Women writers

Kim Kelly, Touched (#BookReview)

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In 2023, novelist Kim Kelly was one of the two winners of Finlay Lloyd’s inaugural 20/40 Publishing Prize, with her 1920s-set historical novel, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (my review). Publisher Julian Davies had hoped at the time to award one fiction and one nonfiction prize, but there was a dearth of good nonfiction entries. That was rectified in 2024, with Sonya Voumard’s book on dystonia, Tremor (my review), being one of the two winners. This year, Kim Kelly returned with a nonfiction work on anxiety, titled Touched: A small history of feeling – and won again.

There is an obvious similarity between these two nonfiction winners, given both deal with medical conditions that impinge significantly on their writers’ lives. However, as quickly becomes apparent, the similarity is superficial, probably due to their writers’ origins. Voumard and Kelly are both published authors with other books to their names, but Voumard is a journalist while Kelly is a novelist, and this I think informs their different approaches to their subject matter.

Finlay Lloyd describes Touched like this:

Why this book is different
Documenting the damaging role of anxiety in our lives is hardly new, but Touched takes us inside the destabilising riot of a three-day panic attack with such insight, honesty and humour that the perspective we gain is revelatory and overwhelmingly hopeful.

Why we liked it
This book has a wonderful breadth of understanding—of the author’s own crazily complex family, of the wider issue of anxiety across society, and of her own voyage as a highly competent yet vulnerable being in a worryingly unhinged world.

Both Voumard and Kelly use a personal narrative arc to frame their discussions. For Voumard it’s the brain surgery she is about to undertake as her book opens, while for Kelly it’s the three-day panic attack she has leading up to her Masters graduation ceremony. Kelly’s focus is this attack. She takes us into it, viscerally. It is the emotional and narrative core of this book. Voumard, on the other hand, weaves her own story through a wider story about dystonia, in which she explores its different forms and treatments through the experiences of others as well as her own. Both writers situate their conditions within a wider societal context, but very differently.

And here I will leave Voumard. After all, she has her own review already!

Kelly starts her book with an (unlabelled) author’s note in which she explains that memory is slippery, so dates and details may not be precise, but “everything in this memoir is true, in essence and in feeling”. I like this, because no-one can remember all the tiny details, and in most cases – crime, excepted – they are not important. What is important is being truthful to the experience, and this, I feel, Kelly achieves.

“It’s exhausting, being human”

Touched is divided into two parts – the lead up to graduation day, and then graduation day and its aftermath. Within these parts are single-word titled chapters starting, logically, with “contact”, and her contradictory responses to “touch”, to how physical touch can settle her but can also produce anxiety when it involves people she doesn’t know well, like, say, hairdressers, doctors and dentists. As for masseurs, no way! But “touched” of course has other meanings, including:

To be in touch, to communicate. To have the touch, a skill at something. To be touched, to be momentarily captured by some sentiment. To live in a vague state of craziness. To feel. Small word, wonderfully big inside its tight dimensions of spelling and sound.(p. 14)

Kelly, who is a book editor as well as a novelist, loves words, so her memoir is written with the eye of someone who is deeply engaged with the meanings of words and how they convey feelings. As graduation day approaches, and she and her partner drive to Sydney for it, she suffers an excruciating panic attack which she describes with a clarity that is revelatory for those like me who have not experienced that degree of psychic distress. At the same time, she looks back to history – including to the Ancient Greeks and philosophers like Aristotle – for ideas on anxiety. And she flashes back to her own past, exploring how and where and why it all began. Her Jewish roots, the experiences of poverty and war in her Irish Catholic tree, the insecurities of her parents, her own childhood fears, and wider societal issues like the imposter syndrome that is particularly common among women, all come into the frame.

It’s not all distress and misery, however, because in between her mulling she shares her wins, her strategies, and her optimistic self that keeps on going. The writing is beautiful, slipping between information-sharing, straight narrative, and light or lyrical, rhythmical moments when she takes a breath and so do we.

