Women writers

Diana Blackwood, Chaconne (#BookReview)

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Diana Blackwood, ChaconneDoes a book set in the early 1980s qualify as historical fiction? Does a book about a twenty-something woman’s romantic adventures, and search for direction, qualify as coming-of-age? The answer is probably yes to both. Certainly, it is within these parameters that it’s appropriate to discuss Diana Blackwood’s debut novel Chaconne.

Chaconne, as you can see, has a gorgeous cover. Rather than an image of a pretty young woman, promoting the idea of a “woman’s book”, it features a harpsichord – with an image of a Pershing (or similar) missile inside its open lid – sitting in a golden-lit rural landscape. This clues us into some important aspects of this novel, which are that music and war are involved. Of course, the title, Chaconne, also suggests a music theme. A chaconne, says Wikipedia, is “a type of musical composition popular in the baroque era when it was much used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line (ground bass) which offered a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and melodic invention”. By this description, the “chaconne” works as a metaphor for Eleanor who is “sort of” progressing in her life, though with a deal of repetition, particularly in her way of choosing the wrong men and of  bumbling along, without goal, from job to job. And within this main storyline are several interesting people and events which intervene along the way to add variety and decoration to the whole!

The novel starts with 24-year-old Eleanor arriving in Paris in 1981 to meet her lover, the bourgeois communist Julien whom she’d met a couple of years earlier in Sydney while he was an exchange student in Australia. Eleanor, who has “a fuzzy sense of being shut out of her proper story as if she had failed youth, been found wanting by life itself”, seems to have little direction in her life, though we know from flashbacks that she’s interested in music. One of her complaints against her mother, Mavis, and there are many, is that she’d stopped Eleanor’s piano lessons, replacing them with something she deemed more important for Eleanor’s education, maths tutoring! Escaping to Paris, though, is a bit of out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire, because Julien proves to be rather less than she thought. She finds herself spending much time alone in a tiny flat, relieved somewhat by her English teaching job at a lycée. Fortunately, her loneliness is assuaged a little by some lovely people, such as Rosa and the kind Monsieur Joubert who recognises her interest in music and starts, in a small way, her musical education.

As her relationship with Julien flounders, she meets Lawrence, an American who is flat-sitting for her next-door neighbour. It’s not long before she follows him to Germany, where he, a PhD student in deconstructive theory, is an English tutor on an American airforce base near a German village. The novel is set during the Cold War, when fear of nuclear destruction was high. Here Eleanor also obtains work teaching English. But, Lawrence – as we readers could have told her, just as we could have with Julien – doesn’t turn out to be the man she hoped.

Providing a background to Eleanor’s lacklustre romantic life is the unsettled political situation. Julien is engaged in communist politics, taking part in peace marches and the like, while Lawrence works on a military base where Eleanor keeps her Parisian life quiet and tries not to get too close to the base’s scary off-limit areas. Nonetheless she lives with “the unpalatable truth … that the nuclear umbrella was sheltering her by paying her rent.”

Not only does Lawrence draw her to this uncomfortable environment, but he is also not interested in music. What was she thinking in following him? Luckily, Eleanor finds a choir in the village, and her life gradually starts to change as she finally finds the thing that enlivens her.

And this is perhaps where the novel was a little problematical for me. While Eleanor’s journey to self-discovery was interesting, I never quite “felt” her sadness or her joy. I liked her, but I didn’t fully engage with her. This may be because she makes too many bad decisions that didn’t quite ring true for the intelligent young woman she clearly is. The coming-of-age felt a little late (particularly for the 1980s, which was before our 30-is-the-new-20 age?) But, this could just be sensible me speaking! Still, I would love to have seen more of her gutsy-but-also-life-challenged friend Ruth.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot to like about this book. I particularly enjoyed Blackwood’s obvious love of the English language. Eleanor and her Australian friend Ruth – not to mention her aforementioned mother – are grammar nazis (though that’s an unfortunate phrase given the post-war setting of this novel, a time when Germany was particularly uncertain about its past). The book delights in wordplay (including puns), alongside more serious discussions of grammar. Lawrence pegs Eleanor as “a proponent of prescriptive grammar” while she expects that “traditional grammar was another thing he would like to see tossed on the scrapheap”. The discussions Eleanor has about language are those we have here among the extended Gums’ family. We discuss language with each other, yell at the TV, argue about prescription versus description, ponder how and why language does or should or shouldn’t change. There are no answers but it’s fun exploring the issue.

Blackwood’s writing is also beautifully evocative, such as this description of Monsieur Joubert – “loneliness was close about him like a Parisian winter”. And this of the beginning of spring:

In the last few days spring has retreated. The quickening of the senses, the opening up to life and fate, had been dampened by chilling rain and the need to wear a jumper again.

This is exactly why I’m not a big fan of spring! It taunts with moments of warmth before plunging us all into cold again! Time and again Blackwood captured moments perfectly.

Chaconne, then, is an intelligent, well-written, well-structured book set in interesting times and places. I did like the cheeky metafictional reference to The catcher in the rye’s Holden Caulfield. Eleanor suggests that he needed “a firm but loving grandmother”. However, she also recognises that,

of course, the whole point of being a fictional character was to suffer misadventures and setbacks and humiliations without being bailed out by your grandmother, at least not until you’re sufficiently chastened.

Very true – and in the end our fictional character is – but no, I’ll not give it away.

Chaconne is book that should appeal to those who love Western Europe and baroque music, who remember the 1980s, and who like their romantic novels to be thoughtful and not neatly wrapped up. By the end, Eleanor has grown, but, as in life, we know she has yet more growing to do – and that’s the sort of ending I like.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) loved this novel and includes two YouTube links to music referenced in the novel.

AWW Badge 2018Diana Blackwood
Chaconne
Melbourne: Hybrid Publishers, 2017
296pp.
ISBN: 9781925272611

(Review copy courtesy Hybrid Publishers)

Jane Austen, The Watsons (Unfinished) Redux

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Book covers for Jane Austen's The Watsons

Book covers for Jane Austen’s The Watsons

Jane Austen fans, as you probably know, do a lot of re-reading. Given we only have six complete novels, plus her juvenilia and a couple of unfinished novels, we have little choice. Fortunately, it’s not a chore! And so, having completed rereading all her novels over the last few years for their respective 200th anniversaries, my local Jane Austen group decided to return to her two unfinished novels, starting this month with The Watsons. This was the third time we’ve done it in our relatively short existence. We did it in 2008 and again in 2011 (at which time I wrote my own reflections for this blog).

