Review

Helen Garner, Why she broke: The woman, her children and the lake (#Review)

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Three years ago I reviewed Helen Garner’s This house of grief about Robert Farquharson who drove his car into a dam in Victoria, resulting in the deaths of his three sons. It’s a grim grim story, so you might wonder why I am now writing about her essayΒ “Why she broke: The woman, her children and the lake” about Akon Guode who, in 2015, drove her car into a lake in Victoria resulting in the deaths of three of the four children inside.

There are two reasons, the main one being that this essay was, last week, awarded the Walkley Award (about which I’ve written before) for Feature Writing Long (over 4000 words). I hadn’t read the article when it was published in June this year, and probably wouldn’t have read it now, except for this award. What, I wondered, when I heard the news, made this essay, on a topic so seemingly similar to her recent book, worthy of the Walkley Award? The other reason is that although there are similarities – both parents drove their cars into water resulting in the deaths of children – there is a big difference. One parent was a father, and the other a mother. I wanted to know what, if anything, Garner would make of that in her analysis.

I’ll start two-thirds through the essay, where Garner quotes Guode’s defence counsel using a statement made to the Victorian Law Commission in 2004:

While men kill to control or punish their children or partner, women kill children because they cannot cope with the extreme difficulties that they encounter in trying to care for their children.

Given the current political climate – Harvey Weinstein, Don Bourke, et al – this statement must surely be read as part of that bigger picture concerning women’s powerlessness.

In the first part of the essay, Garner describes Guode’s life. She was a Sudanese refugee to Australia who had been married as a teenager but had then lost her husband in the civil war there. In that culture women cannot remarry, but remain a possession of their husband’s family. Guode’s third child was fathered by a brother-in-law. Eventually, after more trauma in Africa, she was sponsored to come to Australia by another of her late husband’s brothers, Manyang. Her life here became difficult in a different way, with her bearing four children to this already married man. At the time of the incident she had seven children.

Garner details the difficulties of Guode’s life, including the traumatic birth of her seventh child, and her struggle to care for her family while also sending money back to family in Africa. To her, this was an obligation, but at the committal hearing, Garner writes, a local community leader said that “It is not an obligation. I would call it a moral duty”! Not surprisingly Garner’s reaction to this is that “under the circumstances this seems like a very fine distinction”! This sort of word play – “obligation” versus “moral duty” – can make such a mockery of the law (or of its practitioners), can’t it?

There was of course discussion during the hearing of Guode’s mental state, with the judge suggesting that “something dramatic” must have triggered her action. The psychiatrist, however, argued that “it can just be the ebb and flow of human suffering, and the person reaching the threshold at which they can … no longer go on.”

But Garner also proposes a possible “trigger event” that went back 16 months to the last traumatic birth. Postnatal haemorrhaging was so bad she was close to needing a hysterectomy. Guode initially refused treatment. Garner writes that she was

prepared to risk bleeding to death on a hospital gurney rather than consent to the surgical removal of the sole symbol of her worth, the site of her only dignity and power: her womb?

Surely, a woman whose life had lost all meaning apart from her motherhood would kill her children only in a fit of madness.

Garner also discusses the technicalities of infanticide versus murder in Victorian law, and Guode’s counsel’s argument that all three deaths should be viewed through “the prism of infanticide”, which would result in a lesser sentence, even though only one of the children met the age criterion. Her eventual sentence makes clear that he didn’t win his argument.

What makes this essay so good, besides the analysis, is Garner’s writing. Here she is on a jury trial versus a plea hearing (which this was):

If a full-bore jury trial is a symphony, a plea hearing is a string quartet. Its purpose seems to be to clear a space in which the quality of mercy might at least be contemplated. There is something moving in its quiet thoughtfulness, the intensity of its focus, the murmuring voices of judge and counsel, the absence of melodrama or posturing. It’s the law in action, working to fit the dry, clean planes of reason to the jagged edges of human wildness and suffering.

That last sentence! Breathtaking. It reminds me once again what an excellent essayist Garner is, and it’s not just for her style. She has the ability to take us on a journey, leading us logically, and empathically, to consider values and ethics, without ever being didactic.

In this essay, it’s her concluding comments and final question regarding mercy which gets to the nub of it. It concerns the idea of “mother”, which she calls “this great thundering archetype with the power to stop the intellect in its tracks”. Read Garner’s essay, and/or this report in The Age, and see what you think. I don’t envy Justice Lasry’s job, but I know, based on what I’ve read, where my intellect goes.

aww2017 badgeHelen Garner
“Why she broke: The woman, her children and the lake”
The Monthly, June 2017
Available online

Caroline Moorehead, Dancing to the precipice (#BookReview)

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Unusually, my reading group read two biographies about non-Austrian women this year, Jane Fletcher Geniesse’s book on Freya Stark (my review) in January and now, this month, Caroline Moorehead’s book Dancing to the precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French RevolutionΒ on the French aristocrat Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de La Tour-du-Pin-Gouvernet. Interestingly, Moorehead has also written a biography of Freya Stark. Moreover, while Caroline Moorehead is an English writer, it turns out that her father was the Australian war correspondent and historianΒ Alan Moorehead. How tangled is all this!

But now the book itself. Dancing to the precipiceΒ chronicles the life of French-born aristocrat Lucie, from her birth in 1770 to her death in 1853, a period which, you’ll realise, covers some of Europe’s and, in particular, France’s most tumultuous times. Lucie de la Tour du Pin, as Moorehead calls her, saw most of it up close and personal, but somehow managed to survive. The evocative title conveys a sense of how tenuous that survival could be. It comes from Lucie’s own words written just before the storming of the Bastille. She wrote:

Amid all these pleasures we were laughing and dancing our way to the precipice.

Lucie, Moorehead tells us, went on to say that while this blindness was pardonable among the young, it was “inexplicable in men of the world, in Ministers and above all, in the King”. She wasn’t wrong – and the rest of the book tells us how often throughout their lives they nearly went over the precipice.

Dancing to the precipice is a thorough work, thorough in its description of Lucie’s life, and thorough in the research carried out by Moorehead. The biography is footnoted (though not intrusively) and contains an extensive list of sources at the end. It is also well-indexed. All of these are important – to me, anyhow! The reason the book is able to be so thorough – without Moorehead ever needing to resort to gap-filling – is because her life is so well documented, by herself primarily.

