Women writers

Gail Jones, Salonika burning (#BookReview)

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Australian author Gail Jones’ ninth novel, Salonika burning, is a curious but beautiful novel, curious because she fictionalises four real people for whom she has no evidence that they met or knew each other, and beautiful because of her writing and the themes she explores. The novel is set during World War 1, but its focus is firmly on the interior rather than the grand stage of battle.

It opens dramatically with the burning of the city of Salonika (Thessaloniki). This is another curious thing, because this destructive event was caused not by an act of war but an accidental kitchen fire. Also, the novel is not set in Salonika but some 90 miles off, in and around “the field of tents that comprised the Scottish Women’s Hospital”, on the shores of Lake Ostrovo in Macedonia. It is 1917, and the novel’s narrative centre is this hospital and those working in and around it. Here, not Salonika, is where our four main characters are based — Stella, an assistant cook/hospital orderly; Olive, an ambulance driver; surgeon Grace; and Stanley, an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps. They are based on the Australians, writer Miles Franklin and adventurer Olive King, and the British painters, Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer. In her Author’s Note, Jones makes clear that she has fictionalised these characters, and that while all are known to have worked in the vicinity, there is no evidence that they met or even knew each other. It is “a novel which takes many liberties and is not intended to be read as a history”. This is fine with me. After all, a novel, by definition, is not history. The novel follows these characters over a few months after the burning of Salonika.

“everything was coming apart”

So, why Salonika? I see a few reasons. For a start, its burning sets the novel’s tone. On the first page we are presented with opposing ideas. The sight of the burning city is described as “strangely beautiful” but, on the other hand, “alarm, instant fear, the sufferings of others … were no match for excitement at a safe distance”. As the fire died, “excitement left and in its place was a murky lugging of spirit”. Throughout the novel, Salonika represents these contradictions, this tension between what is ugly, what is beautiful; between what is random, what is not; and in how to respond to, or feel about, what is being experienced.

The Salonika fire also encompasses the idea of witness and representation. In the opening scene, Jones describes a painting made of the fire by William T. Wood. It is a “morning-after scene, brightly calm, with a floaty view from the heavens” done in his “signature pastels, remote as a child’s dream and thinly decorative”. Those who saw this painting later, she writes, “saw the pretty lies of art”, whereas “former residents and soldiers said, No, it wasn’t like that”. This tension too is played out in the characters as they think about how they might represent their experience.

The burning of Salonika, then, embodies several ideas that are followed through in the novel. But, Salonika is also relevant to the plot. The novel’s narrative arc lies mainly in the characters and their emotional reactions to what is happening as the months wear on. Not only is there the war with its injured and dying soldiers, but malaria is rife, and the privations they experience, professionally and personally, are exacerbated by the burning of Salonika and the attendant shortage of essential provisions – food, petrol, medical supplies. However, a plot also unfolds, and it is something that happens on the way to Salonika, well into the story, which sets the novel’s final drama in motion.

Salonika burning traverses themes that are the stuff of the best war literature – themes that expose the “idiocy of this war, of all wars” and its impact on those caught up in it – but it offers its own take. The telling feels disjointed, particularly at the start, with its constant switching between the perspectives of the four characters who interact very little with each other until well into the novel – and even then it’s often uneasy, as befits their temperaments. And yet, the novel is compelling to read, primarily because of these characters. They are beautifully individuated, so flawed, so human, so real.

Olive, who is the first character we meet, and the one who closes the novel, is confident, tough and practical. Grace, too, is tough, doing her “duty” with a “dull vacancy”. Stella, at 38, the oldest of the four, is “cranky and wanting more”, more excitement to write about, but she believes in “chin-up and perseverance”, while the youngest, 26-year-old Stanley, is “ill-fitted … to this life of rough cynical men”.

These are “intolerable” times, and we are privy to their struggle to maintain their sanity. Olive resorts to her German grammar to escape the emotional load, while Stanley has his mules and favourite painters, his “Holy Rhymers”. Stella, “writing jolly accounts in her diary”, thinks about what stories she will tell, while Grace has her favourite brother to think about and write to. The disjointed structure mirrors, I think, their sense of isolation. Contact and the potential for friendship is there, but Matron discourages emotional engagement. There’s “no room for emotion”, she says, just “duty”. Olive, who seems to represent the novel’s moral centre, thinks otherwise:

It seemed another kind of duty, not to forget. Olive wanted to speak of what she had seen and known, though she suffered too much remembrance.

This could neatly segue to that issue of representation, and the post-war work done by Stella, Grace and Stanley, but instead, I want to conclude with another idea. On a supply trip to Salonika, Olive, “driving in her safe foreign aura”, had been indulging in a dose of self-pity, but is suddenly confronted by the loss Salonika’s burning represented for its residents, “and only now understood that it was the woe of others that claimed importance”. Likewise, Stanley, Grace and Stella are confronted with the woes of others through the novel’s closing drama, and must decide where their humanity lies.

I started this post noting some curious things about Jones’ approach to her story, but these didn’t spoil the read. Rather, they added to my interest as I read it. Ultimately, Salonika burning is a true and tenderly written novel that captures the essence of war’s inhumanity, and then goes about extracting the humanity out of it. A worthy winner of the 2023 ARA Historical Novel Prize.

Lisa and Brona also read and enjoyed this book.

Further reading

Gail Jones
Salonika Burning
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2022
249pp.
ISBN: 9781922458834

Monday musings on Australian literature: Untangling the tangles

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Introducing last week’s Monday Musings, I mentioned that the article I was sharing in that post contained a clue to a curly identification I was working on for my upcoming Australian Women Writers blog post. I said that I might share that puzzle this week, and that is what I am doing.

I will get to that soon, but as I also explained last week, that very article that I shared came with its own identification puzzle. That article was signed W.M., and best I cold find was W.M. Kyle, M.A. (or, William Marquis Kyle). He was a loose fit, because while he was a contemporaneous Queenslander, and did write newspaper articles, his interests seemed more philosophy than literature. Fortunately, some of my regular commenters took up the challenge. (How great is this!)

Melanie (Grab the Lapels) posited William Montgomerie Fleming but, while his dates fit, he seems unlikely in terms of his location and focus. I’m glad, though, to add him to my knowledge bank. Meg, however, came up with Winifred Moore, whom she found in Women Journalists in Australian History in a discussion about “the confinement of women journalists to the women’s pages”. Meg wrote that this article said that “under the direction of Winifred Moore from the 1920s, the Brisbane Courier’s ‘Home Circle’ section included a political column of sorts, profiling public personalities in Australia and abroad, alongside the usual recipes and serialised novels.” (You can read more about Moore at the Australian Women’s Register.)