I do not plan here to write a “proper” review, so if you are interested in my thoughts, please check the link above. However, there are a couple of additional comments I’d like to make, starting with the question I posed in my 2011 post. The question relates to its unfinished nature. There are in fact two main questions regarding this: why did she stop writing it and why didn’t she pick it up again? And here I’ll quickly recap the novel’s background for those who don’t know it. The Watsons was written in Bath probably around 1803-1805, though there isn’t complete consensus about this. It’s commonly believed that she abandoned it after her father’s death in 1805 because of sadness and the resultant uncertainty in her living conditions. Whether this is true or not, it is true that she didn’t take up serious writing again until she settled in Chawton in 1809.

Now, it was at Chawton that she took up two earlier works, which became her first two published books, Sense and sensibility and Pride and prejudice. Why did she not then take up The Watsons and rework/finish it too? This is the more interesting question, I think, than why she stopped it in the first place. There are some theories around, though I haven’t investigated them thoroughly. However, her nephew James Austen-Leigh, who wrote the first “memoir” we have about her life, conjectures that Austen had become aware of “the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in such a position of poverty and obscurity” but I’m not sure I buy it.

My group discussed this idea, and we all felt that Austen had other “poor” heroines, of whom Fanny Price is the obvious example. But, the Dashwood girls were not well-to-do either. It’s true that Austen’s plan for The Watsons, as Cassandra reported, was for things to get worse for our heroine, but still …

No, my idea is different. The Watsons is broadly about four sisters and their marriage prospects – as is Pride and prejudice and Sense and sensibility. When we look at The Watsons, which Austen started after drafting those two books, we can see characters and storylines which remind us of these first two books. And so, I wonder whether, having published P&P and S&S, Austen felt she didn’t have enough new ideas to add to this storyline and wanted to try something different. Certainly, the next book, Mansfield Park, was something different. The marriage plot is still there, but it’s about a poor relation who is taken in by her wealthier ones. The interesting thing is that The Watsons commences with the return of 19-year-old Emma Watson to her family having spent 14 years with a wealthy uncle and aunt. Perhaps Austen decided to explore the story of the poor relation from a different angle, from the time of arrival at the new home?

Another thing about The Watsons is that as well as having characters who remind us of those first two novels, it also has characters reminiscent of some in later books, particularly in Emma. This suggests that while she didn’t finish The Watsons, her work on it wasn’t wasted – and she knew it.

We’ll never know of course. There’s so much we don’t know about our Jane, but it is fun trying to fill in the gaps.

A couple of apposite quotes

There’s more I could explore about this tiny fragment of around 17,500 words, but I’ll save those for the next re-read! Instead, I’ll conclude with two excerpts which grabbed my attention this time.

Gender and money

The first is a conversation between the heroine Emma and the wealthy aristocrat, Lord Osborne, who is interested in her, though his regard is not returned. In this conversation, he suggests that all women should ride horses:

‘I wonder every lady does not. – A woman never looks better than on horseback. –’
‘But every woman may not have the inclination, or the means.’
‘If they knew how much it became them, they would all have the inclination, and I fancy Miss Watson – when once they had the inclination, the means would soon follow.’
‘Your lordship thinks we always have our own way. – That is a point on which ladies and gentlemen have long disagreed. – But without pretending to decide it, I may say that there are some circumstances which even women cannot control. – Female economy will do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.’

Here we see Emma’s mettle. She stands up to Lord Osborne – to his assumptions about women and to his obliviousness that not all people have the means he has.

On reading to escape

And finally, The Watsons contains another of those wonderful quotes by Austen about books and reading. Here, right near the end of the fragment, Emma is thinking about the downturn in her fortunes through the death of her uncle:

The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling, nor likely to lessen; and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind, the dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce, made her thankfully turn to a book.

So, even in 1805, reading was seen as a way to occupy the mind and so escape, for a while, the troubles of life.

Jane Austen
“The Watsons”
in The Oxford illustrated Jane Austen. Vol VI, The minor works (ed. R.W. Chapman)
London: Oxford University Press, 1969
pp. 315-363

Lynette Washington, Plane Tree Drive (#BookReview)

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Lynette Washington, Plane Tree DriveLynette Washington’s debut collection of short stories, Plane Tree Drive, reminded me a little of Rebekah Clarkson’s Barking dogs (my review). Both are collections of stories revolving around a location, and in both the location is in the Adelaide region. There are differences though. Clarkson’s book is a little grittier with an overall theme of community undergoing social change, while Washington’s book is the portrait of a suburban street. There is change, of course, but the change is more broadly human – breakups, ageing and retirement, generation gaps, friendship and dementia, illness and death – although contemporary issues are also touched on.

Like Clarkson’s book too, Washington’s has some continuing storylines – such as Jennifer who is unhappily married to Dan while pining for her first love, Alexander – that are interspersed with the stories of other people. I liked this. Not only do these ongoing storylines provide a lovely sense of cohesion for the whole, but they also reflect a typical neighbourhood street. By this I mean that in any of our neighbourhoods there are people we know well, those we know a little, and others whom we only know passingly. And so, in Plane Tree Drive, there’s Jennifer who appears regularly; there are others like Maurice, Alice, Amily and Faraj who appear more than once, sometimes as a reference in another person’s story; and there are those who only appear in their own story.

To make all this work, Washington pays careful attention to structure. The overall order is chronological, driven primarily by Jennifer’s story, but the collection starts and ends with the other main continuing story, that of musician Maurice. His final section cleverly but light-handedly brings several of the characters together, but I won’t tell you how! The book is divided into sections – I think that’s the best way to describe it – which are named for the characters they cover, but some sections comprise small chapters. For example, a section titled Faraj, Coralie and Ruby, which focuses on Afghani asylum-seeker Faraj, has two short chapters, “Housing Needs Assessment” and “The Bay”. And this brings me to form …

Many of the stories are short, in fact very short, and most are told first person, but there’s some interesting variety, some experimenting with form, too. There’s a dialogue between Maurice and his wife Jacqui (“He said/She said”), some diary entries by the teenaged Poppy (“Dear diary”), several government employee reports on Faraj’s application for housing (“Housing Needs Assessment”), some social media commentary (in the cheeky “Scarlett’s shed”), and even a flow-chart from IT expert Sarah (“Oma’s fruit cake”). This playing with form – which brings with it changes in tone – break up what could, in other hands, become a tedious and melancholic parade of first person voices.