Lucie, in fact, has been described as the Pepys of her generation because of the memoir she started writing when she was 49. TitledΒ Journal d’une femme de 50 ans, it wasΒ published posthumously and covers her lifeΒ through the Ancien RΓ©gime, the French Revolution, to the time ofΒ Napoleon, until March 1815 when he returned from exile on Elba. In her Afterword, Moorehead explains that in addition to this memoir, which apparently has never been out of print, she had access to an extensive collection of letters written by Lucie to a god-daughter and many others, and the papers and correspondence of her husband. A wealth of resources that I suspect many biographers would die for.

Except, it’s perhaps this wealth that has caused my one little criticism of what is, really, an excellent biography. My criticism, as you’ve probably guessed, concerns the amount of detail in the book. There were times when I wondered whether I really needed to know as much as she gave, for example, about the wedding of a half-sister or the love-life of her friend. In terms of social history, perhaps yes, but there were times I wanted a tighter focus, and to not be inundated with quite so much information about so many people.Β That said, Dancing to the precipice is a fascinating story about an astonishing period of history and an engaging and resilient woman.

There were many aspects of the book I enjoyed, starting with refreshing my old high school and university history studies in the French Revolution. As Moorehead revealed each new phase in that tortuous process by which France moved from the ancien regime to the final republic, I remembered. I loved the description of Lucie and her husband’s time as Γ©migrΓ©s in Albany, NY, in America, and the resourceful way they fit into the life there, despite their aristocratic training. I also loved the descriptions of fashion and food in Paris, and of the salons, and the role played by women in encouraging intellectual discussion and debate. Every time the Γ©migrΓ©s felt it was safe to return to Paris, the salons started up again (until, eventually, they didnt!) Moorehead draws a stark comparison between the engagement of women in public debate in France versus that of their English counterparts:

Englishwomen remained, to the surprise and annoyance of their French guests, firmly in their segregated and inferior places, expected to withdraw after dinner to allow the men to talk literature and politics. In England, a visitor smugly remarked, women were β€˜the momentary toy of passion’, while in France they were companions β€˜in the hours of reason and conversation’. As Jane Austen put it, β€˜Imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms’, something that Lucie, brought up to talk intelligently, would find extraordinary. (Loc 4713)

What most retained my interest in the book, though, was Lucie herself. Always the aristocrat but also believing in the need for change, her resilience and resourcefulness in the face of blow after blow was inspiring. Besides the escapes from France and the returns, only to have to escape again, there was the loss of her children. Only one from her ten pregnancies outlived her, something Moorehead argues was extreme, even accounting for the times. Lucie was also unusual for a more positive feat, that of having a successful, loving marriage for 50 years. She and FrΓ©dΓ©ric were, it appears, true partners.

So, there was more to enjoy about the biography than to criticise, and I’m very glad I read it. I’ll conclude with a quote from the book describing FrΓ©dΓ©ric’s last days, and his statements about the importance of studying history:

He now spent much of his time in his room, reading and writing to [grandson] Hadelin, long letters mulling over his own life and urging the young man to study, to think on serious matters, to develop a taste for reflection. He should turn, he wrote, towards β€˜the vast questions of humanity: there you will find true riches’. […] Β It was in history, he told Hadelin, that he should seek to find ways of understanding the world, and to learn how to make his mark on it; for it was to history that β€˜one must look to discover motives and judgements, the source of ideas, the proof of theories too often imaginary and vague’. Reflection, he added, was β€˜the intellectual crutch on which the traveller must lean on his road to knowledge’.

It’s astonishing that this couple who, Moorehead writes,Β stood out “for the reckless ease with which they challenged political decisions they considered to be lacking in morality or common sense”, regardless of who was in power, survived into their old ages. It says, I suspect, something about both the respect with which they were held and their ability to judge when it was time to skedaddle. A most interesting read.

Caroline Moorehead
Dancing to the precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution
London: Vintage, 2010
ISBN: 9781409088929 (ePub)

Stephanie Buckle, Habits of silence (#BookReview)

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Stephanie Buckle, Habits of silenceI have been champing at the bit to read local author Stephanie Buckle’s debut short story collection, Habits of silence, ever since I attended its launch in August by John Clanchy at the Canberra Writers Festival. The readings that both Clanchy and Buckle herself gave from the book grabbed my attention and convinced me that this would be a book I’d like. However, it had to wait its turn in my review copy pile. Finally its number came up – and I devoured it. I will never understand why some readers don’t like short stories. At least, I understand their reasons in my head, but I don’t in my readerly heart! (If that makes sense.)

John Clanchy, in launching this beautifully designed book, spoke about its title which is not, as commonly occurs, the title of one of the stories inside. When this happens, it’s logical to consider what the title means, and for Clanchy it reflects the book’s interest in communication, and particularly in the part played by silence. Silence, he said, can be positive or negative, and both of these are explored in Buckle’s stories. This is not to say that all the stories are specifically about, or even feature silence in a major way. But even in those that don’t, there’s usually some missed communication or miscommunication that might just as well be silence.

And now I come to that part that’s always a challenge with reviewing short story collections, which is whether to quickly survey all the stories or focus on a couple or try to do a bit of both. I usually opt for the last of these, and will probably do so again here. One day I’ll come up with an exciting new way to discuss short story collections, but I haven’t found it yet!

So, the survey part. There are fourteen stories, some of which have been published before, with a couple having won awards. There are both first-person and third-person stories – providing lovely variety – and the protagonists range in age, situation, and gender. It feels like a collection that could only be written by someone with a good few decades of life experience under her belt (but perhaps that’s denying what imagination can do). I’m certainly not saying that Buckle has experienced all she writes about, but the stories do feel imbued with a deep sense of knowingness.

One of the stories that is specifically about silence is titled, well, “the silence”. It’s about two brothers, Jim and his older brother George Clayton (love this cheeky last name), who live in a country town and have run the family furniture business for years, without speaking to each other. Each works alternate days and George communicates with Jim by letter, because, it seems

Silence is safe. Silence commits to nothing. Far easier to be silent than to speak.

Except, this silence is burning Jim up – that, and his brother’s complete inflexibility about changing anything in their increasingly anachronistic shop to bring it up to date. I liked this story, the beautiful realisation of the characters, and its tentative but by no means certain resolution.

Another story in which silence is central is “fifty years”. This is one of the stories read from at the launch, and it tantalised me. It concerns a woman who has been rendered mute by a stroke. She’s in hospital, attended by her husband of fifty years and her daughter, from whose point of view the story is told. Here’s part of the excerpt read at the launch. It comes after the husband has been prattling on with platitudes:

And that’s when I see it, the first time. It’s the expression you make when you think no one’s looking. The one you make to yourself, with your back turned. It’s the one that makes all the others look like masks, as if all the cups of tea, and all the ironed shirts, are just pretending. She turns from me and regards him quite steadily, but as if she sees him down the wrong end of a telescope, or as if he’s a fly buzzing still against the window, that she briefly thinks she might stir herself to deal with, but can’t be bothered. Are you still here? it says.

