TBR reading

Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart (Review)

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Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart

First edition, from Heinemann (via Wikipedia)

At last I’ve read that classic of African literature, China Achebe’s Things fall apart. It all came about because this year ABC RN’s classics book club is doing Africa. As I’ve been wanting to read this book for a long time, and as my reading group has been making a practice of choosing one ABC RN bookclub book a year, I recommended Things fall apart and – woohoo – they agreed. I am so happy! OK, so I’m easily pleased, but …

The funny thing is that as I started it, I did wonder what all the acclaim was about. Yes, I was finding the writing gorgeous, and yes, I found all the detail about life in the little Igbo village of Umuofia fascinating, but were these enough for its huge reputation? Then, I got to Part 2 – this is a classic three-part book – and the arrival of white man and the missionaries in southeastern Nigeria. The plot started to thicken – but, not just the plot. The whole gorgeous structure of the novel, its complexity and its sophisticated analysis of human society and the colonial imperative started to become clear.

Here, though, is my challenge – a challenge faced by all bloggers writing about much-analysed classics – what can I add? I haven’t actually read any of the analysis, except for my edition’s introduction, so I risk either going over the same old ground, or heading off on a completely irrelevant tangent, but I’m going to try. And how I’m going to try is to talk about a few of the aspects of the book that stood out to me, which, as is my wont, will focus more on how it is written than with the story itself.

However, I will start with a brief synopsis of the story, just in case there are others out there who haven’t read it. The plot is fairly simple: it tells the story of Okonkwo. Born to an “ill-fated”, “lazy and improvident” man, he decided early in life that he would not be like his father. He becomes a powerful and respected “warrior” in his community, one known to be hardworking but who could also be cruel to his family or to anyone who showed weakness. He is determined to be a “man”, to never show a “female” side. Male-female dichotomies are, in fact, an underlying thread in the novel. Whenever things go wrong for him, his response is always aggressive: if you aren’t confronting a situation head on, you are a “woman”. This inflexibility, his unwillingness to waver from his tough-minded course, results in his downfall. He could be seen I think as a classic tragic hero, as the man who could have been great but for a tragic flaw, an inability to be flexible, an unwillingness to marry his two sides.

This idea of two parts is fundamental to how the novel is structured and how the themes are developed – and Achebe conveys it through dichotomies and parallels. There’s the male-female one, which Okonkwo battles within himself. “When did you become a shivering old woman” he asks himself regarding the distress he feels after engaging in a violent act. Later, he is surprised to hear of a husband who consulted his wife before doing anything:

 ‘I thought he was a strong man in his youth.’ ‘He was indeed,’ said Ofoedu. Okonkwo shook his head doubtfully.

But there are other dichotomies, and two, in particular, that I found interesting. One is between  Okonkwo and his friend Obierika. Both are respected men in the village, and both adhere to their traditions and conventions, but Okonkwo, who is “not a man of thought but of action” is so fearful of appearing weak he follows the “laws” rigidly. Obierika on the other hand is more thoughtful:

Obierika was a man who thought about things. When the will of the goddess had been done, he sat down in his obi and mourned his friend’s calamity. Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offence he had committed inadvertently? But although he thought for a long time he found no answer. He was merely led into greater complexities. He remembered his wife’s twin children, whom he had thrown away. What crime had they committed?

A similar dichotomy is set up between two missionaries:

Mr Brown’s successor was the Reverend James Smith, and he was a different kind of man. He condemned openly Mr Brown’s policy of compromise and accommodation. He saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness.

So, we have dichotomies established within the two cultures he’s describing – the African and colonial/missionary – but these two sets of dichotomies also work as parallels for each other, reflecting the differences, the conflicts in fact, that can occur within both (all) cultures.

Now I get to more uncomfortable ideas. Okonkwo’s tragedy could be seen to mirror Africa’s, but this is a tricky thing to consider. Okonkwo’s flaw we know. Did Africa, likewise, have a flaw or weakness? We criticise colonialism – and surely it is a bad thing, the subjugation of one people by another, the taking of one people’s land by another – and yet … Achebe himself benefited from the education brought by the missionaries, and in Things fall apart he tells us that some Igbo villagers saw positives:

The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuofia.

Some even saw positives in the religion.

So, Achebe is not uncritical of either side of the colonial equation – the colonisers and the colonised – but his final point in the novel makes clear his attitude to the colonial project. In the last paragraph we learn that District Commissioner plans to write a book. Its title, “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger”, euphemistically describes the colonisers’ mostly violent/aggressive subjugation of African people as “pacification” and demonstrates an arrogant assumption that a society not like their own is “primitive”. For Achebe, then, the overriding point of Things fall apart is not so much to present the positives and negatives within the two opposing cultures, but to expose the disdain with which the colonisers treated African people, and the way they denigrated African culture.

This is such an honest and provocative book, one that would bear multiple re-readings – like all good classics. Have you read it?

Chinua Achebe
Things fall apart
London: Penguin Classics, 2001 (orig. pub. 1958)
ISBN (e-book): 9780141393964

Dymphna Cusack, Jungfrau (Review)

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Dymphna Cusack, Jungfrau

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Are there some historical periods that particularly fascinate you? There are for me, and one of those is that between the two world wars. It was a complex time encompassing both economic hardship and great social change. A time when many of those Victorian era constraints were being lifted and women, in particular, were starting to enjoy an independence and freedom they hadn’t had before the First World War. Dymphna Cusack’s first novel, Jungfrau, is set in this period and deals with this very subject.

I have written about Cusack before, when I reviewed A window in the dark, her memoir about her time as a teacher. Because of its relevance to this novel, I’ll reiterate a couple of the points I made in that review. Cusack, I wrote, had a finely honed moral and social conscience, and was acutely aware of injustice. She was convinced of the “wickedness of our economic system”, and abhorred the power those with money had over others. She was consequently outspoken on social and economic justice issues, and was particularly critical of the treatment of “that much-maligned creature, the woman teacher”. A window in the dark was written forty years after Jungfrau, and is a memoir, but you can see the genesis of her values and ideas in this, her first novel.