So, of course, I researched Winifred Moore a little more (pun unintended). She wrote the “Home Circle” pages under the pseudonym of “Verity”. But, I also found references to a paper she had given on women writers in 1927 (three years after the article I posted on last week) . So, thanks to Meg, I think there is a good chance that she may be our W.M. I plan to share more on her later. Meanwhile, the original puzzle …

The mysterious J.M. Stevens

I had chosen a story by J.M. Stevens to be my May post for the Australian Women Writer’s Challenge, but, as we find all too frequently, identifying our writers can prove tricky. So it was for J.M. Stevens.

A major source for Australian writers is the (fire-walled) AustLit database and I was delighted to find that J.M. Stevens did have an entry there. It gave me some of her background, including her parentage, and identified an apparently better-known sister as Maymie Ada Hamlyn-Harris, who was a writer and convenor of the Lyceum Club literary circle. It also said that Stevens married John Frederick Stevens around 1917 which means, of course, that her last name stayed the same.

Book cover for The mad painter

Austlit gives her dates as 1887 to 30 May 1944, and uses J.M. Stevens as their name heading for her. They add that she also wrote under other names: Joan Marguerite Stevens, Janie M. Stevens, Joan M. Stevens. The University of Melbourne’s Colonial Australian Popular Fiction digital archive agrees with Austlit’s dates, but uses Janie M. Stevens as their name heading. They list one book for her, The mad painter and other bush sketches, by J.M. Stevens.

All well and good. It seemed pretty straightforward, but I like to find more if I can and this is where things came a bit unstuck because on 31 May 1944, Brisbane’s The Telegraph reported on the death of Mrs Joan M. Stevens. It says:

Mrs Joan M. Stevens, whose death look place yesterday afternoon at her home, Bylaugh, Glenny Street, Toowong, had been an invalid for many years. She was the fifth daughter of the late Mr E. J. Stevens MLC and the late Mrs Stevens, and had lived practically the whole of her life in Brisbane and Southport. Mrs Stevens was gifted musically, showed considerable talent as a painter and like several members of her family possessed distinct literary gifts, two of her books having been accepted for publication in the south. The late Mrs Stevens, who was the wife of Mr John F. Stevens, is survived by her husband, one daughter, three sons, and one granddaughter. Mrs Stevens was the third sister in the same family to die within six months; Miss Alys Stevens died in November last in Melbourne, and her eldest sister, Miss J. M. Stevens, died in Brisbane a few weeks ago.

So, this seems like “our” J.M. Stevens – same death date, and married to Mr John F. Stevens. But, they also mention a sister, “Miss J.M. Stevens”. Oh oh! Who is this? Three months later, on 17 August, this same newspaper announced the posthumous publication of a novel This game of murder, and says it

was written by the late Joan M. Stevens (Mrs J. F. Stevens), whose death took place a short time ago. The late Mrs Stevens, who was the fifth daughter of the late Mr E. J. Stevens, MLC, a former managing director of the “Courier,” belonged to a literary family. Her sisters included the late Miss J. M. Stevens, the writer of short stories and nature studies, whose death occurred earlier in the year. Another sister is Mrs M. Hamlyn-Harris, who has published several books of verse.

Now, AustLit had said that J.M. Stevens (remember, aka Joan M. Stevens and Janie M. Stevens) was a freelance journalist, with articles and short stories appearing in the leading magazines and weeklies in Australia and New Zealand in the earlier part of her life. In her later years, it says, she wrote a long series of nature studies for the Sunday Mail.

I was starting to feel confused. We have a Mrs. J.M. Stevens and a Miss J.M. Stevens. We have a Joan M. Stevens and a Janie M. Stevens. And it seems that despite AustLit’s entry, they are not the same person, but sisters who both wrote. We know that Joan wrote This game of murder, but who wrote The mad painter and other bush sketches? The cover says J.M. Stevens. It sounds like a nature-related work – the sort of writing that Miss J.M. Stevens did. Certainly Brisbane’s The Week writing about this book on 7 January 1927 describes its author as “Miss Stevens … nature lover and also something [of] a humorist”.

Then I found it! The Brisbane Courier, in an article on Queensland writers on 15 October 1927 identifies Janie Stevens as The mad painter’s author. So, clearly we have two sisters here with the initials J.M. One (Miss Janie) wrote The mad painter, and the other (Mrs Joan) wrote This game of murder. The life dates (at least, the death date) given by AustLit for J.M. Stevens and the Colonial Australian Popular Fiction archive for Janie Stevens, are for Joan. I have shared all this with the AustLit researchers who are always happy to receive feedback. Their challenge now, besides confirming my deduction, will be to identify who wrote which of the newspaper articles ascribed to J.M. Stevens!

I really should be doing more reading …

Monday musings on Australian literature: Queensland’s women writers, 1920s

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Yesterday, as I was trying to untangle a curly identification for my next Australian Women Writers blog post, I came across an interesting article in The Brisbane Courier. Published on 15 October 1927, and penned by one W.M., the 1300-word article is titled “Queensland Women Writers: Poets and Novelists“. Of course, it caught my attention, and not only because buried within was an important clue for my puzzle (about which I might write next Monday).

Although I’ve written several Trove-inspired posts about Australian literature in the 1920s and 30s, this one caught my attention for two reasons – it is focused on just one state (Queensland) and is limited to women writers. I don’t know whether W.M. wrote separately about Queensland’s men writers, because it’s hard to search on by-lines like “W.M.” I did try to identify him. He may be William Marquis Kyle, whom I came across via an announcement for a lecture to be given by “Mr. W.M. Kyle, M.A.” He was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in 1938. The best record I found for him included that “he gave public lectures, wrote and reviewed newspaper articles and was well known as a broadcaster”.  So, on this slim basis, I am going to refer to “W.M.” as he/him.

Queensland women writers

W.M. commences by talking about poetry, arguing that

When we contemplate the work of Australian writers, we can hardly fail to be impressed with the large proportion who have chosen poetry rather than prose as their medium. May it not be that a young nation, like a young writer, turns to poetry as more fitting than prose to express wonder and joy in a country which inspires emotions and sensations most appropriately uttered in lyrical form?

He goes on to say that whether his reasoning is true or not, “there is a larger amount of creditable verse than prose in the imaginative literature of Australia” and this is “apparent in any survey of the women writers of Queensland and their work”. But, he says, two novelists do occupy the first and last positions in his chronological list of Queensland women writers: Mrs Campbell Praed and Mrs Dorothy Cottrell. Both have appeared on my blog before.

