Review

Jennifer Down, Pulse points (Guest post by Amanda) (#BookReview)

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Amanda is on a roll, reading several Aussie women writers, so when she offered me a review of Jennifer Down’s collection of short stories, Pulse points, of course I said yes. I love her opening explanation of why she loves short stories – I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Amanda’s review

Jennifer Downs, Pulse pointsI love short stories. They can be an introduction to literature, restore your faith in fiction and inspire awe in a mere few pages.  The good ones shed light on the human condition – who we are, what we do and why we do it. The great ones perceive and portray human complexity in original and vivid colours.

Pulse Points is a collection of 14 short stories by Jennifer Down, pulse points being the metaphor for emotional life changing moments. The stories are of varying quality. At best Down has a keen ear for dialogue, well-rounded characterisation and with sensitive depiction of issues. The stories are not plot driven, they do not deal with large macro political issues, no biting satire, no morphing magical realism and no laugh out loud moments. That is not a bad thing. That is just not Down’s style.

Instead the stories are focused on brief periods, sometime even moments, of the characters’ lives which are used to explore universal themes: loss, mourning, the treatment of women, rural isolation, disfranchisement and childhood neglect appear several times. These are stories about humanity.

Down utilises a traditional treatment of the short story form, the timeframe is largely linear with some flashbacks. The voices are polyphonic, switching between first and third person.

For my tastes, there were too many discordant stories and the linkage between the main title and the stories was too loose. I have been influenced by the style of Elizabeth Strout where characters in her short stories (Olive Kitteridge and Anything is possible) not only appear consistently though the novel linking one story to another but also providing an alternate prospective. Similarly, Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of maladies) can write distinct, unconnected short stories but her ability to stick to an overarching theme is more disciplined.

As such Pulse points is best treated as a “pick and mix” rather than being read as a whole in one sitting.

In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Down is quoted as saying “If I’m trying to bring attention to a particular moment, a point of tension or an image, you need to let it have a bit of space, to let it breathe. So, for me, having a more economical approach to language is one way of trying to achieve that.” Pulse points is populated with pared-down prose, but that is different from narrative restraint.

To that end, I prefer the stories in the collection that do not rely on melodramatic plot devices, sudden improbable violence or tragedy to propel the narrative. In some cases, the violent event jars the pacing of the story and interrupts the crescendo, distracting the reader and making one question the focus of the story (the eponymous “Pulse points” and “Vaseline”). For deft pacing and the seamless use of fictional violence (or the threat of) – George Saunders (Victory lap) and Flannery O’Connor come to mind.

Down’s strongest pieces are gentle, subtle explorations of profound themes using quotidian details and sound so authentic, they could be autobiographical:  in “Convalescence” dealing with the imbalance in a relationship, the sifting power balance and the sacrifice both partners endure. In “Pressure okay“, Down manages to convey the gently mourning of the loss of a spouse who served as the conduit for an endearing father to understand his feisty adult daughter. “Turncoat” similarly explores the slow burn of mid-life crisis. Like most readers, I love recognising myself in characters, creating empathy and the sense of being understood.

She is at her best when dealing with sensitive, analytical, educated characters; less so when she tries to portray the mindless rage and violence of teenage boys in “Dogs” (the weakest piece). The narrative is too brief and too horrific to allow any three-dimensional view of the characters or their motivation.

Similarly, those stories set in Australia or dealing with Australians aboard (“Convalescence” and “Aokigaraha“) resonate more than pieces set in the US (“Vaseline” and “Eternal father”) where Down does not have the vernacular or familiarity to make the characters sound genuine. As a reader I was grappling for place names or dialogue to try to identify which country the story was taking part in to give the mind a sense of location and what to expect of the characters.

Some of her writing is wholly original, comparing the contents of a women’s handbag to the movements at the bottom of the seabed and at other times – “she dyed her hair the colour of sunshine” – her writing is more prosaic. Frequently, her stories end too abruptly, another paragraph or two even in a vignette could provide direction and closure for the reader.

A reader can tell that a lot of work has gone into crafting and refining these stories and it shows. But Down is still a very young writer and compared to more assured short story collections this falls short. This is Down’s second publication. Her first, the Magic hour is a widely acclaimed novel. I look forward to her future works.

AWW Challenge 2019 BadgeJennifer Down
Pulse points
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2017
240pp.
ISBN: 9781925355970

Capel Boake: Three short stories

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Capel Boake, no date, presumed public domainHaving written about Capel Boake in my last Monday Musings, I couldn’t resist checking out some of her short stories. Bill’s AWW Gen 2 Week concluded yesterday, but I hope he’ll accept this post as a contribution.

Boake’s stories are easily accessible in Trove. In fact, I was spoilt for choice, so just picked three at random. By the time I’d edited three – that is, corrected the multiple OCR errors* – I felt I’d done my bit for a while and so stopped there. I can’t say whether my three chosen stories are representative of her whole output – she wrote many short stories and poems – but I’m assuming they are. All appear in newspapers – in the days when newspapers published short stories – and most were syndicated. This means the version I edited is not necessarily the original publication, but I decided not to spend time identifying this.

AWW Challenge 2019 BadgeThe three stories (linked to their newspaper text) are:

  • The brothers (Canowindra Star and Eugowra News, 9 January 1920): a brother returns from the war, under a cloud, having been accused by his father, before leaving, of stealing money from the family farm business. He hadn’t, but he’s not going to dob in who did.
  • The necessary third (The Australasian, 28 August 1926): a wealthy young man meets, on a steamship trip from South Africa to Melbourne, a not so well-heeled young woman, and her mother, who is ambitious for a good marriage for her daughter.
  • Jenny (Weekly Times, 21 June 1930): a poorer young woman, “a State child”, is helped by a young man to make her career as a world-famous dancer.

A propos my point above re syndication, “The brothers”, for example, was first published, according to the subscriber-only AustLit database, in The Australasian in 1919.

These are generally straightforward stories, which is not surprising given they were published in newspapers and therefore intended for a broad audience. They lack the punch of, say, Barbara Baynton’s turn-of-the-century stories, but they make interesting reading nonetheless.

Two of them are romances – or, what the Western Mail reviewer I quoted in Monday Musings called “sex stor[ies] created on conventional lines”. They draw on traditional tropes – the poor young woman with the pushy mother, and the poor young woman who becomes a star thought the assistance of a young man who loves her. And yet, these young women are not pawns, and they do exercise some agency. Paula (“The necessary third”) takes things into her own hands to protect her self-respect, while Jenny (“Jenny”) takes action to ensure that she gets what she really wants (even if what she really wants is traditional!)

