Monday musings on Australian literature: White writers on Indigenous Australians

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Over the years I’ve read many books written by white Australian writers on indigenous Australians*, including Mrs Aeneas Gunn’s We of the Never Never, Nene Gare’s The fringe dwellers, Thomas Keneally’s The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Kate Grenville’s The secret river, Peter Temple’s The broken shore, and several books by Thea Astley. Later this week I’ll be reviewing another, Margaret Merrilees’ debut novel The first week. I avoid reading reviews of books before I write my own, but I did want to find out about Merrilees, who is new to me. My research uncovered an essay written by her in 2007 titled Tiptoeing through the spinifex: White representations of Aboriginal characters.

In it, as the title implies, Merrilees tackles the dilemma faced by white writers in Australia:

To write about Australia, particularly rural Australia, without mentioning the Aboriginal presence (current or historical) is to distort reality, to perpetuate the terra nullius lie. However, for a non-Aboriginal writer to write about Aboriginal people is to run the risk of “appropriating” Aboriginal experience; speaking on behalf of … There’s been too much of that already.

I don’t think this dilemma is confined to writers, but writers occupy a particularly visible and influential position which heightens the challenge for them. Thomas Keneally has said that if he wrote his 1972-published The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith today he would not write in the voice of Blacksmith but from a white perspective, because “the two cultures are so different in their maps of the world that it was reckless to do it”’. Kate Grenville, whose The secret river was published in 2005, wrote in Searching for The secret river that:

I’d always known that I wasn’t going to try to enter the consciousness of the Aboriginal characters. I didn’t know or understand enough – and felt I never would. They – like everything else – would be seen through Thornhill’s eyes.

Fair enough. However, as Merrilees realises, it’s not always that simple. She looks broadly at the history of white representation of indigenous Australians in literature, suggesting it has often been well-intentioned but fraught nonetheless. She “listens” to what indigenous writers such as Jackie Huggins, Melissa Lucashenko and Kenny Laughton have said about “whites writing on blacks” and the resultant distortions and misconstructions. She explores some examples of fraud and theft of indigenous stories and culture by white Australians, such as Elizabeth Durack painting as Eddie Burrup and Patricia Wrightson using Aboriginal mythology. And she discusses the dangers of the opposite of appropriation, that is, the complete absence of indigenous people. She recognises that the situation hasn’t been helped by the paucity of indigenous writers, although this has started to slowly improve in recent decades.

So what are white Australian writers to do? Merrilees argues that

a novel which attempts to capture the Australian consciousness, and in particular a novel with a rural setting, or in which landscape plays a part, is impoverished if it does not address in some way the question past and current Aboriginal presence.

The question is how to do this. Taking herself as an example, Merrilees suggests that while she would decide not to write in the voice of an Aboriginal character, she wouldn’t want Aboriginal people to be silent. However, as soon as she made her indigenous characters speak, she writes, she’d be “tramping about” inside their heads “even though I said I wasn’t going to. A character who speaks is generally doing so in first person. So speech is just a form of first-person narrative after all … How am I going to explain this to all those Aboriginal writers who don’t want me speaking for them?”

Australian academics Kenneth Gelder and Jane Jacobs, she says, state that appropriation is implicit in fiction. If we accept this, we are then confronted with assessing the authenticity of the representation, but this raises more questions:

In the present political climate it is not for a white writer or critic to decide what is appropriate. Only Aboriginal people can decide. And of course, there is never going to be a unified Aboriginal view, any more than there is a unified white view. There is no such entity as “the Aboriginal people” to provide answers.

She therefore argues that “questions of appropriation become issues of personal ethics, conscience issues” and that there can be no definitive conclusions. She’s right, I believe. The only answer, I think, is something she says very early in the essay:

the best thing I [we] can offer Aboriginal Australians is to shut up and listen to them, actually find out what they think.

Genuine, thoughtful trial-and-error seems to be the way to go. Listen, give it a go, and listen again. What do you think?

* I will primarily use the term indigenous Australians to refer to Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Stella Prize 2014 longlist

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I’m not going to write a long post on the Stella Prize longlist because Paula Grunseit has written a good rundown of the books on the Australian Women Writers’ challenge website. Do check it out if you are interested to know more about the books (which I’ll list below).

The Stella Prize, regular readers here will know, is a new Australian literary prize for women writers, this being only its second year. One prize is awarded for a book that can be fiction (literary or genre, novel or short stories, poetry or prose) or non-fiction.

This year’s longlist was announced yesterday. It includes three books I’ve read and reviewed. (An improvement for me on last year when I’d read none at the time of longlisting, though by the end of the year I had read a few!) As last year, it’s a diverse collection, which includes debut novels, novels by indigenous authors, a short story collection, memoirs, a biography, and social analysis non-fiction (I have no idea what else to call books like Night games and The misogyny factor).