If that doesn’t make you want to read this book, then I’d say you’re a lost cause! Buckle’s insights into human relationships make you sit up and pay attention – and her honed spare writing is well-suited to her theme.

The second story in the collection, “sex and money”, is also about a lonely wife who feels unappreciated. Like the husband in “fifty years”, Frank appears to know little about the wife he lives with, and is more likely to help a neighbour than do something she’s asked. And yet, in his head, he loves – at least he desires – his wife. Rose meanwhile finds her own way of obtaining pleasure. It’s all to do with money, but not what you might be thinking. Buckle’s playing with ideas of lust, desire and money here is cheeky – and telling.

But not all marriages, not all relationships in the book, are poor. The woman inΒ “the man on the path” has been grieving her beloved husband’s death for four years. She has come to the Lakes, a favourite holiday place of theirs, for a break, but feels out of place amongst all the happy holidaying couples. Then, out walking, she meets a man on the path, but a “failure of courage”, an inability to communicate appropriately, sees an opportunity to make a connection pass. She perseveres with her walking, however, and, well, you never know, there could be a second chance …

There’s nothing like mental illness to focus us on essential truths about humanity. Lillian, in the opening story “lillian and meredith”, is developing dementia – her “words scatter in all directions” – but, like many of the book’s characters, she’s lonely so when new patient Meredith appears she sees her opportunity. Meredith is welcoming, but when money goes missing, it all falls apart and poor Lillian is handled with less than kindness by the staff. This is just one of several stories which feature mental illness, with three of themΒ – “us and them”, “frederick”, and “no change” – set in the same place, Cedar Grove Psychiatric Facility. There is no cross-over in characters, but there’s something nicely grounding in returning to a familiar place, even if when we get there we are confronted by questions about duty of care and our frequent failure, for whatever reasons, systemic or personal, to provide it.

Buckle’s stories, then, explore all sorts of relationships – between couples, siblings, parents and children, friends, teachers and students, and even staff and patients – showing that none are immune from communication challenges, from silences that hide true feelings to words which do the same, from convictions that relationships are true to realisations that they aren’t, from attempts to connect to refusals to do so. Although some stories impacted me more than others, I was engaged by them all, reminding me once again why I love short stories. It’s their little nuggety insights into human nature – and Buckle’s Habits of silenceΒ provides just that.

aww2017 badgeStephanie Buckle
Habits of silence
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2017
202pp.
ISBN: 9780994516534

(Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd)

 

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The sympathizer (#BookReview)

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Viet Thanh Nguyen, The sympathizerA cover blurb on my edition of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, captures the novel perfectly when it calls it “intelligent, relentlessly paced, and savagely funny” (Wall Street Journal). I loved reading it. It’s quite coincidental that I read this straight after Hoa Pham’s Lady of the realm (my review)Β but they make anΒ interesting pairing because both deal with the Vietnam (or American) War and its aftermath, both are written in first person from a Vietnamese character’s point of view, and both question what happens when revolutions win. But, their approaches couldn’t be more different.

The sympathizer starts with an in-your-face statement by a never-named narrator: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” It is April 1975 and the war has ended with the capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese Army, but in the second paragraph we discover something else about our narrator. He is not talking to us but to a “Commandant”. So, where is he, and why is he talking to a Commandant? We don’t fully find out until near the end, although we soon discover that he is being held captive and is writing his “confession”. The story he tells, the story we read, is his confession. And what he confesses to is his life as a North Vietnamese mole in the close employ of a South Vietnamese General.

In this role, he leaves Saigon in the chaotic evacuation and ends up in Southern California, still working (now unpaid) for the General, while at the same time sending covert reports back to his “aunt” in Paris. In other words, in the USA, he maintainsΒ his life as a man of “two faces”, a man who is “able to see any issues from both sides”. He can do this, not only because of his role as a mole, but also because he is a bastard, the son of a Vietnamese woman and a French priest who had seduced her and had never acknowledged his son. With feet in both camps – the Orient and the Occident – he is well-placed to comment on their respective cultures and actions while, at the same time, symbolising their conflicts, confusions and misunderstandings. Near the end he says:

I was always ever divided, although it was only partially my fault. While I chose to live two lives and be a man of two minds, it was hard not to, given how people had always called me a bastard. Our country itself was cursed, bastardised, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, centre and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for further bisection …

What makes this book such a great read – besides its heart and themes – is its writing. Nguyen migrated to the USA with his parents when he was 4 years old. In the notes at the back of my edition, he describes growing up in a Vietnamese enclave in California, and how he’d decided that he couldn’t live life well with two languages, so decided to “master one and ignore the other. But in mastering that language and its culture, I learned too well how Americans viewed Vietnamese”. This seems to the main driver for this book – to tell a story about the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective – but his aim is wider than that too. It is to comment on war, on its futility, and on the way American culture seems to thrive on it.

The first chapter introduces us to the central feature of Nguyen’s writing, satire, and my, it shows how well he mastered his adopted language. If the pace is relentless, as the Wall Street Journal says, so is the satire. Its targets are broad, and non-discriminatory, though, admittedly, American life and culture bear the major brunt. In Chapter 3, he discusses prostitution:

I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed wall of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

The language is sly and wry, as our narrator of the divided-soul teases us – provokes us – again and again with dualities and paradoxes. Literally, he is a communist sympathiser, but his true sympathies are broader. “Although it’s not correct, politically speaking”, he says, he feels “sympathy” for the South Vietnamese poor who were attacked by their own soldiers. “No one asks poor people if they want war”, he writes.

And so the book continues. There are comic set-pieces such as his role as a Vietnamese expert on the making of a film that reads very much like Apocalypse Now. The experience teaches him that not controlling the way you are represented results in “a kind of death”. There are also awful scenes of torture and violence, including those where he is ordered by the General, even in the USA, to eliminate apparent opponents. He says of the General’s plans:

The General’s men, by preparing themselves to invade our communist homeland, were in fact turning themselves into new Americans. After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.

This idea of “freedom and independence” is the complex conundrum that underpins the fundamental irony of the book, from its opening chapters when Ho Chi Minh is quoted as saying “Nothing is more important than independence and freedom”. What these mean, what people do in their name, and why so often they are taken away by the very people who called for them, are scrutinised by Nguyen via his narrator.