Oh dear, I’ve spent a lot of time describing the book and how it works but not much on whether I enjoyed it – so I’ll do that now. Of course I enjoyed it! How could any reader who is interested in the lives of people not enjoy a book which pokes into the nooks and crannies of all our lives? There are stories with a political bent, albeit told from personal not political perspectives. These include the aforementioned Faraj and his search for a home, a couple (Stella and Graham) who travel overseas to access euthanasia legally, and a woman (Coralie) watching the demolition of a loved theatre. I like that Washington doesn’t proselytise, but simply shows how people are affected by and react to these situations. There are lighter stories, such as Marg who talks to animals, particularly her neighbour’s badly behaved cat (“That cat”).

And there are, dare I use that cliché, “poignant” stories, such as, to give an example, Martha and Charles (“Gaps between boxes” and “So much sand and so much water”). They are a retired couple who have been together since childhood but who, at this point in their lives, suddenly find themselves at odds. She wants to adventure – to “seek out the gaps between the boxes” they’ve been ticking all their lives – but he just wants peace. He thinks “the boxes made a darn good life”. This story is gently and warmly told. No fireworks, just hope and acceptance on both sides.

There’s exploration in the writing – in form in particular – as I’ve already said, but the stories are accessible. This is the sort of short story collection that should have wide appeal. The use of recurring characters makes it appealing to those who prefer novels, while the playing with the short story form and structure provides interest for the short story lover.

Washington, who has appeared here before as editor of Breaking beauty (my review), precedes her book with an epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby. The quote concludes with “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” I wouldn’t say I was repelled, albeit some characters are more appealing than others, but Plane Tree Drive does contain a wide variety of life which makes it an engaging and yes, enchanting even, read. Like many books from smaller publishers, it deserves a wider audience than it will probably get.

AWW Badge 2018Lynette Washington
Plane Tree Drive
Rundle Mall, MidnightSun Publishing, 2017
245pp.
ISBN: 9781925227345

(Review copy courtesy MidnightSun Publishing)

Monday musings on Australian literature: AusLit Women Academics on Colonial Women Writers

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Over January, some of us Australian litbloggers – as the result of Bill’s (The Australian Legend) AWW Gen 1 Week – have been talking about early Australian women writers. It’s a topic of great interest to me, ever since the 1980s when I became interested in these writers. There seemed to be a flurry, at that time, of academics and researchers writing in this area – and this work has continued. For my benefit – and hopefully for others – I thought I’d document some of those who pioneered this research (in my time anyhow.)

Debra Adelaide

Adelaide (1958-) is probably best known now as a novelist, and I’ve reviewed her most recent novel, The women’s pages, here.  But I first knew of her as a researcher and writer about our older Aussie women writers. I bought both of her books on this topic back when they came out. One is A bright and fiery troop: Australian women writers of the nineteenth century (1988), which is a collection of essays she edited, covering writers like Louisa Atkinson, Catherine Helen Spence, Ada Cambridge and Tasma. (Adelaide acknowledges two woman in my list below, Dale Spender and Elizabeth Webby.) The other, which was published the same year, is Australian women writers: a bibliographic guide (1988). It is a comprehensive list (to the best of her research by the late 1980s) of all Aussie women writers. It includes a brief description of and a list of works by each writer. A wonderful resource.

Patricia Clarke

Clarke (1926-) is a historian focusing on women in nineteenth century Australia, including writers of all forms/genres. her books include Pen portraits: women writers and journalists in nineteenth century Australia (1988), The governesses: Letters from the colonies, 1862-1882 (1989), Pioneer writer: the life of Louisa Atkinson, novelist, journalist, naturalist (1990), Tasma: The life of Jessie Couvreur (1994), and Rosa! Rosa!: a life of Rosa Praed, novelist and spiritualist (1999). With Dale Spender (see below), she also published Life lines: Australian women’s letters and diaries 1788-1840 (1992). I love that these books look at writing beyond fiction – as important as that is – to letters, diaries, and journalism.

Joy Hooton

Hooton (1935-), an academic, is perhaps a bit of a ring-in to this group. She co-authored both The Oxford companion to Australian literature (1986) and the Annals of Australia literature (both of which I have). She is also an authority on autobiographic writing, and has published an anthology of autobiographical writing from the convict era to the present day, Australian lives: an Oxford anthology (1998). Most of the early writers, here, though, are male. However, I’ve included her because her works, particularly the Oxford companion and the Annals, are useful sources for researchers. And because just to be a woman academic, particularly one born pre-WW2, would not have been easy.

Elizabeth Morrison

Morrison (1936-) is another historian of colonial times, but her speciality is the role of the Australian newspaper press as publisher of serial fiction, particularly in the colonial era. She edited two of Ada Cambridge ‘newspaper novels’,  A Woman’s Friendship and A Black Sheep, which were published by UNSW Press, but she has also written many academic articles and given lectures on the subject. I have her edition of A woman’s friendship (republished 1995, orig, 1889), which was published in the Colonial Texts Series series, by UNSW Press (through, surprisingly, the Australian Defence Force Academy where Morrison was based).

Dale Spender

Spender (1943-) is an academic and feminist who has spread her wings wider than “just” Australian women, but her Australian credentials include being founding editor of Pandora Press (which published several of the older Aussie women authors I read in the 1980s, including Rosa Praed’s The bond of wedlock) and a commissioning editor of the Penguin Australian Women’s Library (whose books I also read, including Ada Cambridge’s Sisters). She also wrote Writing a new world: Two centuries of Australian women writers (1988). (Thanks Bill, for the reminder!)

Spender’s wider interests include early British women writers, and in this area her books include Mothers of the novel: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen (1986). You can see why I’m interested in her! I have this book on my Kindle!

You might like to check out her website. I do like her definition of “himitator”.

Elizabeth Webby

You may remember Webby (1942-), because my last two Monday Musings drew from a lecture of hers – but I didn’t say much about her except that she’s a retired academic. She was Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney for nearly 20 years, and has been editor of the literary journal Southerly. She researched both colonial and modern Australian (women’s and men’s) literature, and perhaps her main legacy, publication-wise, is as editor of the Cambridge companion to English literature (2000), which I have. She has written numerous articles and given lectures on colonial literature, including an article on colonial women poets in Adelaide’s A bright and fiery troop. She has also published a bibliography about our early Australian poets, Early Australian poetry: an annotated bibliography of original poems published in Australian newspapers, magazines and almanacs before 1850. Bibliographies make for pretty dry reading, but how important they are!