Anna Krien, Night Games

Courtesy: Black Inc

Anyhow, here is the list, in alphabetical order by author:

  • Letter to George Clooney, by Debra Adelaide (Picador): fiction, short story collection
  • Moving among strangers, by Gabrielle Carey (UQP): non-fiction, memoir
  • Burial rites, by Hannah Kent (Picador): fiction, debut novel
  • Night games, by Anna Krien (Black Inc): non-fiction, see my review
  • Mullumbimby, by Melissa Lucashenko (UQP): fiction, novel
  • The night guest, by Fiona McFarlane (Penguin): fiction, debut novel
  • Boy, lost, by Kristina Olsson (UQP): non-fiction, memoir
  • The misogyny factor, by Anne Summers (New South): non-fiction
  • Madeleine, by Helen Trinca (Text): non-fiction, biography, see my review
  • The swan book, by Alexis Wright (Giramondo): fiction, novel
  • The forgotten rebels of Eureka, by Clare Wright (Text): non-fiction, history
  • All the birds, singing, by Evie Wyld (Random House): fiction, novel, see my review

Three books published by UQP (University of Queensland Press)! Good for them.

For those of you who are interested, this year’s judges are:

  • Kerryn Goldsworthy, critic and writer (chair, and on last year’s panel)
  • Annabel Crabb (journalist and broadcaster)
  • Brenda Walker (author and academic)
  • Fiona Stager (bookseller, and on last year’s panel)
  • Tony Birch (writer and lecturer )

The winner will be announced on March 20.

Poetry at the Gods … with Les Murray

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What can I say but that it was wonderful to be in the presence of the man who is arguably Australia’s greatest living poet, Les Murray. Poetry at the Gods is a monthly event which has been run for many years by local poet Geoff Page*. (The Gods is a cafe-bar attached to the Australian National University’s Arts Centre.) I have only managed to get to a few readings over the years but, having had to miss Murray in the past, I was darned sure I was going to make it this time. Not only did I get there, but I got my copy of his Selected poems (Black Inc, 2007) signed. Woo hoo!

Before continuing, I should briefly explain Murray for non-Australians who may not have heard of him. His career has spanned over forty years. He has won multiple awards, has published many volumes of poetry (not to mention verse novels and prose works), is on the National Trust of Australia’s 100 Living Treasures, and is often spoken of, here at least, as a Nobel Laureate contender. I must admit that I don’t always get his poetry – but I enjoy the challenge. That’s poetry isn’t it?

Les Murray, Best 100 poems

Courtesy: Black Inc

Now to the evening. Murray read in two “sets” both lasting around 30 minutes. The first set comprised unpublished (I believe he said) poems written in recent years, while the second came from The best 100 poems of Les Murray published by Black Inc in 2012. (I am currently reading their Best 100 poems of Dorothy Porter).

I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about the reading. As much as I love attending poetry readings, because it is special to hear poets read their own poems, I find it hard to report on them. No sooner is one poem read, than the next one starts. It’s impossible – for me anyhow – to process the poems and say something meaningful about them as a whole. I will however make a few scattered observations.

I’m not sure how much Murray, now 75 years old, had planned in advance what he was going to read, but it looked pretty impromptu. In both “sets” he simply (simply?) flicked through the book he was reading from and chose poems he seemed to feel like reading. Sometimes he provided a few words of introduction to the poem, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he gave a little chuckle before or after, and sometimes he didn’t! In the first half, the poems ranged across such diverse subjects  as an apartment block in Beijing, English as a second language, and the challenge of writing haiku. I wish I had them before me. The variety spoke to an active, curious mind, to the poet’s ability to draw something beautiful, meaningful, from pretty well anything, which is what we want our poets to do, isn’t it? Oh, for such a mind.

In his second set, he read some poems that I do have before me, poems such as “The future”, “Postcard”, Lyrebird” and “Dead trees in the dam”. One that has stuck in my memory is the poem about his son who has autism. Titled “It allows a portrait in line scan at fifteen”, it was written when his son was fifteen, and perfectly conveys what I understand to be the experience of living with autism:

Giggling, he climbs all over the dim Freudian
psychiatrist who told us how autism resulted
from refrigerator parents

The poem conveys the split between the person and “it”, the condition. There’s humour, frustration and anger, as much the son’s as the parents’. Murray conveys the fascination with facts and rules, the focus on objectivity, the prodigious memory, that can be typical of autism. The final lines are heart-rending:

He surfs, bowls, walks for miles. For many years
he hasn’t trailed his left arm while
running.
I gotta get smart! looking terrified into the
years. I gotta get smart.

Religion is important to Murray. In fact, the two books of his that I have are dedicated “To the glory of God”. However, his poems are not, overall, self-consciously religious, are not dogmatic but many are informed by a faith in and an understanding of religion. In this context and as one who likes thinking about words and truths, I enjoyed poem “Poetry and Religion”. Here are the opening lines:

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing’s said until it’s dreamed out in words
and nothing’s true that figures in words only.