Jungfrau is set in Sydney over a few months in the 1930s. It concerns three young women in their mid to late twenties: the rational, realistic and religious Eve, the emotional, dreamy and vulnerable Thea, and the modern, pragmatic, confident Marc. Eve and Thea have been good friends for several years. Marc is Thea’s friend, but Eve and the free-thinking Marc do not like or understand each other. At the novel’s opening, Eve and Thea are talking about Thea’s interest in a man twice her age, a married university professor. Eve cautions Thea about the risks, but Thea is ready “to take life—use it—now, instead of letting it use me”. Eve gently retorts that “If you leave yourself open to the world, it will rush in on you”.

Indeed, Eve, who has seen first hand in her maternity ward the results of poor, single women taking life, suggests that experiencing life “is much safer in books”. She says to Thea:

When you talk about getting in touch with reality and finding out what life is, all you really mean is following your instincts in spite of the consequence … Only, if you take your friend Marc’s prattling literally, I’d advise you to learn more about physiology than you know at this moment. You can’t safely combine what your modern friends rather euphemistically call ‘experience’ with a degree of ignorance that’s almost mid-Victorian. You’ll need to be practical if you’re going to be a realist. Marc’s evidently both.

The novel, as you’ve probably guessed by now if the title hadn’t given it away, explores what happens when Thea does not heed Eve’s advice and lets this relationship develop. I’d call this a coming-of-age novel but, having been written by Cusack, its themes are as much social as psychological. What did it mean for a woman at that time to have an affair with a married man, and what were her options with the – hmm – consequences?

The trouble is that while obstetrician Eve and social worker Marc are daily faced with the grim realities of life, teacher Thea evades them. Here’s Eve on her ward rounds,

All this rot about reality, this frenzied escape into abstractions, had curiously little to do with life as she knew it. … Here was reality. Tortured bodies, tired minds, birth and death. Nothing vague about this; no escaping from facts; no sheltering behind fancies.

Acerbic Marc has her own view on woman’s lot:

Women are cursed, all right. If you wither on the virgin stem you go all pathological; if you go off the deep end you get some foul disease; and if you marry and have dozens of young you die of exhaustion.

By contrast, here is Thea discussing the real Jungfrau with her professor:

“Yes,” he said almost inaudibly, “white, proud and untouched. But they’ve built a funicular almost to the top of it now, and the tourists swarm all over it like flies.”

“Poor thing! I don’t mind climbers and mountaineers; but it must hate the tourists soiling it—”

“That is usually the fate of the proud and the untouched,” he said, digging his stick in the turf, and she recoiled as though struck, her hands flung out in a gesture of defence.

Oh dear, we readers think – and so would Eve and Marc if they’d heard this conversation. Their lot, though, is to love Thea and to watch in dismay as she takes life to an edge that she is not fit to handle.

The critical thing about this book is that Cusack doesn’t judge these three women for their choices. We might find Marc a more sympathetic, more appealing personality, of the three, but Cusack is even-handed. She understands human psychology and empathises with women. Her ire is focused more on society’s expectations and rules than on any one woman’s decision or behaviour. I described this novel earlier in my review as a coming-of-age novel, but it could equally be called a novel of ideas. In it Cusack exposes “the reckless squandering of human possibilities”, of lives “anaesthetised by half-baked education, political platitudes and doles”. Economic inequities, abortion, women’s independence, and the meaning of freedom are her targets.

I read this book as part of my long-term plan to read classic Australian literature – and I enjoyed it immensely. While the social milieu is very different from now – thank heavens – the emotional truths transcend the particulars of time and place. The language did feel a little overblown at times. It has that DH Lawrence sort of emotional intensity that can sometimes be a little too melodramatic, or declamatory, for my 21st century ears. And yet, paradoxically, one of the novel’s real pleasures came from its descriptions of Sydney. Cusack catches the landscape – the plants, the light, the water – beautifully (but I’ll save sharing a couple of those for a Delicious Descriptions post).

I imagine this was a confronting novel at the time of publication, but I hope it got people thinking, as Cusack surely intended. Cusack, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Miles Franklin, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, to name the best known from that era, were fierce and intelligent writers. We are lucky to have them.

awwchallenge2015Dymphna Cusack
Jungfrau
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012 (Orig. ed. 1936)
ISBN: 9781743431450 (ebook)

Note: I do need to have a little whinge. There were several errors/typos in my kindle edition, which is disappointing and did spoil the read a little.

Tara June Winch, Swallow the air (Review for Indigenous Literature Week)

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Tara June Winch

Tara June Winch (Courtesy: Friend of subject, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Tara June Winch’s Swallow the air is another book that has been languishing too long on my TBR pile, though not as long as Sara Dowse’s Schemetime. For Swallow the air, it was a case of third time lucky, because this was the third year I planned to read it for ANZLitLovers Indigenous Literature Week. Like the proverbial boomerang, it kept coming back, saying “pick me!” Finally, I did.

Winner of the 2004 David Unaipon Award for unpublished indigenous writers, Swallow the air made quite a splash when it was published in 2006, winning or being shortlisted for many of Australia’s major literary awards. (See Tara June Winch’s Wikipedia entry). I believe Winch is working on another novel, but it hasn’t appeared yet.

Now, though, to the book. The first thing to confront the reader is its form. It looks and even reads a little like a collection of short stories*, but it can be read as a novella. There is a narrative trajectory that takes us from the devastating death of narrator May Gibson’s mother, when May was around 9 years old, to when she’s around 15 years old and has made some sense of her self, her past, her people. May’s mother is Wiradjuri, her father English. At the novel’s opening, she is living in coastal Wollongong, which is not her mother’s country, in a single-parent household with her mother and her brother, Billy, who has a different and indigenous father. Absent fathers are, I should say, disproportionately common in indigenous families.

In fact, one of the impressive things about this debut novel is how subtly, but clearly, Winch weaves through it many of the issues facing indigenous people and communities. Poverty, loss of connection to country, the stolen generations, mining and land rights, alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, rape, child abuse by the church, imprisonment and the tent embassy are among the concerns she touches on during May’s journey. Listing them here makes it sound like a political “ideas” novel but, while Swallow the air is “political” in the way that most indigenous writing can’t help but be, its centre is a searching heart, for May has been cast adrift by the suicide of her mother. Life, which was tenuous anyhow, becomes impossible to hold together as her brother and aunt, both loving, struggle with their own pain.