W.M.’s article starts with brief paragraphs on the older writers. They are (links go to their Wikipedia pages):

For these six writers, W.M. identifies a work or two, and adds some assessment or description. I’m not sure why he allows Sumner Locke her own name, given she married Henry Logan Elliott. Perhaps it’s that most if not all her works were published before she married, and she died the following year. Anyhow, he praises her, saying “her style was forcible and direct, as shown in her novels”.

He has positive words for all these writers. Of Rosa Praed, he says:

Her style was simple and illustrative, and she had the faculty of making her characters “live.” Her descriptions of the social life of early Brisbane, centring in Government House, show that in many respects the social life of the present time still resembles that of 30 years ago.

Mary Hannay Foott’s “poetic style was simple, but distinguished by considerable lyrical power”, and he praises her versatility. Mabel Forrest’s early promise, evident in a story published when she was 10, “has been fulfilled by an exceptionally large output of poetry, short stories, descriptive articles, and novels”. And, while her novels “contain many descriptive passages of outstanding charm and sincerity, upon her verse rests her claim to rank among the foremost writers of Australia to-day.” Her novel The wild moth was adapted to screen by Charles Chauvel in The moth of Moonbi.

Emily Coungeau had, he says, “a mind attuned to the beauty of Nature and the best in human hearts” which enabled her “to produce verse of much charm and sensibility”. Emily Bulcock’s poetry, on the other hand, was characterised by a “strong spiritual note”.

The rest of the writers, listed under the heading “Other writers”, are given one sentence or less, with the exception of the first in the list, Zora Cross. Her reputation has lasted more than most of the above. The reason for the short shrift given to her seems to be that she made her home in Sydney, so, not really a Queensland writer it seems! Few of the others are remembered today, except perhaps for the last on his list, the aforementioned Mrs Dorothy Cottrell. She, he writes, “is hailed by American publishers as a writer of exceptional power”. Her novel The singing gold was first serialised in The ladies home journal. The cover here is the 1956 edition (obvious from the fashion!) which suggests she remained popular for some time. A later story of hers became Ken Hall’s 1936 film, Orphan of the wilderness.

However, I will comment on one other. Wikipedia and the ADB have an entry for Nelle Tritton (1899-1946) whom Wikipedia writes as Lydia “Nellé” Tritton, and ADB as Lydia Ellen (Nell) Tritton. She had an interesting life. She was born in Brisbane in 1899, but in her mid-20s, she went to London and toured Europe, gained “a reputation for knowledge of international affairs”, and married a former officer of Russia’s White Army. The marriage ended in 1936, and in 1939, she married the exiled Russian prime minister Alexander Kerensky in Pennsylvania. ADB writes of their time in America that “their life, when they were together, was idyllic, with numerous visitors and games of croquet”. W.M. tells us none of this – much of which happened after 1927 – but it’s interesting that he’s included her, given she was barely in Australia. All he says of her is that “while still in her teens” she wrote a booklet of “Poems”. Curious – but fascinating. 

W.M. concludes that, from his brief survey, “it is evident that the work of Queensland writers has reached a standard which justifies and claims adequate attention from the reading public”, and he quotes literary critic Bertram Stevens, who had died in 1922 but had apparently said:

Australia has now come of age, and is becoming conscious of its strength and its possibilities. Its writers to-day are, as a rule, self-reliant and hopeful. They have faith in their own country; they write of it as they see it, and of their work and their joys and fears in simple direct language.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Stella Prize 2024 Winner

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The 2024 Stella Prize winner was announced last Thursday, the 2nd of May, but that was the also the day my blog turned 15, and I didn’t want to flood cyberspace with too many posts. Then this weekend was the SixDegrees meme which meant another post coming at you. So, I decided to do my Stella 2024 post, this year, as a Monday Musings. It makes sense to do so, in fact, because it’s an historic win. First though, the winner, for those of you who haven’t heard yet:

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy

Why historic? Again, some of you will already know this, but Alexis Wright, one of our leading First Nations writers, is the first writer to win the Stella twice in its 12 year history. An impressive achievement by any measure. I am embarrassed to say, however, that of the now four Stella winners I haven’t read, Wright’s two are among them. This is not because I don’t want to read them, but because they are big tomes, and my life doesn’t seem to lend itself these days to chunksters. I read and loved her multi-award winning novel Carpentaria (my post), which was big enough – at over 500 pages – but that was before blogging when time pressures felt different! Clearly, though, I should make time for this because, from what I can tell, its subject matter is something I care about and it has the wit and playfulness, passion and imagination, that I loved in Carpentaria.

Praiseworthy has already been recognised by the literary establishment. Last year it won the Fiction Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. Further, as publisher Giramondo shares, it has been shortlisted for many other awards: The Dublin Literary Award 2024; the People’s Choice Award, the Christine Stead Prize for Fiction and the Indigenous Writers Prize in the 2024 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award; The James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2024; and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance in the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards.

The chair of the judging panel said this about the book:

Praiseworthy is mighty in every conceivable way: mighty of scope, mighty of fury, mighty of craft, mighty of humour, mighty of language, mighty of heart. Praiseworthy is not only a great Australian novel – perhaps the great Australian novel – it is also a great Waanyi novel. And it is written in the wild hope that, one day, all Australian readers might understand just what that means. I do not understand. Not yet. But I can feel history calling to me in these pages. Calling to all of us. Imagine if we listened.

Giramondo’s (above-linked) page for the book, includes excerpts from other critics and reviewers. Samuel Rutter of the New York Times Book Review describes it as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, while Jane Gleeson-White wrote in The Conversation that “Praiseworthy is Alexis Wright’s most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet…a hero’s journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty”. More than one references Ulysses, such as Ruth Padel, who describes it in The Spectator as “an impassioned environmental Ulysses of the Northern Territory… Playful, formally innovative, multi-storied, allegorical, protean and dizzyingly exhilarating, it is long, lyrical and enraged”. Several, in fact, praise the language; and many comment on its satirical aspect, its lyricism, its comedy. Lynda Ng, in Meanjin, calls it:

The finest distillation yet of Wright’s themes – a bold assertion of Aboriginal sovereignty that successfully encompasses all areas of life: culture, economy, and jurisprudence.

Of course, Giramondo has selected excerpts that praise, but the sources of that praise are impressive.

There are those who think that she should/may/will be Australia’s next Nobel Laureate for Literature.

Returning to the Stella, you can read more on the Stella website, including a link to Alexis Wright’s acceptance speech, and an expressive video performance of a brief scene from the novel by Boonwurrung actor Tasma Walton.