And that, I think, is as good a place as any to end on, don’t you think?

*I’ve reviewed his verse novel The scarring.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Bread and Cheese Club and Indigenous Australians

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Since last week’s Monday Musings post on Melbourne’s curious, but now defunct, Bread and Cheese Club, I’ve been doing further research into its various activities, and have found it to be an amazingly vibrant organisation. The club’s motto was “Mateship, Art and Letters” and a major focus seemed to have been Australian writers. Certainly its first Knight Grand Cheese, JK Moir, was a significant book collector, and it did publish around 40 or so books. However, its activities spread widely across what they would have described as Australiana. I might come back to them again, but today I want to write about their relationship to indigenous Australian culture.

Publishing

The club was quite an active publisher and among its publications were some rather significant works, for the time in particular, to do with Australian Aboriginal culture:

Albert Namatjira, 1949 (Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Albert Namatjira, 1949 (Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

  • Art of the Australian Aboriginal by Charles Barrett and Robert H. Croll (with a foreword by anthropologist AP Elkin), in 1943. Charles Barrett was a naturalist and journalist, and R.H. Croll an author and public servant. Both travelled widely throughout Australia. Barrett was passionate about protecting ancient Aboriginal art, writing that its protection “should be a national concern: white morons have already disfigured many”.
  • The art of Albert Namatjira by C. P. Mountford, in 1944. Albert Namatjira is one of Australia’s best known Aboriginal artists, a pioneer. Mountford was a mechanic and public servant turned anthropologist who, by the 1920s, was developing the interest in indigenous Australian culture that stayed with him the rest of his life. He was particularly interested in art, but I was intrigued to read in the Australian Dictionary of Biography that “in 1935 he was appointed secretary of a board of inquiry to investigate allegations of ill-treatment of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, at Hermannsburg and Ayers Rock”. He also travelled with Norman Tindale who is famous for his detailed map of indigenous Australia.

Interesting, I think, that it was this “little” club which published these books.

Donation to the Adelaide University’s fund for Aboriginal research

This one intrigued me, and is what inspired this post, in fact. I read in The Argus, 19 May 1951, that Albert Namatjira had donated £1000 to the Adelaide University’s fund for Aboriginal Research. But, apparently, the story goes, he did not make the donation himself because “as Australian law now stands, an aborigine cannot control an income of his own”! Enter Bread and Cheese Club founder JK Moir who made the donation on Namatjira’s behalf out of the proceeds of the book by CP Mountford. Moir is quoted as saying:

Albert, as an aborigine, cannot control his affairs, but I know what we have done has his enthusiastic endorsement. There is no precedent for this anywhere. An aborigine raising £1000 through his work for the cause of his own people is unique. I can assure you it will not be the last donation if we can help it.

Coranderrk and the Barak Grave

The final story activity I want to share is more in the style of those working bees that groups like Rotary and Lions have often done. It concerns the cemetery at Coranderrk. Coranderrk was an Aboriginal reserve established by the government for dispossessed indigenous Australians. It operated from 1863 to 1924. It’s quite a story that I won’t detail here, but in 1950 the land was handed over to the Soldier Settler Scheme. The cemetery, which of course contained graves of the previous indigenous residents, was by then in disarray. In a letter to the editor of the Healesville Guardian on 19 May 1951, naturalist David Fleay wrote of being “shocked at its state of absolute neglect and ruin”. Only two graves, one being that of, Barak, the last king of the Yarra Yarra tribe, were distinguishable he said. He also refers to the marble monument to Barak that had been in a significant position in the town of Coranderrk but was now in a depot. He argued that money should be put aside to renovate the cemetery and that the Barak monument go to its “rightful place”. He also suggests that “it is possible that the Melbourne Bread and Cheese Club, champions of Australiana would take a decided interest”.

And so, in fact, they did. A Healesville Guardian column by Oswald C Robarts on 11 November 1955 writes of their contribution. They seem to have become involved in 1952 and carried out at least one working bee in 1955. It’s not clear what else they did. A report in the Club’s journal, Bohemia, states that “we did a good day’s work and those who remember the terrible state of the Cemetery when we saw it on our first visit would be surprised. Much remains to be done.”

I will conclude though with Oswald C Robarts:

On January 23 this year, several members of the Club travelled from Melbourne, bringing with them the necessary materials and equipment for handling the heavy parts of the memorial. Working throughout the day in near-century heat, they completed the job. It should be scarcely necessary to add that these men, like others who have previously urged that something should be done about Coranderrk, were not concerned with public kudos nor material gain.