This is where I become a little uncomfortable as a non-indigenous person making a generalisation about indigenous literature, but I’m going to do it anyhow, because I think I’m on firm ground. I’m talking about story-telling and what I understand to be its intrinsic role in indigenous culture. It imparts – or can do – a different flavour to the writing. Marie Munkara’s David Unaipon Award winning Every secret thing (my review) has some similarities in form to Swallow the air, and covers some similar thematic territory, but is very different in tone. Munkara’s novel also presents as a bunch of stories, with a uniting narrative thread. Swallow the air is more subtle, but nonetheless it’s the idea of stories that underpins the narrative.

What particularly impressed me about Winch’s writing is the way she manages tone and structures her story. She understands the Shakespearean imperative to offer some light after dark. For example, there’s a lovely little chapter/story called “Wantok” about family closeness which occurs after a story about a difficult work experience. In another situation, with just one word at the end of a story (“Mission”) – “Seemed [my emphasis] all so perfect, so right” – she prepares us for the opposite in the next (“Country”).

This flow – with shifts in tone that are sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic, and with a narrative that is mostly linear but with the occasional flashback – kept me reading and engaged until the end. As did the writing itself. It’s deliciously poetic. Sometimes it is tight and spare, as in:

I do not cry, my eyes are hardened, like honey-comb, like toffee. Brittle, crumbling sugar. He puts his hand out toward me; we shake hands, a pact that I won’t be here digging up his past when he gets back.

And I’m not.

And in this description of life in the city: “Suits and handbags begin to fill the emptiness of the morning”. Other times it is gorgeously lyrical (a review buzz word, I know, but sometimes there’s no other word):

The river sleeps, nascent of limpid green, tree bones of spirit people, arms stretched out and screaming. And at their fingertips claws of blue bonnets, sulphur-crested cockatoos and the erratic dips and weaves of wild galahs, grapefruit pink and ghost grey splash the sky.

But back now to the story. As May makes her journey, we meet many characters – her brother, aunt, women like Joyce who care for her but also know when to push her on, men with whom she hitchhikes, to name a few. None of these characters are developed to any degree, but we learn what we need to know about them by how they relate to May. Most are kind, generous, nurturing. May’s journey, in other words, is not challenged so much by human barriers, but by emotional, social, political and historical ones. It is a generous thing that when she starts to understand her place, it’s an inclusive understanding, one that encompasses all of us who occupy this land:

And it all makes sense to me now. Issy’s drawing in the sand, boundaries between the land and the water, us, we come from the sky and the earth and we go back to the sky and the earth. This land is belonging, all of it for all of us.

However, while May comes to a better understanding of the land and her relationship to it, there is no easy resolution to the ongoing struggle of living in a place in which there is still “a big missing hole” created by the loss of connection to culture. It will take a long time to refill that hole, if indeed it can be done, but books like this will help communicate just what it means, and how it feels, to be so disconnected.

awwchallenge2014Tara June Winch
Swallow the air
St Lucia: UQP, 2006
198pp.
ISBN: 9780702235214

* One chapter/story, “Cloud busting” was published in Best Australian Stories 2005.

Sara Dowse, Schemetime (Review)

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Sara Dowse SchemetimeWhat Sara Dowse didn’t know when she recently commented here on her love-hate relationship with Los Angeles was that I was in the closing stages of reading her novel, Schemetime, set there. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I’ve had this novel since Christmas 1990 when I was living in the LA area (in adjoining Orange County, in fact). For some reason, I didn’t read the book then, and it has been sitting on my TBR pile ever since, along with several other novels by Aussie writers from the 1980s and early 1990s.

It was interesting to read a book in 2014 that was published in 1990 but set mostly in the late 1960s. This is not a unique situation of course, but most books in my TBR pile are set around the time they were written. Why then was this one set a couple of decades before it was written, making it a “bit” historical, but not really? I think it’s because the late 1960s was an exciting time, politically and socially. It was the time of the anti-Vietnam War movement, a time when high ideals were being vigorously tested against commercial imperatives. Where better to set such a novel than in LA – using the film industry as a framework?

Early in the novel, Dowse establishes this tension through her description of place:

California the golden, Eden re-entered. People pretend they are children. They revel in the heat and the sunshine. But they are fretful. Do they deserve this? The question nags. So there is always, underlying the play, the fear of catastrophe. For a paradise, it has known its fair share. Earthquakes make dogs howl and plateglass shatter and bricks spill from walls, and the fires that sweep through the hills and down the canyons have consumed the grandest of estates. Coyotes live in those hills …

I love this prose – so crisp, so clear, so evocative, and yet so provocative too.

But now to the plot. Schemetime concerns an Australian filmmaker, Frank, who comes to LA wanting to make a career in the film industry, a quality career, though, on his terms. Through him we meet a varied cast of characters: refugee film director Mannheim who wants to make artistic films but needs to make commercials and B-grade movies to survive; Frank’s old flame Susan, a physiotherapist and anti-war campaigner, who leaves her Aussie husband for Nathan; this Nathan, a lawyer conflicted about money and his ideals; the black singer-actress, Paula, with her precarious career; and sundry others. We watch Frank as he enlists these characters to help him, practically, artistically or financially, achieve his goal of making a film about his somewhat mysterious father.

This is not a plot driven novel, however. It is about LA, but more than that, it is about characters searching for, well, meaning. This may sound clichéd, but isn’t it what most of us seek? What makes this novel not clichéd is the style and structure Dowse puts to her task. Often when we describe a novel as reading like a film script, we are suggesting, usually a little dismissively, that the author has written it with a movie deal in mind. But, when I say Dowse’s book reads like a film script, I am implying something very different. I am implying a complex picture comprising multiple little scenes, that sometimes flow and sometimes jolt us along with sudden changes in perspective, much like a camera can, particularly in an experimental movie. In fact, particularly given its time, I’d say this novel is innovative (or experimental) in structure and narrative point-of-view, in the way it moves between first person narration by Frank, and the third-person subjective perspectives of the main characters. It is, though, highly readable because the language is accessible. The syntax is flexible and the imagery expressive, but they are both comprehensible.