I thank these, and all the other academics, who thought researching Aussie women writers was an important thing to do. I’m sure it wasn’t always easy.

I’ve only selected a few, of course – those that have been particularly relevant and useful to me – but if you have some favourites in this sphere that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear about them.

Tasma (Jessie Couvreur), Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill (#BookReview)

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Tasma, Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill

The first thing to say about Tasma’s debut novel Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill is that it’s rather wordy, speaking to a literacy different from that of today’s readers. For this reason, Uncle Piper won’t appeal to readers who like short simple sentences, and a plot which moves along at a good clip with little reflection or commentary. Consider yourself warned, but know also that, according contemporary reports, this novel made Tasma famous in a week.

So, if you enjoy immersing yourself in the writing of different times, and are interested in late 19th century Australia, Uncle Piper has plenty to offer, starting with well-drawn characters who, in modern clothes, would be as real today as they were in 1888.

Take father, the Uncle Piper of the title, and his son George, for example. Uncle Piper is a self-made man. In his case this involved emigrating from England, where he was poor and with few prospects, to Melbourne, where, starting as a lowly butcher, he worked hard to establish himself as the wealthy, successful businessman he is at the novel’s opening. Now, what often happens when parents struggle to establish themselves and create for their children opportunities that they never had? Why, those children take their easy, comfortable lives for granted. That’s what! Not a new story, is it?

And so, about a third of the way through the novel, we have a wonderful scene between father and son over a girl of whom the father doesn’t approve. Feeding this scene is a two-decade history of growing frustration on Uncle Piper’s part and a learned, practised nonchalance on George’s. The scene is delicious and requires no suspension of disbelief to understand. Here’s a short excerpt of a confrontation in Uncle Piper’s beloved tower at Piper’s Hill:

So he [George] courted a personal attack … and sat caressing his moustache, as was his wont, with his eyes bent on the floor, while his father exposed his grievances in a crescendo key.

If there was anything humiliating in being rated as an “able-bodied young man who wasn’t worth his salt,” as a loafer who was hardly fit to “jackaroo” on a station, as a “lazy lubber” who would “go to the dogs if it weren’t for his father,” George never betrayed that he felt humiliated by so much as the twitching of an eyelid. Persistently stroking the ends of his moustache with an air of profound abstraction, he made it apparent, as soon as Mr. Piper stopped to take breath, that he was suppressing an inclination to yawn.

Can’t you just see it – the increasingly apoplectic father and his determinedly calmly indifferent son!

In basic plot, Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill is a romance, a marriage story, set against the social backdrop of a meeting between these well-to-do parvenu Pipers, and the impoverished but upper crust Cavendishes. The lowly-born Mrs Cavendish is Uncle Piper’s sister. At the beginning of the novel, the Cavendishes are on a boat being brought out to Australia by Uncle Piper who has, in effect, been supporting them for years and who would now like them with him. He’s offered to find the reluctant Mr Cavendish a job “in the government”. The Cavendishes include two daughters, the kind, unassuming Margaret and her younger sister, the beautiful and imperious Sara. Sara follows her father’s mould of snobbish self-regard trumping any sense of human feeling or empathy, while Margaret is in her mother’s caring and hardworking mould.

Coming out on the same boat is the thirty-something Rev. Lydiat who, unbeknownst to them all, is also connected to the Pipers – this is a nineteenth century novel after all. His now-deceased mother had been Uncle Piper’s second wife. So, the afore-mentioned George is his step-brother, and Uncle Piper’s still-a-child daughter Louey, whom he’d had with the Rev’s mother, is of course his half-sister. But wait, there’s more. Also in Uncle Piper’s household is Laura, the Rev. Lydiat’s sister, whom Uncle Piper had promised his wife, on her deathbed, to care and provide for.

… a house divided against itself …

And now the plot gets complicated – though it’s easy to follow in the book. Rev. Lydiat falls (purely, of course) in love with Sara, while on the boat. And George and Laura, unrelated by blood, are in love. But, Uncle Piper wants George to marry his as-yet-unseen-to-any-of-them cousin Sara. And just to round all this off, Margaret is quietly, humbly, in love with Rev. Lydiat. Lest you give up at this point and think this all sounds a bit silly, let me say that despite its fairly traditional plot of love-triangles and interfering parents, the book has a lot more to offer.

So, where to go from here? There are many angles from which this book could be discussed. Issues like religion, money and class (as I’ve already mentioned), colonial life and the Australian landscape, and even the book’s relevance to Tasma’s biography, are all well worth exploring. I could also have fun teasing out comparisons between this book and Jane Austen’s Persuasion (my review). It’s not hard to see Sir Walter Elliot and his daughter Elizabeth in Mr Cavendish and Sara, or to see Anne Elliot in the capable Margaret. I could also talk about the style, and the influence on the style and tone of its being originally serialised in a newspaper.

However, given my previous reading of Aussie women writers at the time – of Ada Cambridge’s A woman’s friendship and Sisters, and Rosa Praed’s The bond of wedlock – I’d like to mention Tasma’s social commentary, particularly regarding women. Part of the commentary relates to the opportunities offered by Australian life. Uncle Piper’s generosity and capacity for hard work is offset against the snobbery of Mr Cavendish who is happy to take his brother-in-law’s money while continuing to hold himself “above” his host. He is snobbish, selfish and shallow, and by the end of the novel, has learnt nothing. Uncle Piper, on the other hand, along with his son George, learns some lessons and, by the end both have recognised and corrected some of their less tolerant behaviours.

For Uncle Piper much of this change relates to his step-daughter Laura Lydiat. For all his generosity, Uncle Piper has his faults. He can be autocratic, for a start. This does not sit well with the opinionated Laura. She has rejected religion, can be sarcastic, and has an “uncompromising disregard of feelings with which she does not agree”, albeit being very happy to eat at Uncle Piper’s table and wear the clothes he provides! She also does not approve of marriage:

though I abominate the system of marriage, though I think the yoking of two people together without a chance of release–as if the yoke mightn’t gall them any day–perfectly barbarous and absurd–still, in view of our ‘exceptional case’–there, don’t be demonstrative till you’ve heard me to the end–in view, as I said, of our ‘exceptional case,’ I’d have gone off with you to the registrar’s any morning–no, nothing would induce me to go to church–and have signed myself Laura Piper, instead of Laura Lydiat!

