Women writers

Stella Prize 2025 Winner announced

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The 2025 Stella Prize winner was announced tonight at a special event at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and the winner is …

Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & practice

How happy am I that a book I reviewed only last week won the award! It is a provocative and thoroughly engrossing book in all the ways. I don’t feel I did full justice to it, but I did love thinking about what she was doing. It’s playfully mind-bending, but is also very serious about the art of the novel, what it can be, and what it can say. I can’t of course say whether I would have chosen it, as I’ve only read two of the shortlisted books. However, it is a wonderful book, and, when it comes to acceptance speeches, de Kretser is up there with the best. (You can see it at the Stella site) She was compassionate and eloquent. She made a beautiful but pointed statement commemorating two groups of women: the Stella founders who rejected business as usual in the literary world, and the women and girls of Gaza who are suffering under the business-as-usual actions of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

She also said:

“I’m still afraid. But I’ve just accepted a prize that is not about obedience. It’s not about feel-good narratives, it’s not about marketing, it’s not even about creativity – Stella is about changing the world.”

Michelle de Kretser on a screen

It was pure class.

The announcement was made at a special event at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. It involved: an introduction by Fiona Sweet, Stella’s CEO; a discussion between three of the judges (Astrid Edwards, Leah-Jing McIntosh and Rick Morton) about the shortlisted books; the awarding of the prize; Michelle de Kretser’s recorded acceptance speech (see here); and a conversation between her (in Sussex) and Rick Morton.

Just to remind you, the short list was:

  • Jumaana Abdu, Translations (fiction, kimbofo’s review)
  • Melanie Cheng, The burrow (fiction, my review)
  • Santilla Chingaipe, Black convicts: How slavery shaped Australia (non-fiction/history)
  • Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice (fiction, my review)
  • Amy McQuire, Black witness: The power of Indigenous media (non-fiction/essays)
  • Samah Sabawi, Cactus pear for my beloved: A family story from Gaza (memoir/non-fiction)

And the judges were Gudanji/Wakaja woman, educator and author Debra Dank; teacher, interviewer/podcaster, and critic Astrid Edwards; writer and photographer Leah-Jing McIntosh; Sudanese–Australian media presenter and writer, Yassmin Abdel-Magied; and journalist and author with a special focus on social policy, Rick Morton. Astrid Edwards was the chair of the panel.

I have now read nine of the 13 winners: Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds (2013, my review), Clare Wright’s The forgotten rebels of Eureka (2014, my review), Emily Bitto’s The strays (2015, my review), Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things (2016, my review), Heather Rose’s The museum of modern love (2017, my review), Alexis Wright’s Tracker (2018), Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The erratics (2019, my review), Jess Hill’s See what you made me do (2020, my review), Evie Wyld’s Bass Rock (2021), Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear (2022, my review), Sarah Holland-Batt’s The jaguar (2023), Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (2024), and Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & practice (2025, my review).

Thoughts anyone?

Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 28 Comments

Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel, Theory & practice, is a perfect example of why I should follow my own reading advice, which is that as soon as I finish a book I should go back and read the opening paragraphs, if not pages. I like to do this because there often lies clues to what the book is really about. It certainly is with Theory & practice.

Theory & practice starts like a typical novel, whatever that is. We are in Switzerland in 1957, with an unnamed 23-year-old Australian geologist who is waiting for a bus to go up the mountain. Meanwhile, back in Australia “rivers of Southern Europeans are pouring into Sydney”. The story continues, with a flashback to his living in the country with his grandmother when he was six years old. During this time he steals her precious ring, and lets her blame her “native” worker Pearlie. The story, told third person, returns to 1957 and a potential tragedy when, writes the narrator, “the novel I was writing stalled”. And, just like that, we switch to first person.

I wrote to my American friend after I finished it, that I needed to do a bit of thinking. I saw an underlying thread concerning colonialism, I wrote, but how does that tie in with the idea of “theory and practice”, and with my glimmer of something about the messiness of life and how it can be represented in art. And, to make things more complicated – in this rather slim book – the narrator is writing a thesis on Virginia Woolf’s The waves, in which Woolf attempted to play with the novel form, calling her novel a “playpoem”. In Theory & practice, de Kretser also plays with the form, but by using fiction, essay and memoir in a way that nods a little to autofiction, but that feels more intensely focused on ideas than narrative.

So, here goes … With the jump to first person, our narrator introduces us to an essay titled “Tunnel vision”, by the British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, that she read in the London Review of Books. In this essay Weizman discusses what de Kretser characterises as “the application of Situationist theory to colonising practice”. She kept finding herself returning to the idea of “theory and practice” and her recognition that “the smooth little word ‘and’ makes the transition from theory to practice seem effortless” when she knew was not the case. She knew all about “the messy gap between the two”. Her novel had stalled because it wasn’t what she needed to write. What she needed to write about was the “breakdowns between theory and practice”.

We then shift gear again, and flash back to when the narrator is a child and learning the piano, learning both musical theory and piano practice. The relationship between the two might have been obvious to her teacher but it wasn’t to her.

“messy human truths” (p. 38)

Are you getting the drift? I thought I was, but the novel shifted gear again to 1986 when the narrator, at the age of 24, moves from Sydney to Melbourne to undertake an MA in English. Her topic is to be Virginia Woolf and gender, drawing on feminist theory. She soon uncovers a confronting thread of racism in Woolf’s diaries – a reference to “a poor little mahogany coloured wretch”. This was E.W. Perera, a Ceylonese barrister, politician and freedom-fighter man who, according to Woolf, had only two subjects, “the character of the Government, & the sins of the Colonial Office”. He made Woolf uncomfortable, though husband Leonard sympathised. The problem for our “mahogany-coloured” narrator is that Woolf’s discomfort makes her uncomfortable, but her thesis supervisor, Paula, won’t agree to her changing direction to explore racism. Our narrator’s solution, on the advice of an artist friend, is to “write back to Woolf”, to find or create her own truth in Woolf’s story.

Throughout the novel various parallels are drawn which illuminate the theme, even if they don’t resolve the mess. In her personal life, the narrator’s “practice” – a love affair with a man attached to another woman he claims to love – keeps butting up against her understanding of feminist theory and its key idea of supporting the sisterhood. Desire and obsession, she was finding, trumps theory every time. How to reconcile this? We are thrown into academia, with its politics and jealousies, and St Kilda’s colourful bohemian life, as she reaches for answers to questions both academic and personal.

Concurrently, there is the mother-parallel, one in which regular phone calls from her mother offering practical help and advice interrupt the text and narrative flow, and contrast with the Woolfmother whose abstract presence continues to complicate our narrator’s research and understanding. On the one hand, says our narrator, Woolf said ‘”Imagine” and opened the doors to our minds’, but on the other, she was “a snob and a racist and an antisemite”. Both are as complicated – “messy”, dare I say – as any mother-daughter relationship.