If it’s not plot-driven, then, what does drive it? Several things really. The characters’ relationships with each other, for one. An exploration of the meaning of art, for another. And dreams, the dreams and passions that drive us. Much of the novel concerns Frank’s filmmaking venture with Mannheim and Paula. There are lengthy discussions about the 1931 film Tabu, made by Murnau and Flaherty. It was a production mired in conflict between two, if I understand correctly, competing perspectives – Murnau’s focus on aesthetic “truths” and Flaherty’s on those coming from social or political realities. Dowse seems to be suggesting that “art” is (perhaps even should be) a constant struggle between these two imperatives. In Tabu, Mannheim argues, Murnau’s

craft and artifice triumphed. But there is enough of the real to make us believe …

There’s another reason why Dowse seems to have chosen Tabu to discuss, and this is its setting, the Pacific. The Pacific is the link between her two lives – her American birth and her adopted Australian home. Its nature is paradoxical, representing different things to different people: to Mannheim, “nothing in the Pacific is quite as real” as Europe;  to Susan it is both escape and barrier, “the way to freedom and then the highest wall”. One of my favourite scenes occurs when Frank, Paula and Nathan do a beach-crawl along the LA coast looking for the perfect Australian-looking beach! Various stories and images of the Pacific appear throughout the novel, making it, perhaps, her “poem to the Pacific” like Murnau’s Tabu.

Schemetime is a novel of grand conception. Even the title with its hints of schemes, screens and dreams suggests that. I’m not sure I’ve fully grasped all that Dowse intended, and I certainly haven’t touched on all that she raises in this book about “money and love and culture”. I haven’t explored, for example, the rise and fall of Nathan as a hotshot lawyer-investor or the conflicted restlessness of his second wife Susan or the survival skills of first wife Estelle or even the discussions about artists in exile.

“The camera”, Mannheim lectures early in the novel, “is no golem … it sees things you cannot imagine”. And so, we find, does Dowse’s pen. Schemetime is a fine read – and one that is as relevant today as it was when it was written, perhaps even moreso.

awwchallenge2014Sara Dowse
Schemetime
Ringwood: Penguin, 1990
295pp.
ISBN: 9780140080742

Wallace Stegner, Crossing to safety (Review)

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StegnerCrossingPenguinNearly two decades ago, I read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of repose. I loved it. Indeed, for many years I had the following quote from it on my work whiteboard: “Civilisations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations”. Not just civilisations, I thought, but marriages, teams, organisations. I like the way this man thinks. And so, when someone suggested my reading group do his last novel, Crossing to safety, I jumped at the chance. At last I could read that copy languishing on my TBR.

The tricky thing about discussing Crossing to safety is that it’s about many things – big ones like life, friendship, love, order versus chaos, and the nature of art (in its wider meaning), as well as more specific ones like academia and east-versus-west (in the US). I can only tackle a few of them in this post so will pick those, of course, that speak most to my enthusiasms. First, though, the plot.

Crossing to safety chronicles the 35-year friendship (amicitia) between two couples, which started in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1937. Charity and Sid Lang are a well-to-do couple, with two children, from the east, while Larry (who narrates the story) and Sally Morgan are a far poorer couple from the west. Both women are pregnant when the couples meet, and both men are working, on contract, in the English department of the university. The novel, though, doesn’t start with their meeting. It starts 35 years later, in 1972. Larry and Sally have been summoned, some 8 years after their last visit, to the Langs’ summer compound in Vermont, “the place where during the best times of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters”. Pretty soon we realise things are somewhat awry. Charity is “at death’s door”, hence the summons. We also learn that Sally is disabled, though since when we don’t know.

The story, then, is being told from 1972. Our narrator, Larry, is aware that:

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half-invention, and right now I realise that there is much about Sid and Charity Lang that I either invented or got secondhand.

This, together with the fact that Larry frequently comments and reflects on life, memory and art, gives the book a complexity without detracting from its being an engaging story about interesting people. Interesting? Did I say interesting?

This is not an adventure story (Larry, early in the novel)

One of the themes of the novel concerns the nature of art. Larry is a writer, so it’s not surprising that he’s interested in the creation and meaning of art. There are several discussions between the characters, as well as comments by the narrator, on the subject.

Around two-thirds through the novel Sid and Charity’s daughter Hallie asks Larry to write a novel about them. Larry demurs, pondering after the discussion:

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish?

We are reminded of this a little later in the novel when the four, with their children off their hands, spend a sabbatical year in Italy, lapping up art and culture. Most people, they consider, have read Milton’s Paradise lost, but how many have read Paradise regained? Can art, they wonder, only be about “sin and suffering … the most universal human experiences”? Charity, naturally, dissents, arguing that “of course you could make great art out of happiness and goodness”. She argues that artists (including writers) found it “easier to get attention with demonstrations of treachery, malice, death, violence” but “art ought to set standards and provide models”.

This is pretty much what Stegner has done – not by creating boring paragons but by presenting characters who “made mistakes” but who “never tripped anyone up to gain an advantage”. Instead, they “jogged and panted it out the whole way”. In doing so, he explores what determines a worthy, or even just meaningful, life.

Order is the dream of man (Larry, quoting Henry Adams)

Early in the novel, Larry quotes historian Adams’ statement that “Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man”. This is, I think, one of the major themes of the novel. It’s not for nothing that Charity is established as the supreme organiser. She has absolute faith – one that is never dimmed by evidence to the contrary – that “if you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, made it happen”. Time and again, though, Larry shows that

… you can plan all you want to … but within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe yourself fine.

And so, illness happens, jobs are lost, wars start – and the dream of man comes asunder. We could call this fate, and at times Larry does, but I think, really, Stegner is more realist than fatalist. He, through Larry, recognises “the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man” but this is no breast-beating “woe-is-me” novel.

de Amicitia (Cicero, alluded to by Larry)

I don’t want to end on heaviness, so let’s get to the unifying theme, or idea, of the novel – friendship. It’s a friendship built on immense generosity – of spirit and of means. Charity and Sid welcome Sally and Larry into their heart and home. They are generous when Larry has early writing successes “where smaller spirits might let envy corrode liking”. They provide financial support (paid back, later, though not demanded) when polio strikes Sally. In return, Larry points Sid towards a job when Sid’s career flounders. And so on … all that you’d expect in a real friendship, in other words.