The stories also provide some insight into the times. I was particularly intrigued by this comment in “Jenny”. It’s told through the eyes of the young man, and here he is watching her, now a world-renowned star, dance on her home stage:

Glancing at the absorbed faces around him, their parted lips and shining eyes, he saw she had the same effect on them. Release . . . release . . . their spirits were free for once from the tyranny of the mechanised age that had gripped the world with relentless fingers.

This, then, is not “bush realism”, but a commentary on the modern urban world. However, it was also written in 1930 – Capel Boake straddling Bill’s Gen 2 and Gen 3 periods.

A neglected woman writer

Capel Boake has been identified as one of three neglected women writers of the 1930s by Gavin De Lacy in the La Trobe Journal (vol. 83, 2009), the other two being Jean Campbell and ‘Georgia Rivers’ (pseudonym for Marjorie Clark). De Lacy says that while they were all prominent in the Melbourne literary scene in the 1930s, they have been, with the odd exception, overlooked in significant studies of Australian literature. (He’s right. I found little about Boake in my little collection of books.)

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Boake did not write many novels. Painted clay (1917) was highly praised, but only two more novels were published in her lifetime – The Romany mark in 1923 and, 13 years later in 1936, The dark thread. De Lacy quotes a contemporary critic as saying The dark thread had some shortcomings which “constant practice in the novelist’s art might have been expected to overcome.” Another critic, Frank Wilmot (writing as Furnley Maurice), compared it with Dreiser’s An American tragedy. Nettie Palmer, however, said that it wasn’t “quite a Dreiser, as Furnley suggested … but it’s very respectable.” More interesting to us, though, is contemporary critic Susan Sheridan who argued that it

provides a salutary corrective to the bourgeois family sagas of the period.

Another reason for revisiting Boake in Gen 3!

De Lacy notes that Boake, Campbell and Clarke haven’t been revived as “forgotten authors despite the recent interest in Australian women writers”. Not only are most of their books long out of print, but are “virtually unprocurable in second-hand bookshops”. An option for Text Publishing perhaps”?

He offers various reasons for this, including publishing practices at the times, but he also says that the 1930s was a “radical literary and political decade” and these three women’s novels don’t quite fit “the prevailing orthodoxy and literary preoccupations and myths of the ’30s.” Also, he says, the writers who have been remembered were mostly Sydney-oriented and associated with the New South Wales section of the Fellowship of Australia Writers. Kerr, Campbell, and Clark belong to the same period, but they

were Melbourne authors, setting their novels in that city. They were among the earliest prewar Australian writers to fictionalise an urban environment, ignoring the bush as a theme, and preceding most of their better known contemporaries in writing about the city.

Including them in our study of the era would, as he says, deepen our understanding of the history of women writers (and, thence, I’d argue, of Australian literature.) Gen 3, here we come.

* The original image of “The brothers” is so bad that I was unable to fix all the errors – that happens sometimes in Trove, newsprint not being the best quality medium for preservation.

Louise Mack, Girls together (#BookReview)

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Louise Mack, Girls togetherWell, that was, surprisingly, genuinely enjoyable. Louise Mack’s Girls together is a sequel to her novel Teens (see Bill’s review), and features protagonist Lennie (Elinor) Leighton. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, given I know something about Mack, through my Monday Musings on her and my review of her debut novel The world is round, but it was, because …

The novel starts with this paragraph:

Square and solid as ever, stood the old brown school, with the fig-trees standing in its playground. The wooded staircase was as firm as even under the rush and onslaught of hurrying feet; the sturdy gate still bore with patience the cruel slammings of girls, big and little, rushing in late when the bell had finished ringing, or hastening homewards before half the school had left the classrooms.

It goes on to describe the chaos and disorganisation attending Lennie who is running late for her train home, and has, besides, lost her ticket. I thought that I was in for a pretty traditional school story. School stories were my favourite stories when I was a young reader, but now, of course, my interests are very different. I was prepared to persevere, however, because I was reading the book for Bill’s AWW Gen 2 Week and because this is a classic written in 1898 by a too-little known Australian woman writer. (You may wonder why I specifically chose it, but it was a serendipitous decision, being one of the books I found in my late aunt’s house when I was managing her estate. Bill’s week proved the perfect opportunity to read it.)

As it turned out, the book is not a traditional school story. School is part of it, but the focus is 16-year-old Lennie at a point of transition in her life – and her relationship with her 18-year-old friend Mabel, who returns in the opening chapters from Paris and is training to be an artist. Now, Lennie belongs to the tradition of some other famous sisters – like Judy in Ethel Turner’s Seven little Australians, Jo in Little women, and even, in a way, Elizabeth in Pride and prejudice. She’s impulsive more than sensible, but is loyal and generous of heart to those whom she loves. She lives with her parents (the Mother and the Doctor), her big brother Bert who is at University, and her little sisters, sensible Floss, gentle obedient Mary and the youngest, 11-year-old Brenda, who is observant, quick and a bit naughty. I’m sure you can recognise some of these “types”.

There is a marriage plot – but not for Lennie. This is more a coming-of-age book than a romance: it’s about Lennie’s transition from self-focused girlhood to adulthood and its associated more mature world-view. This, Mack handles nicely. Her characters may be recognisable types – but they are also individualised. Mack captures how girls feel, how they relate to each other authentically. Here is Lennie meeting her friend Mabel after two years’ separation:

You see they merely hovered on the outskirts of all they meant to say, touching things lightly, with the shyness of their reunion still lingering around lips and eyes. But as the twilight deepened, and darkness came softly into the bedroom, laughs grew more and more frequent with them.

But, there are many writers who capture relationships and communication well. What makes this book particularly interesting to read for us, now – and here I’m repeating the point made by Bill – is the social history, the picture Mack paints of 1890s Sydney, including a reference to the Banking Crisis of 1893.  The reference is brief, but it is used as a plot point in the trajectory of Lennie’s life.

More interesting, though, is the discussion of gender. Louise Mack was not, I understand, an activist in the Australian suffrage movement but she was part of the “women-oriented culture” which was becoming increasingly visible from the 1890s. Gender issues, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, underpin much of what happens in Girls together. Indirectly, it’s there, for example, in an assumption that “girls” can go to university. Whether they should or shouldn’t isn’t even discussed. It’s just assumed that they can. Direct references, though, abound. Mabel’s art teacher in Paris tells her:

‘When you go back to Australia, Mees, you just take care you do not marry, for eef you marry you will never paint better than you do now.’