All this is told in prose that is captivating with its changing rhythms from the tersely poetic – “the evening felt jumpy, spoiling for a fight” – to realistic description, and natural dialogue.

Eventually our narrator manages to squish her “ideas about Woolf’s novels into the corset of Theory”, but, perhaps recalling her earlier awareness that “theory taught us … to notice what was unimportant”, it does not fill her with pride. It does, however, fulfil the university’s requirements and she can move on.

And so does the novel, making another leap to the end of the twentieth century, and on into the 21st century. She has more to say about the ways humans abuse others – as she’d been abused as a child, as Woolf and her sister had been abused, and as Donald Friend, in an interesting late discussion in the novel, abused young Balinese boys. Such is the legacy of sexism, racism and colonialism.

Now, how does this short but invigorating novel bring all this together? By reminding us, as the novel has done all the way through, that life is messy, that neither art (including the novel) nor theory can provide the answer, though they might provide insights. This is why, I’d say, de Kretser continues to play with the novel form, to find ways to convey the reality (not the realism) of life. I will end with a Woolf quote shared by de Kretser two-thirds through the novel, because I think she would apply it to herself:

“I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind & my eyes, refusing to be stamped & stereotyped.”

Kimbofo also loved this book.

Michelle de Kretser
Theory & practice
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2024
184pp.
ISBN: 9781923058149

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Vol. 3)

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Mansfield Park book covers
Mansfield Park book covers

A year ago, my Jane Austen group did a slow read of Mansfield Park, meaning we read and discussed it, one volume at a time, over three months. I posted my thoughts on volume 1 (chapters 1 to 30), and volume 2 (chapters 19 to 31), but I missed the third meeting, and never wrote up the final volume (chapters 32 to 48). However, this year my reading group scheduled Mansfield Park for our Classic read, so I’m taking the opportunity to share my thoughts on that last volume.

But first, a brief intro. The reading group member who recommended we read Mansfield Park did so because she wanted to see whether she would better like this, her least favourite Austen, on another read. She didn’t. I understand this. Mansfield Park is regularly identified as Austen’s hardest book to like. It feels prudish to modern eyes; its protagonist Fanny isn’t exciting nor is her romance; and it is more serious and certainly less sparkling than its predecessor, Pride and prejudice. Re this latter point, Jane Austen collected opinions on the novel from friends, family and others, and reported that one Mrs Bramstone “preferred it to either of the others — but imagined that might be her want of Taste — as she does not understand Wit.”

Now, my thoughts …

Volume 3 starts the day after Fanny has rejected Henry Crawford’s proposal. As someone in my reading group said, all the novel’s action takes place in the final chapters, and I mostly agree, although significant events do take place in the previous volumes, including the visit to Sotherton and the plan to put on the play, Lovers vows.

I wrote in my first two posts that what was striking me most was the selfishness, or self-centredness, of most of the characters. It suggested to me that Austen was critiquing the selfishness/self-centredness of the well-to-do, and how this results in poor behaviour, carelessness of the needs of others, and for some, in immoral behaviour. (I think we could equate these ideas with today’s concerns about “entitlement”.) This thread continued in volume 3. Indeed, here is where it all comes home to roost, confirming my sense that Mansfield Park is fundamentally about morality.

Fanny is clearly the novel’s moral centre. She quietly observes, and reflects on, what goes on around her. As one of my reading group members said, it is through her eyes, her thoughts, that we see the novel’s world. In the first chapter of volume 3, Sir Thomas speaks to Fanny about Henry’s proposal, explaining why she should accept him. Henry is

a young man … with everything to recommend him: not merely situation in life, fortune, and character, but with more than common agreeableness, with address and conversation pleasing to everybody.

Then he adds pressure. She owes Henry gratitude for his role in obtaining advancement for her brother in the navy, and marrying Henry is her duty to her family as such a marriage can only help them. Sir Thomas is therefore perplexed and shocked at Fanny’s ongoing refusal – despite these persuasions – to consider Henry. He asks:

“Have you any reason, child, to think ill of Mr. Crawford’s temper?”
“No, sir.”
She longed to add, “But of his principles I have” …

However, she feels that to tell Sir Thomas of her observations of Henry’s unprincipled behaviour towards Julia and the engaged Maria would betray them – so, she’s caught and says nothing. She hoped Sir Thomas – “so discerning, so honourable, so good” – would accept her “dislike” as sufficient reason. Unfortunately, not only can he not accept it, but he accuses her of wilfulness and ingratitude. It’s mortifying.

To his credit, however, Sir Thomas backs off, planning to let nature take its course, and, with a little judicious encouragement from the sidelines, he believes Henry will win her round. So Henry continues to press his suit, and Fanny continues to hold steady, reflecting at one point on “his want of delicacy and regard for others”. A few chapters on, Mary Crawford also presses her brother’s suit, but Fanny – she who is called wimpy by many modern readers – pushes back, telling Mary,

I had not, Miss Crawford, been an inattentive observer of what was passing between him and some part of this family in the summer and autumn. I was quiet, but I was not blind. I could not but see that Mr. Crawford amused himself in gallantries which did mean nothing.

While Fanny is coping with this, Edmund is moving forward with his plans to win Mary Crawford’s hand, despite her rather telling hatred of his chosen profession as a clergyman. Fanny – not altogether disinterested it has to be admitted – had observed Mary’s poor values, but it takes Edmund a long time to see her for what she is, for her lack of “principle”, her “blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind”. Edmund is convinced that Mary had been corrupted by the influence of others. He talks of “how excellent she would have been, had she fallen into good hands earlier” (instead of those poor influences she had in London. City versus country values is another thread running through this novel.)

I could expand more on this selfishness-leading-to-poor-behaviour-or-immorality theme because examples abound in the volume, but my aim here is to just share some ideas. And, I want to share another one…

I also mentioned another developing theme in my post on volume 1, the education of Sir Thomas. Interestingly, this is related to something I am observing in my current slow read of Austen’s next novel Emma, that of the quality of guidance given to young people and what happens when that guidance is faulty, misguided and/or not grounded in good moral teaching. It’s not a new theme for Austen, as you can see in Edmund’s comments above about Mary Crawford. But, it’s Sir Thomas’s learnings as one of those who does the guiding that I want to focus on.

Like many of Austen’s characters, in fact, Sir Thomas engenders a variety of reactions from readers. Some see him as harsh and uncompromising. It’s easy to argue this when you see the way his children – and niece – fear him. But others, and I am one, see him as a father trying to bring up his children as best he can, with little help from the indolent Lady Bertram. Fanny, our moral centre, talks of his “parental solicitude”. We see hints of his kindness in volumes 1 and 2, but it is in volume 3 that we see what he is really made of. He’s a man of his times, of course, but one who had his children’s best interests at heart and who realised too late that his raising of them had been misguided.