Just to remind you, this year’s Stella judges were writer, literary critic, Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival and this year’s chair, BeeJay Silcox; Filipino-Australian poet, performer, arts producer, and advocate, Eleanor Jackson; First Nations award-winning poet and arts board member, Cheryl Leavy; novelist, occasional critic and full-time dad, Bram Presser; and writer and historian, Dr Yves Rees.

Wikipedia offers a well-presented complete list of the winners and all the short and longlisted books.

Thoughts anyone?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 4, Kate Helen Weston

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In 2021, I started my Monday Musings sub-series on forgotten Australian writers, with posts on Helen Simpson and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop. This year I added Marion Simons, who was my first post on the Australian Women Writers (AWW) blog this year. As I explained then, Elizabeth Lhuede and I have decided to focus this year on sharing public domain works published in 1924 – or written by writers who died in 1924. So today, I am introducing another writer I’ve posted on there, Kate Helen Weston.

As with Marion Simons, I am not including here the piece written by Simons that I published at AWW. It is an entertaining piece titled “The ubiquitous apostrophe”. If love discussions of grammar and punctuation, do check it out at AWW.

Kate Helen Weston

Kate Helen Weston (1863-1929) was born Kate Helen Carter in Ballarat, Victoria, to British parents who came to Australia for the gold rush, but she died in Adelaide. Indeed, one “L.B.” described her in The Australian Woman’s Mirror (of 24 February 1925) as “one of the best-known of Adelaide’s feminine inky-wayfarers”. She has an entry in AustLit, and in Debra Adelaide’s Australian women writers: a bibliographic guide, but not in the Australian dictionary of biography or Wikipedia. Adelaide’s News (10 December 1924) provided a brief biography of her in their “Pen Portraits of People” series, after she was elected president of the Liberal Women’s Educational Association.

These sources aren’t quite in tune with each other. AustLit says that she married John Samuel Weston “in Adelaide in 1885, and moved there in 1892”. Adelaide’s News says she married “Mr. J.T. Weston … and later came to Adelaide”. AustLit says that she was widowed in 1894, and “turned to writing to provide financially for herself and her children. She contributed to many Australian newspapers, and published fiction between 1911 and 1928”. They also say that “she was Lady Superintendent of the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide between 1900 and 1914”. The News, on the other hand, says that “after her husband’s death she accepted the position of secretary to the Elder Conservatorium, which she held for 22 years”. So, some minor differences in detail here – in the name of her husband and in her Elder Conservatorium role. These would be good to clarify, but for now I’m noting them and moving on.

The News tells us that she “developed literary and artistic tastes” and had published three novels in London. In fact, she published four novels, one a few years after the News’s article. Her novels were The partners (1911), The man MacDonald (1913), The prelude (1914) and The vagabond soul (1928). The man MacDonald, says News, “had a wide vogue”. Melbourne’s Table Talk (26 July 1928), announcing the publication of The vagabond soul, said that “the story, which contains a dramatic situation of some originality, is entirely Australian in setting, and it is written with the same facile spontaneity which characterises Mrs Weston’s other novels”. But, her novels have not lasted.

Both AustLit and the News mention her other literary and journalistic work, but AustLit is more specific, telling us that she contributed to many Australian newspapers. They say she was “music and art critic for The Register, contributed to The Woman’s Record – a monthly publication – and, according to her obituary in The Advertiser, she was the ‘founder of community singing in Adelaide’.” She received a Commonwealth Literary Fund Fellowship in 1915, and was also actively involved in the National Council of Women.

Weston was clearly well-known in Adelaide’s literary circles. The News (9 September 1924) reports on an address she gave at the monthly meeting of the Liberal Women’s Educational Association. (Th Association aimed to educate women in political and social matters, but, said The Register on 2 March 1926, it could also become active in social reform, “when necessary”.)

Anyhow, the focus of Weston’s talk was Australian Women Writers. The News starts with:

It was not until one began to reckon up the women writers of Australia, said Mrs. Weston, that it was realised how many there were and what a contribution they had made to the literature of Australia in poetry, prose, and journalistic work, though it was only of late years that woman had met man on equal ground in the field of journalism. 

Turning then to poetry, she said that Australian men were credited with being better poets than Australian women, but she believed that the work of women poets was “possibly much more original in style as it bore the impress of no old world stylist, and invariably expressed the writer’s personal outlook on life”. Mary Gilmore, for example, “spoke always with a woman’s voice and wrote, not of things but of humanity and the home”. She named, and apparently read from many, contemporary Australian poets.

She then talked about fiction, arguing that it’s through fiction that the life of an age is chronicled. She named many novelists including those we still recognise today, like Mary Gaunt, Ada Cambridge, Mrs Campbell (Rosa) Praed, and Ethel Turner. She also mentioned – and I think this is an astute and significant recognition – the “many letter writers, whose small contributions fitted into the interstices of the wall of literature which was being built”. 

She concluded by arguing that the Commonwealth Government needed to more actively encourage Australian literature. She pointed to the lack of Australian publishing houses and the small market. She said, writes the News, that “writers of fiction could not afford to remain in their own country, but were forced to go to the fogs of London or the bustle of America, where they lost their nationality and their English”. And she urged would-be writers “to read all styles, and copy none” – and to practise constantly. 

The News and AustLit both describe her other, considerable, community involvements and achievements. These included having a tilt at politics. The News writes that she stood for a ward in municipal elections in 1923, and “polled the highest percentage of votes ever gained by a woman in the elections in this State”. Her death, after falling from a tram from which she never regained consciousness, seems tragic.

So far I have written on four women writers for this year’s AWW project. Two, Marion Simons and Alice Tomholt, never married, and two, Kate Helen Weston and Lillian Pyke, were widowed with young children. All, it seems, managed to eke some sort of living from writing. 

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Vol. 2)

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Mansfield Park book covers
Mansfield Park book covers

As I wrote last month, my Jane Austen group is doing a slow read of Mansfield Park this year, meaning we are reading and discussing the novel, one volume at a time, over three months. This month was Volume 2 (that is, chapters 19 to 31). It starts with the return of the patriarch, Sir Thomas Bertram, from his plantation in Antigua, and ends with Fanny rejecting Henry Crawford’s proposal.

Last month, I said that the thing that struck me most in volume 1 was the selfishness, or self-centredness, of most of the characters. I wondered whether Austen was writing a commentary on 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 immorality (however we define that). Having now read volume 2, I’m still on this path – together with a couple of other, somewhat related ideas, education, which I also mentioned last month, and parenting.

But first, the selfishness and self-centredness continues. In this volume, Maria marries and she and Julia leave Mansfield Park, leaving Fanny the only young woman at the Park. Mary Crawford, over in the parsonage, no longer has a young female friend to entertain her, so her sister Mrs Grant thinks Fanny would suffice:

Mrs. Grant, really eager to get any change for her sister, could, by the easiest self-deceit, persuade herself that she was doing the kindest thing by Fanny, and giving her the most important opportunities of improvement in pressing her frequent calls. 