And the girls themselves frequently discuss gender issues, sometimes with Lennie’s brother Bert. There’s a discussion about ambition where Bert suggests that Mabel and Lennie talk about it constantly while men, he says, never do. Does this reflect women’s increasing awareness that they can have goals beyond the domestic? There’s a reference to Lennie’s mother’s anxiety about the potential for girls failing in their push for “public” careers, and, being a woman of her times, she “would have kept them back from success rather than let them face the chance of failure.” All this is told naturally, not melodramatically, giving a realistic sense of a normal family facing changing times. We see parents having their thoughts and concerns, but supporting their children, rather than opposing them.

Nonetheless, this is a book of the 1890s. So, when Lennie is told by Mabel’s art teacher – a character respected in the novel – that “It’s better to be a good woman than a great one, little girl … unless you can be both”, I wondered what Mack really saw as options for her heroine.

All I can say is that the novel has an open ending. This may be because Mack planned to write more about the family – and she did write a third novel, Teens triumphant, in 1933 – but perhaps it also reflects an awareness that girls’ lives aren’t complete at the age of 17 or so, and that Lennie still has a chance at greatness!

Finally, there are lovely descriptions of Sydney, but again this is not overdone. In this week’s Monday Musings, I quoted a reviewer writing in 1917 that Capel Boake had “not made the mistake, very common with our writers, of painting in the ‘local colour’ so heavily that the human element in the picture is lost in what we may call a superficial provincialism of incident and characterisation.” Well, neither did Mack make this mistake, some twenty years earlier. The colour is there and is lovely, but is used sparingly to set the scene – and perhaps convey some attendant emotions:

The year was at September, when suddenly Summer came stepping down from her niche among the seasons, and ousted Spring before her time was well begun. The hot winds from the great inland plains of New South Wales blew down over the mountains to this city at the Harbour’s edge, and suddenly everyone woke from their winter cosiness, and furs and fires, and delightful nights, to find that the time for sleeping was over, and the restless nights and long, trying days of the Australian summer-time had come again, long before their time was due.

Girls together is an entertaining, refreshingly written story that clearly draws on Mack’s own experiences and concerns. It also reflects the social consciousness for which the period is well-known and, as an urban novel, it offers an antidote to the “bush realism” school which largely typifies Bill’s Gen 2 period. Well worth reading if you get the opportunity.

AWW Challenge 2019 BadgeLouise Mack
Girls together
London: The Pilgrim Press [n.d]
[first pub. 1898]
220pp.

Jamie Marina Lau, Pink Mountain on Locust Island (Guest post by Amanda) (#BookReview)

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Late last year I hosted a review of Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic by Amanda who had responded to my call on the Australian Women Writers Challenge for reviews of it and Jamie Marina Lau’s Pink Mountain on Locust Island, which won the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Readings Residency Award, and was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.  Amanda offered to write reviews of both, and so, as with Axiomatic, I am hosting Amanda’s review, so that it can then be added to the AWW database. Thanks very much – again – Amanda!

Synopsis of Pink Mountain on Lotus Island

From publisher The Lifted Brow’s website:

“Monk lives in Chinatown with her washed-up painter father. When Santa Coy—possible boyfriend, potential accomplice—enters their lives, an intoxicating hunger consumes their home. So begins a heady descent into art, casino resorts, drugs, vacant swimming pools, religion, pixelated tutorial videos, and senseless violence.”

Amanda’s review

Jamie Marina Lau, Pink Mountain on Lotus IslandTwenty-year-old Lau’s debut novel is simultaneously innovative, surreal, disjointed and funny. At her best she writes like a stand-up routine; at her worst, though, she veers into the bizarre and nonsensical: “cardigan metropolis and a hushed voice millennia”; “he was in a creme brulee mood”. I don’t get it either. The chapters are divided into numerous short vignettes and sequences, some only a sentence long and follow a linear timeline. It’s a book for the social media and internet age – perhaps written for those just getting used to reading serious prose after the word limits on Twitter.

Its protagonist Monk is 15, and living with her Xanax-addicted former Art lecturer Dad after the departure of her Mum. It could be set in any urban metropolis with a bustling Chinatown. Along comes the love interest Santa Coy (also a developing artist) and then things get complicated.

There is a narrative though that can be followed, and it is cinematic so you can visually follow her discussions around what makes Art and what people will sacrifice for it, the difficulties of human relationships, and cross cultural complexities.

Food is another obsession – its preparation, consumption, description of, e.g. Yum Cha – and some bizarre discussions. What is the difference physically and philosophically between turnips and yams? Turnips are lively and yams are brooding. Obviously, if you didn’t know this you have to visit the same supermarkets as Monk does. [Haha, love this Amanda.]

Some plot twists are unbelievable and her non-traditional use of metaphors and language often fall flat. Lau (who also makes music under the pseudonym ZK King, hence the musical references in the novel) stated in an interview that she often has several browsers open while writing – reading articles, listening to music etc – and this multimedia multi-tasking is what comes across in her writing and original use of language.

Lau described Monk as the most sincere female character she had created – and that is the strength of this novel, Lau’s authentic portrayal of her teenage Monk as a composite of angst, joy, confusion, curiosity and strength. You just need to get through some bizarre distractions to discover this.

AWW Challenge 2019 BadgeJamie Marina Lau
Pink Mountain on Locust Island
Brow Books, 2018
244pp.
ISBN: 9780994606884

Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic (#BookReview)

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Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a guest post by Amanda for Maria Tumarkin’s book of essays, Axiomatic. At the time that post was negotiated, I had no immediate plans to read the book myself, but that changed when Brother Gums and family gave me a copy for Christmas …

Now, if you are a regular reader here, you may remember that Amanda had mixed feelings about the book. She liked the writing, and found the analysis was “at its best in the first three sections when dealing with complex social issues”. But, she found the book “unrelenting”, “not balanced or fair”, and ultimately nihilistic in not offering hope or, to put it simply, ways forward. She concluded by asking what Tumarkin wanted to achieve with the book. Having now read the book, all of these comments make sense to me, but my response is more positive. Perhaps it’s because this Ukrainian-born Australian Tumarkin reminds me of Helen Garner whose bold, clear-eyed writing about tricky subjects I greatly appreciate. Indeed, Garner is quoted on the back of my edition, describing Tumarkin as charging “headlong into the worst and best of us, with an iron refusal to soften or decorate…” That’s Garner, and that’s Tumarkin.