Basically, interest in the “old” Australians who have gone, and wise, firm and considerate care for those that remain, are matters of public conscience. There is by now fairly wide general agreement that far too often in the past, as well as today, they have been handed the seamiest side of Western civilisation. Here is a paradox to be removed, for Australia today is spending millions on the Colombo Plan, and bending over backwards to assure our Asian neighbours that there is no such thing as a “White Australia” policy in a racial sense.

There is an element of paternalism in “the wise, firm and considerate care for those that remain” but this seems to be to be pretty strong stuff for 1955. Thanks once again to Trove for making these papers available.

Evie Wyld, All the birds, singing (Review)

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Evie Wyld, All the birds, singing

Courtesy: Random House Australia

Quite by coincidence, I read Evie Wyld’s second novel All the birds, singing straight after Eleanor Catton’s The luminaries. I was intrigued by some similarities – both have a mystery at their core, and both use a complex narrative structure – but enjoyed their differences. Wyld’s book is tightly focused on one main character while Catton’s sprawls (albeit in a very controlled way) across a large cast. Paradoxically, Wyld’s 230-page book spans a couple of decades while Catton’s 830-page one barely more than a year. And yet both convey, through their structures, an idea of circularity, of the close relationship between beginnings and endings. But, enough prologue. On with All the birds singing.

The book opens powerfully:

Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding. Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring our their wings, singing, if you could call it that. I shoved my boot in Dog’s face to stop him from taking a string of her away with him as a souvenir, and he kept close by my side as I wheeled the carcass out of the field and down into the woolshed.

And so we are introduced to Jake and the things that dominate her life – Dog, sheep and birds. Soon, we learn there’s another thing – fear. But fear of what, or whom, we don’t know. From this opening, Wyld tells her story in alternating chapters: the odd ones, set in England, move forward, and the even ones, in Australia, move back to what started it all. It’s an effective structure that explores the ongoing impact on Jake of whatever it was that happened. We see what’s happening now, and we slowly see how she has got to this point.

Jake, at the start of the novel, is in her 30s. She’s a loner, capably running a sheep farm on a remote British island. Her nearest neighbour, Don, keeps a bit of a fatherly eye on her, and tries to encourage her to engage with the local community, to go to the pub for example, but Jake is not interested. As we move back in time we learn snippets about various significant people in her life – a lover while she was a shearer, a controlling man whom she’d initially seen as her rescuer, a female friend and co-worker. We also learn that she’s estranged from her Australian family, and we discover that she has scars on her back, but how they were caused are part of the mystery.

Wyld’s writing is marvellous. The imagery is strong but not heavy-handed because it blends into the story. The rhythm changes to suit the mood. The plot contains parallels that you gradually realise are pointing the way. There’s humour and irony. I love the fact that our Jake, on the run from whatever it is, smokes “Holiday” brand cigarettes.

There’s a bleakness to the novel, but it’s not unremitting. Jake, always the outsider, is tough and resourceful. She sleeps with a hammer under her pillow, but she has a soft side that is revealed mostly through her tenderness towards her animals. She talks to Dog, and losing a sheep always brings “a dull thudding ache”. The imagery is focused. Black, shadows, and fire in various permutations recur throughout the novel. They provide possible clues to what started it all; they contribute to the menace she feels now; and they help create an unsettling tone for the reader. We are never quite sure whether the shadow she sees out there, watching, following her, is real or a figment of her imagination. Jake is not an unreliable narrator, but we see through her eyes, and her eyes are influenced by her very real fears. She is “damaged goods”, though not in the sense meant by the paying customer (if you know what I mean!) offended by her scarred back.

And of course, there are the birds. They’re omnipresent. Sometimes they reflect her mood (“the birds sing and everything feels brand new”); sometimes they break tension; sometimes they suggest death. There are specific birds – butcher birds, night jars, galahs, merlins, currawongs and crows – and there are birds in general. The imagery references the real and metaphorical, from the crows hovering over the dead ewe in the opening paragraph to the birds near the end that attend the defining event:

[…] and the birds scream, they scream at me, Chip, chjjj, cheek, Jaay and jaay-jaay notes, Tool-ool, twiddle-dee, chi-chuwee, what-cheer … Wheet, wheet, wheet, wheet […]

awwchallenge2014It’s deafening. But it’s the silence and the dead birds afterwards that impresses the full horror on us:

The trees don’t want me there … There’s not a single bird to make a sound.

All the birds, singing is about how the past cannot “be left alone”. “We’ve all got pasts”, the shearers’ boss tells Jake early in the novel, but for some people the past must be dealt with before they can move on. The novel is also about redemption. It’s not the first novel about the subject, and neither will it be the last, but it is a finely told version that catches you in its grips and makes you feel you are reading it for the first time.

John at Musings of a Literary Dilettante loved the book too. Thanks to my brother and family for a wonderful Christmas gift!