Touched is a personal story, and so, by definition, it can be intensely self-focused at times. However, the intensity serves a purpose for those unfamiliar with what anxiety can do. Further, with a keen sense of tone, Kelly regularly reins it in so it never wallows. At the time of her writing, she tells us, around 17% of Australians had experienced some form of anxiety disorder. That’s nearly one in five of us. This book is for all those people – and for the rest of us who know someone who has experienced it, or who might ourselves experience it one day. We just never know. We should thank Kim Kelly for putting herself out there, so beautifully and so honestly.

Read for Novellas in November (as novella-length nonfiction) and Nonfiction November, but not quite finished in time!

Kim Kelly
Touched: A small history of feeling
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2025
142pp.
ISBN: 9780645927030

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing (#BookReview)

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My reading for Buried in Print Marcie’s annual MARM month has been both sporadic and minimal, to say the least, but this year I finally got to read a book that has been on my TBR shelves for a long time and that I have planned to read over the last few MARMs. It’s Atwood’s treatise (or manifesto or just plain ponderings) on writing, Negotiating with the dead. Interestingly, in 2003 it won the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Autobiography/Memoir. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, though on reflection I can see it does have a strong element of memoir.

Its origins, however, are not in memoir but in the series of lectures she delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2000, the Empson Lectures, which commemorate literary critic, William Empson. (I recently – and sadly – downsized his most famous book, Seven types of ambiguity, out of my library). Atwood turned those lectures into this set of essays that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002 (and that I leapt on when I saw it remaindered in 2010).

Subtitled “A writer on writing”, this book is probably not quite what most of us would expect, unless we really know Atwood. As she says in her Introduction, it is not so much about writing as about something more abstract, more existential even, about what is writing, who is the writer, and what are the writer’s relationships with writing, with the reader, with other writers, and with themself. It’s also about the relationship between writing and other art forms, like painting and composing. She says in her Introduction that “it’s about the position the writer find himself in; or herself, which is always a little different”. (Love the little gender reference here.) It’s about what exactly is the writer “up to, why and for whom?”

I rarely do this, but I’m sharing the table of contents for the flavour it gives:

  • Introduction: Into the labyrinth
  • Prologue
  • 1 Orientation: Who do you think you are? What is “a writer,” and how did I become one?
  • 2 Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double Why there are always two?
  • 3 Dedication: The Great God Pen Apollo vs. Mammon: at whose altar should the writer worship?
  • 4 Temptation: Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co. Who waves the wand, pulls the strings, or signs the Devil’s book?
  • 5 Communion: Nobody to Nobody The eternal triangle: the writer, the reader, and the book as go-between
  • 6 Descent: Negotiating with the dead Who makes the trip to the Underworld, and why?

There is way too much in the book for me to comment on, but I don’t want to do a general overview either, so I’m just going to share a couple of the ideas that interested me.

One of her main threads concerns “duality” and “doubleness” in writers’ lives. There’s a fundamental duality for a writer – a novelist anyhow – between “the real and the imagined”. She suggests that an inability to distinguish between the two may have had something to do with why she became a writer. This interested me, but it’s not what interested me most in this book. Rather, it was the idea of the writer’s “doubleness”, which she introduces in chapter 2, “Duplicity”, the idea that there is the person who writes and the other person who lives life (walking the dog, eating bran “as a sensible precaution”, and so on). She explains it this way:

All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person.

It’s obvious, of course, but we don’t often think about it. Writers do, though. Take Sofie Laguna, for example. In the recent conversation I attended, she said she wished she’d kept a diary when she was writing her novel to capture the “dance” she’d had between the conscious and the subconscious as she worked through the issues she was confronting. In other words, the Sofie in front of us was not the Sofie who had written that book. In chapter 5, “Communion”, Atwood addresses this issue from a different angle when she talks about the relationship between writers and readers.