Now, before I continue, I want to make a little comment about style and structure. For most of the book, though there are departures, we are in Fanny’s head, seeing what she sees, thinking what she thinks, but in the book’s final chapter, Austen breaks the fourth wall and talks to us directly. It opens with a favourite quote:

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

“I quit”, she says, drawing attention to the fact that she is telling us a story, and she continues this way:

My Fanny, indeed, at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of everything…

The rest of the chapter wraps up the novel and her characters. She devotes a few pages to “poor Sir Thomas”, telling us that he “was the longest to suffer” due to “the anguish arising from the conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters”. He reflected on the negative impact on Maria and Julia of the “totally opposite treatment” they had lived under

where the excessive indulgence and flattery of their aunt had been continually contrasted with his own severity. […]

Here had been grievous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments, the authorised object of their youth, could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them.

Just look at those last few sentences … there, I think, is Austen’s driver for this novel. Maria and Julia had been allowed to focus on “elegance and accomplishments” with no attention paid to “the moral effect on the mind”. Mary Crawford is similarly misguided.

Jane Austen, as we know, could be witty and acerbic with the best of them, but in this most serious novel of hers she may have shared the moral and social values dearest to her heart.

Thoughts?

Kylie Tennant, The face of despair (#Review, #1952 Club)

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Once again, as I’ve been doing for most to the Year Clubs, I am using it as an opportunity to read an Australian short story, usually from one of my anthologies. For 1952, however, the anthologies came up empty, but I did find one via AustLit, and then tracked it down in The Bulletin. The story, Kylie Tennant’s “The face of despair”, was first published in 1952, but has, I believe, been anthologised since.

Who is Kylie Tennant?

Kylie (or Kathleen) Tennant (1912-1988) was born in Manly, NSW, and grew up (says the National Portrait Gallery) in an “acrimonious household”. In 1932, she married teacher and social historian Lewis Charles Rodd, whom she had met at the University of Sydney, and they had two children. When Rodd was appointed to a teaching position in Coonabarabran in rural New South Wales, she left her studies and walked 450 kilometres to join him.

This must have worked for her because she did more firsthand research for her novels, taking “to the roads with the unemployed during the 1930s Depression, lived in Sydney slums and with Aboriginal Communities and spent a week in gaol” (NLA’s biographical note). She also worked as a book reviewer, lecturer, literary adviser, and was a member of the Commonwealth Literary Fund Advisory Board.

Tennant wrote around 10 novels, including Tiburon (1935); The battlers (1941); Ride on stranger (1943); Lost haven (1946); Tell morning this (1967, which I read with my reading group); and Tantavallon (1983). She also wrote nonfiction (including Speak you so gently, about life in an Aboriginal community), poetry, short stories, children’s books and plays. She won several literary awards, including the ALS Gold Medal for The battlers.

Her Australian Dictionary of Biography entry by Jane Grant says that although the early years of her marriage with Rodd “were complicated by the conflicts between Tennant’s attraction to communism and Rodd’s High Anglicanism, it proved to be an extremely successful creative partnership”. According to Grant, she was briefly a member of the Communist Party in 1935, but resigned a few months later believing the party had lost touch with working-class politics. Grant says that, like slightly older writers such as Vance Palmer and Katharine Susannah Prichard, she believed her novels could ‘educate the public about poverty and disadvantage and change what she termed “the climate of opinion”‘. In other words, she wrote more in the realist style, than the modernism of peers like Patrick White, Christina Stead and Elizabeth Harrower. However, as Grant says “the social message of her novels … was always leavened by humour” – and we also see this in my chosen short story.

“The face of despair”

“The face of despair” tells of a small fictional country town, Garrawong, which, at the story’s opening, had just survived a flood:

WHEN the waters of the first flood went down, the town of Garrawong emerged with a reputation for heroism. “Brave but encircled Garrawong holds out,” a city paper announced, and a haze of self-conscious sacrifice like a spiritual rainbow shone over everyone.

The story has a timeliness given our recent flooding frequency here in Australia. In the third paragraph we are told that “There was a feeling abroad that Garrawong had defeated the flood single-handed” but, a few more paragraphs on, “out of all reason, the rain began again”. Once again the librarians, who had just re-shelved their books, must carry them back out of harm’s way, emitting “small ladylike curses” as they did. But, others weren’t so willing:

“The police began to go round in their duck rescuing the inhabitants; but a strong resistance-movement was developing. They refused to be rescued. They had had one flood—that was enough.”

The story is timely, not only for the recurrent flood issue, but for its description of what is now recognised as “disaster fatigue”. Some residents, like the Doctor, don’t believe it will be as bad as before, that the dam won’t break this time, so they refuse to properly prepare or to accept rescue offers. Others, like the Nurse who runs a maternity home, just can’t do it again. She tells her housekeeper, “I’ll shut the place. I can’t start again, I won’t. No, not again.”

Now, when I was researching Tennant for my brief introduction to her, I found a 2021 article in the Sydney Review of Books. It was by poet and academic Julian Croft and focused on her novel Lost haven. It was published in 1946, just a few years after her best-known books, The battlers and Ride on stranger, but a few years before this story. He writes that Margaret Dick who had written a book on Tennant’s novels in 1966

saw Lost haven as a maturing step away from the ‘austerity’ of Ride on stranger towards ‘a resurgence of a poetic, instinctive response to nature and a freer handling of emotion, an unselfconscious acceptance of the existence of grief and despair’. This was a necessary step towards the maturity of what Dick considered Tennant’s best novel (and I would agree) Tell morning this.

I share this because “The face of despair”, published in 1952 – that is, after Lost haven and before 1967’s Tell morning this – feels part of this continuum. It has such a light touch – one I could call poetic, instinctive, freer – yet doesn’t deny the truth of the situation and what it means for the residents of Garrawong. Tennant uses humour, often lightly black, as she tells of the various reactions – stoic, mutinous, resigned, defeated – from householders, nurses, farmers, shopowners, not to mention the poor rescue police (who “did not seem to realise that they were now identified with the flood, were part of it, and shared the feelings it aroused”). It reads well, because it feels real – with its carefully balanced blend of adversity and absurdity.

Early in the story, the narrator writes of those who felt “mutinous”, who “refused to shift” as they had in the previous flood, adding that

… in the face of this renewed malice there was no heroism, only a grim indignation and a kind of dignity.