Here is one of the reasons I love Austen. She knows exactly how we justify our actions to ourselves.

Anyhow, as a result, Fanny spends more time with Mary, as a favour to others, resulting in, Austen writes,

an intimacy resulting principally from Miss Crawford’s desire of something new, and which had little reality in Fanny’s feelings.

Examples like this pepper the volume. Lady Bertram doesn’t want Fanny to accept a dinner invitation because it would affect her “evening’s comfort”. After all, as Austen writes, “Lady Bertram never thought of being useful to anybody”. Late in the volume, Lady Bertram rises to the occasion, or thinks she does. She sends her maid to help Fanny dress for her first ball, and says so during the ball when Fanny’s appearance is complimented. “Chapman helped her to dress. I sent Chapman to her.” Yes, she did, but only after she was dressed and too late to help Fanny who was already dressed! Austen adds:

Not but that she was really pleased to have Fanny admired; but she was so much more struck with her own kindness in sending Chapman to her, that she could not get it out of her head.

Mrs Grant, Mary and Lady Bertram aren’t the only selfish, self-centred people in this volume. There’s the egregious Henry Crawford who had played, in volume 1, with the feelings of Maria and Julia, and then leaves Mansfield, in volume 2, with nary a word to either of them:

Henry Crawford was gone, gone from the house, and within two hours afterwards from the parish; and so ended all the hopes his selfish vanity had raised in Maria and Julia Bertram.

That’s not the end of Henry, though, because he’s soon back, telling his sister Mary, “my plan is to make Fanny Price in love with me”. In my Jane Austen group, we discussed that as his frivolous flirtation moved to something more serious – as he started to truly see, we believe, Fanny’s value – he gives no thought to whether Fanny will love him. That’s a given! He’s a catch!

There’s more I could say on this theme – I haven’t even mentioned Mrs Norris – but there are other ideas to talk about. I started to see in volume 2 that Mansfield Park is also about parenting, and, relating to this, I’d argue that in this volume we see the beginning of the education of Sir Thomas.

However, Sir Thomas is a controversial character in my group. Some detest him, rather like Mr Yates who had never seen a father so “unintelligibly moral, so infamously tyrannical” as Sir Thomas. But, along with some others, I see Sir Thomas differently.  Sure, he’s formal, but he loves his children – and he has no support in that wife of his. When he realises how silly Maria’s fiancé is, he wants to give her an out. Unfortunately, Maria wants to escape home and its restraints, so doesn’t take it. Sir Thomas is – admittedly – relieved because it suits his wish “to secure a marriage which would bring him such an addition of respectability and influence”. An example of new money, he’s a product of his times, and a “good” marriage can only help! However, as the volume progresses, Sir Thomas looks out for Fanny, wanting to give her opportunities, despite Mrs Norris’ attempts to keep puttng Fanny down.

For me, a recurring theme in Austen’s novels, in fact, is parenting. Lady Bertram is completely hands-off, letting Mrs Norris (as I mentioned in volume 1) have too big a hand in her daughters’ upbringing, to their detriment. Sir Thomas, on the other hand, is strict and – well, let’s talk about how it all plays out in volume 3. Here, though, he is kind to Fanny and wants well for her.

I have more to say on this, but I’ll leave it here as there are two ideas I’d like to share from my group’s discussion.

One of our members talked about the Australian critic John Wiltshire’s discussion of the disempowerment of women in his book Jane Austen and the body. He argues that caring for servants and the working class is a traditional role for genteel but otherwise disempowered woman, but that “this benevolence has a Janus face” because it replicates the inferior-superior social relationships that characterise the wider society. Mrs Norris, Wiltshire argues, “punishes others for her own dependency and frustration, whilst being able to hide this from herself in the guise of generosity to the recipients and loyal service to the system”.

Similarly, all at Mansfield Park have, through their adoption of poor Fanny Price “basked in the pleasure of benevolence”. But this has let Fanny become Mrs Norris’ victim. Both Fanny and Mrs Norris, says Wiltshire, are outsiders, “fringe-dwellers”; both are single, defenceless females who are “not part of the family except by courtesy. The one lives in the small White House, on the edge of the estate, the other in the little white attic at the top of the house”. Wiltshire argues that Fanny becomes the scapegoat upon whom Mrs Norris can “exercise her frustrations and baffled energies”. By scolding and punishing Fanny, she can “appease her own sense of functionless dependency and reaffirm the strictness of the social hierarchy which gives meaning to her life”. An interesting idea which I plan to think more about. It doesn’t excuse Mrs Norris, but it might explain her!

The other idea I want to share came from a young American visitor to our meeting. While she had read Austen and other classic authors, she said that her main reading, currently, is romance and general fiction. So, as she was reading Mansfield Park, she looked for tropes common to the romance genre. And, she found two significant ones, which could cement Austen’s reputation as the mother of the romance genre! The first trope is the idea of friends (or, here, cousins) becoming lovers, and the other is the romantic heroine’s belief that she’s “not like other girls”. She’s not as pretty, not as outgoing, and so on, as her rivals. Fanny makes this sort of observation in a discussion with Edmund about how she likes hearing Sir Thomas talk about the West Indies. She says she is “graver than other people” and concludes:

… but then I am unlike other people, I dare say.

I loved this insight from a first-time reader of the novel.

So much more to say … but there will be more opportunities to talk Austen, I dare say! Meanwhile, thoughts?

Rachel Matthews, Never look desperate (#BookReview)

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One of the most appealing things about Rachel Matthews’ third novel, Never look desperate, is that it features some decent men. In this #metoo era, which differs little from what came before, there’s plenty of fiction which shows men in less than stellar light. And that’s fair enough. One of the reasons I read fiction is to expand my understanding of the issues I care about. I can feel along with the so-called sad girl stories, and applaud the angry feminist ones. However, most men I know, like most women I know, are decent human beings trying to live good, fulfilled lives. And this, essentially, is the subject matter of Matthews’ novel.

Never look desperate follows three main characters, in alternating, third-person chapters. These characters are 49-year-old Bernard, 54-year-old Minh, and Bernard’s recently widowed 70-year-old mother Goldie. It is set in Melbourne, immediately post-pandemic. People are starting to get out and about again, but the pandemic’s shadow lingers in the background. Bernard and Minh are single, lonely, and seeking connection.