Back to the writer, though, Atwood talks about, gives examples of, how different writers handle this doubleness, the degree to which they consciously separate their two selves or don’t. This brought to my mind Brian Castro’s Chinese postman (my review) in which he regularly – consciously of course – shifts between first person and third for the same character, a character who owes much to Castro himself but is not Castro. This may be similar to the example she gives, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Borges and I”. It’s also something Helen Garner has often discussed, such as in her essay “I” published in Meanjin in Autumn 2002. Even in her nonfiction works, she “creates a persona”, one that “only a very naive reader would suppose … is exactly, precisely and totally identical with the Helen Garner you might see before you”. My point in saying all this is that I think Atwood is exploring something interesting here. Is it new? I don’t know, but it captures ideas I’m seeing both in statements like those of Laguna and Garner, and in recent fiction where I’m noticing an increasing self-consciousness in writers who are explicitly striving for new forms of expression.

Another double Atwood discusses – one related to but also different from the above – is that between the writer and the writing. The writer dies, for example, but the writing lives on. It brought to mind that murky issue concerning posthumous publication (which was discussed on 746 Books Cathy’s Novellas in November post about Marquez’s Until August). It’s a bit tangential, I guess, but Atwood’s separation of the writer and the writing, her sense of the doubleness of writers, puts another spin on this conundrum.

She discusses other issues too, including that of purpose, to which she gives two chapters (3 and 4), setting the art-for-art’s sake supporters against the moral purpose/social relevance proponents, and which of course touches on that grubby issue of writing to earn money!

It’s an erudite book, in that she marshals many writers, known and unknown to me, to illustrate her ideas, but the arguments are also accessible and invite engagement. I did have questions as I read, but she managed to answer most of them. A good read.

Read for Marcie’s #MARM2025

Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
219pp.
ISBN: 9780521662604

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 16, Edna Davies

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Of all the forgotten writers I’ve researched, Edna Davies proved by far the most difficult. Even AustLit had nothing on her besides a list of a few works, but she intrigued me so I soldiered on. This post, like most of my recent Forgotten Writers posts, a revision, with a little bit of added information, of the one I posted there.

Edna Davies

So, for my AWW post I started at the end, where we get some facts. Her death was reported on 26 December 1952 in the Family Notices section of The Pioneer (from Yorketown, South Australia). It said she was 56 years old, which suggests she was born in 1896. The notice gives her name as Edna Irene, identifies her parents, and names her siblings as Daisy, Keith and Jack (deceased).

There are two other entries for her in the newspaper in December. On 12 December, a brief article announced that ‘Miss Edna Davies, “Pioneer” representative and correspondent, has been absent for some weeks because of ill health, and is at present in hospital, where she may have to spend some time yet’. They identify someone who will gather news, and add that “until Miss Davies’ return to Minlaton, advertisements, or payment of accounts, should be sent direct to the Pioneer Office”, which suggests she had an administrative role. They conclude this announcement, by saying that ‘The weekly feature “Comments on the News” (Written by Miss Davies) will, we regret, have to be temporarily suspended”, which confirms her writing contribution.

On 26 December, the same day the death notice appeared, they published a brief obituary. Here it is in full:

Press and Radio Correspondent Dies
Yorke Peninsula generally will feel the loss of Miss Edna Davies, of Minlaton who died in an Adelaide Hospital on Monday. Miss Davies, whose name is particularly familiar to readers of “The Pioneer,” has served many years as Southern and Central Yorke Peninsula’s chief correspondent for radio stations, provincial and metropolitan newspapers. People in many Peninsula towns will miss the friendly weekly phone calls she used to make in her search for news about the doings of local organisations and people. Her articles, as well as her Peninsula news items, have been of great value and interest, and we join her brother and sister and our readers in mourning her sudden demise.

So, it’s likely that she was born in Minlaton, central Yorke Peninsula, which is about 30 kms north of Yorketown, the home of her employer The Pioneer. Indeed, on 20 March 1926, a brief article appeared in The Pioneer, headed “Minlaton. Farewell to Miss Edna Davies”. The article describes an event that was held at the Minlaton Institute “to bid farewell to Miss Edna Davies and Mr. Jack Davies” (presumably the brother mentioned in the death notice.) They were leaving for London. (Indeed, according to Adelaide’s The Register, they left on 20 March). There were “eulogistic addresses” and “a useful cheque” was handed to Miss Davies. What does this tell us? Not a lot, but we can glean some information. She was around 30 years old, and seemingly not married. She was known in the community, at least enough for her departure to be reported on, albeit social news was more common at the time. It also tells us – from the headline – that it was she, not her brother, who was most known.  