Axiomatic comprises five long essays, each interrogating an axiom:

  • time heals all wounds
  • those who forget the past are condemned to re–––––
  • history repeats itself
  • give me a child before the age of seven and I will show you the woman
  • you can’t enter the same river twice

As you’ve probably worked out by now, Tumarkin doesn’t unquestionably accept these axioms, showing them instead to be simplistic or misguided, if not, false.

In the first essay, she explores the notion that “Time heals all wounds” through the prism of teenage suicide. At one point she references psychologist Erminia Colucci’s study of “attitudes to suicide and suicidal thoughts among young people in Italy, Australia, India”, and adds, in parentheses:

(There are intellectually rigorous reasons for her choice of countries. There are lovely simple ones too: ‘I am Italian. I love Australia. I am fascinated by India.’)

This description could also be applied to Tumarkin’s rather idiosyncratic approach to her book. There is intellectual rigour – at least to the best of my knowledge and experience – but it also frequently feels personal, subjective, drawing on stories that interest her, that relate to her experiences, and that may not, initially anyhow, seem the most obvious choices. A lot of names – like Colucci’s, for example – are given, but this is not a foot-noted academic book, so you need to use your search engine if you want to check out the authorities she invokes. All this suggests that the book belongs to the creative non-fiction genre, one for which Garner, too, is well recognised. Amanda described Tumarkin’s writing as “a powerful composite of investigative journalism, analytical thinking and literary technique”. I’d agree, and add “personal reflection”.

But, now, how to discuss this complicated, rather slippery book? Discuss each of the essays, teasing out the ideas Tumarkin explores? Choose just one essay, and use it to discuss Tumarkin’s approach? Or, just focus on some specific aspects of the book that stood out for me? I’m opting for the latter.

What most appealed to me is the iconoclastic way Tumarkin thinks, the way she looks behind the assumptions we make, confronting the platitudes, or the way she asks questions from different (but often logical) angles. Regarding adolescent suicide in “Time heals all wounds”, for example, she identifies the nature of adolescence itself:

… one of adolescence’s constants is not knowing what’s happening inside you. And by extension not knowing what you’re capable of.

How do schools, society, handle this inherently unstable nature of adolescence? Then there’s the current “untreated depression” model of suicide causation, an explanation more common, Colucci tells her, in Australia than in Italy and India. What are the implications of this? This is a powerful essay – offering no resolution or answers. Just questions. I’d argue, though, that there’s value in that. Without asking the right questions, there can be no answers?

In “History repeats itself”, Tumarkin applies her pen to the justice system and the way it treats “offenders”, the way it assumes that they’ll re-offend, and then behaves, treats them, accordingly. It’s devastating – and certainly discomforts those of us, including herself she admits, living “cushy middle-class” lives.

Tumarkin discusses how offenders fall through the cracks. For example, she writes:

It’s a real issue, how to keep people real. And not make them into catchphrases for banners, appendixes to principles … Many of those who advocate on behalf of others don’t want a connection with those they are advocating for.

And yet, there are paradoxes, she sees, in connecting. Beware what you start if you can’t see it through. What, for example, does giving up drugs do to a person whose whole life is bound up in that community? What indeed? Do you have an answer?

(An aside: I can’t resist mentioning here that the idea of “connecting” recurs several times in the book, reminding me of EM Forster’s Howards End and its theme, “only connect”.)

Then there’s the notion of “knowing [my emphasis] your life is precious” and the assumption that that is “the default state of the human psyche”. But

How about all those people for whom their life does not feel precious? Why not is often the easy bit to get [and she then catalogues the reasons why not]. A harder question is can the feeling your life’s worth shit be fixed, whether from outside in, or inside out? Can it? All the services offering legal aid, food, counselling, employment (tedious employment), shelter, they cannot get close to this worth-shit feeling … I mean this feeling’s impervious to being messed with, it is too deep and diffused … And when this feeling is there it skews the survival instinct  …

“History repeats itself” also provides examples of another feature of the book – its writing. There are perfect (often gut-wrenching) descriptions like this:

Perhaps one way of putting it is that many of Vanda’s [her main “guide” in this essay] clients live their lives on a highway where they are repeatedly hit by passing trucks. As they are bandaging their wounds, cleaning them out with rainwater, putting bones back into sockets, another truck’s coming.

Beyond this, the writing is varied, and rather eccentric, slipping from formal perfection, dialogue and narrative, to, at times, idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation that stop you in your tracks, forcing you to think about what she is saying. Compounding this are digressions and odd juxtapositions which also keep the grey matter exercised.

There is so much more to say about the content, style, thought processes, and inspirations for the book, not to mention the ‘yes’ moments – so many of those – but I’ll close with what I see as a unifying idea running through the five essays – the past. How the past affects us, how we perceive and deal with it. I’m not sure I fully grasped her meaning on one reading – and maybe there is no one meaning. But I sense she’s saying that although the past is significant, although it doesn’t “disappear”, we are not – to quote one of her contacts – “all sum totals of our histories.” That idea is too simplistic – and yet is the way it is too often viewed, which limits us, repeatedly, in our interactions with each other, personally, politically and systemically.

Axiomatic is, for me, a compassionate work. While Amanda sees it as lacking hope, I see it as realistic. True, it doesn’t offer answers. As Vanda says, “there are no fairytale endings.” Why not, Tumarkin asks. “Because,” replies Vanda, “people are people.” And that, I’d say, is the fundamental humanity of this slippery, uncomfortable, provocative book.

AWW Challenge 2019 Badge

Maria Tumarkin
Axiomatic
Brow Books, 2018
201pp.
ISBN: 9781925704051

Jarrah Dundler, Hey Brother (#BookReview)

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Jarrah Dundler, Hey BrotherIs she ever going to write another actual review you’ve been probably wondering but yes, I am – and it’s for the young protagonist book I mentioned in my recent Reading Highlights post. The book is Jarrah Dundler’s debut novel, Hey Brother, which was shortlisted for the The Australian/Vogel Upublished Manuscript Award in 2017 under the title Tryst. Tryst is quite a clever title: it’s the nickname of the 14-year-old protagonist Trysten, and suggests actual and hoped for trysts between the teen couples, but maybe it also has overtones of something more genre-like so was rejected? As it is, the published title conveys both the familial and broader meanings of brotherhood, which are played out nicely in the novel.