The sympathizer is, in many ways, a bitter novel, because it sees clearly into the human heart, and its messy, divided nature, its “moth-eaten moral covers” – but the bitterness is offset by a sense of resilience and a belief that it need not be like this. A big thanks to my Californian friend Carolyn for sending me this.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) was also impressed by this novel.

Viet Thanh Nguyen,
The sympathizer
New York: Grove Press, 2015
382pp.
ISBN: 9780802124944

Hoa Pham, Lady of the realm (#BookReview)

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Hoa Pham, Lady of the realm

Hoa Pham was one of the participants at the recent Boundless Festival (my post), so it’s rather apposite that her latest work, Lady of the realm, popped up as my next review copy. The very brief author bio on the Festival site describes the novel as “about a Buddhist clairvoyant in Vietnam”. Well, it is, but it’s about far more than that too.

Vietnamese-Australian Hoa Pham was born in Hobart after her Vietnamese parents went there to study in the 1970s. She has written several novels, children’s books, plays and short stories, but her novella, Lady of the Realm, is the first that I’ve read. It’s a slim book, a novella in fact, told first person in a chronological sequence that covers nearly five decades from 1962 to 2009. If you know your south-east Asian history, you’ll realise that this time-span starts during the Vietnam or American War (depending on your perspective.)

It’s quite a challenge to cover such a long and tumultuous period in less than 90 pages, but Pham achieves it by keeping her focus tight – to the experience of the Buddhist monk LiΓͺn. Before we meet her formally though, there is a short prologue, which is also in her voice, albeit unknown to us at that point. She prepares us for the vignette-style in which she tells her story:

Looking back over the years, it seems that time stretches and contracts, depending on my experience of each moment. Some moments are etched in my memory, like the sunlight patterning the water in the river, ethereal moments captured only by my mind. Other longer stretches of time are a blur ….

This makes perfect sense to me in terms of how we remember our lives, and hence works for telling a story that covers a long life in a turbulent place. However, if you are someone who likes to get lost in a character and the ongoing drama of life, this book may not work for you.

So, LiΓͺn. She is introduced in 1962 as a young girl who has a prescient dream that the Viet Minh will come and destroy her fishing village. This marks her as the one to succeed her grandmother BΓ  as keeper of the shrine and mouthpiece for the Lady of the Realm (as she calls the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Quan Ám). Unfortunately, the village head ignores the warning, and the village is attacked with most in the village killed. LiΓͺn, however, escapes, and lives to chronicle the aftermath.

The book then takes us through moments in LiΓͺn’s, and therefore Vietnam’s, life in 1968, 1980, 1991 and 2007, before finishing in 2009 when LiΓͺn is now an old woman living in a Buddhist monastery. She has experienced much violence and oppression – through the war and the “fall of Saigon”, through the Communist regime which she “naively believed” would bring peace but which brought “re-education” and more death, and through later “reforms” which were supposed to open up Vietnam but saw her beloved Prajna Monastery destroyed. LiΓͺn survives it all, sustained by hope:

Ever hidden away the Lady could still bring hope, I thought. I had found the Lady in many guises, but the strongest seemed to be the Lady I had inside. (1980)

This hope is sorely tested, however, and in the last section she says:

Sanctuaries are an illusion, only suffering is real. I know that this is not what Buddha taught, and my experience has made my own sayings out of his teachings. I believe that any safety I find is temporary, any refuge is not permanent. But my teacher would say, all things are impermanent and change. I hope that our situation will change. Some days I cannot bear another moment of being under siege. (2009)

The tone, here, is typical of the book as a whole – calm, somewhat resigned, and sometimes hopeful.

Now, how to describe the writing? There’s the tone, and there’s Pham’s simple, direct language (which is also evidenced in the above excerpt). There’s also her preponderant use of short paragraphs. And there’s the episodic form, with each episode/year heralded by an epigraph, the last four by Buddhist monk and peace activist, ThΓ­ch NhαΊ₯t HαΊ‘nh. Together, these create a sort of prose-poem, and with that, dare I venture, a higher (or perhaps just universal) plane of truth!

In other words, Pham has contrived to tell a personal, human story through her character LiΓͺn, while also conveying a philosophical attitude to life based on endurance, compassion and most of all hope. A moving, inspiring read.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) captures the book beautifully in her review.

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Hoa Pham
Lady of the realm
Mission Beach: Spinifex Press, 2017
98pp.
ISBN: 9781925581133

(Review copy courtesy Spinifex Press)

Stan Grant, Talking to my country (#BookReview)

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Stan Grant, Talking to my countryHistory is, in a way, the main subject of my reading group’s October book, Stan Grant’s Talking to my country. I’m consequently somewhat nervous about writing this post, because discussions of history in Australia are apt to generate more emotion than rational discussion. I will, though, discuss it – through my interested lay historian’s eyes.

However, before we get to that, I’d like to briefly discuss the book’s form. Firstly, it’s a hybrid book, that is, it combines forms and/or genres. In the non-fiction arena, this often involves combining elements of memoir with something else, like biography, as in Gabrielle Carey’s Moving among strangers (myΒ review). In Grant’s case, he combines memoir with something more polemical – an interrogation of Australian history, and how the stories we tell about our past inform who we are and how we relate to each other.

Secondly, and probably because it’s not a straight memoir – Grant wrote his memoir, The tears of strangers, in 2002 – the book is structured more thematically than chronologically, though a loose chronology underlies it. For example, his discussion of the lives of his grandparents and parents doesn’t happen until Part 3, and then in Part 4 he discusses the government’s policies for handling “the ‘Aboriginal problem'”, particularly that of assimilation (or, more accurately, “absorption”.) This structure enables him to focus the narrative on his theme, so let’s now get to that.

The book opens with an introductory chapter titled, simply, My country: Australia. In it, Grant sets out why he wrote the book, which is to convey to non-indigenous Australians just what life is like for indigenous people, to explain that although history is largely ignored it still “plagues” indigenous people, and to tell us that the impetus for him to finally write the book was the booing of indigenous football player Adam Goodes in 2015. And here, in very simple terms, Grant states his thesis:

This wasn’t about sport; this was about our shared history and our failure to recognise it.

He goes on to explain that while some tried to deny or excuse it, his people knew where that booing came from. From my point of view, it’s pretty clear too.

“the gulf of our history”

Now, I’m not going to summarise all his arguments – or the stories of his and other indigenous people’s experiences – but I do want to share some of his comments about history. As Grant is clearly aware – and what Australian isn’t – history is politicised, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. My generation, the baby-boomers, grew up learning that Captain Cook discovered Australia and that Governor Phillip established the first settlement. If Aboriginal people were mentioned, it tended to be in passing. They were merely a side-bar to the main story. We may have learnt about the missions (and the “great” work they were doing) and we may have learnt in later years of schooling that many indigenous people lived in poverty, but we weren’t told about the massacres and violence that occurred, and nor was it ever suggested that we* had invaded an already occupied land. However, as we now know, these things we weren’t told are incontrovertible facts, supported by evidence.