Since writing my AWW post, I have done more research, and have discovered something about why she was known in the community. For example, Adelaide’s Observer (3 November 1923), writing on the Central Yorke’s Peninsula Agricultural Society’s annual show, observed that “the show committee provided the dinner … under the able management of Miss Edna Davies … Things worked smoothly in this department”. The article also praises the work of the Society’s secretary, Mr D.M.S. Davies, Edna’s father.

Anyhow, back to her chronology, three months after the report of her going to London, Moonta’s The People’s Weekly (12 June 1926) writes about the Minlaton Literary Society’s fourth annual musical and elocutionary competitions, advising that entries go to “secretary (Miss Edna Davies)”. This must have been a clerical error because, from the many newspaper reports under her by-line – and headed “Travel” or “Our London Letter” – it’s clear that she was in England by June 1926, then through 1927 and probably into early 1928. It’s possible that some of the articles dated later in 1928 were written back home.

Certainly, on 31 May 1929, there is a report in The Pioneer of the Minlaton Institute Literary Society’s seventh annual musical and elocutionary competitions and once again entries were to go to secretary Edna Davies. She probably was back on the job then. From this time, there are more articles, stories and columns – including her “Comments on the News” – by her South Australian papers. Together they build up a picture of who she was, and what she thought about life – local, national and international.

One that captured my attention was written from England, and published in The Pioneer on 6 January 1928. She starts by saying she hadn’t been doing much sightseeing so was “short of material” for her London Letter. So, she writes about some reading she’s doing about Australia, including a book by Mr Fraser. From what she says, I believe the book was Australia: The making of a nation (1911/12) by Scottish travel writer John Foster Fraser. Chapter 19 is tilted “A White Australia”. Fraser, a man of his times, understands the desire for a “white Australia”, but asks this:

What will Australian people say when the question is put to them, “As you are not developing this region [the great uninhabited north], what right have you to prohibit other people from developing it? It was not your land in the first instance. You obtained it by conquest that was peaceful. What can you do to resist conquest by force of arms? Who are you to say to the world, Let other peoples crowd together and be hungry owing to congestion of population, live cramped and struggling lives, but we, although doing practically nothing to develop our own resources, do not want anybody else to come in and develop the resources of a part of the world not given to us but given to the human race?'”

Davies is taken with this question and asks, “Have we all studied the pros and cons of the question carefully, so that should it be wanted, we can without hesitation give a carefully thought out decision after viewing the question from all sides. Looking back through history we see that no nation has ever come into, or held its own, without fighting for it, so why should we be an exception”. Her thinking – and Foster’s thinking – is not our thinking, but that she took the issue up and was published tells us something about her and the times. Neither of course consider that “little” line of Foster’s that “It was not your land in the first instance”.

Another randomly chosen example of her thinking comes from 20 June 1952, when she writes in her column “Comments on the News”:

READING about a press conference Mr. Menzies had recently in London this thought struck me — “What much wider outlook British pressmen seem to have than do their colleagues in Australia.”
And that’s a bad thing for Australia. Because if pressmen haven’t a wide outlook how can the public, who depend on them for news of the outside world, be expected to have one.

She slates it to the “old problem” of Australia’s geographic isolation, suggesting that “we are so isolated from other places that it it [sic] hard to realise that their welfare and their doings are important to us”.

AustLit lists 5 stories by her, and AWW lists 12 short stories in Stories from online archives (11 from the 1930s and 1 from the 1940s), but these are just a few of many short stories by her that were published in South Australian newspapers, and The Bulletin. I shared one of The Bulletin stories in my AWW post. Titled “Scrub”, it’s perfect “Bulletin-fare”, with its story of a woman who cannot get over a childhood nightmarish experience in the bush, and an intriguing take on lost-child-in-the-bush tradition in Australian culture.

Edna Davies turned out to be another example of an independent woman who seems to have made a career for herself in journalism and writing.