Publisher Allen & Unwin categorises Hey Brother as Popular Fiction, and describes it as “a genuine and compellingly portrayed family drama of a tough kid from rural Australia”. I would describe it, however, as a coming-of-age novel, and it reads to me as more Young Adult than Adult. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it explains my uncertainty about how to read it – or, to be more specific, how to write about it.

So, the book. Hey Brother has a first person narrator, the aforementioned Trysten who lives on a property in northern New South Wales with his mother, Kirsty, and his big brother Shaun. His father, Old Greggy, is there too, but prior to the novel’s start he’d been exiled by Kirsty to a caravan down by the river. So, it’s a somewhat fractured family, but not devastatingly so, because it becomes quickly clear that there’s an underlying love and respect between them all. The novel starts with big brother Shaun going off to fight “the Taliban in Afghanistan”, where he’d “been keen to head from the get-go, back when the dust from the Twin Towers was still settling”.

Into this mix comes uncle Trev who turns up to support his sister, Tryst’s mother who is worrying about her son off at war. Her form of “worrying” includes self-medicating with alcohol and letting her other responsibilities fall by the wayside. Unfortunately, Trev, who has some lovely moments of wisdom, also self-medicates his own demons the same way. It’s not a lethal mix, but it creates its challenges, and in fact offers Trev some insights. There is also Tryst’s best friend Ricky, and, as the book progresses, their girlfriends, Jessica and Jade. It’s a tight little community, and Dundler handles the relationships well. They feel real, with the tensions authentic, understandable, and not over-dramatised. In fact, Dundler’s characterisation is a strong point. His people live and breathe from the moment they appear on the page.

Hey Brother, then, features the typical YA narrative – a young teen meets his first love and is desperate to spend more time with her. But this particular story is complicated by the teen’s relationship with his brother whom he hero-worships but who returns from war psychologically damaged, suffering from PTSD. The novel’s crisis is, in fact, triggered by Shaun’s mental distress, and complicated by the conflict confronting Tryst between his love for Jessica and for his brother.

The novel is told first person by Tryst, in the vernacular of a rural, teenage boy. It’s fresh, direct, immediate, full of the profanity and colloquialisms that are appropriate to the context – but, here’s the thing, it is also more descriptive than reflective. Tryst comes across as a loving, heart-of-gold young man, but he is about the moment. To some extent we can see the deeper issues at play here – the PTSD, the complexity in the adult characters’ lives and relationships – but these are not the novel’s focus. The focus is Trysten, his life and, ultimately, his growth. This, to me, makes the novel Young Adult – and makes it quite different from, say, Laguna’s The choke (my review) where, although the story is young Justine’s, the themes focus on the impoverished environment – economically, socially, spiritually – that makes her life the way it is.

Did, then, I enjoy the novel? Yes, in that its protagonist and setting are foreign to my experience and I like to read about lives different to mine, and because the writing was engaging, lively, and appropriate in language and imagery. Here, for example, Tryst describes Trev confessing to past troubles:

It was like he wanted the words to go straight down the plughole after he’d uttered them.

And Trev, late in the novel, gives Tryst some advice:

‘Decisions, mate. That’s what defines you in the end. Some advice for ya–before you make one, try and give it a little thought beforehand, would ya? ‘Cause, believe me, regret’s a f****n c**t of a thing to live with.’

I also liked that late in the novel, we learn, in passing, that Ricky, Tryst’s friend, is indigenous. The reference is somewhat didactically done, but Dundler clearly wanted to do what we need more of, that is, to include indigenous characters without their indigeneity being an issue in the story. How you do this is the challenge.

However, Young Adult Fiction is not really my interest. Young Adult concerns belong to a long-ago part of my life. I appreciated Dundler’s skills in plotting and characterisation, not to mention his heart and desire to give life and air to some big issues, but I did tire at times of Tryst’s concerns, perspective and voice. Not his fault, mine. I would unhestitatingly recommend this book to YA readers – and would willingly check out Dundler’s next work. A good debut.

For a beautiful post on this book, check out Theresa Smith’s (Theresa Smith Writes).

Jarrah Dundler
Hey brother
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2018
281pp.
ISBN: 9781760631123

(Review copy courtesy Allen & Unwin)

Note: The asterisked words in the quote are to defect the wrong sort of hits coming my way.

Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic (Guest post by Amanda) (#BookReview)

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I am thrilled to host this post by Amanda who responded to my call on the Australian Women Writers Challenge for a review of Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic, which won the Best Writing Award in this year’s Melbourne Prize for Literature awards. However, Amanda does not have a place to post reviews on-line, so we agreed that I would post it here so it can then be added to the AWW database. Thanks very much Amanda!

Amanda notes that Tumarkin has her own web page, and that Axiomatic has also been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards to be announced at the end of Jan 2019.

Amanda’s review

Maria Tumarkin, AxiomaticHaving lived outside Australia for several decades I had not heard of Tumarkin.  A professor in Creative Writing at Melbourne University, she is the author of several non-fiction titles, Axiomatic being her 4th and her first with Brow Books publishing – an independent, not-for-profit publisher dedicated to innovative writing at about marginalised topics.

At the time of this review, Axiomatic had won the Melbourne Prize for Literature’s 2018 Best Writing Award. And Axiomatic is great writing but it is also flawed.

More like a compilation of long essays, the title is derived from 5 axioms which are the themes driving each section of the book. The writer then goes on through the essays to dispel the axiom through a collection of real life case studies and experiences.

She opens with her strongest and most heart-wrenching piece “Time Heals All Wounds” about teenage suicide in Australia. Tumarkin’s writing is a powerful composite of investigative journalism, analytical thinking and literary technique. Brutal and unflinching – delivering a  punch to the gut – Tumarkin is able to conjure in the mind’s eye all the complexities and nuances of grief, love and survival  through snippets of conversation and quotidian details. She includes numerous references to contemporary writers, classical literature, Greek mythology and philosophers, deftly combining both fiction and non-fiction.

In terms of critiques – and there are a few – the writing never lets up. There is no pause, no distraction, no break in the narrative for the reader apart from what is self-imposed. Sentences have been meticulously crafted and her writing sings, but it’s hard to appreciate it all because Axiomatic is so unrelenting.