This is not to say it’s all smooth sailing. There are tensions, a serpent in Eden to use Larry’s metaphor. They are mainly caused by Charity’s unfulfilled ambitions for Sid and her over-organising nature that results, at times, in “a clash of temperament or will” that she always wins. Stegner writes some powerful scenes that, while not high drama in the big scheme of things, glue us readers to the spot. There is “painful ambiguity” in this friendship but it is underpinned by “uncomplicated love”. If you believe that’s possible, as I do, you will love this book.

How valid is the commission?

This is an unusual review for me because I’ve barely touched on aspects like the style and the structure. Both are interesting and deserve attention, but my patience with myself is running out! Early in the novel, Sid asks Larry about “that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write”. Are they “reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what” and “who appoints them?” They appoint themselves, they agree, but if so “how valid is the commission?” Good question. All I can say is that I’m glad Stegner appointed himself because he is one thoughtful, engaging writer.

Wallace Stegner
Crossing to safety
New York: Penguin Books, 1988
341pp
ISBN: 9780140133486

Jessica Anderson, One of the wattle birds (Review)

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I have finally read Jessica Anderson’s final novel, One of the wattle birds, which has been sitting in my beside cabinet since my parents gave it to me in 1998! Never let it be said that I don’t read books given to me – though, on reflection, I’d prefer you didn’t hold me to that! I have many many books in my TBR pile and most of them are not in the bedside cabinet. For a start, they wouldn’t fit. Anderson, though, has stayed there because she really was high priority, as I do like her. What finally prompted me to read this novel was Lisa Hill (ANZLitLovers) who recently reviewed Anderson’s penultimate novel, Taking shelter. She suggested that we swap books, when I’d read mine. When I suggested that it might take me some time, she sneakily said, “I’ll send mine up to you and then you will feel guilty if you don’t do it.” That was mean, don’t you think?

And so, being the responsible person that I am, I read One of the wattle birds and am glad of that little nudge (but don’t tell Lisa!). It is a deceptively simple book. When I started reading it, I wondered whether I was really interested in the first-person story of a 19-year-old female university student and her boyfriend. I thought I knew what it would be about, but how wrong I was. Set in Sydney, it describes three days in the life of the narrator, Cecily Ambruss, the only child of a single-parent family. Cecily’s mother, we discover, had died of breast cancer the previous year while Cecily was overseas with her boyfriend, Wil, and two other couples. Not surprisingly, Cecily is grieving deeply. Her grief is not helped by her inability to understand two things: why did her mother let her go overseas without telling her about the terminal illness and, what’s more, refuse to let her be called back, even for the funeral; and why did her (unmarried) mother stipulate that Cec must marry before she can inherit. Interesting, n’est-ce pas?

Red Wattlebird (Photo: JJ Harrison, using CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia)

Red Wattlebird (Photo: JJ Harrison, using CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia)

The three days over which the story takes place happen to be part of stu-vac, but while Wil – good, decent, conscientious law-student Wil – is taking his study seriously, arts student Cec is distracted. She cannot get her questions out of her mind. She has given up bothering Wil about them as he’s tired of her talking about her mother. And yet, grief is like that, particularly grief after unexpected deaths. You talk and mull, and mull and talk, over and over and over.

This brings me to the birds. There is, of course, the wattle bird. Cec calls it the DOIK*, for its sound, or “no-comment bird”, because it seems to be drowned out by other birds, reflecting, presumably, Cec’s feeling of inconsequence.  In another reference to birds, Cec says :

I feel like one of those raggedy birds you see trying to feed their remorseless young. And among the gaping beaks, that one gapes widest. And among the chorus of cheeps, that one cheeps loudest.

The beaks and cheeps are the insistent questions that the bird tries to quieten with answers she’s gathered from others, such as her mother’s friends, her uncle and aunt, and even her counsellor. But they don’t satisfy, so she keeps searching – and eventually comes to her father, a man who had professed to have no interest in her and whom, therefore, she had long ago decided she didn’t want to meet.

Alongside this search for answers, Cec does do the occasional study – and what she’s studying is Malory’s story of King Arthur which is, appropriately enough, a quest story. But, it raises other issues for Cec too, such as how much magic versus Arthur’s “own hands” played in his achievements. I suspect this has something to do with Cec learning that not everything has a clear, logical answer.

While all this is interesting, much of the delight in reading the novel comes from the interactions between characters. They are, generally, exquisite. The often prickly Cec has wonderful exchanges, for example, with her Aunt-by-marriage Gail, her Gran, and her father who tries his best to help her see where her mother may have been coming from. These characters aren’t paragons, but neither are they malign. They are, simply, human. My only quibble with Anderson’s characterisation is that Cec and her friends – all around 19 years old I assume – seem at times a little improbable. How many 19-year-olds – particularly university students – talk about mortgages and the like?

Anyhow, by now you must be wondering about Cec’s mother. Without spoiling anything, there’s nothing to suggest they had a difficult relationship – and the answers to Cec’s questions are probably pretty mundane. The point of the novel is, in other words, not so much Cec’s relationship with her mother but her coming to terms with her grief, her identity, and her relationship with Wil.

This novel is not easily categorised. Part quest, part comedy-of-manners, part family drama, it has some laugh out-loud moments as well as reflective ones. It explores many of the themes common to Anderson’s work. One is money and power. Cec’s family has money – “fruit and veg have been good for us” – and money is used both subtly and not so, as a means of control. Another is deceit and concealment. As the novel progresses, Cec starts to tell Will less and less. At first she justifies it because it’s all too complicated to explain – and he does tend to brush her emotional concerns off –  but, by the third day, there are many things she doesn’t tell him. “I foresee no end to the things I won’t tell Wil”, she says. And another, as the surprising last paragraph makes clear, has to do with the act of creation or, perhaps more correctly, with living life creatively.

One of the wattle birds is a tight, cleverly conceived “concoction” that makes, I’d say, a fitting conclusion to Anderson’s literary life. Has anyone else read it?

Jessica Anderson
One of the wattle birds
Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1994
Cover design: Joanna Hunt
192pp.
ISBN: 9780140240320

*A not very tuneful bird. We have a resident Red Wattlebird in the tree outside our bedroom. It squawks us awake every morning.