MISS THIS IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHO MARRIES WHOM …

At the end of the novel, when the also-changed Laura does indeed marry, Tasma compares gentle, dutiful Margaret’s response to the marriage service with Laura’s:

She [Margaret] had followed the service in its most literal sense with all the earnestness of her nature, and would have had no sympathy with the half-perceptible gleam that might have been detected in Laura’s eyes at being called upon to obey George.

START READING HERE AGAIN …

The novel is not, as you can tell from this gentle hint, overtly didactic. There is some running authorial commentary, but the ideas and themes are well conveyed through the story and the characters, who are, for the most part, realistic though there are some saints and sinners among them.

Uncle Piper owes much to the Victorian novel tradition, but one adapted to an Australian setting. The plot overlays a New World made-good story over the more traditional romance narrative. The result is a novel which explores some new ideas about life within a familiar format, which makes it particularly special, I think, for Antipodean readers. Tasma should be read more.

Posted as a contribution to Bill (the Australian Legend)’s Australian Women Writers Gen 1 Week. See also my Monday Musings post this week on Tasma.

AWW Badge 2018

Tasma (Jessie Couvreur)
Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill: An Australian novel
Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook, 2006
(Originally serialised in The Australasian, 1888; published as a volume, 1889)
Available online at Project Gutenberg of Australia

On Reading Pleasures, and not being alone

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Reading pleasuresFor my birthday last year, a friend who knows me well gave me a delightful little book titled Reading pleasures. I hadn’t planned to blog about it but, upon looking at it again this week, I changed my mind – mainly to share one idea that recurs in the book. First, though, some background. The book was published by the National Library of Australia in 2016, and is just one of many gorgeous books the Library publishes each year. It comprises quotes, mostly from writers, about reading, and each one is accompanied by a delightful image – photographs, paintings, drawings, cartoons – from the Library’s collection. The majority of quotes come from Australians, but there are other sources, including Haruki Mirakami and the Bible!

The book opens with a Forward written by Jennifer Byrne, an Australian journalist and, over the last decade, the host of ABC Television’s Book Club program. She writes that the book represents “a celebration – and examination – of the lifelong, earthly, impossible-to-explain love affair between readers and their books.” What she found, she says, when reading all the quotations, was how many different ways readers view reading. Some see at as private, a refuge, an escape, while others see it as the opposite, as providing company, as reassuring us that we are not alone. There are other views too, of course, such as those that apply social, moral and/or intellectual values to reading, but it is this issue of aloneness – or non-aloneness – that I want to share, because it’s a significant feature of my reading.

At least three of the quotes refer to this idea. Richard Flanagan describes his protagonist in The narrow road to the deep north (my review) visiting a bookshop. Dorrigo Evans “vaguely” browses the shelves looking for Virgil’s Aeneid, but, writes Flanagan,

It wasn’t really the great poem of antiquity that Dorrigo Evans wanted though, but the aura he felt around such books – an aura that both radiated outwards and took him inwards to another world that said to him that he was not alone.

Another quote comes from bibliotherapy advocate Susan McLaine who says:

Great writers tackle the mysteries of human personality and dark existential concerns. Reading them, we feel less alone.

And then Elliot Perlman (whose novel The street sweeper I’ve reviewed) writes:

A great writer can attach themselves to your mind and your heart, and you feel you understand the world better. As long as you have the capacity to read, you needn’t be alone anymore.

Jennifer Byrne says that she would once have “sided with the solo/escape faction”, that she had always seen reading as “a refuge”, but, through her ten years with her book program, she had discovered that reading can be a more “sociable” activity. As a book group member for thirty years myself, I enjoy this social aspect of reading – as well as the escape aspect – though for many of us, I’d say, it starts way before joining book clubs. It starts when books are read to us, and when we swap, lend and/or talk about books with our friends and family. This sociability aspect is conveyed through some of the illustrations in the book. Most, naturally, depict solo readers, but there are others that are more community-focused, such as four boys reading during a school health week (1930), a father reading with his daughter (1932), eight girls reading in an orphanage dormitory in New South Wales (1935), and, on the next page, a 1934 photo by Harold Cazneaux of some school girls at the exclusive Frensham School, reading, writing and drawing.

However, I see the relationship between reading and not being alone as accommodating more than this particular “sociability” aspect – and I think this other meaning is conveyed in the quotes I’ve shared. This meaning is about our deeper selves, about our discovering that our innermost thoughts and fears, loves and hates – including those we feel less proud of or just less certain of – are not ours alone. Through reading, we discover people who think, feel, suffer, act as we do. When we rail at, laugh at, grimace at, shout at and/or empathise with them, we are recognising them in ourselves and we feel – at least, I feel – less alone. I may or may not feel better about myself, but I feel more connected as a human, I feel that I am human. I might also, hopefully, take the opportunity to examine, privately, my feelings, ideas, actions and think about whether I might modify them (those I don’t like anyhow) in the future!

In other words, whether or not it brings me up with a start, shocking me with recognition, and whether it then reassures me that I’m okay or makes me want to better myself, it is this sense of not being alone which makes reading such a valuable, meaningful exercise for me.

What about you? Why do you read? Does the idea of  “not being alone” play any part in your reading pleasures?

Reading pleasures
(with a Foreword by Jennifer Byrne)
Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2016
128pp.
ISBN: 9780642278968

Monday musings on Australian literature: Tasma (aka Jessie Couvreur)

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Tasma, c. 1890. (Public Domain, from the State Library of Victoria, via Wikipedia)

This week Bill (of The Australian Legend) is running an Australian Women Writers Gen 1 Week, through which he plans to highlight Australian women writers from our first generation of writers, which he defines as “those writers who came before the 1890s and the Sydney Bulletin ‘Bush Realism’ school, although many of them continued writing into the first part of the 20th century.” These women, several of whom I read before blogging, include Louisa Atkinson, Ada Cambridge, Rosa Praed, Catherine Helen Spence, and Tasma. I have written about some of these writers before, particularly Louisa Atkinson and Ada Cambridge, so today I’ve decided to highlight Bill’s week by writing on another, Tasma, whose book Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill I’ve promised to contribute to his project.

Who was Tasma?