Tumarkin’s arguments are also often convoluted. She veers off on tangents at the slightest provocation and then expands these into auxiliary sections. Her analysis is at its best in the first three sections when dealing with complex social issues, and is less effective and more self-indulgent when focusing on her personal friendships and relationships. (The last section – “You Can’t Enter the Same River” – seems out of place). The book is uneven in quality.

Axiomatic is not balanced nor fair in its judgments. Some would question Tumarkin’s right to take a position on any of these subject but, as she states herself, this has never stopped her in the past, and it certainly doesn’t now. She likes “to kick the floorboards out from under her readers”, so are the shock techniques of her writing her key selling points? If so, she is selling short the stories of these survivors.

Reasoning aside, what Axiomatic lacks from a visceral perspective is hope. Fictitious happy endings are overrated, but hope is not. Tumarkin puts forth unattainable Utopian standards both for society and its participants in order to fix its ills, and therefore Axiomatic is ultimately nihilistic.

As a reader, the one question I have is – what does Tumarkin wish to achieve with this book? She paints in grim detail an Australian society bereft with failings. The unsung heroes rallying against the system and circumstances are alone. But these problems of teenage suicide, poverty, abuse ,corruption and inadequate systems are perennial and  can be made about many countries.

There are no easy solutions to these problems. Tumarkin does not have the answers. Most readers will be both devastated and frustrated with the pieces – is it meant to serve as a rally cry for the rest of us to do more to rectify these issues? You can’t read Axiomatic and not be moved – but then what do you do with this awareness?

If you’ve read Axiomatic, Amanda and I would love to know what you think about it, and Tumarkin’s intentions?

AWW Badge 2018Maria Tumarkin
Axiomatic
Brow Books, 2018
201pp.
ISBN: 9781925704051

Rodney Hall, A stolen season (#BookReview)

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Rodney Hall, A stolen seasonRodney Hall is one of those Australian authors who deserves more attention than he seems to get. Consequently, I’m thrilled to at last include him in my blog, with his latest novel A stolen season. I was introduced to Hall back in the late 1980s when my reading group read his surprising novel, Just relations, and I’ve also read another surprising novel by him, The day we had Hitler home. Hall is good at surprising, because A stolen season isn’t exactly run-of-the-mill, either, in terms of its characters and set-up.

It’s a tricksy book comprising three different, more-or-less alternating, story-lines. The chapters go like this: Adam and Bridget, Marianna, Adam and Bridget, John Philip, Adam and Bridget, Marianna, Adam and Bridget. Adam and Bridget, then, form the driving story, and there seems to be no connection between the three sets of characters for a very, very long time. Indeed, by the middle story, John Philip, the only literal connection is a minor character from the first Adam-and-Bridget chapter appearing as a rather minor character in this one. Later, a similarly loose, not-exactly-direct, connection occurs between Adam and Marianna. What gives, we wonder? Who are Marianna and John Philip? Why are we also reading about them? And, will they all ever actually meet, as we expect in novels like this? Well, all I’ll say is that Hall does not, as is probably his wont, do the expected. No, I’ll say more in fact: if we focus our energies on worrying about this structural plot issue, we risk missing what’s important, which is the overarching idea that gradually reveals itself, an idea relating to money and power, and to the way they can not only deceive but actively generate inhumane/anti-human values.

The main story, Adam and Bridget’s, centres on soldier Adam. He returns from fighting with the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq so severely damaged that he can only live, get around, by means of an exoskeleton (the “Contraption”) that is activated and controlled by his brain, something which Hall explains at the end is not complete science fiction. Adam and Bridget’s story is surprising from the beginning, because, while we realise that this injured soldier, Adam, whom we’ve just met, has a wife, we don’t realise, until he arrives home, that the marriage was essentially over by the time he’d gone to war. This was not because they hated each other but because they’d married on a whim – “it seemed a fun thing to do at the time, but they were just kids and kidding” – and the marriage had run its course. Unfortunately for Bridget, she had never got around to legally leaving Adam after he had physically left her to go to war, because it had never seemed necessary. Now what was she to do?

Adam and Bridget’s story is darkly humorous, but also deeply moving, not least because Hall imbues them with a humanity that we can relate to and recognise. They embody the sorts of inner conflicts anyone would experience in a situation like this – Adam, desiring his wife but incapable of achieving what he most wants, wants, genuinely, generously, to set her free, and Bridget, feeling trapped but empathetic, increasingly tender, wants to do the right thing by this decent strong man. Hall writes their story – writes all of the stories in fact – from the individual characters’ third person points of view. Not only does this make for engrossing reading, but it reveals Hall to be a writer who knows, fundamentally, what makes us human.

Meanwhile, Marianna, a German-born Australian, is on the run in Belize after discovering that her husband had seriously deceived her and was implicated in the greed that underpinned what we Australians call the GFC. While Adam and Bridget’s story is the most personal one, hers is the more mysterious, mystical one. Why is she in Belize, and what does she want with the Mayan pyramid? It’s all to do with numbers, mathematics, and end-of-the world predictions. Hers is the hardest story to pin down, because of its more mystical quest. She sees the temple:

… the structural puzzle of steps and platforms on all sides forming a pyramid crowned by a little room with a single doorway–like the lonely eye of the soul.

Marianna gets it. With neither front nor back, nor left nor right, the geometry is inward looking.

And then there’s John Philip, 70-something, indolent and mega wealthy from family money, who suddenly finds himself in possession of a strange bequest – a long-lost book of “the” artist Turner’s erotic sketches of female pudenda. What he does with these is to thumb his nose at his family in a stylish but shockingly public way while, at the same time, making a statement about art. His is the central or peak story to and from which the other chapters formally if not narratively move. It is satiric, rather than tragic, and has a guffaw-producing, conversation-ending last line, but, in placing him at the centre of his story, Hall is surely presenting his manifesto on the meaning and role of art. John Philip realises:

‘The thing about art’–he finds words for the revelation taking shape in his mind–is that art can be a gift. It’s for whoever sees what it is. That’s what makes it art in the first place.’ He probes deeper. ‘I suppose that also makes it political. I mean, if you can’t stop it speaking the truth.’