Towards the end, the title is referenced when Tennant decribes how “the face of despair” looks in different people as they ponder the flood’s impact. For example, “in the farmer in the thick boots it was the foam in which he had wiped his feet”, but in the poor old vagrant woman, it is “blue lips”. Tennant follows this with:

Despair does not cry out or behave itself unseemly, despair is humble. Its face does not writhe in agony. There is no pain left in it, because it is what the farmer said it was —“The stone finish.”

There is more to the story, and it’s not all grim. Rather, as Dick (quoted above) wrote, there’s “an unselfconscious acceptance of the existence of grief and despair”, and, as the last line conveys, one that encompasses a survivor spirit despite it all. A great story.

* Read for the 1952 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

Kylie Tennant
“The face of despair” [Accessed: 16 April 2025]
in The Bulletin, Vol. 73 No. 3791 (8 Oct 1952)

Helen Garner, The season (#BookReview)

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In 2023, The New Yorker published a piece on Helen Garner. Written by Australian journalist, Helen Sullivan, its title, “The startling candor of Helen Garner”, captures exactly what I like about Garner, as does this a little further on:

Her writing is elegant but colloquial, characterized by an impulse to say and share things others might keep private.

Garner’s latest book, The season, is a gentler book than most, if not all, of her previous books, but these things – the writing and the honesty – are still in play. BeeJay Silcox, in conversation with Garner about the book, described it as “a graceful book, a love letter from a grandmother to boys and men” and suggested that it’s “not very different” from Garner’s other books as some have said. As is my wont, I take a middle ground. I did find it quieter, less contentious, but it still has her openness, her often self-deprecating honesty, and her clarity about what she is and isn’t doing.

“a nanna’s book about footy”

What Garner isn’t doing in this book, and what surprised many of those she spoke to as she was writing it, is some sort of social or societal analysis of footy. “Blokes”, for example, who’d been “formed by footy”, expected “fact and stats and names and memories”, while others, particularly women, assumed she was writing “something polemical, a critical study of football culture and its place in society” (like, say, Anna Krien’s Night games. Indeed, in my review of that book, I reference Helen Garner’s writing.) These assumptions panicked Garner somewhat. She was not writing these, but “a nanna’s book about footy”, a book

about my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die.

Pure Garner: it describes what her book is, but belies the insights and observations that lie within. However, both sides are described and hinted at in the opening pages of the book, when Garner writes about her grandchildren. She understands her granddaughter she says, but

having never raised a son, I now began to learn about boys and men from a fresh angle, to see their delicacy, their fragility, what they’re obliged to do to themselves in order to live in this world, the codes of behaviour they’ve had to develop in order discipline and sublimate their drive to violence.

During Melbourne’s extended pandemic lockdowns, Garner watched more footy, and saw it in a new light. She glimpsed “what is grand and noble, and admirable and graceful about men”.

Given all this, and the fact that Amby (Ambrose) is her youngest and last grandchild, she wanted to better know him, “before it’s too late”. She wanted to “learn what’s in his head, what drives him; to see what he’s like when he’s out in the world, when he’s away from his family, which I am part of”. She decided to follow his Under-16s football team, driving him to training and attending their matches.

“It’s boys’ business. And my job is to witness it.”

The footy season starts, and there is Garner, “a silent witness” on the sidelines, with notebook in hand. She’s the quintessential invisible woman, and happy to be so, albeit she asked Amby’s and the new 21-year-old coach’s permission first. What follows is something that reads rather like a diary. In the aforementioned conversation, Garner said she initially struggled to turn her experience into a book. She started writing it in the past, but that gave it an historical feel, so she changed to present tense, and voilà, she had her story. And she was right. It feels fresh and personal.

The book, essentially a memoir, is well-paced, partly because of the chronological drive implicit in the training-playing season, but also because of the way Garner mixes gorgeous description and small snatches of dialogue, with astute reflections and self-questioning. There are times when she loses heart: it’s cold on the sidelines; is she “trespassing on men’s territory, ignorant of their concerns and full of irrelevant observations and thin-skinned responses”; who does she think she is, “intruding on his [Amby’s] privacy, feeding off his life”. But she “slog[s] on”, because writing is what she does.

What she also does – whether it be a novel about a dying friend (The spare room) or a true crime book about the trial of a man accused of killing his children (This house of grief) – is capture life in all its messiness. If you’ve read any Garner, you will know that she understands messiness and will not shy away from it. Here, it encompasses her own aging and being a grandparent who can only ever be on the periphery; an adolescent boy’s challenge in coping with school, girls, and training; and the emotional ups and downs of football, the rigours of training, the errors that let the team down, the wins and losses.

I am not into football, but I found The season compelling. I enjoyed spending time with Garner again, but I also appreciated her insights into masculinity. Throughout, Garner asks the men and boys around her – Amby in particular, but also coaches, trainers, fathers – pertinent questions, such as why have a mullet (haircut), what is good about tackling, is he proud of his battle scars. The answers are sometimes surprising, occasionally funny, but nearly always enlightening. Amby tells why he likes tackling:

“I guess it’s basically inflicting physical harm but with no actual hard feelings. It’s just aaaaapchwoooooo and then you get up and keep playing, and then at the end you shake hands, and no one remembers anything.”

Football, Garner sees, is “a world in which a certain level of violence can be dealt with by means of ritual behaviour”. I never will understand this violence and men thing, but Garner’s sharing her time with the boys and men – particularly her willingness to ask the right questions, to listen and to reflect – did continue my education (and hers).

However, it’s not all about masculinity. There are all sorts of other observations, some self-deprecatingly humorous, such as this reflection on a match where Amby’s team “verses” a bigger, stronger team:

How quiet our team’s supporters are! We stand there like inner-city intellectuals, analysing our boys, criticising their every move, using modal verbs in knuckle-rapping tenses: should have, ought to have.

This made me laugh, but it also conveys Garner’s ability to mix tone, and to flip modes, between the grittiness of football and quiet, humorous, compassionate observations.

The season is exactly what Garner intended, a warm-hearted “life-hymn” about a season spent getting to know her youngest grandson as he transitioned from boy to man. It’s an attempt to understand what makes men tick, and the role footy can play in forming young boys into men. I find it hard to buy the “warrior” stuff that goes with male sport, as Garner seems to, but I can understand where it comes from, because there can be nobility and grandeur in sport.

If, like me, you are not a football follower, don’t let that put you off. The season is not a sporting memoir full of facts, figures and rules. Instead, it’s a nanna’s story about time spent with a loved grandson, a story with footy at its centre but that is, fundamentally, about the things Garner does best, character, drama, and emotion.

Kimbofo also loved this book. It would make a good companion to Karen Viggers’ novel about youth football (soccer), Sidelines.