Some, unfortunately, still ignore these facts and some try to interpret them differently, while the rest of us accept them but feel helpless about how to proceed. And this leads directly to Grant’sΒ underpinning point, which is that we – black and white Australians – meet across “the contested space of our shared past”. Elsewhere he states it a little less strongly as “the gulf of our history”. I love the clarity of these phrases. They explain perfectly why discourse in Australia regarding indigenous Australians can be so contentious and so often futile. Grant’s point is that we can’t progress as a unified nation until this space is no longer contested, until the gulf is closed or bridged.

Grant puts forward a strong case based on experience, anecdote and hard facts (such as the terrible, the embarrassing, statistics regarding indigenous Australians’ health outcomes, incarceration rates, etc) to encourage all Australians, “my country” as the title says, to understand why, for example, when we sing the national anthem – “Australians all, let us rejoice” – indigenous people don’t feel much like joining in. What do they have to rejoice about? Where is their “wealth for toil”.

Suffice it to say that I found this a powerful book. While in one sense, it didn’t teach me anything new, in another it conceptualised the current state of play for me in a different way, a way that has given me new language with which to frame my own thoughts.

By now, if you haven’t read the book, you’ll be thinking that it’sΒ a completely negative rant. But this is not so. It’s certainly “in your face” but Grant’s tone is, despite his admitting to anger, more generous. His aim is to encourage us white Australians to walk for a while in the shoes of our indigenous compatriots and thus understand for ourselves what our history, to date, has created. He believes that good relationships do exist, that there is generosity and goodwill but that,Β as the Adam Goodes episode made clear, bigotry and racism still divide us.

Late in the book Grant discusses the obvious fact that this land is now home to us all, that many of us have been here for generations and “can be from nowhere else”. Rather than rejecting “our” claims to love this place, he writes that this should make it easier for us to understand indigenous people’s profound connection to country. He writes:

I would like to think that with a sense of place comes a sense of history; an acceptance that what has happened here has happened to us all and that to turn from it or hide from it diminishes us.

And so, rather than telling indigenous people that “the past is past” andΒ “to get over it”, it would be far better, far more honest, far more helpful, for us non-indigenous people to say, “Yes, we accept what we did and understand its consequences. Now, how should we proceed?” Is this really too hard?

Stan Grant
Talking to my country
Sydney: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2016
230pp.
ISBN: 9781460751978

* And by “we”, I mean, as Robert Manne explains it, not “we” as individuals, but as the nation.

Gabrielle Carey, Moving among strangers (#BookReview)

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Gabrielle Carey, Moving among strangersEmma’s guest Monday Musings post last week on Randolph Stow provided the impetus for me to finally retrieve Gabrielle Carey’sΒ Moving among strangers: Randolph Stow and my familyΒ from my TBR pile. I’ve been wanting to read it for the longest time, but … well, those of you with big TBRs will understand.

Moving among strangers, whose title comes from a line in Stow’s novel The girl green as elderflower, is an unusual book. It’s partly a biography of Stow, and partly a memoir of Carey and her family, but Carey wouldn’t call it either. She says in her prologue:

… this book is not a biography. Neither is it a work of literary analysis or scholarly enquiry. It is more like a β€˜mostly private letter’, to use Stow’s phrase, written out of curiosity, and tenderness towards a man whom I have come to think of as an almost-relative, a dear friend of my mother’s, and the ideal literary mentor.

It all started when, as her mother was dying in 2009, Carey wrote to Stow in England letting him know of her mother’s condition. It was his response, which came four days after her mother’s death, which set Carey off. She’d known there’d been a connection, of course, but she didn’t know much about it. Stow wrote that Joan’s letters from London, when he was a schoolboy and undergraduate, “were like a window on the world”. Why, Carey wondered, did her mother correspond “with a young man, an adolescent, thirteen years her junior, who wasn’t even a relation?” This question is never properly answered in the book, not because there’s something salacious to discover (in case you were wondering), but because some connections made in life don’t have explanations beyond the fact that they occur. If that makes sense.

So, as the book progresses, Carey follows a Stow trail, “like a groupie”. She interrogates his novels and other writings, and reactions to them. She reads the letters Stow wrote to members of her and his family. And she visits the places in England where Stow had lived and meets some of the people who knew him there. One of the main strands in her story concerns Stow’s unease with Australia – with his feeling rejected by Australia and/or his rejecting Australia. There is no answer to this question either, but Carey’s exploration of the issue is enlightening (particularly given all those other Australian intellectuals who left in the 1960s – some well known like Germaine Greer and Clive James, others less so like Jill Ker Conway and Ray Mathew. Each story is different but there is probably a thread that links them too?)

There are many angles, in fact, from which I could write on this engaging but slippery book. There’s Carey’s sharing of her own history – the loss of her mother, her tricky relationship with her sister, the death by suicide of her father, and so on. There’s the form of the work and how it fits into what seems to be a new breed of biography-memoirs that is popping up. And of course, there’s Stow, himself. He comes across as an elusive character, and that’s probably because he was. When she, having made connection with him, enthusiastically tries to engage him, by correspondence, in a literary discussion about his and her mutual interest in James Joyce, he shuts her down, albeit politely, explaining that he was “old and ailing” which, in fact, he was. He died the next year.

This doesn’t deter her – for which we should be grateful because although the book is not, as she forewarns us, a biography, we do, nonetheless gain insight into Stow. She paints a picture, in the end, of a man at odds with the country in which he was born though exactly why is hard to say. Did he reject Australia – with its “depressing tolerance, even worship, of the second-rate” (his words) – or did Australia reject him with its inability to understand his work. Australian critics, apparently, panned his novel Tourmaline, for example, rejecting its combination of “fable and poetry” with “realism”. A later critic, Carey says, notes that Tourmaline represented a change, a move away from “bush realism … towards something more experimental”. However, at the time, as is so often the case with innovative creators, this was not recognised and Stow’s “too truthful, too confrontational of conventional attitudes” novel was not appreciated in his own country. Stow felt the rejection.

But, Carey is wary of coming to conclusions, as she constantly reminds us. At one point, when she has questions and no answers, she tells us that given there’s no one alive to tell her “the real story”, she “can only imagine”, but a page or two later, she says

But I could be wrong. Being wrong, I realised, is how I’ve spent most of my life: misinterpreting, misunderstanding, misjudging, miscommunication. Words slip and slide, as T.S Eliot said, or as Stow put it, ‘words can’t cope’.