Dymphna Cusack, A window in the dark (Review)

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Dymphna Cusack‘s A window in the dark has been glaring at me from my TBR pile for many years now. Not being able to stand it any longer, I decided to sneak it in before my next reading group book, Michelle de Kretser‘s Questions of travel. Posthumously published by the National Library of Australia, A window in the dark is Cusack’s chronicle of her teaching years, spanning 1922 to 1943.

For those who haven’t heard of her, Dymphna Cusack (1902-1981) is an Australian writer best known for her collaborative novel (with Florence James), Come in spinner (1951), and Caddie, the story of a barmaid (1953), which was made into a successful feature film in 1976. According to Debra Adelaide‘s comprehensive introduction, Cusack was not interested in writing her autobiography but, in the mid-1970s, three decades after she finished teaching, she decided to write about this part of her life. While much has changed since 1975/6 when she wrote it (let alone 1944 where the story ends), A window in the dark – “my job was opening a window in the dark for the minds entrusted me” – is an interesting read. It is not, though, a typical writer’s memoir; its focus really is teaching and education.

The book is well produced with an excellent introduction and explanation of its genesis by Debra Adelaide (though I would have loved an index). It was prepared from the version included with her papers held by the National Library of Australia. This version is probably the final draft, but Adelaide believes that Cusack would have done more work on it, had it found a publisher. Certainly, it does have some rough edges, but not enough to spoil the content nor to prevent our getting some sense of Cusack as a person, as a writer, and of course as a teacher.

Cusack tells the story of her years as a teacher chronologically, starting with university and her decision to accept a bonded Teachers College Scholarship. However, a number of themes run through the book and I’m going to frame the rest of this post through some of them.

Format: Photograph Notes: Dymphna Cusack (1902...“The sum total of my years of teaching in Broken Hill and Goulburn was the conviction that the high school curriculum was insane”

Cusack decided very early in her career that the curriculum she was required to teach was unsuitable for all but the minority who planned to go on to university. She rails, in particular, against the teaching of ancient languages (Latin) and against the focus on British history and English (as in from England) literature (both only to the end of the nineteenth century, what’s more). She criticises educational practice which relied heavily on examinations and argues against dependence on IQ assessment for identifying capable students. She is disgusted by corporal punishment. She does become a bit repetitive, as she moves from school to school, but that simply reinforces her passion for relevant education and humane methods. Being personally interested in local and contemporary history, she’s distressed that students weren’t taught about their own places. Students in Broken Hill were taught nothing about that city’s origins, nor its geology and botany. Students in Parkes learnt nothing about William Farrer and his pioneering work with wheat. And so on … Students learnt, well, I’ll let her tell you:

It was the same in every country town I lived in. An essential part of our history was ignored, whether massacres of whites by blacks or blacks by whites, while we got bogged down in the Hundred Years’ War or the Thirty Years’ War or the Seven Years’ War – all taught with no reference whatever to the basic economic causes underlying them.

She was happiest when, for various reasons, she was given non-examination classes to teach. Then she could teach what she thought was useful. A playwright herself, she was renowned for her drama classes, and the school plays she produced.

“I look so middle-class; it’s my nose”

Despite her ongoing frustrations (not to mention chronic health issues), she had, you can see from this quote, a sense of humour. Cusack belonged to that wonderful cohort of left-leaning writers in early to mid-twentieth century Australia, a cohort which included Miles Franklin (with whom she collaborated on books), Flora Eldershaw and Frank Dalby Davison.  She had a finely honed moral and social conscience, and was acutely aware of injustice. She was not above using her “middle-class” look to get a hearing on issues important to her. She was distressed that Australia, which, by the 1850s was

politically and socially the most advanced country in the world … should by the middle twenties be bogged down into a morass of social and sectarian bigotry and educational conservatism.

Cusack became convinced of the “wickedness of our economic system”, which could not fund milk for children of unemployed parents but could, somehow, find the “money for everything for war”. She abhorred the power those with money had over others. She became unpopular with the Department of Education for her outspokenness on social and economic justice issues, and was particularly critical of the treatment of “that much-maligned creature, the woman teacher”.

“What we want is the warmth, the humanity, the feeling for Newcastle that is inherent in everything you write about …”

So said BHP’s Newcastle manager Keith Butler to Cusack in 1943 as he offered to pay for a novel about Newcastle and the steelworks. Not surprisingly, Cusack would have none of it. She did, however, write her novel, titled Southern steel (1953), and it was, apparently, a positive portrayal. Cusack wrote throughout her teaching career – mostly plays, many of which were performed on the ABC but only some of which have ever been published. She tackled tricky-for-her-times issues such as racism, workers conditions’ and war. Her second novel, Jungfrau (1936), which explored young women, their sexuality and abortion, was runner-up in the Bulletin’s S. H. Prior memorial prize. It was shocking for its time.

“… I found in my teaching life teachers are sublime optimists – why, I never knew.”

And yet, she must have known, for she stuck to teaching through years of ill-health and poor treatment by those in power. She did it, partly of course to support herself, but partly too because she loved her students. She was still receiving thankyou letters from them in her last years. That surely says something.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeWhy, though, read a book written in the mid-1970s about education in the 1920s-40s? It is not, after all, a memoir, so there are gaps in the story of her life – particularly in terms of her significant relationships. And while she mentions some of the plays and novels she wrote during the time, she does this mostly in relation to something happening in her teaching life. Moreover, it’s not particularly interesting in terms of form. That is, she doesn’t play, as some writers do when writing non-fiction, with narrative style or voice or perspective. Yet, there are reasons for reading it. It works as social history and a history of education. It provides insight into the development of her political philosophy and social values. It shows off her skills as a writer, particularly her ability to evoke people and place. And, for all its seriousness, it contains many entertaining anecdotes.

I’m so glad I finally read what turned out to be a fascinating book about (and by) a compassionate, funny and feisty woman whose intelligence is displayed on every page. Would that every child had teachers like this.

Dymphna Cusack
A window in the dark
Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1991
175pp.
ISBN: 9780642105141

Elizabeth Jolley, Diary of a weekend farmer

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Elizabeth Jolley's Diary of a weekend farmer

Bookcover (Image courtesy Fremantle Arts Centre Press)

I took 2 valium and went to bed early (Monday 12th October, 1970)

Elizabeth Jolley’s Diary of a weekend farmer is one quirky memoir (if you can call it that). And yet it is, really, exactly what you might expect from a writer who rarely wrote the expected!