Evie Wyld
All the birds, singing
North Sydney: Vintage Books, 2013
232pp
ISBN: 9781742757308

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Bread and Cheese Club

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I bet that title has you wondering! It was certainly new to me when I came across a book in my late mother-in-law’s collection titled Fellows all: The chronicles of the Bread and Cheese Club. Published in 1943, and written by HW Malloch, this book is a history of  the early years of the club by its first voted-in member.

I was intrigued, of course, so did some research. The Bread and Cheese Club, as it turns out was formed in Melbourne in June 1938. Its motto was “Mateship, Art and Letters”, and it was particularly active in promoting Australian writers. The Club apparently published around “40 volumes of verse and tributes” as well as a journal titled Bohemia. The founder* and Knight Grand Cheese (oh dear!) was John Kinmont Moir (1893-1958), a Melbourne book-collector. He apparently died in 1958, and the club gradually declined, finally ending in 1988. I wonder how many Melburnians know about it now?

Delving further, I learnt a little more about Moir and the club. Moir, in particular, is a rather significant man in Australian letters. According to the State Library of Victoria, Moir, from the 1930s to 1950s, “set himself the daunting task of collecting one copy of every work of fiction, poetry and drama ever published by an Australian author.” This, they said, at a time when Australian literary authors were neither fashionably read nor collected. The result was “one of the finest private libraries of Australian literature ever assembled”, one that he donated to the State Library in the 1950s. It remains one of their most significant collections. You can read more about him – and it’s an interesting story – online in the State Library’s La Trobe Journal.

John Shaw Neilson

John Shaw Neilson (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

But, back to the Club. It was male only. The twelve founding members included the poet John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942) and balladist Edward Harrington. According to Malloch, the unusual name was chosen because they wanted something “Bohemian” and “arresting”, and it had the desired effect: it made people curious and provided an opportunity for members to explain their aims. Malloch tells a lovely story, too, about one of its practices – quaint to our point of view but indicative of their era – which was making it “a penal offence” to address each other as “Mister”.  Doing so incurred a fine of one penny which helped, in the early days at least, to swell the club’s coffers!

John Arnold in the La Trobe Journal says that Moir was conservative – right-wing, in fact. But the club was not political – though I suspect from my reading of Malloch that it leaned more right than left. Its goals were:

To promote mateship and fellowship among persons of mutual interests, to foster a knowledge of Australian Literature, Art and Music and to cultivate an Australian sentiment … (Malloch, p. 17)

It did this not only through publishing but by undertaking a wide range of projects and activities such as art exhibitions, song of the year competitions, short story competitions, and lobbying government. Malloch describes some of the earliest activities, including a short story competition which was judged by Nettie Palmer. Searching the National Library of Australia’s digitised newspaper database in Trove provides a fascinating picture of the breadth of the Club’s** activities. One report states that the Bread and Cheese Club was behind the Commonwealth Government’s providing a grant for the writing of a biography about JF Archibald, the founder of The Bulletin.

The club also invited guest speakers, and often opened those meetings to the public. Malloch tells us that these speakers included artist Max Meldrum, indigenous Australian activist, pastor and state governor Doug Nicholls, and journalist-author Frank Clune.

I could go on … it’s a fascinating story of passion and commitment to Australian culture. They even printed 50,000 stickers with such slogans as “Combine Pleasure and Patriotism and Read Australian Books” and “Let Your Christmas Gift be an Australian Book”. Where are these people now!

Finally, before I go, I can’t resist sharing one of those odd little reading synchronicities. I have, as my regular readers know, just read Eleanor Catton’s The luminaries. It starts with 12 men gathered in a hotel room, but they became 13 when a hotel guest wanders in. The Bread and Cheese Club started when 12 men met in a studio with the aim of “fostering Australian Art and Literature”. Having had their meeting, they adjourned to a nearby “city hostelry” where they met Malloch, and promptly asked him to join them. And so, he writes, there were 13. I know, I’m being silly, but I enjoy such, dare I call them, coincidences!

* POSTSCRIPT: While some reports describe Moir as the founder, Malloch’s book doesn’t state this. On page 10, he writes that: “Twelve turned up at the studio of Fellow E. J. Turner, 132 Cubitt Street, Richmond, and set the ball rolling with the definite aim of fostering Australian Art and Literature”. And on page 13, he specifically names these twelve as “the founders”. Moir was elected president (aka Knight Grand Cheese) and Turner secretary (or Worthy Scribe).

** Searching Trove surprisingly retrieves another Bread and Cheese Club in Melbourne! Malloch tells us briefly about that too. It was a very small club of solicitors and in 1859 merged into the Law Institute of Victoria.