Back to Adam and Bridget. What is so special about their story is the way Hall weaves the political into the personal so closely that they are almost indistinguishable. It is here that the “cost” of war is plain to see; it is here that the “money” theme – the idea that “the accountants” are at “the wheel” – is played out to its bitter end; and yet, it is also here that people’s ability to be quietly heroic in the only important way, in our treatment of each other, is laid bare. It’s an astonishing novel about some specific issues of our time, namely the Iraq War and the GFC, and about those wider questions concerning being human and the meaning of art.

Now, however, I’m kicking myself, because this book deserves a wider audience than I’ve seen it getting – and, unfortunately, its turn came up on my reading pile at the slowest time of year for blog reading. It’s a time when readers might peruse various “best-of” lists, but, at least as I’ve observed in previous years, pay less attention to more serious posts. This is a real shame, because both Rodney Hall and this, his latest book, deserve some real attention. It’s a book that will pay the reader who likes to take time to ponder in spades.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed this book.

Rodney Hall
A stolen season
Sydney: Picador, 2018
342pp.
ISBN: 9781760555443

(Review copy courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)

The Griffyns “play” music

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Musical Instrument Playground

Some of the instruments, including the Bicycle Hurdy-Gurdy.

We always say that musicians play music, or play their instruments, but the Griffyns took this to a whole new level last weekend when they presented their “Giant All-Ages Instrument Playground” concert. Were we surprised? No, because this was the Griffyns, after all …

However, being prepared to be surprised also meant that we didn’t know what to expect. Here are some of the descriptions they used to promote this concert, which, they explained, was created by them and their “crackpot team”! You get the drift:

Griffyn have brought in Jim Sharrock (famous for his Musical Mushroom Gardens), and visual artist Byrd (one of Canberra’s pre-eminent mural and graffiti artists) to join West Australian Mark Cain (of AC/PVC fame), to collaborate in making this unique collection.

AND

We’ve transformed satellite dishes, PVC pipes, foot pumps, balloons, skis, tin cans, fence-posts bicycles, wooden boxes, garden utensils, and more into some of the most incredible musical instruments you’ve never seen!

AND

The Circularsawruses have come to town – Roll up to Belconnen Arts Centre to experience the launch of the Griffyn Ensemble’s Instrument Playground! The Griffyn Ensemble have assembled a crackpot team of musical musicians and makers from across the country and the Canberra community to create and compose on some of the most curious sounds to have ever hit the capital. Hear such wondrous musical inventions such as the wintry Ski Bass, the Bicycle Hurdy Gurdy, and the Flutes of Many Mouths.

Although this concert has been in Griffyn director Michael Sollis’ mind for some time, its timing was perfect because it followed the recent three-part ABC documentary, Don’t stop the music, on the importance of music education for children. One of Sollis’ hats is Music Viva’s Artistic Director for Education, a role which involved him, at least in the beginning, working with the late (wonderful) Richard Gill.

Anyhow, some of the concert was beautiful, some exciting, and some – yes, we have to admit – challenged the ears, but it was all good fun. It started with fun, in fact, with a musical pun sort of fun, when soprano Susan Ellis, supported by other members of the ensemble, entered the performance space singing a “Walking Bass” complete with hiking poles. From there Susan Ellis featured again, singing Cold Chisel’s “Flame trees”, with Kiri and Michael Sollis on “flutes”, and Holly Downes on her quad bass – but look, there were, at my rough count, some 13 or so pieces performed, so I’m not going to list them all. Instead, I’ll just share some representative highlights.

Performing the Little Drummer Boy

The audience was flummoxed when asked to identify the Bicycle Hurdy-Gurdy version of the Beatles “Blackbird” and was entertained by the Flutes of Many Mouths (or was it Many Hands?) version of “The little drummer boy”. The Surgical Glove Bagpipe was a sight for sore eyes – and, well, what it was for the ears depends a bit on your attitude to the bagpipes – but I recognised the tune, which was a start! Most of the pieces were familiar, or recognisable, which was probably a good thing given the instruments were all invented. Best to ease us in gently!

However, there were some original pieces, such as Michael Sollis’ “Baloons” (the spello remaining because, he said, it’s hard to erase highlighters, in which the music was written). It was performed by Holly Downes, Michael and Kiri Sollis, and Chris Stone on their chosen, more-or-less appropriate-to-them instruments. Audience members had copies of the colourful score and were asked to identify which “line” was for which instrument. We passed – just – I think!

There was, in fact, quite a bit of audience participation. Jim Sharrock, on a sort of slide-guitar-with a tin-can soundbox, was joined by Susan Ellis, to lead us in “Tannenbaum”. Towards the end, young students from Aranda Primary School, who were scattered around the audience, joined in, playing their parts, as conducted by Michael Sollis, on tiny wind instruments made of PVC pipes.

And I must mention an appropriate piece for the time of year, “Cicada”, composed by Paul Kopetz, and from his Australian Backyard Suite. The words go:

A hazy Australian summer. A scorching stifling day. All creatures of water, bush, and sky are still, awaiting the coolness of sunset. All except one – the cicada. His relentless tune defies stillness and is stillness. His metronomic song drips from gum trees. His symphony of survival deafens our senses.

It seemed well-suited to a “buzzing” performance on the Griffyns’ invented instruments. (You can hear a version on YouTube.)

This might all sound a bit “silly” but it wasn’t. It was fun – and it was about serious musicians showing us how you can make music out of just about anything, and how it’s more important to give it a go than to stay on the side and watch (as we did, skedaddling before the audience was let loose on the instruments at the end. We did, in our defence, have another event to go to.)

For a little introduction to what we experienced, check out this promo video:

Once again, it was something completely different from the Griffyns. It wasn’t the most restful concert we’ve been to, but it was one of the most joyful, not to mention inventive. And we can all do with a bit of joy and invention in our lives, can’t we?

Griffyn Ensemble (and Friends): Michael Sollis (director), Holly Downes, Susan Ellis, Kiri Sollis, and Chris Stone with special guests Jim Sharrock, Mark Cain, the Circular-sawruses and some children from Aranda Primary School.

Clare Wright, You daughters of freedom (#BookReview)

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Clare Wright, You daughters of freedomWell, that was a tome and a half! And in saying this I’m referring less to the length of Clare Wright’s new history, You daughters of freedom: The Australians who won the vote and inspired the world, than to its depth and richness. There are, in fact, two main stories going on here – the story of women’s suffrage in Australia and England, and that of Australia’s leadership in the world, at the time, in terms of progressive politics, of forward-thinking social legislation. They were heady, optimistic times, and the suffragists (being those men and women who advocated for women’s enfranchisement) were part of it all.