It is a slim volume – illustrated with warm, shimmery paintings by West Australian artist, Evelyn Kotai. The diary entries were written by Jolley at irregular intervals from 1970 to 1974 (probably), and are accompanied by poems by Jolley, plus the occasional contribution from her husband Leonard and daughter Ruth. Some of the entries are reflective

… being on this piece of land makes me feel very much aware of the shortness of life, I mean our human life in comparison with the land and the big old trees. (from Monday 6th [September, 1971] continued)

while others are factual

Ruth and I tried to plant tomatoes ground too dry and hard. (from 10th November 1970)

As you can see, little care (or perhaps a lot of care – how are we to know?) is taken with punctuation.

Jolley’s trademark wry, or even wicked, comments are in evidence

Next door’s place has been well cleared and conquered I think the word should be … (from 11th November 1970)

There is, in fact, a tiny plot running through the book and it has to do with the “neighbour woman”. She appears regularly as a rather ambiguous presence who doesn’t respect Elizabeth and her city-slicking family, and their farming endeavours, but offers some useful advice at times. Much of this “plot” is carried though a poem (“Neighbour Woman on the Fencing Wire”) which continues in sections throughout the book:

I suppose you didn’t notice last Sunday evening
you left your rake and mattock out …
(from “Continuation from the Fencing Wire”)

This woman is a little thorn in Jolley’s side – always pointing our her failings – and yet at the end, Jolley’s underlying compassion becomes evident as she writes of the “neighbour woman’s death” and her husband’s grief:

… and I understood I was face to face with someone who really loved the neighbour woman and that he would never get over something that is brushed aside in the word bereavement. (from No date required)

But, what this little volume particularly shows is her love of the land – along with her recognition of its challenges. Here’s one example:

Is it an alien place resisting or is it retreating from all our human endeavour. And then the doves fly up glowing in the rising sun and the sound from their wings is like a tiny clapping. (from Monday 25th February, 1973).

There is a very Jolley-esque tension here between an almost mystical beauty and a power that is not always benign.

And here is a reference to gums and their widow-making capability:

The wind moves the trees great branches fall
In the wind or in the stillness
A few feet nearer and I should have been crushed
Into the greater stillness.
(from “Great Branches Fall”)

These diary entries were made before her first book, Five acre virgin, and other stories, was published in 1976, though she’d had individual short  stories published from the 1960s on. When I read memoirs by writers, I look (of course) for references to writing. There is not much here, though. Besides the mention of something her husband said as being “a very good 1st sentence”, the main reference to her writing is this:

I finished the story “Pear Tree Dance” for the BBC, an idyllic ending! The newspaper of Claremont Street contains the grim and sinister side of things. (from 19th August 1971)

She’s right about that. Newspaper is one of my favourites of hers but it is rather grim. It was not published until 1981 … and is about a woman who wanted her own piece of land. I think I’ll leave it here – and let you ponder that idea!

Elizabeth Jolley
Diary of a weekend farmer
South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993
ISBN: 1863680438
95pp

Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts

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Joyce Carol Oates @ The Belmont Library

Creative Commons licensed image by San Mateo County Library via Flickr

If we wanted to be writers we must examine the world with fresh, sceptical eyes.

Beasts is, I’m ashamed to say, my first Joyce Carol Oates. She’s one of those writers who has kept crossing my path but whom I’ve never quite got to read. I bought Beasts a couple of years ago when I saw it on the remainder table of my favourite independent bookshop – and still it took me some time to get to read it, but I’m glad I finally did. I didn’t really know what to expect – and I’m not quite sure what I got – but I nonetheless found it a compelling read that is staying with me.

Take the opening quote, for example. On the surface it makes perfect sense, and yet when we know who says it we see a whole different layer of meaning to it, a layer that doesn’t necessarily remove the fundamental truth but that certainly shows how such a truth can be twisted or, at least, complicated.

The plot concerns a young college student and her obsession with her poetry writing class teacher, Andre Harrow. The novel (novella, in fact) starts some 25 years after the main events of the novel, when our narrator is at the Louvre in Paris and sees a piece of sculpture that reminds her of the work of Harrow’s wife, Dorcas. The sculpture is an earthy totemic piece that is “primitively human” or, in fact, rather beast-like. In this short three page chapter we are introduced to the notion that something not quite right has happened. “It wasn’t burned after all”, the narrator says, and then soon after mentions the horrible deaths some quarter of a century earlier, of “two people I’d loved”. The final sentence of the chapter is:

This is not a confession. You will see, I have nothing to hide.

As soon as you see a statement like that you can be pretty sure you are in the hands of an unreliable narrator, and this is so here – though she’s cleverly disguised and could be taken to be reliable. It’s all a matter of perspective really! The novel is told first person, in flashback, so we do need to be aware that what she is saying may very well be coloured by her knowledge and experience, that what she says she was feeling at the time, may not be quite right. This adds to the complexity of the book. The structure, though, is pretty straightforward. There’s the first chapter in Paris in 2001, followed by a chapter, set in 1976, describing the night of the house fire (in which the two people died). The third chapter takes place four months before that. From this, the novel works chronologically forward again to the fire.

The novel has a smallish cast of characters – there’s the narrator (Gillian), Andre Harrow and Dorcas, and the girls of the poetry class. Gradually a complex picture is built up of surface friendships with secrecy and jealousy lying just beneath. The reason for this is that pretty well all the girls are obsessed with Andre and each it seems, in turn, have their way with him (or, should I say, vice versa). But here the plot thickens … though perhaps I’ll leave it there for you to discover for yourselves.

Let’s just say that this book is an unsettling exploration of the (sexual) games people play, games in which people can and do get badly hurt. It’s easy to see the young women as the victims – and I must say that to a large degree I think they are. Whenever there is a power imbalance (and this is why I disagree with Helen Garner‘s take in her non-fiction book, The first stone), I see the major wrong as being with those in power. However, that does not mean that the less powerful are not complicit in some way, because often they are, and this seems to be the case with Gillian. She says “I was not predator seeking prey, I was myself the prey. I was the innocent party”. But she has choices, and she makes them, knowing ….

I was in love now. I took strength from my love for Mr Harrow. Though knowing, for I was no fool, that it could never be reciprocated.