Sources

Edna Davies, “Scrub“, The Bulletin, Vol. 56 No. 2906 (23 Oct 1935)

All other sources are linked in the article.

Angus Gaunt, Anna (#BookReview)

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Last month, I posted on the winners of the 2025 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize, of which Angus Gaunt’s Anna was one. I am thrilled with this prize, not only because I love the novella form, but because of the variety of stories we are seeing. So far the fiction winners have been an historical novel from Kim Kelly, a contemporary coming-of-age novel from Rebecca Burton, and an audacious “what if” story from PS Cottier and NG Hartland. Three very different books, and now Anna makes it four.

When I started reading Anna, I thought I was heading into a dystopian novel. It is told third person from Anna’s perspective, and starts with her walking in the woods. A young man is following her. The woods are not identified, and neither is the young man, but she recognises him as a guard from the place she’s just left. Through their initial interaction, we learn that “the war is over” and the gates had been opened. Therefore, she firmly implies, he has no jurisdiction over her.

Anna, we discover as her journey continues, is about 15 years old, and had been taken to a labour camp with her family about three years ago. Her parents had died but she’s hoping her remaining siblings are ahead of her, safe in the exodus she’d missed. We know nothing about the woods – but they do not sound Australian – nor do we know the time setting. It is cold. There are some generic animals and plants – deer, hares, mushrooms, berries. The story focuses on Anna’s thought processes and her survival. There is almost nothing about the sociopolitical situation that got her there. We do know that Anna and the guard speak different languages, which suggests an invasion or some sort of oppression of minorities, but Gaunt does not go there. The notes I made during my reading, include this: “Timeless, placeless, non-political, means not dystopian? More allegory?”

The judges don’t call it either of these, but on “why this book is different” they say:

Winter is only beginning to thaw in a remote forest as Anna treks for her survival, accompanied by someone she cannot trust. With distilled clarity, this short novel carries the reader on a journey from victimhood to self-possession.

So, it is about survival, or, more precisely, about the inner resources you need to develop to overcome a dire situation.

Anna is a moving and absorbing read. Gaunt quickly engages our sympathy for his protagonist, young and defenceless in the woods. The language in the first two paragraphs sets up uncertainty. It starts:

Anna had already walked further than she meant to, but did not want to go back, not yet. She was basking in the sun … also in the silence. She had not done something like this for a long time … (p. 9)

Then she stops and looks up, where she sees “a large predatory bird … floating on secret air currents, delicate wing tips spread”. “Predatory” but “delicate”. Should we be worried? Then she sees the young guard, later identified as Yevgeny. He’s very young, uncertain, and in a show of bravado he tries to shoot the bird, but fails. He’s never shot anything before. And so the narrative and its main characters are established. Anna is alert, sensitive, intelligent and has some nous and wisdom about her. The guard, also young, lacks confidence, experience and nous, and is confused about his role as a man, a soldier, a human. This makes him potentially dangerous but also vulnerable. We – like Anna – are on the watch for which way he might go.

And so the novel progresses as this uneasy, wary-of-each-other pair journey through the woods, looking for the railroad and its promise of civilisation. Early on, during a brief time when she and Yevgeny are not together and she has returned to the camp, Anna meets a dying man who gives her his last food. Then later, together, they come across a cottage containing a barely surviving couple.

This brings another literary form to mind, the journey narrative, the search for home, a new one or old one, and – perhaps – for self. In journey narratives, physical and spiritual or emotional challenges are faced, and people are met. The journeyer must rely on inner resources to overcome the challenges, including assessing whether the people met are to be trusted or not. This is what we watch Anna do. We are privy to her thoughts as she goes, as she draws together past knowledge and present experience, and we gain confidence in her ability to make good decisions. Nearly half way through the story, her mind drifts to the schoolroom. It is comforting, but she stops herself,

recognising that she was attracted by the emotion of it rather than its practical application. There was not room for emotion. She was glad of this thought. Feelings and emotion could only cloud the mind, waste precious resources. All resources were precious. Her mind was clear now. She had a choice to make and she made one. (p. 56)

Of course it’s not a straight line, and Anna, like any journeyer under stress, slips back several times before getting a grip once more.