Helen Garner
The season
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2024
188pp.
ISBN: 9781922790750

Jane Austen, Emma (Vol. 1, redux 2025)

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EmmaCovers

As long-time readers here will know, my Jane Austen group did a slow read of Austen’s novels over several years, starting in 2011. In 2022, we decided it was time to repeat the exercise, and are again reading them chronologically, one each year, making 2025 Emma’s turn.

Our slow reads involve reading and discussing the chosen novel, a volume at a time. We “try” to read as though we don’t know what happens next, to help us focus closely on what we think Austen is doing. Of course, we can’t read like a first-time reader, but it’s a useful discipline.

We always wonder whether this time, after so many reads, we will see anything new or fresh. But, we always do. Just the march of time, with its impact on our knowledge, experience and tastes, means we see the books differently. Take Emma, for example …

Jane Austen, Emma, Penguin

A few re-reads ago, what stood out for me was its beautiful plotting. There’s barely a word or action that doesn’t imply or lead to something telling, even if we are unaware at the time. From my last major re-read, in 2015, I noticed how often the word “friend” or the notion of “friendship” was appearing. The novel starts with Emma losing her governess-then-companion Miss Taylor to marriage. They’ll remain friends but Emma is left alone with her gentle but fussy father. So, she nurtures a friendship with the 17-year-old Harriet. In my post on rereading Volume 1, I explored the idea of friendship, and then watched in Volumes 2 and 3 to see whether the idea continued. It did. This is not to say that what we might identify in a slow read will overtake previous ideas, but that these re-reads enable us to tease out more of the details, which usually results in a deeper understanding of the whole.

So, what would I find this time? I did consider choosing something to look for, like the role of letters or music in the novel, but decided to just see what played out. Sure enough, something popped up, the idea of young people lacking guidance. It relates to issues like character development and to themes like parenting. And, I found it all there in the first few chapters.

The novel begins:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

This can be teased out in many ways, but, remembering that “very little to distress or vex her”, I’m focusing on where Austen goes next. As explained above, the novel opens with Emma’s governess-then-companion Miss Taylor having just married, so Emma, who lost her mother when she was very young, is left alone with her “valetudinarian” father, “a nervous man, easily depressed”. She indulges him, as only a devoted daughter can, but otherwise, she is untrammelled. Austen describes her life, to this point, in the third and fourth paragraphs:

Emma doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own.

The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.

And there it is, “directed chiefly by her own [judgement]”. Neither Emma’s “nervous” father nor the mildly-tempered Miss Taylor/Mrs Weston question or guide her. However, in the same chapter, we learn that there is one who does, her brother-in-law Mr Knightley, “a sensible man about seven or eight and twenty”. Austen writes that:

Mr. Knightley, in fact, was one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them …

We see several examples of his chiding her in Volume 1, including about her interference in Harriet’s response to a marriage proposal. We also see him discussing Emma with Mrs Weston, telling her that she had been a good companion to Emma but had also been better at submitting her will to Emma than in giving Emma the “complete education” he thinks she needed.

Now, moving on to Chapter 2, we hear of another young person, the three or four and twenty, Frank Churchill. His mother, too, had died when he was very young, and, for a number of reasons, he

was given up to the care and the wealth of the Churchills [aunt and uncle], and he had only his own comfort to seek, and his own situation to improve as he could.

The implication here is that he too had been left to his own devices with little guidance other than “his own comfort”. It occurred to me, during this reading, that he is being set up as a parallel and perhaps eventual foil to Emma. But, hold that thought, because Frank does not physically appear in Volume 1. There is, however, a telling discussion at the end of the Volume about his not coming to Highbury to meet his father’s new wife, Mrs Weston. Mr Knightley – note, it’s him again – argues that while Frank’s aunt and uncle are given as the reason:

There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do, if he chooses, and that is, his duty.

Frank simply needed to use the “tone of decision becoming a man”, and there would have been “no opposition”.

Finally, there is a third example, the aforementioned Harriet Smith, who is introduced in Chapter 4. She

certainly was not clever, but she had a sweet, docile, grateful disposition; was totally free from conceit; and only desiring to be guided by any one she looked up to.

The natural child of an unknown person who had paid for her schooling and now for her boarding at that school, Harriet has no parent to guide her, only school teachers – and now, the flawed Emma. By the end of Volume 1, it is not going well for Harriet, who has lost one real and one imagined suitor due to Emma’s guidance.

So, as Volume 1 progresses through its 18 chapters, we see some of the fallout of Emma’s being a law unto herself and ignoring the wisdom of others. I look forward to seeing if this idea is followed through in Volume 2. Is it important to Austen’s world view? Watch this space …

Irma Gold, Shift (#BookReview)

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If Australian writer Irma Gold suffered from Second Book Syndrome while writing her second novel, it certainly doesn’t show. Her debut novel, The breaking (my review), is well-written and a great read. However, in Shift, I sense a writer who has reached another level of confidence in fusing her writing, story-telling, and the ideals and beliefs the drive her. She is passionate about her subject matter, as she was in The breaking, but in Shift she ups the ante to encompass wider themes about art. The result is a strong read that offers much for its readers to think about.

Shift is not the first novel I’ve reviewed about post-apartheid South Africa, but it is my first by an Australian author. Published, says MidnightSun (linked below), in the 70th anniversary year of the Freedom Charter, which outlined the principles of democracy and freedom in South Africa, Shift is set in Kliptown, where this charter was signed. Protagonist, Arlie, is a thirty-something art photographer who has just sold his first work to a significant gallery. It’s potentially career-changing and he should be happy, but he can’t “get his shit together”. He can’t keep girlfriends and while he gets on well with his happily established brother, his relationship with his parents is fraught. He feels his successful architect father has expectations he can’t (or doesn’t want to) meet, and his mother refuses to talk about her South African upbringing. But, Arlie wants to know.

So, after yet another relationship break-up, Arlie decides to go to South Africa, and ends up in Kliptown, in Soweto. He becomes immersed in its life, mixing with visionary choirmaster Rufaro, singer Glory and her younger brother Samson, and other locals such as his favourite photographic subject, the 80-something, “sassy as hell” Queenie. Can he create an exhibition out of his experience? Rufaro would like that …

“sold a dream”

The bulk of the novel comprises Arlie’s experiences in Kliptown, where he is the only white person. Through his eyes, we see the dire situation the people find themselves in. Early in the novel, he goes on a date with Glory to a spoken word evening at Soweto Theatre, where he hears some truths:

The people here had been sold a dream and yet more than two decades on they found themselves still in the same relentless poverty. Mandela was the broker of broken freedom.