Delicious descriptions: More on Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries

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Rightly or wrongly, I try to keep my reviews to a reasonable length. When they start creeping up to 1200 words, I worry that readers will be discouraged from reading. There’s so much to read out there – so many books, so many blogs, so many articles. And so, when my review of The luminaries started to close in on 1100 words, I decided that it was time to stop. There’s always my Delicious Descriptions series I thought …

So here I am. I’m going to introduce my follow-up with another character description, this time of the young banker:

Charlie Frost was no great observer of human nature, and as a consequence, felt betrayed by others very frequently. The air of cryptic strategy with which he often spoke was not manufactured, though he was entirely sensible of its effects; it came, rather, out of a fundamental blindness to all experience exterior to his own. Frost did not know how to listen to himself as if he were somebody else; he did not know how to see the world from another man’s eyes; he did not know how to contemplate another man’s nature, except to compare it, either enviously or pitiably, to his own. He was a private hedonist, perennially wrapped up in the cocoon of his own senses, mindful, always, of the things he already possessed, and the things he had yet to gain; his subjectivity was comprehensive, and complete.

An important aspect of the novel I omitted in my review was its relationship to the 19th century Victorian novel. I just couldn’t do it justice in a few words … Since writing my review, I’ve been roaming around blogs and reviews, reading various responses. I’m finding a fascinating array of ideas: it’s rich, it’s hollow, it’s tedious, it’s exciting, it’s innovative … and so on. Many discuss this 19th century novel aspect – and one of the issues raised is Catton’s characterisation. Some suggest, as I have too in other reviews, that the novelist should show not tell. They argue that Catton’s character descriptions, such as the one above, do too much telling. They don’t like it. I don’t see it that way, though. For me, it’s a matter of what you show and what you tell. No amount of her “showing” me Charlie Frost would result in my being able to describe his character the way she has here. I’m more than happy to read such delicious descriptions as this, and then watch the character acting it out.

Catton also invokes other stylistic features of the Victorian novel – the coincidences, the red herrings, the mixed identities, the large cast of characters, the gritty realism, and the omniscient and sometimes intrusive narrator. Is Catton being anachronistic or has she offered a fresh take? I feel the latter. For one thing, there is no clear protagonist until, perhaps, towards the end when the chapters shorten and the focus narrows to the two who we realise are the luminaries. That’s a subversion of expectations. Maybe it’s this that creates the problem.  With no protagonist for us to hang our hat on, we feel adrift, uncertain. We thought the stranger, Walter Moody, would be our protagonist but he disappears midway after the trial. Furthermore, Victorian novels tend to have clear moral arguments. This novel has themes and moral concerns, but the conclusion does not, really, resolve them. That’s not particularly subversive, but it is more modern.

Another way Catton has nodded to the 19th century tradition is through using descriptive chapter summaries to open each chapter, as in “In which a stranger arrives in Hokitika …”. You need, with this book, to be a reader who reads such details. Some readers tend to ignore  features like chapter headings, seeing them as superfluous, but in The luminaries you ignore them at your peril. As the novel draws to a close, the “in which” chapter summaries become longer as the chapters themselves, following her waning-moon astrological structure, become shorter. By the last few chapters, these so-called summaries contain information that is not further elaborated in the chapter itself. If you don’t read them, you miss some plot. I liked this playing with the form, this reminder that the book is a holistic thing. It, too, is subversive.

However, I mustn’t be too holier than thou, because I didn’t put the effort into understanding the astrological charts, which represent another nod to the 19th century (though not so much to the 19th century novel.) As I understand it, astrology, an ancient school of thought, experienced a resurgence in the 19th century after being generally discarded during the 17th-18th centuries’ Age of Enlightenment (or Reason). Goethe, no less, was an enthusiast, as was, later in the century, Jung. For me, though, reading all the text in the novel is one thing; leaving the novel to go research astrological signs and their meanings is a whole different ball-game. If such knowledge added meaning to the novel, then I’m afraid I missed it.

All this brings us to one question. Why did Catton choose to write her novel in this style? Is it riff, pastiche, reworking, or homage? I’m not sure, but it sure seems to have got a lot of people talking. As for me … I’m still puzzling!

PS One of the most interesting analyses I’ve read of the novel is by Julian Novitz in the Sydney Review of Books.

Eleanor Catton, The luminaries (Review)

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Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Now here’s the thing … I don’t make a practice of reading mysteries. I really don’t care about who dunnit. When Mr Gums and I watch television crime shows, I rarely concentrate enough to work out the plot intricacies, but I do watch the characters. I’m always interested in the detectives and their relationships. I want to know who they are and what makes them tick. And so, I must say that I got a little tired of the plot machinations in Eleanor Catton’s Booker prize-winning novel, The luminaries. I didn’t really want to expend effort to keep track of the complexities of whose gold went where, who told whom what, and so on. But, I did find the book an interesting read, nonetheless.