Bernard, a photographer who works at Officeworks, dearly misses his father Marvin, who had died 12 months ago. He also wears a locket encasing some of his dead-ex-wife’s ashes around his neck. He had loved his wife, and the fact that they were divorced when she died, does not lessen his grief. With both gone, he feels that from now, “the world would keep taking pieces of him”, but he’s surviving – just. The last time he’d had sex, on a Tinder date, “it was all over in one minute and 10 seconds – the same time it took him to microwave porridge”.

Vietnamese-born Minh, who came to Australia by boat when she was seven, works at the Kino cinema complex. She has never married, though has had her share of boyfriends. She loves her mother, but rarely sees her because her evangelical step-father had kicked her out long ago. We first meet her as she wakes, gasping, from “night terrors”, and we soon learn that she carries trauma from the loss of her father on that boat from Vietnam and from the racism she experienced as the only Vietnamese kid at school.

Goldie is more complicated. She’s “alternative”, and uncompromising. She is implicated in her husband’s death, though this is not a legal issue in the novel, because she had slowly replaced his blood pressure tablets with alternative medicines. She has a new lover, but she’s prickly – and grief and ageing are not making her any easier to be with. However, Franz is hanging in there. As she does with the other characters, Matthews nails her with sentences like this:

Goldie didn’t really have friends. Her old workmates from a community centre in Collingwood, found her difficult to work with, but we were grateful when she wrestled with management for better conditions.

She is the most difficult character for readers to identify with, but she has her own baggage, including a tough upbringing, during which her mother would lock her in a dark laundry, aka “the Thinking Room”.

“the world was different now” (Goldie)

So, we have three people who are all grieving or have suffered losses in their lives. Bernard and Minh meet early on via the dating app Tinder, and through the rest of the novel there’s a rom-com type tension regarding whether they will overcome their anxieties and get together. The novel’s other main tension concerns whether there will be a rapprochement between Goldie and Bernard, whose upbringing had been difficult with such an inflexible, “alternative” mother, and who believes that she does not grieve his beloved father. We though know better. (Marvin, whom we only know by hearsay, is one of the book’s joys.)

Now this might all sound ho-hum, but it’s definitely not, for a few reasons. One is the humour. Matthews captures the place and time, and her characters, with light satire that preserves their humanity while letting us laugh at the things they and we do in these strange times of ours. She hones in on some of the absurdities and pretensions of our times, without condemning. After all, who knows who will have the last laugh! That said, the IKEA and cruise-ship scenes are priceless.

Another reason is the characterisation. These characters are real. We know them, and, even if we are not exactly like them, we have surely suffered similar sadnesses and insecurities. This week, for example, we lunched with a recently widowed friend, and as I greeted her with a hug, she said “oh, a lovely hug”. One of the points Matthews makes so eloquently in this novel is the longing “to be touched” in those left alone – especially during the pandemic. So, there’s genuine pathos here, too, as we watch our characters struggle, hard, to beat back their justifiable fears and reconnect.

Related to the characterisation is the setting. Melburnians will love all the grounding references to places, products and businesses that carry signals for those who know, but are self-explanatory enough for those who don’t. The novel is also peppered with pop-culture references, particularly to music but also to film and TV shows, which will be more universal for the generations involved.

Then there is the quiet wisdom. Bernard’s dad had told him once that “a sad day is only a day”. This is not to minimise intense grief, of course, but it puts into perspective the little ups and downs that we can let get on top of us if we don’t take care. Matthews shows the various kindnesses people meet through life, often in unexpected places, and also that online-friendships, like Minh has with Suzy in New York, are real and sustainable.

Goldie recognises early in the novel that “the world was different now. She just had to find her way”. By novel’s end, our characters are finding their way. The future isn’t guaranteed, but they are on their way with a little more connection in their lives. What did E.M. Forster say in Howard’s End? “Only connect”. Yet again, we see his wisdom – and Matthews has given it to us in a funny, warm-hearted novel that is a real pleasure to read.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed this novel.

Rachel Matthews
Never look desperate
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2023
297pp.
ISBN: 9780645565393

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

Marjorie Barnard, The lottery (#Review, #1937 Club)

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This will probably be my only review for the 1937 Year Club but I am thrilled to do it, because it is by Marjorie Barnard, an author whom I have mentioned many times, but have not yet managed to review here. My post is on a short story from her collection, The persimmon tree and other stories, which is one of the very few short story collections I’ve read more than once. It is so good. And don’t just take it from me. Carmel Bird mentions it in her bibliomemoir, Telltale, calling it “extraordinarily powerful”.

I wasn’t sure, in fact, what I was going to read for this week. I certainly hadn’t considered this collection because it was first published in 1943 but, rummaging around Trove, I discovered a story by Marjorie Barnard in The Bulletin of 6 January 1937. The page was titled “Of a lottery winner: First Prize” but I recognised it immediately, and let out an internal whoop. Here was my chance.

“The lottery”, as it is titled in the collection, has been anthologised, including in The Penguin best Australian short stories (1991), though the titular story, “The persimmon tree” is, I believe, the most commonly anthologised from the collection.

Who was Marjorie Barnard?

Marjorie Barnard (1897-1987) was an Australian novelist and short story writer, critic, historian and librarian. She wrote five collaborative novels with Flora Eldershaw, under the pseudonym, M. Barnard Eldershaw. Their first novel, A house is built, was published in 1929, having jointly won, with Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo, The Bulletin prize in 1928. Their last, the futuristic Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow was censored, and published in an expurgated edition as Tomorrow and tomorrow in 1947. Barnard also wrote works of literary criticism, and is credited with writing the first assessment of Patrick White (in Meanjin in 1956) and the first biography of Miles Franklin. (Jill Roe writes of the biography in the ADB, saying that “written with misgivings and before the release of Franklin’s voluminous papers, it exhibited characteristic virtues, with insight and style making up for ambivalence and inevitable error.”)

Barnard, along with Eldershaw, and other Sydney-based writers, like Frank Dalby Davison, was deeply concerned about the social and economic upheavals of the 1930s. These three, known as “the triumvirate”, held literary soirees which were attended by like-minded writers including Xavier Herbert and Miles Franklin. They were active in promoting writer’s rights (through the Fellowship of Australian Writers), and opposed censorship. She was a pacifist, and was apparently named in those political witch hunts of the 1950s, making her cautious about what she admitted to in terms of political affiliations. She was one of many writers who corresponded with, and often asked advice of, Nettie Palmer. She was a significant force.

In 1983, she was awarded the Patrick White Award, as was also her admirer Carmel Bird, years later. Hers was a long, and active life – far too long for me to cover here – and unfortunately, I don’t think anyone has done a biography of her. She is more than a worthy subject.