Which is not, necessarily, to say that Mandela achieved nothing, but that life is far more complex than a “god”, as Mandela was to Arlie’s mother, can ever be. What Arlie sees, then, is poverty, drug addiction, violence and hopelessness. He sees young people, like Samson, not believing there’s any point to school. He sees a settlement without proper sewerage, electricity, or running water to their homes, not to mention with “asbestos sheeting everywhere”. However, on the flip side, he also sees community, hard work and hope.

So, back to my opening claim about Gold and her second novel. Taking the writing and the storytelling first, the writing is tight. It has the confidence of an editor, which Gold is, but mostly of one who is passionate about her material. The descriptions are fresh and vivid. We can visualise the place, with, for example, its “ramshackle tapestry of shacks constructed from discarded materials, each one rippling into the next”. The characters – who are drawn from Gold’s travels to the region (see here) – feel authentic. They are not stereotypes, but breathe life into the story with their thoughts, worries, fears and hopes. Arlie questions his actions, are they that of “a white saviour”? The colourful Glory, with her orange hair and fake orange nails, doesn’t “try to please”. She has her own views, and “plays her own game … take it or leave it”. The visionary Rufaro is passionate about the power of singing. It shows everyone, he says, who they are, that “we will be more … we are more”. Samson is a boy on the cusp of manhood, exuding bravado one moment, begging to play soccer the next.

The novel, too, is well structured. It opens with a shocking event to which we return at the end, and then follows a chronological arc from Arlie’s personal crisis and his decision to go to South Africa, through his time there, to his ultimate return home. There is drama along the way. Arlie’s father Harris visits, and Gold perfectly captures the discomfort between them alongside their unspoken love for each other. There is no simple resolution, just, perhaps, another step along the way to understanding. There is also love, violence and tragedy, but I won’t spoil those.

“make the invisible visible”

Shift is a story about a forgotten, if not betrayed, community, but one that survives all the same. It’s about a man who cannot keep a girlfriend, who is at odds with his father and distanced from his troubled mother, but who wants better relationships. It is a multi-layered love story – to a community and its people, and between Arlie and the people he cares for. But, most of all, it is a story about the power of art – or, if not that, at least about hope for art’s power. From first meeting Arlie, Rufaro has a dream that he will create “an exhibition that will show the world the truth about Kliptown”. He tells his choristers that Arlie

is going to expose what the government is doing here. That they have forgotten us. The pressure must come from outside, because our government does not listen to us.

Arlie, Gold writes later in the novel, “had always believed that art could change minds, that if enough minds were changed then the world changed” but, when it comes to it, he wonders “what could his photos possible achieve?” Can he “make the invisible visible”?

This brings me back to my opening paragraph and Gold’s wider themes. Shift is a strong, moving novel about a struggling community that has been left behind, for all the promises of freedom. However, it is also a novel that believes art can expose truths and, through that, shift our thinking and thus nudge the world towards being a better place. Gold has written her heart out in this novel to “make the invisible visible” – and to make room for hope. The next move is ours.

Irma Gold
Shift
Rundle Mall, SA: MidnightSun, 2025
269pp.
ISBN: 9781922858566

(Review copy courtesy MidnightSun Publishing)

Paddy O’Reilly, Other houses (#BookReview)

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It’s not totally coincidental that this week’s Monday Musings post was about a publisher of realist or social novels, that is, of novels which aim to explore social problems of their time. My reading group’s March book, Paddy O’Reilly’s Other houses, belongs to this tradition. I have been wanting to read it since it was published in 2022.

Searches of the Internet, including of Wikipedia, retrieve various definitions of the social novel (also called social problem or social protest or social justice novel), but they essentially agree that these are works of fiction which tackle some sort of inequality, prejudice, or injustice, through the experiences of their characters, and that their intention is to encourage social change. In Other houses, O’Reilly interrogates the idea of social mobility. Her protagonists, Lily and Janks, are “battlers“, working class people who struggle payday to payday, but they want more for their now 15-year-old daughter, Jewelee, who had started to run wild, heading down the path of delinquency.

“Good people live here” (Lily)

So, they move from their working class suburb to one they “could barely afford”, and enrol Jewelee in “a good school”. Jewelee might now behave as though she’s “too good” for her “bogan” parents, but they believe it was worth it. The problem is, Janks, now working in a food-factory, has mysteriously disappeared. The novel opens with Lily driving through her old neighbourhood at night, hoping to find Janks there. “Good people live here”, she says. “They try”.

From here the novel is told in the alternating first person voices of Lily and Janks, with Lily’s story occupying the greater part of the narrative. Having worked as a supermarket cashier in her old home, she is now a cleaner, which is where the title comes in. The novel is beautifully constructed around the cleaning jobs Lily does with her cleaning partner, the older, and wearing out, Shannon. While they clean houses, Lily reflects on her current and past lives, on the “entitled” Jewelee, on the lives and aspirations of the people they clean for, all the while worrying about Janks, and trying to find him. She prints “have you seen” leaflets and scours all the places he might possibly be. She does not believe he has deserted her willingly.

And, we know that he hasn’t. Having borrowed money from a bikie gang, he’d been “snatched” off the street, and coerced into paying off the loan by doing a job for them. The novel’s plot comes from this: will Janks get the job done, without being caught, and be allowed to return safely to the life they are building? Many of us in the group called this book a page-turner, but some disagreed. The plot is too straightforward, they said. It doesn’t have the breath-catching twists and turns of a thriller. Others of us, however, define page-turners differently. Ours don’t require an edge-of-the-seat plot. Rather, they are books that compel us on, because of the characters, or the writing, or the ideas, or the plot, or any combination of these. What do you think?

“Things, world, wrong” (Shannon)

Anyhow, there is a plot – whether you see it as a page-turning one or not – and there is also lightness, despite the seriousness of the protagonists’ plight. Much of the lightness comes from the house-cleaning scenes. Lily and Shannon name the houses they clean, such as the House of Hands (with its profusion of chrome dirtied by sticky hands), the House of Doom (whose owners see the world as “blighted”), Horror House (inhabited by a hoarder), and Lily’s favourite, the House of Light (which lets the sun shine in). They share their thoughts about the inhabitants and the lives they know (or think) they lead. If anyone knows how we live, it’s likely to be cleaners, eh? Lily’s and Shannon’s perspectives – their observations, opinions and reflections on how others live – are what gives this book its real heart.