A strange thing for a writer to say, perhaps? And yet, perhaps not. Perhaps, it’s something only a writer could say?

You are probably getting the gist now of this unusual book – and hopefully, realising what a delightful, engrossing and stimulating read it is. It is not a long book, and is therefore not comprehensive. If you want, for example, to read about the Stow book I know best, his first Miles Franklin winner, To the islands, you won’t find it here. What you will find though is an intelligent analysis of Stow the man and of his work. You will also gain, or, at least I did, some insights into literary Australia of the mid to late twentieth century – not a list of luminaries, or even a history, but a sense of the life and times, and of how one particular writer did (or didn’t) navigate it.

Near the end, Carey returns to a theme she introduced earlier in the book, that of twinning or duality of perspectives. She concludes that, in the Essex pub where she met people who had known Stow in the latter years of his life, she found “twin versions” of him, one “content in his lifestyle, in his aloneness, who was self-sufficient and independent” and one “who was uncomfortable in his own skin, internally and perpetually in conflict over his sexuality, his nationality and his identity.”

If you are interested in Stow, in Australian literary history more broadly, and/or in Carey herself, this is a book for you.

aww2017 badgeGabrielle Carey
Moving among strangers: Randolph Stow and my family
St Lucia: UQP, 2013
232pp.
ISBN: 9780702249921

Carmel Bird (ed), The stolen children: Their stories (#BookReview)

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Carmel Bird, The stolen childrenCommenting on my post on Telling indigenous Australian stories, Australian author Carmel Bird mentioned her 1998 book The stolen children,Β describing it as her contribution “to the spreading of indigenous stories through the wider Australian culture”. It contains stories told to, and contained in the report of, the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Bringing them home)*. She offered to send me a copy, and of course I accepted (despite having read much about the Report at the time.)

Bird said in her comment that the book is “still regularly used in schools”. This is excellent to hear because it contains a history that needs to be told – forever, alongside all those other histories taught to Australian students. It needs to be as well (if not better) known by our students as the story of The Gold Rush or Our Explorers. We need to know it, we need, as a nation, to know our dark side, our failures, as well as our big adventures and achievements.

What makes this book particularly useful is Carmel Bird’s curation of it – and I would call what she’s done “curation” because of the complexity and variety of the writings she has gathered and organised. Bird has structured the book carefully to tell a story, with introductory front matter (including a preface from Ronald Wilson the National Committee’s prime commissioner); the Stories themselves; Perspectives from people at the time, including Hansard excerpts from politicians at the tabling of the Report; the Report’s Recommendations; and end matter comprising an Afterword from historian Henry Reynolds and a poem titled “Sorry” by Millicent whose story appears in the Stories section. Bird’s curation also Β includes providing introductions to each of the stories to draw out important issues or points about that person’s situation, and adding other explanatory notes where appropriate.

This careful curation ensures that the book contains all the content and context it needs to stand alone as a resource for anyone interested in the Stolen Generations.

“It made no sense”

In her story, Donna says “It made no sense”. She’s describing her train trip away from her mother in the company of a white woman, a train trip she’d been initially excited about, thinking it was to be a family trip. However, with her mother staying behind on the platform and her brothers disappearing one by one as the journey went on, it just made no sense to her.

None of the stories make sense. And they are all heart-rending. Some children were given up willingly by their mothers, who believed it would result in better opportunities, and some, most, were stolen, often suddenly, with no explanation. Some were newborn, some pre-school or primary school-age, while others were 12 years old or more. Some found themselves in loving foster homes, but many found themselves in institutions and/or abusive situations. All, though, and this is the important thing, suffered extreme loss. They lost family and they lost language and culture. Fiona, for example, who will not criticise the missionaries who cared for her, says, on reconnecting with her family thirty-two years later:

I couldn’t communicate with my family because I had no way of communicating with them any longer. Once that language was taken away, we lost a part of that very soul. It meant our culture was gone, our family was gone, everything that was dear to us was gone.

Fiona also makes the point, as do several others, about the treatment of the mothers:

We talk about it from the point of view of our trauma but – our mother – to understand what she went through, I don’t think anyone can understand that.

The mothers, she said, “weren’t treated as people having feelings”.

The stories continue, telling of pain, pain and more pain. Murray says “we didn’t deserve life sentences, a sentence I still serve today”, and John talks of being a prisoner from when he was born. “Even today,” he writes, “they have our file number so we’re still prisoners you know. And we’ll always be prisoners while our files are in archives”. This is something that I, as a librarian/archivist, had not considered.

But, there’s more that makes no sense, and that’s the government of the time’s refusal to apologise, to satisfy, in fact, Recommendations 3 and 5a of the Report. This issue is covered in the Perspectives section, with extracts from speeches made by the then Prime Minister John Howard and the Minister for AboriginalΒ Torres Straight Islander Affairs Senator Herron who argue against making an apology, and fromΒ the Opposition Leader Kim Beazley and Labor Senator Rosemary Crowley, who made their own apologies. Crowley also says:

If ever there were a report to break the hearts of people, it is this one.

The Perspectives section also includes other commentary on the Report and the apology. There’s a letter to the editor from the son of a policeman who cried about his role in taking children away from “loving mothers and fathers”, and one from La Trobe Professor of History Marilyn Lake contesting the historical rationale for the practice of forcible removal. She argues that there had never been “consensus [about] the policy of child removal”. There’s also a long two-part article published in newspapers that year, from public intellectual Robert Manne. He picks apart the argument against making an apology, noting in particular Howard’s refusal to accept that present generations should be accountable or responsible for the actions of earlier ones. Manne differentiates between our role as individuals and as members of a nation:

we are all deeply implicated in the history of our nation. It is not as individuals but as members of the nation, the “imagined” community, that the present generation has indeed inherited a responsibility for this country’s past.

In the event, of course, an apology was made, finally, in February 2008, by Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. This, however, does not mitigate the value of Bird’s book. It has value, first, as documenting our history and the voices of those involved – indigenous people, politicians and commentators. And second, it contains thoughts and ideas that we still need to know and think about, not only for historical reasons, but because in the twenty years since the Report we have not made enough progress along the reconciliation path. It is shameful.