“The lottery”

What is so “extraordinarily powerful” about The persimmon tree and other stories is the quietly controlled but clear-eyed way Barnard interrogates human experience, in general, and women’s experience, in particular. Many of the stories have a strong feminist undercurrent, and “The lottery” is one of these. What makes it remarkable is that it is told third person through the perspective of the husband, which sets us up to align with him – perhaps.

The story is set in suburban Sydney. It starts with the husband, Ted Bilborough, having just boarded the ferry on his way home from work. His co-passengers tell him – show him in the paper, in fact – that his wife had won the lottery, “Mrs. Grace Bilborough, 52 Cuthbert-street.’… First prize, £5OOO, Last Hope Syndicate.” The thing is, Ted didn’t know. We then follow him on his way home as he goes through various emotions – and as he does so, we glean a picture of who he is and the sort of life his wife has led. A disconnect builds between how he – the perfect unreliable narrator – sees that life and the way we do.

At first, we are told that “everyone likes Ted”. He’s decent, it seems, in that typical-for-the-time suburban-husband way, and because of this “he’d always expected in a trusting sort of way to be rewarded, but not through Grace”. It’s little qualifications like this – “but not through Grace” – that give the game away.

Alongside Ted’s thoughts are descriptions of the evening. They too contain nuances that suggest deeper truths are at play. “The sun was sinking into a bank of grey cloud, soft and formless as mist” and two pine-trees have a “soft arrested grace”, a bit like his Grace, we readers might think. A little further on, “Ted could see that the smooth water was really a pale, tawny gold with patches, roughened by the turning tide, of pale frosty blue”.

He wonders how she’d paid for the ticket, “He hadn’t noticed any difference in the housekeeping, and he prided himself he noticed everything”. He starts to rethink Grace, who’d been “a good wife”, while he’d been “a good husband”. Indeed, “theirs was a model home” but, “well, somehow he found it easier to be cheerful in other people’s homes than in his own”. Whose fault is this? Well, Grace’s of course!

She wasn’t cheery and easy-going. Something moody about her now. Moody. He’d worn better than Grace; anyone could see that, and yet it was he who had had the hard time. All she had to do was to stay at home and look after the house and the children. Nothing much in that. She always seemed to be working, but he couldn’t see what there was to do that could take her so long. 

And so it continues, Ted ruminating on the situation, on their marriage, and on how things might proceed – even starting to feel a bit magnanimous with this money that’s not his own – until he arrives home, and discovers exactly what Grace intends. It’s all in the name of the Syndicate!

The writing is delicious. Spare, and accessible, it nails women’s lives and the constrictions so many live under. There is little agency for many of her women, and Barnard draws this with such simple but knowing realism it takes your breathe away. I love many of the stories in the book – and this is as good as any of them.

* Read for the 1937 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon (Stuck in a Book) who, I discovered, has reviewed the collection.

Marjorie Barnard
“The lottery” (orig. pub. in The Bulletin, 6 January 1937)
in Marjorie Barnard, The persimmon tree and other stories
London: Virago Press, 1985 (first published by Clarendon in 1943)
pp. 97-105

Full text of The persimmon tree and other stories is available online at the Internet Archive

Thomas King, Borders (#Review)

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Thomas King’s “Borders” is the eleventh of fourteen stories in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. Like the previous story by Duane Niatum, it was also written in the 1990s.

Thomas King

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides some basic information about King, but I am supplementing that with information from Wikipedia which introduces him as an “American-born Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about First Nations”. He was born in California in 1943, and “self-identifies as being of Cherokee, Greek, and German descent”. He has written novels, children’s books, and short stories. 

King studied in Californian schools and universities, before earning his PhD at the University of Utah. Between his various degrees, he worked in many jobs, including spending three years in New Zealand. He moved to Canada in 1980, where he worked as an academic until he retired.

In terms of his First Nations activity, our main interest here, Wikipedia says that “his 1986 PhD dissertation was on Native American studies, one of the earliest works to explore the oral storytelling tradition as literature”. He is committed to a wide range of issues concerning First Nations rights, prospects and culture, but most relevant to his story, “Borders”, is a statement Wikipedia shares from his book, The inconvenient Indian:

“The issue has always been land. It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people”.

“Borders”

According to Blaisdell, “Borders” appears in King’s 1993 short story collection, One good story, that one, which was a best-seller in Canada. “Borders” is one of those frequently anthologised stories, apparently, which doesn’t surprise me because it is a ripper. From what I’ve read about King’s writing, “Borders” feels typical of his approach, with its conversational style and use of humour to convey a serious message. King adapted this story into a teleplay for a CBC anthology drama series, and it has also, recently, been turned into a graphic novel for a younger readers.

The narrative comprises two storylines which are alternated with each other. It is told first person through the eyes of a young boy. One storyline concerns his much older sister, Laetitia, leaving home at the age of 17 to live in Salt Lake City, Utah, while the other tells of a trip he makes with his mother some five or so years later to visit this sister. The crux of the story, though, lies in what happens at the US-Canada border. Asked to give her “citizenship”, the mother insists “Blackfoot” and is denied entry. She refuses to offer anything else. As a result, she and her son get caught in a no-man’s land when, attempting to return to Canada, the same response to the same question results in her being refused entry there too. As one of the border officials tries to explain to her, “it’s a legal technicality, that’s all”.

Of course, that’s not all. Blackfoot people ranged across the great northwest of America in what is now known as America and Canada. For our narrator’s mother, that land is her “citizenship”, not that she is American or Canadian, and she will not back down.

From the opening, the mother is established as sensible, no-nonsense. She doesn’t want Laetitia to go to Utah, and she doesn’t give in easily, pointing out the negatives right until they leave her at the border. But Laetitia will go and her mother is eventually proud of her, because she hadn’t “gone floating after some man like a balloon on a string” nor had she “snuck out of the house … to chase rainbows down alleys. And she hadn’t been pregnant.”

We first meet the border, as mentioned above, when the mother and son (our narrator) take Laetitia there, from where she’ll get a bus to Salt Lake City. We see the border, but mother and son don’t attempt to cross it at this point. The writing, at this early point, captures the obstinacy and strength in both mother and daughter, alongside the love between them::

The wind had come up and it blew Laetitia’s hair across her face. Mum reached out and pulled the strands out of Laetitia’s eyes, and Laetitia let her.

“Laetitia let her”. Conveys so much, doesn’t it?