Clare Wright frames her history of this period in Australia’s nationhood through the story of five suffragists – Vida Goldstein (1869-1949), Dora Montefiore (1851-1933), Nellie Martel (1855-1940), Dora Meeson Coates (1869-1955), and Muriel Matters (1877-1969). These women should – like that famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst is – be household words. Indeed Pankhurst knew and used most of them in her long battle for women’s suffrage in England. Why are they not? Why, for example, asked Clare Wright at the lecture I attended, is there no statue to Vida Goldstein in Victoria? (There is, she tells us in her Epilogue, a memorial park bench in her hometown of Portland, Vic! A park bench!!)

Well, lest we think they are not well-known because achieving suffrage was oh-so easy in Australia, Vida told otherwise to a US Senate Select Committee on US Suffrage during her 1902 USA tour:

Vida wished the senators to know, too, that this was the result of years of hard fighting–in case they also subscribe to the ‘one fine day if just happened’ school of political progress.

In other words, our five women (and all the other Australian fighters for the cause) may not have had to chain themselves to a grille like Muriel Matters did in England in the Suffragette cause, nor refuse to pay taxes as Dora Montefiore also did in England for the same cause, but they had lobbied their case hard. Indeed, while South Australia granted suffrage to its women in 1894, and the new federal government to women in 1902, it took until 1908 for the last state in Australia, Victoria, to do so.

I should clarify here that, although Australia was a leader in women’s suffrage by being the first nation to legislate suffrage for all white adult Australian women, without property qualifications, and to enable those women to stand for parliament, it was just for white women. As Wright says, “it was now race, not gender, that defined the limits of Australian citizenship.”

Writing history

You daughters of freedom is, then, a good read, because the story it tells is fascinating. The five significant women are all wonderful subjects in their own right:

  • Vida Goldstein, the private school girl who “developed a passionate commitment to the underprivileged” and a “zeal for social reform”, and stood for parliament several times to pave the way for others;
  • Dora Montefiore, the committed socialist whose practice of non-violent civil disobedience was observed by a young Gandhi;
  • Nellie Martel, the elocutionist whose militant activism resulted in her being arrested in England and spurned by papers at home;
  • Dora Meeson Coates, the artist whose “Trust the women” banner is now on permanent display in Parliament House; and
  • Muriel Matters, the actor who led the grille protest in the House of Commons, flew in a “Votes for Women” labelled airship over London, and undertook a popular, successful lecture tour on English suffrage in Australia.

I’m not going to share their stories, because you can find them in reviews (like Lisa’s, in the link below), in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (on which their names above are linked), and most importantly in Clare Wright’s book. Each of these women played critical roles in the suffrage fight both home and in England where limited women’s suffrage wasn’t achieved until 1918.

No, what I want to write about is the style, because no matter how interesting or important history is, few (besides the academics and die-hards) will read it if it it’s not written in a way that engages. And this is where Wright shines. It’s a hefty tome, at nearly 500 pages. It’s a complex one which juggles the stories of five quite disparate women, from the late nineteenth century to the second decade of the twentieth. And it is extensively researched, with each page containing not one but several quotes from mostly primary sources (such as newspapers, speeches, and documents from personal papers.) A daunting work for researcher and reader alike.

In my admittedly limited knowledge of historical writing – so I might be barking up the wrong tree – Clare Wright’s approach reminded me somewhat of Thomas Carlyle’s in his three-volume The French Revolution. It’s a few decades since I read Carlyle, but that history could be written with such verve and colour made a big impression on me. Like Carlyle, though perhaps not quite so flamboyantly, Wright is not afraid to use bold rhetorical tools to tell her story. Explaining why 1911 didn’t turn out to be the golden year England’s suffragettes hoped, Wright writes:

Truth be told, the writing was on the wall well before that. The summer of 1911 continued in a national pantomime of over-the-top pageantry and under-the-surface tension with the King and his court centre stage. But the audience should have been shouting, ‘Over there! Look over there!’

Over there  … to Bermondesy […]

Over there … to Ireland […]

And further over there–to Germany […]

The glorious late summer of Edwardian England was about to shatter like a cheap vase.

There is nothing inaccurate in what she says – to my knowledge, anyhow – but the way she says it is fresh, compelling, and devoid of dry or, worse, obfuscating academese. I could pull out example after example of writing that captures our attention, but I think I’ve made my point.

Wright is also careful to make clear where the historical record is lacking. Why did Nellie, for example, suddenly disappear from public life? Wright explains that there are no clear answers, but follows up to discuss the “few clues”.

And, then, almost best of all, there’s the extensive use of contemporary newspaper reportage – surely made so much easier for modern researchers by the wonderful Trove. Wright draws on conservative and progressive newspapers from around Australia to reflect what people – as represented by editors and journalists – were thinking at the time. When Nellie, say, or Vida, were active in England, the Australian papers were watching closely and reporting. Not only does this flesh out our understanding of the suffrage question, but it fleshes out the wider social history.

The book is chronologically told, with evocatively titled chapters, such as, for example, Chapter 28’s “Homecoming Queen, Australia, winter 1910”, which chronicles Muriel Matters’ return home for her lecture tour. However, despite this signposting, readers do have to be on their mettle to keep track of our five suffragettes, to know where they are at any one time, and which of the many political organisations, if any, they’re aligned with. It’s a complicated story that Wright aims to tell – and following it requires attention.

They were heady days …

So, You daughters of freedom, is an engrossing read – but, I have to admit that, as I read it, I became sadder and sadder. This was mainly because of that thread that I mentioned in my opening paragraph, the one to do with Australia’s leadership in terms of progressive politics. What happened to us – us Australians I mean? There we were, at the turn of the century, leading the world, not only in women’s suffrage but in a whole raft of social reform measures, relating to working conditions, conditions for women and children, and, even, Maternity Allowance. We were also the first nation to elect a socialist or Labor government, when Andrew Fisher was swept into power in 1910.

Well, what happened, says Wright, was World War 1, which completely changed the nation’s narrative. But that is another story. Meanwhile, I highly recommend You daughters of freedom, and look forward to Wright’s third book in her planned trilogy on Australian democracy.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) has also reviewed this book. She liked it too.

AWW Badge 2018Clare Wright
You daughters of freedom: The Australians who won the vote and inspired the world
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018
553pp.
ISBN: 9781925603934