Anna is beautiful to read, from the first sentence. The language is tight but expressive. The necessary tension is off-set by moments of tenderness and hope, not to mention some subtle foreshadowing. And the characterisation is warm and empathetic.

I concluded my post on last year’s winner, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin, that it was an audacious “what if” story. Anna is also audacious, in a different way. It calls on the tropes of established forms, like allegory and the journey narrative, but makes them into something new, something that confronts issues like trust and power in a way that feels both modern and timeless.

Read for Novellas in November.

Angus Gaunt
Anna
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2025
110pp.
ISBN: 9780645927047

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.

Teffi, The examination (#Review, #1925 Club)

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Mostly for the Year Clubs, I read an Australian short story, usually from one of my anthologies. However, for 1925, I couldn’t find anything in my anthologies, so turned to other newspaper-based sources, including Trove, but I mainly found romances or works that were difficult to access. And then, out of the blue, I found something rather intriguing, a story titled “The examination”. It was written by a Russian woman named Teffi, translated into English by J.A. Brimstone, and published in The Australian Worker, an Australian Workers’ Union newspaper, on 25 November 1925. I don’t know when it was originally written, nor have I been able to found out who J.A. Brimstone was.

Who is Teffi?

The Australian Worker ascribes the story to N. Teffi. This nomenclature is interesting. My research suggests that Teffi, not N. Teffi, was the pen name of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya (1872-1952). Wikipedia gives her pen name as Teffi, but its article on her is titled Nadezhda Teffi. Curiously, the article’s history page includes a comment from a Wikipedian, dated 11 June 2014, that “Her pen name is only Teffi, not Nadezhda Teffi”. This Wikipedian “moved” the article (Wikipedia-speak for changing titles) to “Teffi”, but it was later moved back to “Nadezhda Teffi”. Seems to me it should be under “Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya” or “Teffi”. But, let’s not get bogged down. There’s probably more I don’t know about how she used her name over time.

The more interesting thing is who she was. Wikipedia provides what looks like a fair introduction to her life, so I won’t repeat all that here. Essentially, it says she was a Russian humorist writer who could be both serious and satirical, but whose gift for humour was “considered anomalous for a woman of her time”. However, she proved them wrong, “skyrocketing to fame throughout Russia with her satirical writings, so much so that she had candies and perfume named after her”.

Literary scholar Maria Bloshteyn, writing in the LA Review of Books in 2016, would agree. She starts her piece by describing Teffi as “once a Russian literary superstar”, and says that “Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya claimed that she took the comic-sounding and intentionally androgynous nom de plume for good luck”. Bloshteyn writes:

She began to publish in her early 30s and tried her hand in various genres, but it was her short stories, with their keen and hilarious observations of contemporary society, that were read by everyone from washerwomen to students to top government officials. They won her literary success on a scale unprecedented in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

My short story, however, was written post-Revolution, given we are talking 1925. But, I’m jumping ahead. Tsar Nicholas II was a big fan, Bloshteyn says, as was Vladimir Lenin “with whom she worked in 1905 at the short-lived New Life [Novaia Zhizn’] newspaper”. She left Russia in 1919, during the “Red Terror” when things started to turn sour. Her popularity continued in the émigré world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, her books were read again and “celebrated as recovered gems of Russian humor”.

This potted history sounds very positive, but Bloshteyn explains that there was also darkness in her life, including the death of her loved father when she was young, difficult relationships with siblings, a failed marriage, mental health problems, and more. Also, “she became a victim of her immensely successful but severely confining brand”, meaning editors and readers “only wanted the Teffi they knew” and, worse, “they perceived all of her stories as funny, even when they were clearly tragic”. How frustrating that would be, eh?

She was inspired by – and has been likened to – Chekhov. Bloshteyn says:

Her appreciation of the absurd, of the comic minutiae of life, helps set off the darker or more transcendent aspects of our existence, but her main focus, in the tradition of the great 19th-century Russian writers, was always human nature itself: what makes us tick and why.