And yet, she of course, like the girls before her, lets herself be drawn into a situation that is both thrilling and destructive. Harrow is an aficionado of DH Lawrence – Lawrence was big on campuses in the 1970s as I recollect – and tells his students (with terrible irony) that:

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no ‘morality’. For what’s ‘morality’ but a noose around the neck? A noose? What’s ‘morality’ but what other people want you to do, for their own selfish unstated purposes.

Hmm … this sounds a bit like the Nietzschean conundrum explored in The immoralist doesn’t it, but Oates plays it out in a very different way by exploring its implications across gender, age/experience and power differences to see what falls out.

The novel starts with an epigraph from a DH Lawrence poem:

I love you, rotten
Delicious rottenness

… wonderful are the hellish experiences

Wonderful for whom one may well ask? The ending – or is it the beginning – provides no definite answer but it sure teases out the complexity of “love” running rather amok amongst people who think little about the ramifications of their actions. Damage, as it usually does in such situations, ensues. What price morality, eh?

Joyce Carol Oates
Beasts
London: Orion, 2002
138pp.
ISBN: 0752855921

Marie Munkara, Every secret thing

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They all nodded, not knowing what the hell curry* was but getting gist of the story all the same.

Marie Munkara leads us a merry dance with Every secret thing, her first book, which won the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander writer. What exactly is this “thing” she presents to us? A novel? A short story collection? Well, I think it’s a bit of both. It looks like stand-alone short stories, and can probably be read that way. But, the same characters keep reappearing in the stories and there is a chronological thrust to it with a conclusion of sorts in the final story, so I’d call it connected short stories.

Form, though, is not the only way in which she leads us a merry dance. This is a genuinely funny book – sometimes slapstick or ribald, sometimes more bitter, satiric and/or ironic, but pretty well always funny. However, her subject matter is desperately serious – the destruction of indigenous culture through contact with white culture, specifically in this book through contact with missions and missionaries.

Bathurst Island (Tiwi Islands)
Approaching beautiful Bathurst Island (Tiwi Islands)

Marie Munkara was born in Arnhem Land and spent the first few years of her life on Bathurst Island in the Tiwi Islands. She left there when she was 3 years old, and didn’t return until she was 28. These stories, she says, are drawn from those told to her by friends and family, and are set, I think, in the early to mid twentieth century. She explores a wide range of issues reflective of indigenous-white contact at that time, including education and religion, the stolen generation, sexual abuse, the introduction of alcohol and disease, and anthropological research.

Munkara sees humour in everything (more or less) but her more biting humour is reserved for the “mission mob” because, of course, it is they who wield the power over the “bush mob”. The “bush mob” are shown to be intelligent and resourceful but no match for the power of the muruntawi (white people). Her language draws on a wide range of traditions – including indigenous storytelling, biblical, common clichés – and from these she tells stories that are only too believable. Here she tells us about one of the Brothers:

And so time passed and the natural progression of things came to be and the bullied became the bully, and the bully became the misogynist, and the misogynist became a Brother in a Catholic mission in a remote place in the Northern Territory… (“The sound of music”)

A too familiar story, told in a biblical tone. There is a funny story in which the “bush mob” tries to lead an anthropologist astray by feeding him incorrect information (such as obscene or silly names for ordinary objects), but their victory is Pyrrhic, as the end of the story conveys:

And after all, it was difficult sometimes to tell the difference between the missionaries and the madmen and the mercenaries because their eyes all looked the same and their tongues all spoke the same language of greed. If it wasn’t your soul they wanted, it was something else. Until it became an automatic response whenever a strange muruntani appeared to put out your hand for the specimen bottle to piss into or extend your arm for a blood sample to be taken or for the ungracious thought to pass through their mind that here was yet another who had come to take but as always gave nothing in return. (“Wurruwataka”)

Her stories about the stolen generations are particularly bitter, but again she uses humour. She tells the story of Marigold (née Tapalinga) who’d returned “home” after years away, only to find that she no longer fit, but:

Nor did Mrs Jones want the hussy back as their servant having sprung the little slut underneath Mr Jones in the spare room. The poor man was still traumatised by the ordeal. This wasn’t the first time she’d raped him, he claimed. (“Marigold”)

Only an indigenous writer could write something so patently ridiculous on this topic – and so drive the point home!

Munkara neatly tracks the Bishop’s behaviour and impact on his flock by constantly changing her epithet for him. In the first story, “The Bishop”, he is introduced as “his Most Distinguished” but is then referred to by various names including “his Most Garrulous”, “his Most Impatient” and “his Most Impious”. This changing of names for the Bishop is rather unsubtle humour but it carries a sly comment on the “mission mob’s” disrespect for indigenous culture by insisting on naming indigenous people, completely ignoring the fact that they have their own names. And so, in the first story, we are introduced to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, to Epiphany, Lazarus, and John the Baptist, to name just a few of the cast of characters populating the book.

Another technique Munkara uses is to pepper her stories with white culture sayings and clichés, such as, “misery loves company alright”, “looking on the bright side”, “but you just can’t please everyone”, and this one:

And so it came to be that for the first time ever, the mission mob found themselves sitting where they’d never sat before – between a rock called ‘you didn’t see that one coming did you’ and a hard place called ‘bush mob’s indifference’. (“The good doctor”)

Overall, this is deceptively simple but clever writing that sets up and undermines its premises every step of the way. First “the mission mob” seems to be winning, and then “the bush mob”. However, while it could be said that “the bush mob” were “clever individuals who had learnt to sit on the wobbly fence of cultural evolution without falling off”, the real truth is that

They didn’t have to die to go to hell because the mission had happily brought that with them when they’d arrived unasked on the fateful shores of the place that was their heaven all those years ago. (“The movies”)

A spoonful of sugar, they say, makes the medicine go down, and that’s certainly true of this book. The sugar is not so strong though that you miss the medicine. Munkara makes sure of that – and the end result is a very funny but also very sobering book. I suspect and hope that Munkara has more … because the missions are only one facet of the history of contact in Australia. There is plenty for her to sink her teeth into.

Musings of a Literary Dilettante and Resident Judge have also reviewed this book.

Marie Munkara
Every secret thing
St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2009
181pp.
ISBN: 9780702237195

* Reference to the colloquialism “giving them curry”.