Born Jessie Huybers in London in 1848, Tasma (as she later styled herself) came to Hobart, Australia, with her parents in 1852. Her family was apparently among the more prominent in Hobart, with their friends including successful author Louisa Meredith (1812-1895) and her husband Charles. In 1867 Tasma married the 25-year-old Charles Fraser moving to Melbourne with him. However, the marriage was troubled and Tasma returned to Hobart in 1872, leaving her debt-ridden husband behind. The following year she sailed to England with her mother and youngest siblings, and spent the next couple of years soaking up European culture with her family. Returning to Melbourne and her husband in 1875, she discovered that he’d had a child with a servant. With divorce, particularly initiated by women, rare, they remained married but lived mostly separate lives.

She started writing in 1877, taking the pseudonym Tasma to honour the colony of her youth, and in 1878 her first articles were published. In 1879 she returned to Europe with her mother and some siblings, determined to earn her living as a writer. This also marked the final break with Charles, and they were divorced in 1883.

And here I’ll quote biographer Patricia Clarke (see below):

Tasma’s life deserves to be much better known, and not only because of her now almost forgotten fame as a novelist. Just as interesting and more gender-defying, she was also an acclaimed public lecturer in Europe, and a foreign correspondent for the London Times, both roles that contradicted the perception of women as solely home­bound. In her personal life also, Tasma defied all the stereotypes of the nineteenth-century woman by separating from, and divorcing, her first husband.

DPAC’s article (see below) describes her as “a celebrity lecturer” on the “geography, history, industries, culture and social progress of Australia” and says that her lectures were reported in French, Belgian and other newspapers. She met the eminent and more compatible, albeit significantly older, Auguste Couvreur in 1881, and married him in 1885, but before that, writes Clarke:

For six years before her second marriage, Tasma lived the life of a ‘New Woman’, the independent woman then beginning to appear both in real life and in fiction. From her base in Paris she earned her own living and was involved in the radical issues of the day. An interviewer wrote, ‘She was not a woman to hide the light of her militant radicalism under a bushel. When pressed to talk about her method of writing, she spoke instead of the latest developments in collectivism, and made an impassioned plea for the poor’.

Sadly, Jessie Couvreur died in 1897 of coronary heart disease, just before her 49th birthday. Way too young for someone who clearly gave a lot to her times.

What did she write?

Tasma, Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill

During her life, Tasma wrote, according to the DPAC article, 7 novels, 20 short stories (several set in Tasmania) and over 36 articles on a variety of subjects. Uncle Piper of Piper’s Hill, her first novel, was published in 1889, and her last, A fiery ordeal, was published, posthumously, in 1897, the year she died.

In her chapter in Debra Adelaide’s A bright and fiery troop, Margaret Harris quotes 20th century poet and novelist Winifred Birkett’s claiming Tasma as Australian

… in spite of her Dutch-French parentage, English birth, Belgian marriage, and long continental residence and professional career! She has been called by people who cannot get away from systems of category and comparison, “the Australian Jane Austen” and “the Australian George Eliot”, but without bringing her under the patent of any other writer’s name we may remember her simply as the “Tasma” of her own titling, and Australian enough by such an implication.

Interesting! Of course, I did my own bit of research in Trove and found some similar references from her 19th century contemporaries. One article in Tasmanian News (11 August 1892) reported on an interview conducted for a “Celebrity at Home” column in The World journal, writing that “Her interviewer credits her with much of the spirit of Thackeray and George Eliot, which, in combination with marked originality, is the secret of her success.” And an article from the year before in Tasmania’s Mercury (21 January 1891) writes that

The favourite Christmas book of 1888 [Uncle Piper] went through three editions before January, 1890. The success of her last two works has been equally marked, and Mr. Edmund Yates, the most competent of judges, regards her as a story writer of extraordinary power. “Uncle Piper” may very likely live as long as “Charles O’Malley,” and it is not impossible that one of “Tasma’s” literary efforts in the Chaussée de Vleugrat [sic] may yet attain the immortality of “Villette.”

Tasma, The penance of Portia James

Strong praise, eh! I’ve only read 20% (on my Kindle) of Uncle Piper to date, and, while the style owes more to late Victorian than to Jane Austen’s Regency/Georgian era, I can see the comparison in some of the cheekiness I’m reading. To see Eliot, Thackeray and/or Bronte, I think I’ll need to read more!

I won’t say more about her writing, except to share a comment made by Clarke regarding her descent into obscurity:

The usual explanation for her obscurity is that, like other Australian women writers who wrote about love, marriage and domestic relationships and whose main characters were women, her reputation has been overtaken and submerged by the Bulletin school of almost exclusively male writers who emerged in the 1890s. These writers glorified the traditions of mateship and the bush to establish what came to be seen as the authentic picture of Australia. Perhaps Tasma’s later obscurity was influenced by the fact that she died at a relatively young age, that for the second half of her life she lived in Europe, and that she had no direct descendants to keep her memory alive. Other nineteenth-century Australian women writers, such as Ada Cambridge and Rosa Praed, lived much longer, the former in Australia and survived by children, but this has not saved them from a similar, if perhaps less marked, obscurity.

If you’d like to know more, check out the sources below and/or watch for my post later this week …

Sources

Beilby, Raymond. ‘Couvreur, Jessie Catherine (1848–1897)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1969.

Clarke, Patricia. ‘In the steps of Rosa Praed and Tasma: Biographical details: A lecture by Harold White Fellow, Patricia Clarke‘, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1993

‘Couvreur, Jessie Catherine (1848–1897)’, Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Also available in the original form at Trove, titled “The late ‘Tasma’ Courvreur”, The Mercury, 27 October 1897.

Harris, Margaret. ‘The writing of Tasma, the work of Jessie Couvreur’, in A bright and fiery troop (ed. by Debra Adelaide), Ringwood, Penguin Books, 1988.

‘Tasma (Jessie Couvreur nee Huybers)’, in Signifiant Tasmanian Women, Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPAC) (Tasmania). (Entry based on Patricia Clarke’s Tasma: The life of Jessie Couvreur, 1994)

Jenny Ackland, The secret son (#BookReview)

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Jenny Ackland, The secret sonMelbourne-based author Jenny Ackland has tried something rather audacious in her debut novel, The Secret Son. Instead of following the autobiographical route that many first novelists do, she has leapt right in and tackled, albeit from left field, one of Australia’s most controversial legends, Ned Kelly. But, here’s the rub: it’s not exactly about Ned Kelly. It’s far more complex than that.