Anyhow, it’s a few years later, when mother and son set off to visit Laetitia that the fun starts. Our narrator sets it up beautifully, his “mom” packing food for the trip, while he plaintively hopes they can “stop at one of those restaurants too, right?” The pacing of the border conversations is perfect. We chuckle, but we see the point too. When the mother gives up trying to get into the USA, and tries to return to Canada, the humour continues. The Canadian border guard, after some friendly small talk, asks

“Where are you coming from?”
“Standoff”.
“Is that in Montana?”
“No.”
“Where are you going?”
“Standoff.”
The woman’s name was Carol and I don’t guess she was any older than Laetitia. “Wow, you both Canadians?”
“Blackfoot.”

And it starts again. It’s just delicious. “Mom” is polite, but also determined to make her point and not. give. in. There are no histrionics, there’s no violence. Just polite behaviour on all sides. (But, the description of the few days they spend in this limbo region, visiting the duty free shop and sleeping in the car, did remind me of that Kath and Kim episode when Kath and Kel spend their honeymoon at the airport.)

The language is direct and spare, told from a pre-teen’s point of view. He reports rather than comments, but in that reportage we see the truth – of the strength of the mother’s identity and determination to preserve it, and of her wisdom in dealing with her daughter.

Hachette’s promo for the graphic novel version describes it as resonating “with themes of identity, justice, and belonging”. It is exactly that. I imagine the graphic novel is a winner, because the short story sure is.

Thomas King
“Borders” (orig. pub. 1991)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 84-94
ISBN: 9780486490953

Shankari Chandran, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens (#BookReview)

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Shankari Chandran’s Miles Franklin Award winning novel, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens, was my reading group’s March book. Unfortunately I was out of town at the time of the meeting, but of course I wanted to read it – and I did, finally!

Like many people, I think, when I first saw the book, I assumed it was one of those cosy crime novels set in a nursing home or retirement village. The title and the pretty cover certainly suggest that. Only a fraction of this first impression was right, though. It is set in a nursing home, and crimes do occur, but it is not a crime novel and nor is it cosy. Instead, it is a serious, thoughtful and immersive novel that covers many issues confronting modern multicultural Australia, but that also has one main driving idea – which I’ll get to soon.

First, though, I want to clear up another assumption I had, which was that Chandran is a Sri Lankan-Australian writer. Wikipedia told me otherwise. It describes her as a British-Australian writer, who was born in London to Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. She grew up in Canberra, and studied law at the University of New South Wales, before working as a human rights lawyer in London for a decade. She now lives in Sydney. Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens is her third novel. GoodReads describes her first novel, Song of the Sun God (2017), as being “about three generations of Australian Tamil women and the choices they make to survive Sri Lanka’s civil war“. I don’t know what that novel’s overarching idea is, but Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens also draws from its main characters’ experiences during that civil war, and I do have a view on what drives it, so let’s get to the novel.

It is set in the Cinnamon Gardens Nursing Home in a fictional Sydney suburb called Westgrove, which situates it in Sydney’s multicultural western suburbs. The home is taken over in the early 1980s by Sri Lankan migrants, Cedric, Zakhir, and his wife Maya who wants to transform it to a place “where people will be valued”. The novel is told through multiple alternating voices, but starts with a Prologue which describes the home and which, if you read carefully, also prepares us for what’s to come:

Arabian jasmine climbs the wooden trellises staked in the garden beds. They are bold travellers, dark vines carrying white stars up the two-storey walls and around the windows of the residence. The plant grows obediently in the quiet suburb of Westgrove, Sydney, but its tropical ancestors are a wild breed, a vine that grows rampant in the villages of Sri Lanka, a home more familiar to many of the residents.

“Bold travellers”, “dark vines”, and “white stars” together with words like “obediently” and “wild” suggest a tension that we are going to explore.

We then start the narrative proper. It’s 2020, and Maya is now old and living as a resident in the home – albeit one who still holds many strings. Ruben is attending her, and we become aware that he bears fresh and old scars on his body. As the narrative progresses, we learn that the fresh scars come from recent racist attacks on him in the vicinity of the home, while the old scars relate to his experiences in Sri Lanka during the war. These scars more literally embody the tensions that pervade the novel.

From here, the rest of our narrators, all third person, are gradually introduced – Ruben; Maya’s daughter Anjali (Anji), who now manages the home; Anji’s old schoolfriend Nikki, who is the home’s geriatrician; and Nikki’s husband Gareth, who is white-Australian and a local councillor. There are other characters, including, most significantly, Anji’s also white-Australian husband, Nathan, and Maya’s aforementioned husband, Zakhir who disappeared, now presumed dead, ten years before the novel’s opening.

A strength of the novel is the way these characters inveigle their way into our hearts and minds so that we care about them, even the unappealing Gareth who, blinded by self-pity, rashly but unintentionally unleashes the dreadful drama that unfolds. It all hinges on racism. Chandran exposes the awful truth of how endemic racism is in Australian society and how, as a result, things can so quickly get out of hand. Interspersed with this present-day storyline are Maya’s, Ruben’s and Zakhir’s backstories, which explain why they had come to Australia – personally, in terms of what they had experienced during the civil war, and politically, in terms of their Tamil heritage and what that civil war was about.

I said at the beginning that the novel covers many issues which confront modern Australia, but that it also has one main driving idea. The issues include racism, colonialism, and multiculturalism; trauma, loss and grief; friendship, family and community; and the role played by the media, including social media, in fuelling emotions rather than encouraging reason. Underpinning these issues is the idea that drives the narrative – storytelling, and “the most powerful” of all stories, history. By framing her story within the Sri Lankan civil war and its battle over contested histories, Chandran makes her novel relevant to all cultures and societies where history has been used to oppress minorities resulting in violence, disempowerment and oppression, where distortion produces misinformation and confusion that can be manipulated to serve personal and political ends.

As grim and confronting as much of it is, Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens is not without hope. Alongside Chandran’s exploration of the misuse of history is a commitment to the positive value of story. To this end Maya, from the beginning, interviews all residents of the home, capturing their lives and their dreams in order to properly know and care for them. This provides the book with another underlying tension, that between histories that erase and stories that “must not be erased”.

Does it all work? Chandran holds a lot of balls in the air. Early on I felt caught in an awkward amalgam of a contemporary novel about middle class angst (husband versus wife, daughter versus mother, and so on) and one exploring critical political ideas. Also, there’s constant moving backwards and forwards in place and time, the plot felt a little contrived in places, and the main themes are hammered home. However, Chandran balances the tone well, mixing light humour and satire with sadness and tragedy, and the characters are vividly and sympathetically drawn. The end result is a book that reveals our essence, and asks us to consider how we might live together in respectful community. Consequently, despite some unevenness, I greatly enjoyed the read.

Shankari Chandran
Chai time at Cinnamon Gardens
Ultimo: Ultimo Press, 2022
360pp.
ISBN: 9781761151408