Why? Well, first and foremost because of the characters. In the first half of the novel, as the characters were being introduced, I was impressed by Catton’s understanding of human nature.  Her characters, most of them anyhow, are nuanced – if that’s not too clichéd a term. Here for example is Thomas Balfour:

When a restless spirit is commissioned, under influence, to solve a riddle for another man, his energies are, at first, readily and faithfully applied. But Thomas Balfour’s energies tended to span a very short duration, if the project to which he was assigned was not a project of his own devising. His imagination gave way to impatience, and his optimism to an extravagant breed of neglect. He seized an idea only to discard it immediately, if only for the reason that it was no longer novel to him; he started in all directions at once. This was not at all the mark of a fickle temper, but rather, of a temper that is accustomed to enthusiasm of the most genuine and curious sort, and so will accept no form of counterfeit – but it was nevertheless, something of an impediment to progress.

This made me laugh. Not all descriptions did of course, but most are insightful of humanity.

There is also humour in the book – some funny scenes, and wry asides. Since we’re on Thomas Balfour, let’s stay with him. Here he is meeting the chaplain Cowell Devlin:

‘Good morning’, returned the reverend man, and from his accent Balfour knew at once that he was Irish; he relaxed, and allowed himself to be rude.

Thomas, as you might have guessed, is English – and this of course tells us more about him than about Devlin.

Perhaps at this point I should mention the plot, though as a Booker Prize Winner, its basic premise is probably known to most of you. The novel is set in the New Zealand goldfields, Hokitika mainly, over 1865 to 1866. The plot concerns the death of one man, the disappearance of another, an apparent suicide attempt, and the provenance of a gold fortune. There are 20 main characters – 12 described as stellar, representing the 12 astrological star signs; 7 described as planetary, representing, of course, the planets; and one, the dead man, described as terra firma. It’s a lot to keep in your head but Catton does provide a character chart at the front to help.

There is a lot to enjoy while reading this book, in addition to the characterisation and humour. The plot is intricate and fun to unravel if you enjoy mysteries. The goldfields setting is realistic, with its businessmen, publicans, politicians, prospectors, whores, opium dealers and tricksters, not to mention the salting and the duffers. The writing is sure. I enjoyed her use of imagery. Grey and yellow feature throughout as do references to spirits (ethereal, emotional, and alcoholic), ghosts, apparitions, phantoms, fog and mist. These all helped convey a sense of murkiness, and of things shifting before our eyes.

The main themes are to do with truth, lies and fraud, with love, loyalty and betrayal. It’s quite a cynical world that our characters find themselves in. As the not-yet dead man, Crosbie Wells, says to the whore, Anna Wetherell:

There’s no charity in a gold town. If it looks like charity, look again.

There is, of course, but it’s rare – and, as Wells advises, you have to be darned careful about who you trust, because, human nature being what it is, where there’s gold, there’s always greed.

The big challenge of this novel is its structure. I’ve already mentioned the structure of the characters. The astrological theme is carried through into the structure of the narrative. The book is divided into 12 parts which, I learnt at my reading group, are meant to align with the lunar cycle, each part being exactly half the length of the previous part. This didn’t feel artificial, because the increasingly shorter parts provided a rhythm to the unravelling of the plot. The other point to make about the structure is that the novel commences on 27 January 1866, 13 days after 14 January when the critical plot events take place. The novel then moves forward, through the trial and its aftermath, to 27 April 1866 (Part 4). In this part, we also jump back, in alternating chapters, to 27 April 1865, when the major players in the plot start, shall we say, “orbiting” each other, if not downright colliding. The novel then progresses forward again, ending on 14 January 1866, not quite back at the beginning, but on the day that precipitates the narrative.

There is, then, a certain circularity to it all, but what does it mean? Does this structure do anything for we readers? I’m not sure. There are intricate astrological charts at the beginning of each part showing where the 12 characters are positioned, astronomically speaking, on that date. I don’t have the astrological knowledge to know whether these charts added meaning or not. The circularity does, however, suggest another potential theme – which is, as chaplain Devlin says, that:

Some things are never done.

Devlin says something else too, which is reinforced by the way the narrative progresses via the stories of the various players:

never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person’s point of view.

So, in the end, where did it all leave me? Wondering, in fact, whether it was just a little too clever for itself or, maybe, too clever for me. Either way, I did enjoy the read, and was impressed by the skill with which Catton executed her tale and the insight she has into human nature. Beyond that, I think it’s best if you decide for yourselves.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) wasn’t enamoured, nor was the Resident Judge, but John (Musings of a Literary Dilettante) liked it very much.

Eleanor Catton
The luminaries
London: Granta, 2013
832pp.
ISBN: 9781847088765

Vale Pete Seeger

/ Whispering Gums / 29 Comments

Pete Seeger, 2007 (Photo: Anthony Pepitone, using CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia)

Pete Seeger, 2007 (Photo: Anthony Pepitone, using CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia)

If music is powerful, and words are powerful, what power can words set to music have? Pete Seeger knew, but I don’t need to tell anyone that do I? What a legacy he has left us from his 94 years on this earth!

