seemed to effortlessly incorporate complex ideas into a compelling narrative. This starts right at the title, The nightwatchman, which is both literal, Thomas’ job, and metaphorical, in his role of keeping watch as the community’s Chairman. I was reminded a little of Melissa Lucashenko’s novels, in which tough stories are told with compassion and humour to paint a picture of real people confronting a world that’s against them.

Early in the novel, Thomas moves that the Committee call the Resolution the “Termination Bill [because] Those words like emancipation and freedom are smoke”. This bill heralded what is now called the Termination Era (1953-1968). As Erdrich explains in her Afterword, this is what happened to 113 tribal nations. Although some regained recognition, “31 are now landless” and “24 are considered extinct” (p. 447).

The night watchman is one of those books that hits the spot – the heart spot and the mind spot. Recommended.

* The novel is set in 1953, and Indian is the term most commonly used when the specific Chippewa is not.

Louise Erdrich
The night watchman
London: Corsair, 2020
453pp. (Kindle edition.)
ISBN: 9781472155337

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 14, Gertrude Mack

September 8, 2025November 9, 2025 / Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Gertrude Mack is the third of the Mack literary sisters, and by far the least known, though at the time she was well-recognised, with her activities and thoughts frequently reported in the newspapers. Her “disappearance” from view is most likely because, unlike her sisters, all her writing was for newspapers and magazines. She did not have one published book to her name. It makes a big difference to a writer’s longevity in the literary world.

As with many of my Forgotten Writers posts, I researched Gertrude Mack for the Australian Women Writers’ blog. This post is a minor revision of the one I posted there. So, who was she …

Gertrude Mack

Gertrude Mack (?-1937) was an Australian journalist and short story writer. The youngest of thirteen children – who included five daughters – Mack was born in Morpeth, New South Wales, to Irish-born parents, Jemima (nee James) Mack and the Rev’d Hans Mack. As a child, she lived in various parts of Sydney including Windsor, Balmain and Redfern, and was educated at Sydney Girls’ High School. Two of her older sisters also had literary careers, Louise Mack (see my posts) and Amy Mack (whom I featured last week). These sisters have been documented in Dale Spender’s Writing a new world: Two centuries of Australian women writers (1988) and by their niece Nancy Phelan in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, but neither Spender nor Phelan mention Gertrude. According AustLit, a diary of Mack’s is included in Phelan’s papers at the State Library of New South Wales. Curious.

This dearth of formal biographical information meant relying heavily, for this post, on Trove, where articles written by Mack abound. They tell of a curious and adventurous woman who was able to report firsthand on those challenging 1920s and 30s in Europe and the Americas. For example, in 1924, four years after the Mexican Revolution, she decided to go to Mexico City, something her American friends thought “a wild whim”. She writes for The Sydney Morning Herald (22 November 1924), that “according to American newspapers, it did seem a risk, but I knew their way of making any Mexican news appear hectic”. In the end, it does prove difficult, and she fails on her first attempt. She admits that she was not prepared for the poverty she sees in Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, and “was not yet accustomed to the unshaven Mexican”, but she later wrote admiring pieces on the country.

Mack spent eight years in London from around 1929 to 1937, and returned at least once for a few weeks in 1933. It was a difficult time in Europe, and The Sun (18 June 1933) reports that she had found “the same sense of strain in all the European countries, and this has been intensified more recently by the war menace, which seems to be very real.” I have not been able to find an image of her, but during this visit, sister Louise described her in “Louise Mack’s Diary” in the Australian Women’s Weekly (17 June 1933):

Tall, very slight and svelte, in a smart black frock of her own making, her hair marcelled, her big, grey eyes looking big-ger than ever under the glasses she had taken to lately. Elegant? Yes, certainly.

An interesting little fact which came up in a couple of the newspaper reports of this 1933 visit was that on her voyage she, and two other “matrons” had been in charge of 48 children, who had been selected for the Fairbridge Farm School to be taught various branches of farming. Sydney’s The Sun (June 18) explained that “the children, whose ages ranged from eight to twelve years, included both boys and girls, and were chosen by the selection committee of the Child Immigration Society, which body exercises the greatest care in choosing only suitable potential citizens for Australia, says Miss Mack”. If you haven’t heard about Fairbridge, check out Wikipedia. Miss Mack might have had faith in it, but the whole scheme was marred by dishonesty, and worse, child abuse.