Lily speaks with the dignity of a worker, when she says:

We know things no one else knows about our clients. I sometimes pick up objects in the places we clean – a vase, a notebook, a scarf … I give them attention, these things that I believe hold meaning for someone … It’s my moment of saying what I can’t say to their faces. I respect what you hold dear, even when you’re rude to me or barely acknowledge I exist. (p. 30)

Meanwhile, the older Shannon has her own mantra for how things are going, says Lily:

Something has gone wrong in the world … Shannon uses it about the eating habits for the population, the number of appliances in the kitchens we clean, leaf blowers, hair straighteners, so-called superfoods, weird weather events, toilets that wash your bottom, plastic wrapping on fruit that already has its own natural wrapping, quiz shows where she disagrees with the answers, tap water sold in plastic bottles and so much more. (p. 29)

Most definitions of the social novel say “through the experiences of their characters”, and this is true here. Telling her story through the experiences of Lily, Shannon and Janks enables O’Reilly to show what she wants to explore, without being didactic. Through these authentic characters we come to see just what the much-touted upward social mobility really is, means, and feels like. We see Lily and Janks recognising that the poverty faced daily in their old working class suburb results in lives that are lived on the edge with little opportunity to improve one’s chances, but we also see that it’s not easy to simply transplant yourselves into a different life and, essentially, culture:

Tonight my water-stained ceiling and the creeping draught taunt me that although we’ve adjusted to living here, it might be because we brought things with us when we crossed: rental damp and rot, clothes that fall apart, bank accounts that bounce between payday and zero. (p. 74)

For Lily, Broadie feels like “home” and it’s where she returns to find a solution to the problem of the missing Janks.

Other houses is a slim and accessible book, but it offers no simple answers. Rather than support the comfortable view that upward social mobility is the answer to the problems posed by socioeconomic inequity, it asks us to consider instead, how do we overcome the problems caused by inequity – indeed, how do we remove inequity – without expecting people to give up everything they hold dear about where they come from? It’s a quietly provocative novel that speaks to one of the most urgent issues of our time.

Paddy O’Reilly
Other houses
South Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2022
245pp.
ISBN: 9781922626950

Sun Jung, My name is Gucci (#BookReview)

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Some reading synchronicities – those coincidental connections that happen between books we read in a short period of time – are zeitgeist-related. For example, grief is not my go-to, but it is a common theme in contemporary writing so it’s not entirely remarkable that I have written three reviews since January about books focused on grief. What is remarkable is that, in the same period, I have read two books, written nearly 80 years apart, which are told from the perspective of dogs. This surely takes synchronicity to a whole new level – wouldn’t you agree?

A canine perspective is, however, where the synchronicity ends, because Dusty (my review) is told third person through two main voices, Dusty’s and his owner’s, and Dusty is very much a dog. He has no knowledge beyond what he knows as a dog. Gucci, in Sun Jung’s My name is Gucci, is something very different. Not only is he the novel’s sole first person narrator, but he has been reincarnated many times, so has a wealth of knowledge and experience way beyond that of a typical dog. Indeed, as he tells us, he is a “sage”, and an erudite one at that. Now, before you click away, thinking non-human narrators and ideas of reincarnation are not for you, do read on, because Jung makes this work, creating a story that is not only charming and often delightfully humorous, but also thoughtful about life and the connections we make.

Gucci is a Dalmation-like bitzer. At the book’s opening, he is five-years-old and living in a Singaporean animal shelter. He’d given up ever being rescued, when, seemingly out of the blue, “she” appears, and whisks him off to Sydney. Is this destiny? This never-named she, it turns out, has been connected to Gucci, in earlier lives, through their inyeon. Inyeon, the book’s glossary explains, is “Karmic relation or destiny”, but in fact our two are connected through the rarer form of “perpetual-inyeon”. This is “a persistently recurring Karmic relation between two beings through their numerous past lives”, one built on the understanding that “interactions must be mutually beneficial”. Gucci tells us:

I have been reborn three times during her present life; interestingly, and quite unusually, all three rebirth were dogs and all had one absolute karmic duty – to help her to collect and rekindle the shattered smithereens of inyeon that she had long lost.

Notwithstanding this idea of inyeon, the obvious question is, of course, why choose a dog as narrator. Telling a story through a non-human character is not only not easy, it’s a risk, so why? I don’t know Jung’s reasons, but the driver must surely be that unusual narrators have something useful to offer – tone, maybe, or experience or a different way of thinking. Gucci meets all of these. He has some painful things to share about her life, but does so in a lighter tone, which feels more acceptable from a non-human character. Further, as a dog who has experienced the world differently from humans, he can offer different insights into her experiences, not to mention those of humans in general. And, finally, he can illuminate important things about human-animal relationships.

“nothing is absurd”

My name is Gucci is not a hard read, but it does require concentration because we move back and forth in time, in her life, as it intersects with Gucci’s lives – as Nari, the Jindo dog, who dies in an accident when she is 9; as General, the Sapsal-cross dog, who was forced to work as a fighting dog, and is euthanased when she is 13; and of course as Gucci in her present life, now helping her confront and perhaps reconcile the traumas of her past. She had a difficult childhood in Korea, which is where Nari and General know her. The product of an adulterous union between a married man and a melancholic young woman (jageun umma), she is removed from this birth mother when she is 4 years old to live with her father’s wife (keun umma). Keun umma accepts her, with kindness and love, but not so keun umma’s mother, the “old hyena”, who is cruel to this “filthy child” brought into her home.

The time shifting, then, occurs between her past life in Korea, with Nari and General, and her current life in Sydney’s Kings Cross and Darlinghurst, where she is married to an Irishman, but haunted by her past. It’s no surprise to Gucci that she is a “horror novelist … [of] … spinechilling and gory urban mythologies”. In telling his and her story, Gucci is often insouciant if not downright playful, but he is also wise and philosophical, as he guides her and us through the challenges of coping with past experiences which threaten to undermine the present.

Closely associated with this idea of past and present is that of “destiny”. It is a constant thread in the book, and it discomforted me a little, perhaps because as a Westerner, the idea of destiny doesn’t sit easily with my world view. However, if we reframe it to encompass the way past experiences impact present and future actions, then it works – for me, and for the book, where the idea of fate/destiny/luck is variously respected, or upended or foiled, or treated sceptically by her Irish husband. There’s no one answer – just perspective and tolerance for difference.

Much of this story is serious. Bad things happened to her in her childhood, and Gucci reflects on the hows and whys. Early on, she is ostracised at school because of her “impure heritage”. Thinking back to their Seoul home in the suburb of Itaewon, which means “village of strangers”, Gucci wonders “what is being strange or different? Different to what?” Why do humans demonise, or make fun of, those who are different? My name is Gucci is full of good questions and wise ideas, but they are not laboured. Instead, Gucci keeps the story moving forward, with warmth and compassion, leavened by humour that is, at times, lightly satirical. There is a delightful scene when she takes her young Irish boyfriend to Korea, and, after a boozy night they go out for a “hangover cure” breakfast:

Bleary-eyed and with a severe hangover, he could not believe his misfortune as he stared at the abalone congee bowl.