I’ll leave her biography here, but if you are interested, start at Wikipedia, and go from there.

“The examination”

“The examination” tells the story of a young girl, Manichka Kooksina, who is sitting for her end-of-year exams which will decide whether she moves on to the next grade. Important things ride on passing them, including staying with her friend Liza who has already passed and getting the new bike her aunt promised her if she passed. However, instead of knuckling down to study she fritters her time, trying on a new dress, reading, and finally filling her notebooks with a prayer “Lord, Help”, believing that if she writes it hundreds or thousands of times she will pass. Needless to say, she does not do well.

The story is beautifully told from her perspective, with much humour for the reader as she flounders her way through preparation and the exam itself. She feels persecuted, an animal being tortured, and resorts to the absurd solution of writing lines, while her nervous peers have at least tried. I wondered why this particular story of hers was chosen by The Australian Worker. Was it the only one available to them in English? Did the examination theme feel universally relevant? According to Bloshteyn, Teffi said that “even the funniest of her stories were small tragedies given a humorous spin”. This is certainly a “small tragedy” for the – hmm, foolish, procrastinating, but believable – Manichka.

Bloshteyn’s essay is primarily a review of two books that had been recently published, Tolstoy, Rasputin, others, and me: The Best of Teffi and Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea. The former includes sketches and some of her “best loved short stories”. GoodReads says of it that “in the 1920s and 30s, she wrote some of her finest stories in exile in Paris … In this selection of her best autobiographical stories, she covers a wide range of subjects, from family life to revolution and emigration, writers and writing”. I don’t know whether “The examination” is one of them, but Bloshteyn writes, of the child-themed stories she mentions, that all “show children in the process of getting to know the world around them and finding the means to cope with it”. Manichka, although showing some resourcefulness, has a way to go.

I was thrilled to find this little treasure in Trove, and will try to read more Teffi. Has anyone else read her?

* Read for the 1925 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

N. Teffi
“The examination” [Accessed: 21 October 2025]
in The Australian Worker, 25 November 1925

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 15, Tarella Daskein

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I first came across Tarella Daskein back in 2021 when Bill (The Australian Legend) wrote a post about her as the result of her coming up in discussions and reading about Katharine Susannah Prichard. She then slipped my mind until a couple of months ago when I was searching around for a subject for my Australian Women Writers post that month. This post, like most of my recent Forgotten Writers posts, s a minor revision of the one I posted there.

Tarella Daskein

As with many of the lesser-known writers we research for this blog, Tarella Daskein (1877-1945) was somewhat challenging to pin down. It’s not that she wasn’t known. Indeed, Wikipedia and AustLit both have entries for her. However, there were conflicting details of her life. For example, both Wikipedia and AustLit had her death date as 1934, which was curious because Adelaide’s The Advertiser reported on her visiting that city in June 1935. How could that be? Further, The Advertiser also had her husband as Mr. T.S. Daskein while Wikipedia and other newspaper articles had him as Mr. T.M. Daskein. Compounding all this was her use of multiple names, including some confusion over her maiden name. The above-mentioned Advertiser, for example, reported it as Quinn. AustLit, however, resolved this by noting at the end of its entry that her name had been incorrectly spelled as ‘Quinn’ in Miller and Macartney’s Australian Literature: A Bibliography (1956). The death date issue was clarified by, strangely, Wikipedia’s article on her father, Edward Quin, which gave her death as 1945 and cited a newspaper notice as evidence. And a death notice for her husband confirms him as T.M. not T.S.

So, with all that resolved, who was this Tarella Daskein? Tarella Ruth Quin was born in Wilcannia, second daughter to pastoralist and one-time member of the New South Wales Legislature, Edwin Quin, in 1877. She is best known as a writer of children’s stories, but also wrote three adult novels – A desert rose (1912), Kerno (1914) and Paying guests (1917) – and many short stories which were published in contemporary newspapers and magazines. AustLit provides a good outline of her origins. She was one of eight children. Her father owned a dairy farm called ‘The Leasowes’, near Victoria’s Fern Tree Gully, and a sheep station called ‘Tarella’, after which she was named, in far western New South Wales near Wilcannia. ‘Ella’, as she was known, was educated in Adelaide, but spent most of her life on stations. She married Thomas Mickle Daskein, part proprietor of a station in far northwest NSW.