Gertrude returned again to Australia in 1937. There was much interest in her return, with newspapers reporting on her thoughts from the moment she first touched the continent in Western Australia. The West Australian (3 March 1937) wrote that she had passed through Fremantle in the “Orama”, and quoted her as saying Australian writers were doing well in London. “Henry Handel Richardson was acclaimed by many critics as the finest writer of the day”; and Helen Simpson (my first Forgotten Writer) “had taken up broadcasting work in addition to her writing”. She said Nina Murdoch had had success with Tyrolean June and Christina Stead with Seven poor men of Sydney. The paper observed, tellingly, that “undoubtedly Australian writers were getting more recognition in London than in their own country”.

It also quoted Mack as saying she believed England was interested in stories about Australia, but that their interest depended “entirely on the topic of the story.” Unfortunately Australian writers “usually presented the drab side of the life of the country and laid too much stress on the droughts and the drawbacks” and “the frequent descriptions of struggles against drought and the hardships of Australian life gave readers a wrong impression of the country”. Consequently, readers “did not realise that the country had a normal life, with a bright social side, and the mass in England seldom knew that there was very fertile land in Australia”. According to Mack, “German people knew more about Australia and were more interested than the people of any other country”.

Adelaide’s News (6 March 1937) took up the issue of how Australia is viewed, but with a slightly different tack, writing:

“It would be difficult,” said Miss Mack, “to make the average uneducated English man or woman believe that there is, in Australia, such a thing as culture. English people would be surprised if they could have a glimpse of real country life on a big station.
The only way to overcome this wrong idea.” she said, “is by our literature, which has not yet developed fully.”

Although she was talking about staying in Australia for just 6 months, it appears that Gertrude Mack was seriously ill when she returned in 1937. She visited her brother C. A. Mack, of Mosman, but died in a private hospital in Darlinghurst on Wednesday 31 March and was buried at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium on the Friday.

A few days later “an appreciation” written by “W.B.” appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald (6 April). W.B. It’s a moving tribute:

To those of us who had the happiness and the privilege of an intimate association with Gertrude Mack over a long period, abroad and in Australia, her death has meant a very poignant personal loss and sorrow. Her happy outlook on life, her faculty for perceiving the humorous side of things, and her sensitive reactions to atmosphere, made her a delightful companion, and she made friends among every class of people, whether they were foreigners or people of her own race. She had an unusual flair for getting at the heart of the interesting aspects of life and affairs, and this, added to her other gifts, enabled her to write such charming and interesting sketches, stories, and interviews. Her short stories and sketches were invariably the outcome of personal contacts. She could paint engaging pictures of people and places, and make them real to her readers. She also possessed outstanding musical ability, and might have won distinction as a pianist had she elected to take up music as a profession, for she had a fine critical perception and a rare appreciation of the true values in music.

She also translated stories from Russian, collaborating with Serge Ivanov to publish in English a volume of N. A. Baikov’s tales for children. Gertrude Mack was a fascinating woman, and would be a worthy subject for a biography – either on her own, or as part of a larger biography on the Mack sisters.

Sources

“Death of woman writer“, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 April 1937, [Accessed: May 21, 2025]
Gertrude Mack, AustLit [Accessed: 21 May 2025]

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 13, Amy Mack

September 1, 2025September 2, 2025 / Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

In the first decades of the 20th century, a family of sisters made some splash on Australia’s literary scene. I have already written about the eldest of them – Louise Mack – but there were also Amy (this post’s subject) and Gertrude, all of whom appeared in newspapers of the time as writers of interest. They were three of the thirteen children of their Irish-born parents, Rev. Hans Hamilton and his wife Jemima Mack. As with many of my Forgotten Writers articles, I researched Amy Mack for the Australian Women Writers’ blog, where we have several posts devoted to her.

Amy Mack

Amy Eleanor Mack (1876-1939) was a writer, journalist, and editor. She was six years younger than the more famous Louise, and, says Phelan in the Australian dictionary of biography, was “less temperamental … and lived more sedately”, which is not to say she lived a boring life.

Mack began work as a journalist soon after leaving school, and from 1907 to 1914 was editor of the ‘Women’s Page’ of the Sydney Morning Herald. She married zoologist Launcelot Harrison, in 1908, and in 1914, they went to England where he did postgraduate work at Cambridge, before serving in Mesopotamia as advisory entomologist to the British Expeditionary Force. While he was away, Mack worked in London as publicity officer for the ministries of munitions and food.