I’m an Australian of course, but Seeger, who first came to me through Peter, Paul and Mary singing “If I had a hammer”,  introduced me to folk music, or, more specifically, to folk music as protest. Later, I got to hear Peter himself – not live, unfortunately – and others like Joan Baez, Judy Collins who sang Seeger’s songs, and were inspired by him.

Anyhow, in memory of Seeger, I thought I’d share my favourite memories:

  • singing “If I had a hammer”, “This land is your land”, and “Where have all the flowers gone”, with such feeling, in my youth;
  • choosing Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 as the bible reading at our wedding because I loved the song “Turn! Turn! Turn!“;
  • falling in love with The Weavers whose heyday was a little before my time when I saw the 1982 documentary The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time (and then buying the CD);
  • being surprised every time I discover that yet another song I love was either written by Seeger (including those named here) or popularised by him (such as Malvina Reynolds’ “Little boxes” and the traditional hymn “We shall overcome”).

The LA Times obituary quotes Bruce Springsteen as saying that Seeger was:

a living archive of America’s music and conscience, a testament to the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to push American events towards a more humane and justified end.

Seeger himself is quoted as saying “My religion is that the world will not survive without dialogue”. I’m no Seeger expert, but everything I’ve ever heard about the man has either inspired me or made me feel good.  So, vale to Pete. His influence may have been greatest in the USA, but it sure was nice knowing he was around, singing his heart out and doing his best to make the world a better place to live in. Thank goodness we still have the songs.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australia’s difficult novels

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A week or so ago I wrote a post about reading difficult novels. As I researched that post, I came across many lists of difficult novels, including the one I included at the end of the post. The interesting thing is that none of the lists I saw included any Australian novels, and yet they included novels from most of the other continents. Do we not have any, or, more likely, are we just not on the world literature radar enough? Anyhow, I thought I’d get the ball rolling and suggest a few possibilities:

  • Patrick White’s Voss. It’s logical to start with White, because, currently, he’s Australia’s only Nobel Prize winner for literature. (I’ll do the rest alphabetically!).I’m not sure that Voss is his most difficult novel, but it depends on your definition of difficult. White’s prose is dense, with complex sentence structures and intense, but vivid imagery. Many readers find Voss particularly hard to read, though, because of the spiritual communion between Voss in the desert and Laura in the city. However, it appealed to my teenage sense of romance and resulted in my falling love with White.
  • Thea Astley’s Drylands. I’ve read quite a few Astleys. After all, she’s one of my favourite writers. She has a reputation for being difficult, with her earliest novels being particularly so, but I’ve chosen her last because of its form and its sense of desperation. Writer Mandy Sayer, an admirer like me, agrees that she is not “an easy read”, saying that she is “at once poetic, quirky, and literary”. Her imagery can be over the top, and she doesn’t shy from exploring our brutality, but she has such a heart. Every Australian should read her.
  • Peter Carey’s Illywhacker. Carey is hard to pin down, as his books vary so greatly. It’s one of the reasons I like him. You never know what you are going to get, from the at times surreal, to something like True history of the Kelly gang with its 19th century vernacular, unpolished grammar and largely absent punctuation, to the complexly structured like Parrot and Olivier in America (my review) and The chemistry of tears (my review). I’ve chosen Illywhacker, not because it’s regarded as his hardest but because I haven’t read it (yet).
  • JM Coetzee’s Diary of a bad year (my review). Coetzee, in this book and its predecessor Elizabeth Costello, pushes the envelope in terms of “the novel”. Some argued that Elizabeth Costello was more a series of lectures than a novel. Diary of a bad year presents readers with a very specific challenge. How do you read it, with its three (two to begin with) concurrent strands running across the top, middle and bottom of the page? Do you read one strand and then come back and read the next? Or do you try to read them concurrently? This is one of those books that is a challenge to read for its unusual structure and for the interplay between ideas and story that the reader needs to tease out.
  • Gerald Murnane’s The plains (my review). As blogger M. Sarki has written, “There is nothing but difficulty in reading a book written by Gerald Murnane.  But the reading gives me an enormous amount of pleasure…”. Murnane is one of our most innovative writers. He’s a challenge to read – where am I?, what is he saying? – but there’s exhilaration in that. I need to read more of him.

I think five is probably a good start, particularly given I’ve rambled on about each one. Other writers well worth considering if you are looking for “difficult” Australian literature include Rodney Hall, Thomas Keneally (his early works), David Malouf, Frank Moorhouse, Christos Tsiolkas. Not all works by these writers are “difficult” but many are recognised to be so.

I’ve read works by each of the writers I’ve named, but I’m sure other Aussies could name some favourite writers and “difficult” novels too. Has anyone read, for example, Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Let’s get our Aussies out there!