I loved Carmel Bird’s introduction. It’s both passionate and considered, and clearly lays out why she wanted to do this book. I’ll conclude with her words:

I think that perhaps imagination is one of the most important and powerful factors in the necessary process of reconciliation. If white Australian can begin to imagine what life has been like for many indigenous Australians over the last two-hundred years, they will have begun to understand and will be compelled to act. If we read these stories how can we not be shocked and moved …

“There can,” she says, “be no disbelief; these are true stories.”Β This is why the stolen generations should be a compulsory part of Australian history curricula (Recommendation 8a). It’s also why, to progress reconciliation, we should keep reading and listening to indigenous Australians. Only they know what they need.

aww2017 badgeCarmel Bird (ed)
The stolen children: Their stories
North Sydney: Random House, 1998
188pp.
ISBN: 9780091836894

(Review copy courtesy Carmel Bird)

* For non-Australians who may not know this Enquiry, its first term of reference was to “trace the past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence, and the effects of those laws, practices and policies”.Β You can read the full ReportΒ online.

Anosh Irani, The parcel (#BookReview)

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Anos Irani, The scribeOne of the main reasons I read is to enter worlds unknown to me – physical worlds and more interior or personal ones. Anosh Irani’s novel The parcel meets this criterion perfectly. It is set in the Kamathipura red-light district of Bombay/Mumbai, and its main character is a eunuch, or hijra, named Madhu. Brought up as a boy, but never comfortable with that gender, teased and ostracised for his feminine walk, he joins the hijra world at 14 years of age. When we first meet her, though, she’s forty.

The novel opens with a first-person prologue from Madhu, who describes herself as “neither here nor there … neither man nor woman”. It’s clear that she’s at a crossroads in her life, just as Kamathipura is, with the developers moving in and AIDS wreaking havoc. The novel then moves to third person subjective, but still with Madhu who remains our guide until the first person epilogue. It’s a clever structure: it ensures that we are immediately engaged, but then facilitates a narrative that shifts easily between present and past, as Madhu goes through her days while reconsidering her life.

From the beginning, we see that Madhu is deeply unhappy. She is and always has been “a shivering, jittery soul trapped in the wrong body”. She starts her day smoking a beedi, which she flicks away:

She smiled as the beedi disappeared into a gutter. Even dead cigarettes wanted to get away from her as soon as possible.

As the first chapter progresses, we feel Madhu’s pain. She’s forty, no longer in her prime, relegated from being her brothel’s most sought-after prostitute to a mangti hijara, a beggar peddling blessings. She’s grateful to gurumai, the now-failing hijra brothel madam, for taking her in, but she mourns her family who had never given her the love and acceptance she craved. More and more her thoughts turn to them and to her decision to leave when she was fourteen.

“an act of compassion”

It’s important that Madhu be established for us as a figure of pathos, as a character we care about, because by the end of the first chapter we meet “the parcel”, a young 10-year-old virgin girl from Nepal sold by her aunt into sex-slavery. Madhu’s job is to prepare her for her “opening” by the man who has paid for her. It’s a horrific and shocking start to a novel which explores the murky morality of human beings – and we are now attached to Madhu. What are we to think?

Madhu and the parcel are not the only characters, of course. Irani creates a community of people surrounding them – the prostitutes, the brothel madams, the hijra leaders, andΒ Madhu’s ex-lover and dearest friend Gajja. While there is warmth, trust, and loyalty between many of the characters, overall it is a devastating picture of marginalised people who struggle to survive in a world where survival, no matter how or in what form, is all there is.

This is a character-driven novel.Β We are acutely aware not only of Madhu’s inner conflict, but of her fundamental decency, and her desire to reduce the pain of those around her. This is why she had taken on parcel work many years previously. She’d seen the cruelty with which they were treated and wanted to prepare them – she has no notion of helping them escape – so that the trauma will be minimised, so they will live, so they will not go mad. For her, it’s “an act of compassion” – but, oh my, what this “compassion” involves is unbearable to read. It’s the ultimate perversion of the I’m-doing-this-for-your-own-good scenario, except we are not talking about a little slap, or a time-out. We are talking cruelty – being caged in a dark place, starved, and emotional deprived, in order to to remove hope and teach submission. This is better, Madhu believes, than the pimps’ method of preparing “the parcels for whoredom by plundering them beyond belief, turning them into vegetables.”

The parcel is, however, also a plot-driven novel. As Madhu divulges more of her past – and increasingly questions her decisions and behaviour as well as those of her parents – we wonder what decision she will make about her future, because a decision is surely coming. We also wonder what will happen to “the parcel”. Will Madhu save her? And we wonder about Kamathipura, as internal politics within the hijra hierarchy, and with and between brothel madams, are revealed. It’s not only Madhu who’s in transition, but the community as a whole.

And, it’s an ideas-driven novel. In a way it could be seen as Irani’s love-letter to the hijras. He says in his acknowledgements at the end that he grew up opposite Kamathipura. It inspires and haunts him he said, and he is grateful for the “transgendered people, sex-workers and residents … who opened up their hearts and minds to him over the years”. For Irani, writing this book, I’d say, is “an act of compassion”, and he weaves through it the history of and legends involving this “reviled and revered” group of people, the hijras.

But, there are other ideas too, including the moral complexities inherent in Indian society (and in fact society in general). Prostitution, Madhu sees, keeps “the privileged and selfish safe” by satisfying men’s needs:

As long as the people outside Kamathipura were not harmed, what happened inside the cages was justified. It prevented rape. But in order to prevent rape, parcels were being torn from their homes and raped every minute.

This double-standard is forced home later in the novel when there’s an uproar over the rape of a bride. Madhu is bothered by

how much coverage this incident was getting: a bride had been violated on that most sacred of nights. But what about ordinary women on ordinary nights?Β  Or indecent women, perhaps, like sex workers? Or hijras? What happened when less-than-ordinary souls got violated? Why not create a furore then? Why let their pain slide away like rainwater into a gutter?

“Like rainwater into a gutter” is one of the many striking images used by Irani. The writing is direct, accessible, and full of images that startle with their clarity, such as Madhu seeing that, for the parcel, “hope was leaving in the way the sun left the evening”, or observing that, for the aging hijra leaders, “as their bones turned brittle, money and power were the only forms of calcium that worked”.

Madhu is a finely wrought, complete character. With maturity, she comes to question her simplistic understanding of her parents’ and indeed gurumai’s actions. Her life becomes increasingly empty and lonely, and yet still “she believed that sometimes life gave you a lesser version of a dream, and it was up to you to take it.”Β You could, perhaps, say that this is what she does at the end, an end that’s inevitable and, in its own way, redemptive.

In a recent interview, Australian author Richard Flanagan said that novels ask questions. InΒ The parcelΒ that question concerns compassion. I can’t think of a better question for our times.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) has written an excellent review of this book.