The couple returned to Sydney after the war, with Launce becoming professor of zoology at the University of Sydney, and Amy continuing her literary career among other roles and activities. They did not have children. According to Phelan, after her husband died she continued to publish occasional articles, but her impulse to write faded as her health declined. She died of arteriosclerosis in 1939.

Works

Amy Eleanor Mack’s subject was nature, and she wrote about it in newspapers and books, for adults and children. Australian ecologist, Manu Saunders, writes on her blog that:

Australia has a wonderful heritage of nature writers, many working before nature writing was ‘a thing’. The national collection of Australian children’s books about native wildlife is inspiring. Even more inspiring, many of Australia’s best nature stories were written in the early-mid 19^th century, and mostly by women.

And one of those women, she continues, was Amy Eleanor Mack. (I have written before on one of our early colonial nature writers, the pioneering Louisa Atkinson.)

Mack’s first publications were two collections of essays, A bush calendar (1909) and Bush days (1911), which were compiled from articles she’d written for the Sydney Morning Herald. She also wrote two popular children’s books, Bushland stories (1910) and Scribbling Sue, and other stories (1915). Wikipedia lists 14 books, many of which were first published in newspapers, but all of which have nature-related titles, like The Fantail’s house (1928) and The gum leaf that flew: And other stories of the Australian bushland (1928).

Her books were well-reviewed in the newspapers of the time. Her first, A bush calendar, was described by Sydney’s The Farmer and Settler (26 November 1909), as charming, “a sympathetic review of bird life and plant life in the Australian bush during the four seasons of the year”. But what is interesting is what they say next:

It is the kind of book that ought to be on every girl’s bookshelf, and every thoughtful and intelligent boy’s also, being not only an exceedingly pleasant thing to look at and to read, but one calculated to induce in many a desire to get to know more of nature in some of her sweetest phases.

I’m intrigued by the gender differentiation – “every” girl, but only “every thoughtful and intelligent boy”. These sorts of insights into other times make researching Trove such a joy. Anyhow, the review also suggests that it would be “a delightful remembrancer for Australians abroad”. A year later, on 26 November 1910, Sydney’s The World’s News, reviewed Mack’s children’s book, Bushland stories, calling it an improvement on A bush calendar. It comprises a “collection of fables, allegories, fairy tales, or whatever one chooses to call them” which, the News says, has “created a folklore for young Australians”. In it, Mack personifies nature, with birds, beasts and fish all acting and speaking “like rational beings”. Each story has a moral but there is none of the “preachiness, which many youthful readers shy at”.

Reviews of later books continue in a smilier vein. In 1922, on 6 December, Lismore’s Northern Star writes about Wilderness, which, it says,”tells in a most interesting way of the fascinations of a piece of land which once had been a garden, planted with fruit trees and roses, but which has been neglected until the bush reclaimed it for its own”. This is the book that Saunders writes about in her blog in 2017. The book had been originally published in three parts in the Sydney Morning Herald. Saunders explains that it

tells the story of an unnamed patch of wild vegetation in Sydney (Mack never names the city, but given the original publisher and the wildlife she describes, it seems pretty obvious). Mack describes the plot so vividly and intimately that you imagine yourself there. You can visualise Nature reclaiming this plot of land, left untended after the keen gardener who owned it passed away.

Saunders then describes its content, including examples of the nature Mack describes, as well as her attitude to it and her observations. Saunders was surprised but “weirdly” comforted to find conservation messages that are still relevant today embedded within the book.

Legacy

Australian feminist Dale Spender, in her book Writing a new world, says a little about Amy Mack, though she spends more time on Louise. However, she makes a point about the Mack sisters and their peers, Lilian and Ethel Turner:

Lilian and Ethel Turner, Louise and Amy Mack were part of a small group of spirited literary pioneers who at very early ages adopted public profiles in relation to their work. When they moved into the rough and tumble world of journalism – when they entered competitions, won prizes, and published best-selling novels before they were barely out of their teens – they broke with some of the long-established literary conventions of female modesty and anonymity. They sought reputations and in doing so they show how far women had become full members of the literary profession: they also helped to pave the way for the equally youthful and exuberant Miles Franklin whose highly acclaimed novel, My Brilliant Career (1901), was published when the author was only twenty-one.