The secret son spans more than a century, from the 1880s to 1990 and beyond. It is set in both Turkey and Australia, and it weaves two stories. One concerns the 19th-century-born James who ends up living in Turkey, having gone to fight at Gallipoli in 1915, and the other tells of Cem, a 23-year-old Turkish-Australian man who is related to the village where James had lived and who travels there in 1990, ostensibly to learn about his heritage and identity. These two men – James/Jim and Cem/”Jem” – work subtly as foils or parallels for each other. James is intelligent, gentle and hardworking, but somewhat passive. He imagines who his father might have been, what sort of man he was. Cem, on the other hand, is young, directionless, well-meaning but rather self-centred. Turkish taxi-driver, Ibrahim, pins his uncertainty immediately, telling him:

You must know who you are and what man you want to become.

What sort of man he wants to become is something Cem struggles with, making this, partly but by no means primarily, a coming-of-age novel.

This brings me to one of the delights in reading this book, which is Ackland’s depiction of life in the Turkish village she calls Hayat (Turkish, she says, for “heart”). It reminded me of some books I read years ago, such as Beverley Farmer’s stories set in a Greek village. Farmer had married a Greek man and lived for some time in Greece, which explained her convincing insight into village life and relationships. Ackland’s depictions were similarly convincing, so I wanted to know how she’d done it. I found the answer in an ABC Books and Arts interview with her. She too had travelled to Turkey, married a Turkish man, spent time there as a bride and young mother. With this knowledge and experience, and an ability to individuate characters, Ackland creates a world that engaged me.

But now you are probably wondering how Ned Kelly fits into all this. It has to do with a historian named Harry whom Cem meets on the plane. Harry has a theory that Ned Kelly had a secret son who fought at Gallipoli and ended up staying in Turkey. His quest is to prove this theory and, in one of those coincidences that all travellers know about, the village where he believes this son went to is the same one that Cem’s family was from. So the scene is set – but the story that unfolds has less to do with Ned Kelly than with families and secrets, paying debts, and growing up.

I started this post by saying that Ackland has been audacious in this, her debut novel, and I implied that it was because of the Ned Kelly plotline. However, her audaciousness extends beyond this. It’s in the novel’s complex structure, too, in the way she weaves the two men’s stories, to-ing and fro-ing in time. It’s in the recurring motifs like bees and honey, tea and sugar, and woven rugs, that she uses to help keep us grounded. And it’s particularly in the change of voice between the more traditional third person voice used for most of the story to first person for the perspective of Berna, who is the village’s wise woman-cum-fortune-teller. Berna also happens to be Cem’s grandmother and James’ daughter, which effectively connects the two story lines. (The family relationships in this book are, I must say, complicated, and require an attentive reader to keep track!)

Anyhow, Berna provides the main link in the novel’s second plot which is about the “debt” Cem discovers he is expected to pay for something his grandfather Ahmet had done long before he’d left the village for Australia. This plotline exposes dissension in the village, and through it Ackland explores ideas about love and loyalty, truth and lies, revenge and forgiveness, not to mention the application of wisdom versus tradition. As the novel progresses, more of the “truth” about what happened comes out, and the plot thickens as we wonder what will be asked of Cem and what he will do in response. Meanwhile, the Ned Kelly storyline weaves its own path between James, Harry, and the village with the help of a woman pilot called Linda. While complex, it’s sensitively done, with, in the end, enough resolution to be satisfying without being too neat and implausible.

There are many angles from which this book can be talked about, besides those I’ve mentioned. There’s a father-son theme, a cheeky metafictional theme about a book called The secret son, Cem’s family experience in Australia as a child of immigrants, and gender. There’s also the idea of debts due by later generations, which Berna argues is not valid, but which her brother Mehmet supports. It’s relevant, I think, that Berna has the last word in the novel.

Early on Berna tells us that “truth” is not the be-all, that sometimes “life is better with surprises in the recipe”. She’s a wise woman, and this, The secret son, is a wise book. It might be a debut novel, and it might push its readers to keep up at times, but the ideas it explores, and its tolerant, generous treatment of its flawed characters, are those of a humane writer.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) was impressed by the book too.

AWW Badge 2018Jenny Ackland
The secret son
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2015
327pp.
ISBN: 9781925266160

Carson McCullers, Home for Christmas (#Review)

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Carson McCullers, 1959

Carson McCullers, 1959 (photo by Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

As you will guess from the title of this Library of America (LOA) Story of the Week, I meant to post on it closer to Christmas Day than I have in fact achieved. I chose it for two reasons – firstly the obvious seasonal one, and secondly because my first Carson McCullers post was an unusual piece and perhaps not completely reflective of the writer she was. Her story “Home before Christmas”, while nothing like her best-known novels, does get us a bit closer to them.

First, though, some background. LOA’s notes tell us that the story, written in 1949, was the first of a few essays McCullers wrote for magazines like Mademoiselle and Redbook. McCullers’ biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, says, according to LOA, that “even as a preschooler Carson would be asked what she wanted and the answer was, ‘I want book—lots of books, Mama’.” I suspect many of you reading this will say the same about yourselves. I know I would!

LOA shares a couple of other stories about the adult Carson and gift-giving – including one that resulted in such a kerfuffle that someone was written out of a will, and another involving Truman Capote. However, they take us further away from the point of THIS story.

“Home for Christmas” was apparently commissioned by Mademoiselle for its 1949 Christmas issue, and was published alongside pieces by food writer MFK Fisher and novelist Jessamyn West (whom I plan to cover here one day via the Library of America). LOA chose to share McCullers’ piece this last Christmas because 2017 was the centenary of McCullers birth.

Now I said in my opening paragraph that this story, although nothing like her best-known novels, does connect us a little with them. Firstly, an autobiographical piece, it describes life in a southern family, but more significantly, like The member of the wedding, it is seen through a child’s eye. It is not like her novels in the sense that it is not Gothic, and nor does it deal in any major way with the loneliness or “outsiderness” that I remember from her oeuvre – though there is a touch of melancholy in it, all the same.

In some ways, it’s a traditional story about childhood yearning for Christmas. It begins in August with our young first person narrator, that is, Carson, pondering Christmas, and it concludes, just after Christmas, with her yearning for the next Christmas. In between, we hear about the buying of Christmas presents, the cooking of Christmas food, and how Christmas day itself was spent. But, there is also a little unifying theme running through this – the “mystery of Time”.