Anosh Irani
The parcel
Melbourne: Scribe, 2017
284pp.
ISBN: 9781925322262

(Review copy courtesy Scribe Publications)

Ellen van Neerven (ed.), Writing black (#BookReview)

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Writing black:Β New indigenous writing from AustraliaΒ is one of the productions supported by the Queensland Writers Centre’s if:bookΒ that I wrote about in a recent Monday Musings. It’s an interactive e-book created using Apple’s iBooks platform, and can be downloaded free-of-chargeΒ via the if:book page or directly from iBooks.

Title page for Ch. 16, Sylvia Nakachi

Ch. 16, Sylvia Nakachi (Using fair dealing provisions for purposes of review)

Writing black was edited (and commissioned) by Ellen van Neerven (whose book Heat and light and story “Sweetest thing”, I’ve reviewed here). It contains works by 20 writers, in a variety of forms, including prose by writers likeΒ Bruce Pascoe,Β Tony Birch, and Marie Munkara; poetry byΒ Tara June Winch,Β Lionel Fogarty, Kerry Reed-Gilbert and Steven Oliver (most of which are presented in both text and video); and twitter-fiction by Siv Parker. For each writer, there is a “title” page which provides a brief biography, and the works are illustrated with gorgeous sepia-toned photography byΒ Jo-Anne Driessens.

In her editor’s introduction, van Neerven states that, by the time of publication, there had not been a “digital-only anthology of Australian indigenous writing”. This book addresses that gap, but with a very particular goal. It was, she writes, “moulded by possibility”, by the fact that “the multimedia and enhancements a digital publication allows lifts the imagination”. Certainly, we see some of these possibilities in this production.

Her point, though, that particularly interested me was this:

Expectations of what we write about are changing, no longer the narrow restriction of life stories and poetry. Indeed, Indigenous writers do not need to write about Indigenous issues at all, if they choose not to. With more Indigenous books and authors comes a new generation of readers β€” open-minded to what Indigenous writers can write about, and across new forms and experiences.

Great point – just as it’s important that we see indigenous people on television and in movies, for example, without their indigeneity needing to be referenced or be part of the story. Anyhow, we see this broadening of content in Writing black –Β in Jane Harrison’s “Born, still”, for example – although, not surprisingly and completely understandably, given where we are on the reconciliation journey, many of pieces do have political intent.

This brings me to one of the appealing aspect of this production, which is its variety, not only in form as I’ve already mentioned, but in tone and content. The pieces span moods from the intensity of Tara June Winch (“Moon”) to the cheeky humour of Marie Munkara (“Trixie”), from the anger of Kerry Reed-Gilbert (“Talking up to the white woman”) and theΒ frustration of Steven Oliver (“You can’t be black”)Β to the melancholy of Bruce Pascoe’s (“A letter to Barry”). Many of the pieces speak to loss of country and identity, and the emotional impact of these. What makes them particularly powerful is that they come from all over, from the tropical north to country Victoria to various urban settings.

Another appealing thing, which stems from its being an e-Book, is that we can hear poets perform their own work, as well as read the text ourselves. One of these is the new-to-meΒ Steven Oliver. He has four poems in the collection – “Real”, “You can’t be black”, “Diversified identity” and “I’m a black fella” – with video of him reading each of them. He (or his poetic persona) is an urban dweller who regularly confronts questions concerning his indigenous identity. In “Real” he describes a discussion with another who refuses to accept he’s “black”, who produces those crass arguments like he’s “more of a brown” and “not really a full”, but who suddenly turns when our poet responds that his English name suggests he’s not “from here”. Oliver writes:

Listen here Abo, you know-it-all coon
It seemed that my friend has spoken too soon
Just moments ago I was not the real thing
Yet now by his words my heritage clings

This is a long-ish poem, but is accessible. Its use of rhyming couplets provides a light touch that keeps the reader engaged while the actual words drive home a serious point about Aboriginal identity. I hope it’s taught in schools.

Another poem of his, “You can’t be black”, also addresses assumptions others make about what being Aboriginal is:

You can’t be black
When the media shows Aborigines they live on communities
And struggle with petrol, poverty and disease
So you can’t be black
If you’re black you wouldn’t have nice clothes on your back.

Oliver’s poems are made to be performed, as are those of the next poet Kerry Reed-Gilbert.

She also comes out fighting, with five poems. She writes of being in a bar, waiting for the racist slurs (“A conversation and a beer”), or of being exploited by people who only want to know her to further their own aims (“Talking up to the white woman”). She speaks in the voice of a white racist in “Because my mum said so” to show how racism is learnt through families. This is a particular concern of mine. I’ve seen schools trying their hardest to teach tolerance and respect – but that role-modelling at home is mighty powerful stuff.

Another well-established poet who has been politically active for decades is Lionel Fogarty. His two poems in this collection focus more on caring for country, on sharing the land, on passing knowledge on.

The prose pieces are, overall, more diverse. There’s Tristan Savage’s cheeky short film script, “Gubbament man” about Freddy the indigenous “discrimination prevention officer”. Siv Parker’s twitter-fiction piece “Maisie May” was originally released as tweets over several hours on, note, 26th January, in 2014. It tells of a trip to country for the funeral of Aunty Maisie May who “could tell you about country and our ways that we lost over the years.” Marie Munkara is here too with her particular brand of humour to tell about “Trixie” who takes revenge on her ex. There’s also Tony Birch whose “Deep rock” clearly draws from (or fed into) his novel Ghost River (my review). And there’s David Curtis whose “What kind dreaming” tells of three young indigenous men, two already becoming familiar with the life and law of their country and the other a greenhorn from the city, who go bush. Our greenhorn soon learns a few things from the other two, who respect “them old people”.

In an interview in Sydney Review of Books,Β Ellen van Neerven comments briefly on why she wanted to do this “digital collection”:

For me it’s as much about audience and access. There is a really hungry international audience for Indigenous writing but also lots of roadblocks in getting the books out there. Being able to access work online is definitely an advantage and we’ve had a lot of feedback and contact from people overseas who have been able to find out about Indigenous writing and read content from 20 different authors that way.

And that’s exactly it. This oh-so-rich collection introduces readers to many of Australia’s current significant indigenous writers, not to mention the range of issues that interest them. And it’s free to download. That we should be so lucky! A big thanks to if:book and the Queensland Writers Centre for supporting such innovative and sophisticated projects as this one.

aww2017 badgeEllen van Neerven (ed.)
Writing black: New indigenous writing from Australia
State Library of Queensland, 2014
133pp.
ISBN: 9780975803059