Ever political, Spender argues that had it “been brothers (and ‘mates’)” who created the sort “colourful and creative community” these sisters did, and achieved their level of literary success, we would have heard of them. Books would have been written about ‘their “literary mateship” and they would have been awarded a place in the readily accessible literary archives’. But,

because these writers were women, and because they have been consigned to the less prestigious categories of journalism and children’s fiction (both a classification and a status with which I do not agree) they, and their efforts, and their relationships – to rephrase Ethel Turner – go unsung.

Amy Mack is less well-known now than her sister Louise, and certainly less well-known than Ethel Turner, but in her time she was much loved. However, even then, she didn’t always get her due, as a reader wrote to The Sydney Morning Herald on 16 April 1935:

With reference to the articles on Australian women writers in the Supplement, one is surprised at the omission of Amy Eleanor Mack, who surely wrote two of the finest books for children ever published in Australia. In “Bushland Stories” and “Scribbling Sue” the true spirit of our bushland has been preserved with a charm and sincerity all its own, and I think I am right in stating that, with the exception of Miss Ethel Turner’s “Seven Little Australians,” no books published in Australia for children had greater sales.

Four years later, announcing her death on 7 November 1939, The Sydney Morning Herald said that her work “had a mark of reality about them that found for her an increasing circle of readers”, but it was “A.T.” of North Sydney, who wrote to this same paper on 8 November, who captured her essence:

Her culture, wit, and broadmindedness, and her marvellous sense of humour made her a figure in the northern suburb in which she resided.

Sources

Nancy Phelan, ‘Mack, Amy Eleanor (1876–1939)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1986.
Manu Saunders, “The wilderness: Amy Eleanor Mack“, ecologyisnotadirtyword.com, 4 March 1917
Dale Spender, Writing a new world: Two centuries of Australian women writers, originally published by Pandora Press, 1988 (sourced in Kindle ed.)

Helen Trinca, Looking for Elizabeth: The life of Elizabeth Harrower (#BookReview)

August 24, 2025February 1, 2026 / Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

Like many, I was astonished when I read Elizabeth Harrower’s The watchtower (my review), upon its publication by Text Classics in 2012. Astonished not so much for its writing, though that is excellent, but for its subject, which is what we’d now call coercive control. The astonishment comes from the fact that The watchtower was first published in 1966, at a time when domestic abuse was hidden. Harrower recognised it, however, and called it out. The book made a splash at the time, but then disappeared from public view, though not completely from academia. Then, in 2012, Michael Heyward and his Text Publishing Company decided to publish it, and so began what biographer Helen Trinca calls, her “second act”.

Looking for Elizabeth is the second literary biography I’ve read by Trinca, the first being Madeleine: A life of Madeleine St John (my review). Trinca must like challenging subjects, because Harrower, like St John, was challenging to write about, albeit in Harrower’s case, Trinca had the benefit of knowing her.

So, what made Elizabeth Harrower such a challenge? Trinca had many conversations with her from 2012 on, including formal interviews for newspaper articles, and Harrower had placed her papers (including letters, reminiscences, and novel drafts) with the National Library, to which Trinca apparently had full access. But interviews and papers don’t tell the full story, particularly if the subject has spent her life “curating” or shaping it, destroying many of her papers along the way, including, as she told Text editor David Winter in 2013, “more than 400 foolscap pages of literary thoughts – part journal, part stories, part eye-witness accounts, secrets and so on”.

Trinca’s biography draws on a variety of sources, which she documents in her Author’s Note. Besides her personal connections with Harrower, which included meetings, phone calls and emails, and Harrower’s papers, she used the papers of others (including Shirley Hazzard, Kylie Tennant, and Judah Waten), all sorts of other records, and interviews with family and friends. Gaps in information are frequently noted within the text – and are sometimes speculated about using that thing that many literary biographers do, the works themselves. How much can – and do – they tell us about the person who held the pen?

Many writers say they begin their project with a question. In Trinca’s case, the framing question seems to have been, Why did Elizabeth Harrower stop writing at the height of her powers? Because, this is indeed what she did. Having written and published four well-received novels – Down in the city (1957), The long prospect (1958, my review), The Catherine wheel (1960), and The watchtower (1966) – she withdrew her fifth completed novel, In certain circles (my review), from publication in 1971, and never published a novel again, despite many encouragements from her friends including Patrick White and Christina Stead. She wrote a few short stories, but gave up writing altogether by the end of the 1970s.