In the second paragraph, it is August and our narrator is up a tree thinking:

I did not want to talk with my brother. I was experiencing the first wonder about the mystery of Time. Here I was, on this August afternoon, in the tree-house, in the burnt, jaded yard, sick and tired of all our summer ways. (I had read Little Women for the second time, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, Little Men, and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. I had read movie magazines and even tried to read love stories in the Woman’s Home Companion—I was so sick of everything.) How could it be that I was I and now was now when in four months it would be Christmas, wintertime, cold weather, twilight and the glory of the Christmas tree? I puzzled about the now and later and rubbed the inside of my elbow until there was a little roll of dirt between my forefinger and thumb. Would the now I of the tree-house and the August afternoon be the same I of winter, firelight and the Christmas tree? I wondered.

You can see biographer Carr’s point about books can’t you? Anyhow, again, I suspect many of us have pondered Time in this way. McCullers doesn’t labour the point but it pops up a few more times in the article,  including the notion of time behaving differently for different people. “How”, she writes, “could it be that when she [her sister] opened her eyes it would be Christmas while I lay awake in the dark for hours and hours? The time was the same for both of us, and yet not at all the same.” There’s also a delightful little – almost throwaway – line about how her father would manipulate the clocks to enable them to get up early on Christmas morning but not too early for the parents.

“Home before Christmas” is not a particularly deep story/article, but then as an article for a Christmas edition of a magazine, it probably wasn’t meant to be. It is, however, an enjoyable read and, while presumably part of that bread-and-butter work that writers do to survive, it also provides some insight into a significant writer of, and from, America’s south.

Carson McCullers
“Home for Christmas”
First published: Mademoiselle, December 1949
Available: Online at the Library of America

Joy Eadie, Discovering Charles Meere: Art and allusion (#BookReview)

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Joy Eadie, Discovering Charles MeereThe award for my last review of the year goes to something a little left field for me, Joy Eadie’s Discovering Charles Meere: Art and allusion. I say left field because it is, essentially, a book of art criticism, and I don’t do much of that here (or anywhere, for that matter!) However, when Halstead Press offered me a copy for review a few months ago, I was intrigued, so accepted the book. And here is why I was intrigued …

In the email offering me the book, the publisher wrote:

Australian Beach Pattern is Meere’s most famous work and hangs in the Art Gallery of NSW. However, despite its popularity and recognition, it has been labelled by critics as an unimaginative work which glorifies an Aryan ideal of mid-twentieth Australia, and Meere’s name is hardly known.

And thus my interest was aroused, because earlier this year I had been to the Brave New World: Australia 1930s exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. One of the sections was titled “Body culture” and the commentary noted that “the evolution of a new Australian ‘type’ was also proposed in the 1930s – a white Australian drawn from British stock, but with an athletic and streamlined shape honed by time spent swimming and surfing on local beaches.” The notes referred to the problematic aspects of this idea in an era when eugenics was on the rise in Germany.

While the exhibition didn’t, in fact, include Charles Meere, it is in this context that his most famous work, “Australian Beach Pattern” (online image) dated 1940, has been seen and it is this interpretation that Joy Eadie refutes by offering her own reading of the painting. She does this by analysing the painting and comparing it with like works from his oeuvre to develop her ideas about his themes and world view.

Eadie’s thesis is, essentially, that within Meere’s coolly formal application of an Art Deco-cum-neoclassical style lie recurring features including “a certain dry wit, irony, the use of allusion and appropriation, oblique reference to the historical context and to being in a certain time and place, while recalling other times and places”. These features, she argues, are not easily apparent in one work, such as “Australian Beach Pattern”, but they become evident in the context of several works.

Robert Drewe, The bodysurfersHowever, before I discuss the book, I should explain for those who don’t know that “Australian Beach Pattern” is one of Australia’s iconic images. It was used on the program for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, on the cover of Robert Drewe’s The bodysurfers, and apparently features in curriculum materials about democracy in Australian schools. Merchandise featuring it is also amongst the most popular at the Art Gallery of News South Wales, where the painting has resided since 1965. But now, to the book …

It starts with a brief biography of the little-known British-born Meere (1890-1961), then moves on in Chapter 2 to analyse the poster (“1978 … 1938 150 Years of Progress”) he created for NSW’s 1938 Sesquicentenary celebrations. Referencing some of the tensions of the anniversary planning and using the careful eye for detail needed by an art critic, Eadie identifies features of the poster which depart from traditional poster style, and proposes that Meere’s aim was to subvert the “nationalistic hubris” of the anniversary story. Her analysis includes the suggestion that Meere alludes to Hieronymous Bosch’s “Ship of Fools” painting to comment on the practice of sending British outcasts to the other side of the world. She notes his inclusion of tall strong Aboriginal people on the shore, his placing of his own signature in proximity to these figures, and argues that his “choice of black to proclaim the joyous message of progress” was “deliberate and ironic”.

In this vein – analysing Meere’s painting style, use of colour, allusions to European paintings, historical context, and so on – Eadie discusses picture after picture, including of course “Australian Beach Pattern”, to build up her argument concerning Meere’s more subversive commentary on contemporary culture, and she is, overall, convincing. Her close reading of the paintings, mirrors, really, the close textual analysis literary critics do. And her challenge with Meere reminded me of that issue regarding the value to criticism of knowing the creator that I raised in my recent review of Bernadette Brennan’s book, because, in Meere’s case, it appears there are “no diaries or notebooks recording his artistic practice” so, says Eadie, “one can only speculate”.

And speculate she does, sometimes drawing long bows. These show the depth of her research, but with little evidence for what Meere actually knew, saw, experienced or thought, these bows rely on our agreeing with her assumptions – particularly regarding his alluding to other works. Her analysis of his “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” painting is fascinating but relies on our making a number of leaps with her. In her chapter discussing the origins of the large number of “copies” of “Australian Beach Pattern” which regularly hit the market, the speculations build, but, as she does elsewhere, she admits to them, calling one idea “highly speculative”. Other times, she explains that she had to work from digital or reproduction copies of works in private hands, and that her analysis could change on seeing the work itself. None of this, however, gets out of hand, and her arguments are clear.

Discovering Charles Meere might sound dry and suited only to specialists, but not so. Eadie’s writing is engaging and refreshingly free of academic jargon and meaningless polysyllabic words. The book is short, nicely produced, and is well-illustrated, making it easy to follow her argument. As for the content, it should appeal to anyone interested in Australian art and 20th century Australian culture. I enjoyed my foray into the outfields of my reading interests!

aww2017 badgeJoy Eadie
Discovering Charles Meere: Art and allusion
Braddon: Halstead Press, 2017
96pp.
ISBN: 9781925043389

(Review copy courtesy Halstead Press)