Finally, there are the stories about human-animal relationships. Some of the funniest scenes in the book come from these, such as the Kings Cross apartment dog-wars, between dog-lovers and dog-haters. But there are tough stories too, like the sport of dog-fighting which destroys General’s life. This book pays tribute to the importance of our relationships with our animals.

Early on, Gucci forestalls our potential scepticism about his story by claiming that “if you look at everything in the world as connected by the complex web of inyeon, nothing is absurd”. Well, I have a high tolerance for the absurd, anyhow, but even if I didn’t, Gucci is such a delightful guide that I was in for the duration. If you want to read something that’s meaningful but doesn’t weigh you down, try this one.

Sun Jung
My name is Gucci: A dog’s story
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2024
254pp.
ISBN: 9781923023178

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge, via Scott Eathorne, Quikmark Media)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 10, Ruby Mary Doyle

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Unlike my last forgotten writer, Dulcie Deamer, today’s writer, though a prolific contributor to newspapers in her day, has slipped into the shadows. Neither Wikipedia nor the Australian dictionary of biography (ADB) contain articles for her, but the AustLit database does. As with many of my Forgotten Writers articles, I researched and posted a versions of this on the Australian Women Writers’ site.

Ruby Mary Doyle

Ruby Mary Doyle (1887-1943) wrote short stories and serialised novels, newspaper articles including travel and nature pieces, and plays, mostly publishing as Ruby Doyle or Ruby M. Doyle. Much of her writing was published in Fairfax’s weekly magazine, The Sydney Mail. By the 1930s she had, says AustLit, gained a reputation as a writer of some standing. She was also active in the Lyceum Club and the Pioneer Club in Sydney. And yet, there are no articles for her in Wikipedia or the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Doyle was born on the 20 February 1887 in Gunnedah, New South Wales, to Joseph McCormick Doyle, a bank manager for the Commercial Bank, and Annie (née Hooke). She was the first of six children. In 1935, in an article titled “The making of the writer”, Doyle wrote of how she came to writing:

As a child, when I walked through the bush, well behind the family party, every tree seemed an enchanted castle. Birds, butterflies, flowers talked, and I understood them. Imagination — that blessed gift from the gods — had come to me from every side of my family, and finally led me, whether I would or not, into the realm of writing.

According to Kingston, of the Dungog Historical Society, her first published serial was The Dragon, which appeared in The Sydney Mail from 4 June 1913, and was later published in book form as The mystery of the hills. Promoting the book form, which was published in 1919, The World’s News wrote that:

Those who love a story which is thoroughly and typically Australian and of the country will enjoy this tale of love and adventure … The “mystery” we shall not, of course, say anything about, except that it has to do with men who defy the law and have a chief, who is a man of importance. There are several love stories, and they have the usual course, and there is quite a fund of information as to how we Australians live in the country, and how we manage to enjoy ourselves there. 

This little piece says much about how Australia saw itself. “How we manage to enjoy ourselves there [ie “in the country”]” suggests that Australia was well on the way to urbanisation, but fascinated by its bush self.

Further stories and serialisations appeared, including The winning of Miriam Heron in The Sydney Mail in 1918, which was published in book form by Edwards Dunlop in 1924. Announcing this new serial in 1918, The Sydney Mail wrote:

She [Doyle] has already contributed to the ‘Mail,’ and has disclosed literary and dramatic ability of a high order. It is gratifying to note that she shows no disposition to ‘write herself out.’ On the contrary, ‘The Winning of Miriam Heron’ reveals that she has mastered the art of construction, and thus gives her readers a better chance than previously to fully appreciate her literary powers.

From 1924 to 1926, Ruby travelled overseas a few times – to the United Kingdom, the continent, Canada and America – during which time she regularly submitted travel articles to the Dungog Chronicle, which, according to that paper, “were reprinted in many country papers throughout the State.”

Doyle wrote for local papers through the 1920s and 1930s. AustLit lists over 30 works of hers published over this time. She also tried her hand at playwriting. Kingston writes that her play The Family Tree came second in a competition at the Independent Theatre, Sydney, in 1933, and that the following year, The Man from Murrumbidgee, was produced at the Kursaal Theatre, also in Sydney. I believe these are the same play, given The Man from Murrumbidgee is about a status-seeking wife who tries to find “a worthy ancestor” on the family tree.

Doyle’s writing reflects the versatility of the working writer. Her short stories dealt largely with domestic subjects, while her serialised novels included historical stories about the colonial days, and romantic adventure stories. Her non-fiction focused particularly on nature, travel and local history, rather than on social or political commentary. Many of her local history pieces drew on her own family’s long history in the region, and include some delightful touches of humour. For example, she describes a pioneer family (hers it seems), coming out to Australia in 1828 with various things, including merino sheep and

rolls and rolls of beautiful silks, Mr. Hooke having an idea that he would be able to deal successfully in such merchandise. It proved only a supposition, and for the rest of her life Mrs Hooke had a marvellous collection of silks from which her dresses were made. 

There is also some recognition of the original people of the land. Writing in The Sydney Mail 1931 on the town of Gresford, she says that:

Most of the homes in the vicinity bear English and Welsh names — Norwood, Clevedon, Goulston, Camyr ‘Allyn, Caergule, Penshurst, Tre vallyn, etc. The river, named Paterson by the white man, was called Yimmang by the aborigines; one of our poets has written a very beautiful poem, “Ode to the Yimmang,” in which he extols its beauty.

Ruby Doyle was regularly written up in the local Dungog Chronicle, clearly being of interest to the community. She went to England, again, in 1935, planning to be away for two or three years. On 1 March, the Dungog Chronicle,reported on a farewell for this “gifted novelist”, and named Flora Eldershaw – one half of the M. Barnard Eldershaw collaboration – as a co-guest at the event. This suggests Doyle was known to the literati of her time. Doyle died in England in 1943, having never returned home again. A small obituary appeared in various local newspapers, including The Gloucester Advocate (see under Sources). The obituary noted her three published works, but also commented on her writing overall, commenting in particular that

a keen observer of nature, she had the gift of translating her thoughts on paper in an easy readable way.

The piece I posted for the Australian Women Writers Challenge is titled “The flame” (linked below). It is an intriguing story about a disgruntled wife, and invites – particularly from modern eyes – a variety of readings. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Sources

  • Miss Ruby Doyle, The Gloucester Advocate, 12 January 1943 [Accessed: 14 January 2025]
  • Ruby Doyle, “The flame“, Sydney Mail, 24 July 1935 [Accessed: 3 February 2025]
  • Ruby M. Doyle, AustLit [Accessed: 3 Feb 2025]
  • Maureen Kingston, “Was Ruby Doyle our first local travel writer?”, Dungog Chronicle, 25 August 2021 [Accessed via the NLA eResources service: 3 February 1924]