From this literary trajectory, Trinca weaves a moving and interesting story about a fascinating woman. Like Madeleine, this is a traditional, chronologically told biography. It is well-documented, using clear but unobtrusive numbers pointing to extensive notes at the end, and there is a decent index.

“I’ve lived dangerously” (Elizabeth Harrower)

I am not going to tell the story of Harrower’s life, because the biography does that. Essentially, she was born in industrial Newcastle in 1928, and lived with her grandmother after her parents divorced, before joining her mother in Sydney. She never got over, it seems, being “a divorced child”. It dislocated her. Her mother remarried, and Trinca suggests that her stepfather was behind men like The watch tower’s Felix Shaw. She lived in London from 1951 to 1959, before returning to Australia, rarely leaving Australia after that. She did not marry, but had an intense, emotional relationship with the older, married Kylie Tennant, which raises questions that Trinca isn’t able answer, though she points to other “crushes” on older women. Do we need to know?

Through Harrower’s life she mixed with some of Australia’s significant people, including writer Patrick White, politician Gough Whitlam, and artist Sid Nolan. She had a long correspondence with Shirley Hazzard (about which I wrote after attending the launch of a book of those letters.) She died in 2020, suffering from Alzheimer’s. (Her life dates closely mirror my own mother’s.)

Now, rather than detailing this life more, I’ll share some of the threads that run through Trinca’s story, as they provide insight into who Harrower was, and what makes her writing, and her persona, so interesting. They also give the biography a narrative drive.

These threads include that aforementioned one regarding why she stopped writing. Another concerns what drove her to write. Trinca writes about an interview Harrower had with broadcaster Michael Cathcart in November 2015:

She reprised a comment she had often used in the past: ‘I always had an alarming and dangerous interest in human nature. And so recently, I think I was answering some questions, and I said that I felt I had urgent messages to deliver. I wanted to tell people things’.

These things are the emotional truths we find in her books. In an interview with Jim Davidson for Meanjin in 1980, she discouraged people from finding her life in her books, saying that the “emotional truth” is there but “none of the facts”:

None of the books are actual accounts by any means. They are less extreme than reality because reality is so unbelievable. Besides which, people can only take so much. You don’t want to frighten them do you, or do you?

This is the “wounded wisdom” that critics like America’s James Wood identified. It’s not surprising, given the life that led to this “wisdom”, that Harrower was wary, guarded, in her dealings with people, which is another thread that runs through the book. Harrower was polite and genuinely interested in people – “she listened with intent” – but always turned questions back on them rather than give herself away. In 1985, she admitted that, in interviews, “my whole intention seemed to be to give nothing away, to disguise myself”.

Which brings me to the final thread I want to mention, the idea of having “lived dangerously”. Several times through the biography, Trinca refers to Harrower’s saying that she had lived dangerously, but what did she mean? It seems she meant something psychological, metaphysical even. In 2012, she said to Trinca:

In my own mind I have lived dangerously, dangerously in the sense of finding out more and more about human nature. … At this age, you are aware of some very contrary and dangerous things you have done with your life as if you were going to be immortal. This is the irritating thing, now it is dawning on me that I am not immortal.

She said something similar in 1985, “I consider that in my life I’ve lived dangerously, and I haven’t lived a self-protective sort of life”.

“To have lived dangerously”, writes Trinca near the end of her book, “was a badge of honour for Elizabeth”. I read this as Harrower believing that, for all her wariness, she had let herself be open to life and its difficult emotional challenges.

What it actually means probably doesn’t greatly matter, despite Trinca’s “looking”. Nor do the gaps. What matters is the body of work she left, however she lived her life. It’s beautiful, unforgettable, precious, and Trinca tells that story so well.

I now look forward to Susan Wyndham’s biography which is due out soon. How will she fill in the gaps? Will she delve more into Harrower’s political leanings, and what conclusions will she draw about Harrower, who she was and why she wrote what she did?

Helen Trinca
Looking for Elizabeth: The life of Elizabeth Harrower
Collingwood: La Trobe University Press, 2025
309pp.
ISBN: 9781760645755

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