Cover for Tarella Quin Gum Tree Brownie

AustLit says that her first writing comprised short sketches of station life, which were published under the pseudonym “James Adare” in the Pastoral Review. At the editor’s suggestion, she also wrote some stories for children, which she sent to Ethel Turner, hoping to have them published in Sydney newspapers. However, Turner apparently recommended they be published as books. Her first book, Gum Tree Brownie, was published in 1910, with illustrations by Ida Rentoul whom Ella’s younger sister, Hazel, knew at school. This began a long partnership between the two, with Ida Rentoul Outhwaite illustrating many of her books for children. Wilde et al say she was “one of Australia’s most successful writers of fairy-stories for children” and that “humour, irony, a fluent, dramatic style and fantasy reminiscent of Lewis Carroll enliven her stories”.

Bill, as mentioned above, came across her, initially in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s autobiography, Child of the hurricane. Apparently, Prichard was governess for a year at Tarella Station in 1905, by which time Tarella, who was six years older than KSP, was already a published author. Prichard, says Bill, is “pretty dismissive” of Quin’s writing.

However, not all were. Several contemporary reviewers praised her adult novels, often singling out Kerno: A stone for special mention. On 10 April 1915, Adelaide’s Observer wrote:

Kerno, although similar in some respects, is nevertheless distinctly different from A Desert Rose. The latter is a novel – the former is a study – a keen analysis of human feelings and desires. One cannot well peruse the book without thinking deeply, and wondering what one would have done in circumstances like those in which the leading actors found themselves placed. Young people and those having a preference for light ephemeral literature may be inclined to consider the story rather tame; but all who have a true appreciation for human nature, and endeavour to probe into its many and varied qualities, will find in it compelling and absorbing interest.

Those who praise Kerno mostly praise it for its “real” characters and deep understanding of human nature. Indeed, the Observer says that it “richly deserves to rank among the best truly Australian novels”. Daskein was also praised for her understanding of and ability to convey life in the bush and, as the Observer says, for her “descriptive writing which … captivates the reader”.

Notwithstanding all this, Quin mostly wrote for children, with The Australian Women’s Weekly claiming, after the publication of Chimney Town in 1936, that

She has published more ambitious volumes, but her tales for children have a unique charm that makes one feel that this is her real metier.

Quin’s publishing career lasted from around 1907 to the mid-1930s, so it was no flash in the pan. AustLit lists over 20 works by her, but this may not be all. Regardless, she was well-known to readers of her time, and, according to Adelaide’s The Rouseabout, had some presence in literary circles, including being “a foundation member of the Melbourne centre of the P.E.N. Club and a constant attendant at its meetings”. She died on 22 October 1945, at a private hospital in Melbourne. The fact that I found little mention of this beyond The Rouseabout’s short article suggests that in the last decade of her life – after the death of her husband in 1937 – she faded from view.

The piece, “The camel”, which I chose for AWW, was published in The Bulletin’s Christmas issue in 1935. It shows a writer a writer who knows the outback, knows how to entertain her audience, and, who firmly belongs to the bush tradition. Life is tough, but our woman protagonist is resourceful.

Sources

Bill Holloway, “Tarella Down a Rabbit Hole“, The Australian Legend (blog), 16 December 2021 [Accessed: 9 November 2025]
The Rouseabout, “In Town and Out“, The Herald, 12 November 1945 [Accessed: 16 August 2025]
Tarella Quin, AustLit [Accessed: 16 August 2025]
Tarella Quin, Wikipedia [Accessed: 16 August 2025]
William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, The Oxford companion to Australian literature. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2nd, edition, 1994

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“people are woefully similar”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review copy courtesy Text Publishing

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sister Josepha (#Review)

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

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sister Josepha”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise Erdrich, The night watchman (#BookReview)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Survival is a changing game” (Biboon)

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

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

His people were being targeted, the papers said,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gertrude Mack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources