Villainesses thriving in Canberra

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Now I know many Australians see Canberra, their national capital, as a soulless, boring, sliced-white-bread sort of place but not so. There is life here. Art is happening – and it’s fresh, vibrant and young. Not all our young people have left (yet!).

Last night Mr Gums and I went to the opening of a collaborative exhibition organised by a group of twenty-somethings. The theme was Villainess. It was chosen, as one of the collaborators Georgia Kartas wrote in the foreword of the accompanying booklet,

for its surface-level but nonetheless undeniable badassery. Heroes have quests, villains have motives.

This is not a politically-focussed feminist exhibition as its name could suggest – though by its very existence it makes a statement about young women and their sense of self, their confidence, their willingness to get out there and do something for themselves. No, in fact it’s a fashion photo shoot exhibition. It is fun, clever, wicked – and it is stylish, as you’d expect from a fashion shoot. You can read something about its origin and the creation process at hercanberra and at Georgia Kartas’ redmagpie blog.

The collaborators were Elly Freer (photographer), Laura McCleane (make-up artist), and Georgia Kartas (fashion editor). The clothing, the hairpieces, the props were all sourced locally.

The photographic subjects are – of course – villainesses and they were chosen by the models – Elly, Laura, Georgia and their friends. There are ten villainesses, and they come from literature, popular culture and mythology, ranging from the very modern, such as Elle Driver from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, to the very classic, like Medusa.

We loved the exhibition. The photographs are beautiful, and exude a delightful, but intelligent, irreverence which characterises the ethos of the exhibition. A lot of thought has clearly gone into the event, including the production of an accompanying booklet which contains written responses to the villainesses by local writers. These responses give the exhibition an extra dimension – reflective, and often satirical, or tongue-in-cheek. I particularly enjoyed Eleanor Malbon’s response to Elle Driver who was modelled by Elly Freer (what a coincidence in names here!) in which she manages to spoof both Quentin Tarantino and James Cameron (Avatar):

… All together, the problems of the world make a charge at Driver.

Flesh meets steel as she wields her swords. Elle Driver dunks soil erosion in a bucket full of gypsum. She rips the mask off charity programs to reveal their reinforcement of material inequality. Her bullets fly through the heart of the underlying causes of biodiversity loss.

You get the picture I’m sure. The booklet itself, designed by Sheila Papp, is a lovely piece of art and a fabulous memento of the exhibition.

Yep, a good night in which we saw the next generation of artists-creators strutting their stuff. What fun!

Villainess
Kaori Gallery, Cnr London Circuit and Hobart Place, Civic
7-9 November, 2013

Disclosure: I have known the photographer since she was a baby. Go Elly!

Bianca Nogrady, The end: The human experience of death (Review)

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Bianca Nogrady, The end book coverHave you thought about your death? About how and where you want to die? These are the questions Australian science journalist Bianca Nogrady asks us to consider in her recent book, The end: the human experience of death. I’m not a morbid person, but when Nogrady contacted me to ask whether I’d consider reviewing her book, The end, it didn’t take me long to say yes. Like Nogrady I did witness, a couple of years ago, something I would call “a (pretty) good death”. That I felt it was so, intrigued me. I was therefore interested to read what Nogrady had to say.

And what she had to say was fascinating from beginning to end. In her introduction, she says:

This book could just as easily have been Everything you wanted to know about death but were afraid to ask. Death is fascinating, compelling, and it consists of much more than simply the end of a biological life-form. In seeking to understand death, we are seeking to understand life.

The rest of the book is structured logically according to the sorts of topics we are likely to ask about, starting with why we die, and then moving on to issues like defining death, where, when and how we die, spiritual and out-of-body experiences, and religion. Nogrady looks at these issues from all the likely points of view –  medical, sociological, psychological, philosophical, legal and ethical. She organises her information well, and the chapters (and subchapters) flow very naturally from each other.

So far, I have probably made it sound like a well-organised rather dry read – but that’s not how it is. Not only did Nogrady do a lot of secondary research (as the Notes at the end attest) but she also interviewed a lot of people. As a result, the formal information garnered from her research is supported by people’s stories, which also add colour and life to the facts. Many are of course sad – we are talking death after all – but this is not a sad book.

The most complicated section of the book is the second chapter on “Defining Death”. Nogrady takes us carefully through the different “definitions” – specifically, cardiac death and brain death (which, I learnt, can be further subdivided into “whole brain death” and “brain stem death”). She shows how the definition issue has been complicated by medical advances enabling us to keep the body alive and, of course, by the organ transplant process. Royal North Shore Hospital’s Intensive Care Specialist Dr Ray Raper suggests that death is:

a continuum; a graded box with one end as ‘being alive’ and the other end as ‘being dead’ … If you look at the domains of the transition between life and death, they’re spiritual, functional and structural and they’re biological, and the most important ones are the functional ones.

Death, in other words, is a process. If your fingernails are still growing when you are in the coffin, then, says Arizona State University Professor of Philosophy Joan McGregor, the questions needing answers relate to what are we preserving and why do we value it. I’ll leave this discussion here because there is no single solution – or not at present anyhow. This is murky ground indeed, but Nogrady manages to traverse it with clarity. I will probably have to read the book a few times though for the concepts to stick!

She also discusses euthanasia, teasing out misconceptions. She explains the differences between physician-assisted suicide, voluntary euthanasia and terminal sedation. She also explores the rise in palliative care as a profession, covering related issues like death doulas and volunteer workers in palliative care hospitals (or hospices). And of course she talks about near-death experiences, and those death-time phenomena that science can’t explain such as clocks stopping, machines behaving erratically, and deathbed visions.  The final chapter discusses faith and belief. Death is cultural, but, as she discovered, there is as much similarity as there are differences in end-of-life rituals.

It’s a funny thing to say, I suppose, but this is an enjoyable book. It’s neither superficial nor so detailed that you get bogged down. There is a lovely balance between expert opinions and anecdotes. I can imagine reading it again – or parts of it. It’s a shame, though, that there isn’t an index, which seems to be common in non-fiction books aimed at a general market. I guess it’s all about cost.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeIn her epilogue, Nogrady returns to her own experience, to how the death of her grandmother had caused her to want to better understand death. Writing the book, she says, made her think about “the value of planning, or at least thinking about how we want to die”. Death is, after all, a “one-way journey”. We do it alone, and it may well be, she argues, our best chance “find out who we are at the core”. One man who spent a long time thinking about his death, because he had a degenerative, terminal disease, was Australian public intellectual Donald Horne whose last book, written with his wife Myfanwy, was Dying: A memoir. He wrote:

My final drifting away, via a morphine dose, I would want to be among my memories, with Myfanwy whom I love holding my hand.

Think about your death, plan for it, is Nogrady’s final message to us. If you’re ready to take up her challenge, The end would be a good place to start.

Bianca Nogrady
The end: The human experience of death
North Sydney: Vintage Books, 2013
260pp
ISBN: 9781742752051

(Review copy supplied by the author)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Hazel Rowley Literary Fund

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It seemed appropriate to talk about the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund this week given that several commenters on my review of Christina Stead‘s For love alone mentioned Rowley’s well-regarded biography of Christina Stead. Quite coincidentally – amazing how often such coincidences occur isn’t it – AustLit posted on their blog last week a piece titled The names behind our literary awards #1: Hazel Rowley. Today’s post was clearly meant to be.

For those of you who don’t know, Hazel Rowley was one of Australia’s most respected biographers. Christina Stead: A biography, published in 1993, was her first biography. It won the National Book Council’s “Banjo” Award for non-fiction. Her next biography published in 2001 was on the African-American writer, Richard Wright, whose book Native son is on my TBR, courtesy of my daughter. This was followed by Tête-à-tête: the lives and loves of Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre in 2005, and the biography I have read and reviewed, Franklin & Eleanor: an extraordinary marriage, in 2011. Unfortunately, this is where her work ends because Rowley, born in 1951, died in New York of a cerebral haemorrhage in 2011 as that last biography was coming out. What a tragedy – for her, her family, and us. I love the fact that she wasn’t afraid to tackle already well-covered subjects, like Sartre and de Beauvoir, and the Roosevelts. I’m not an expert on the Roosevelts but from my reading I think she did contribute an interesting perspective to the body of work about them.

Anyhow, soon after her death, her friends and family established the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund. It “aims to commemorate Hazel’s life and her writing legacy through activities that support biography and writing in general”. The main vehicle for this is the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. It  is offered annually and provides up to $10,000  to a writer researching a biography, or “an aspect of cultural or social history compatible with Hazel’s interest areas”. The Fund states that “Preference will be given to projects that are about ‘risk-taking’ and expanding horizons, promote discussion of ideas, and make a significant contribution to public intellectual life”. That’s a big call – but an encouraging one too – particularly given the discussion in last week’s Monday Musings about “commercial imperatives” blocking “artistic ones”. More encouragement of “risk-taking” is what we want. Is it good enough though to rely on private funding to achieve this?

(With thanks to AustLit for the inspiration for this post)

Thoughts on Christina Stead’s writing in For love alone

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I can’t resist writing another post on Christina Stead‘s For love alone, which I reviewed recently. Usually in my reviews I make some comments about the writing, but that review was getting so long that I decided to leave that discussion for another day.

I’m embarrassed to admit that For love alone is my first Stead. I’ve been wanting to get to her for the longest time, but somehow other books kept getting in the way. I’ll admit too that I was a bit nervous – as I’d heard over the years that she was difficult to read, or that her books were too miserable. Fortunately, I found neither of these to be the case with this novel. From the first chapter I was hooked. The book does have a little prologue which I enjoyed, but it was the first chapter that really got me in – and it got me in primarily because of its writing.

I love writing that plays with words and this is what I found in chapter one. Take for example this use of the word “bending” in an exchange between the heroine Teresa and her father (pp. 11-12):

“… I am in love again, with a young woman, a woman of thirty, a – ” His voice dropped. He came towards her, seized her arms and looked into her face without bending. “A wonderful, proud looking woman, pure in soul. “My whole life is wrapping itself around her, so I’m glad you brought it up for you will understand later on -”

She angrily shook her arms free. “Don’t touch me, I don’t like it.”

He sighed and turned his shoulder to her. “That is no way to treat men, men don’t like an unbending woman.”

“I am unbending.”

“You will be sorry for it.”

Then a few sentences down, her father says to her about flirtatious, coaxing behaviour in women:

“If, I say, you should ever be tempted to tricks like that, thinking to please some man, remember that they detest those tricks and see through them. They know they are traps, mean little chicane to bend them to women’s purpose.”

This is such a clever and telling exchange. It immediately tells us something about the father, the daughter and their relationship, about the likely themes of the novel (particularly given the title) and, though we don’t know it, it sets up future exchanges with Jonathan Crow who often talks of women trapping men.

A couple pages on is a another exchange in the family in which the idea of “honour” is played with and twisted. Stead, I sensed, was a writer I was going to like.

This, however, is not all that captured me in the first chapter. There were also several oxymorons (oxymora?) that added to the sense of slipperiness. Teresa’s room is described as “an inviting cell” and her brother, Lance, as “chaste and impure”. In the next chapter, a womanising dockhand is “agreeably sinister”.

It is language like this – ironic, satirical, biting – that keeps me reading, particularly in early stages of books where I’m not sure what is happening. I enjoy this sort of language because it challenges our preconceptions and can set a strong tone. (I do like a strong tone.) Mostly, though, such language tells me that the novel in question is likely to be multi-layered and that I’d better be ready to look beneath the surface.

Stead also writes beautiful, evocative descriptions. Christina Houen, commenting on my review of the book, referred to Stead’s description of Sydney. Stead herself grew up on Sydney Harbour. Here is the description Christina referred to. It occurs as Teresa is returning home after the wedding that opens the book:

It was high tide at nine-thirty that night in February and even after ten o’clock the black tide was glassy, too full for lapping in the gullies. Up on the cliffs, Teresa could see the ocean flooding the reefs outside, choking the headlands and swimming to the landing platforms of jetties in the bays. It was long after ten when Teresa got to the highest point of the seaward cliffs and turning there, dropped down to the pine-grown bay by narrow paths and tree-grown boulders, trailing her long skirt, holding her hat by a ribbon. From every moon-red shadow came the voices of men and women; and in every bush and in the clumps of pine, upon unseen wooden seats and behind rocks, in the grass and even on open ledges, men and women groaned and gave shuddering cries as if they were being beaten. She passed slowly, timidly, but fascinated by the strange battlefield, the bodies stretched out, contorted, with sounds of the dying under the fierce high moon. She did not know what the sounds were, but she knew children would be conceived this night, and some time later women would marry hurriedly, if they could, like one of her cousins who had slept the night with a man in one of these very grottoes; and perhaps one or two would jump into the sea. There were often bodies fished up around here, that had leapt when the heart still beat, from these high ledges into waters washed around these rocks by the moon. (Beginning of Ch. 5)

I won’t even try to unpack all this, but I’m sure you can see how intense and dense it is. It’s ambiguous about love and sex – and this ambiguity underlies the whole book, right through to – and beyond – its resolution.

Oh, and then there’s her facility with dialogue, her imagery, her literary and classical allusions – but again this post is starting to get long. Maybe another day!

Christina Stead, For love alone (Review)

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In a recent communication with local author Nigel Featherstone about reviewing, he reminded me of Peter Rose’s advice for new reviewers for the ABR. One of the points Rose makes is:

with major books, ones that have been reviewed extensively in the newspapers, submit reviews that add to our understanding of the book, not just repetitious codas to or echoes of earlier reviews.

This stands also, I think, for classics, for books that have become part of the “canon”. Stead’s For love alone is such a book. My problem then is how to say something about this book that isn’t same-old, same-old. I could be lucky here though, because while Christina Stead is part of the Australian literary canon she’s probably not as well read or as well-known as she should be.

To gain some idea of her reputation amongst the literati, just look at these comments … Patrick White described this book as ‘A remarkable book. I feel elated to know it is there’. Now that is really something isn’t it? Helen Garner has said ‘I could die of envy of her hard eye’, David Malouf wrote that ‘Christina Stead has the scope, the imagination, the objectivity of the greatest novelists’, while American critic Clifton Fadiman called her ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf‘. He has qualified his praise with ‘woman’, but nonetheless, you see what I mean. What can I add to a discussion of a writer of this ilk?

Enough introduction. Those of you who don’t know the novel are probably wondering by now what it’s about. The title sounds a bit melodramatic, and the basic plot-line could suggest it, but in fact the book is low on drama. You don’t read Stead for page-turning excitement. The novel is set in Sydney and London, from 1933 to 1937. It concerns Teresa Hawkins, the 19-year-old daughter of an unloving, self-involved father. Neither she nor her three siblings are happy at home but seem tied to it, mostly for economic reasons. The novel opens with Teresa and her sister Kitty attending the wedding of their cousin Malfi, setting the scene for Teresa’s quest for love – for a real love, though, not for “some schoolfellow gone into long trousers”. Unfortunately, while she is an intelligent and resourceful young girl, she is also naive. She sets her sights on her Latin teacher, the 23-year-old Jonathan Crow*. Consider the name, and you might gain some insight into his nature!

“She believed firmly in the power of the will to alter things and force things to an end”

It’s hard when reading the novel not to think of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (surely it’s relevant that Teresa is also called Tessa?) and, even more, of Edith Wharton‘s heroines. However, while society’s rules and conventions underpin the plot, Stead is more interested in her characters’, particularly Teresa’s, psychology. What does Teresa mean by love, what is its impact on her, and how far will she go for it? Very far, we soon discover. She denies herself sustenance almost to the point of death, not once but twice, in the novel. Why?

Well, let’s look at Teresa/Tessa. Early in the novel, she’s idealistic. She will not, she says, compromise her life. “I’ll never give in” (p. 33) she says to her aunts, and a little later says to her cousin, “I’d work my fingers to the bone to keep my lover” (p. 127). As she becomes immersed in her love for Jonathan Crow, she enacts these vows: “I am killing myself for a man” (p. 314), she realises. “Love is hard” (p. 357). And yet, she continues for many more chapters, to believe in her idea of love (in which women can’t expect happiness) and in Jonathan. This, to her, is how love is. It’s an intriguing portrait of a woman who is strong and intelligent, and yet unable to let go of something that is patently going nowhere. When the inimical Crow describes her as “a true example of masochism and also a perfect example of mythomania”, it’s hard not to agree.

Teresa, then, is not a simple character. Her commitment to Jonathan is complicated: when opportunities arise for greater intimacy, she in fact pulls back. It’s significant that several times through the novel she mentions Ulysses:

she could sail the seas like any free soul, from Ulysses to the latest skipper of a sixteen-footer rounding the world.

Eventually, though, she discovers “true love … the love without crime and sorrow” but, as ABR editor Peter Rose also says “never give away the denouement”, I will leave it here. I’ll simply say that the ending is satisfyingly open and true to Teresa’s character.

“The world was hers and she had no doubt of the future”

The novel is, essentially, a bildungsroman. It’s Teresa’s coming of age, intellectually, psychologically and physically. Her youthful confidence takes quite a battering as she confronts the realities – presented by society and by Jonathan. She realises that society’s rules are counter-human:

Why the false lore of society? To prevent happiness. If human beings really expected happiness, they would put up with no tyrannies and no baseness; each would fight for his right for happiness. (p. 532)

This is not a social history. Despite the descriptions of poverty, the analysis of societal marriage conventions, the discussions about money and power, Stead is not writing a Dickensian novel. Rather, it’s about Teresa’s struggle to know herself as a mature loving women, something that is stunted for some time by her relationship with the slippery Jonathan: “In one speech he would be sardonic and naive, cruel and gay, tender and cold” (p. 380) And yet, Teresa cares for this man, and forgives, and forgives, and forgives again his erratic, careless, misogynistic treatment of her. In fact, she appears to be so in his thrall that her employer James Quick begins to wonder whether she is as intelligent as he’d believed:

What can she be, to tolerate such a contemptible, calculating worm […] this intellectual scarecrow (p. 477, 480).

However, she is, of course, intelligent and in true bildungsroman-style does experience “true” love. But this is Stead and it’s not simple. At one point her new love tells her:

he will send her to university – make a woman of her, make a brilliant woman of her … He would take her to Paris, and elsewhere, no-one who knew her now, would know her then; he would make her over entirely.

Oh dear …

Australian Women Writers Challenge

This is a delicious book – rich in ideas, gorgeous in writing, passionate in conception, and complex in psychology. The more I delve into it, the more I want to say. Perhaps, I will another day.

Postscript: By coincidence, I finished For love alone just as the ABC’s Australian Story broadcast the strange story of revered Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley, her librarian husband and his daughter by his first marriage, Susan Swingler, whom he left in England without telling her the truth. The first thing that crossed my mind as the story – I have Swingler’s book, unread, on my shelves – unfolded was “the things people do for love”. Jolley’s novels, like this one of Stead’s, are emotionally intense and explore some of the darker sides of familial and romantic relationships.

Christina Stead
For love alone
Carlton, The Miegunyah Press, 2011 (orig. pub 1945)
575pp.
ISBN: 9780522853704

* The novel is autobiographical, but by no means autobiography. Here is an article on Keith Duncan who inspired Jonathan Crow.

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Conversation launches its Arts + Culture Section

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I think I’ve mentioned The Conversation before. It’s a blog produced by a consortium of Australian academic institutions. The posts are written by writers who are academics, and each post has a disclosure statement regarding whether the writer has affiliations with/receives funding from organisations that could “benefit” from their article. It’s a good source of thoughtful commentary.

They have “sections” such as Politics + Policy, Business + Economy, and Education. Today they launched their newest section, Arts + Culture. That’s exciting because while there have been articles before on arts-related topics, they’ve been scattered. I was a bit disappointed, though, I must admit, to see that on this launch day there are no articles (as they call their posts) devoted to literature but I suppose that’s the luck of the draw. There are articles on Visual Arts, Music, Film, TV and Gaming. I’ll be watching out for Literature.

Julian Meyrick, Professor of Strategic Arts at Flinders University, wrote the new section’s foundation essay, “Does Australia get culture“. He suggests we don’t. He says:

We are a country not without culture but without a sense of culture. That distinction is crucial. Australia does not lack art, artists or audiences. But as a nation we find it hard to see culture in any but consumerist terms.

He suggests two reasons for this – the fact that our language is English makes it easy to “free-ride the cultural goods and services” of the UK and USA, and that our history is ‘peaceful’. ‘Our cultural consciousness’, he says, ‘has never been pushed into sharp awareness by invasion or forced colonisation … unless you are indigenous of course’. Funnily enough, I read a similar point in my current novel, Christina Stead‘s For love alone. In it, an American character keeps describing an Australian character as English, and in terms of her Englishness. I was starting to wonder about this when he says, “She’s not English but Australian of course, but it’s the English race unadulterated by any revolution”!

But, that’s a bit by the by. The article is interesting but a little odd. For example, the author suggests that Australia doesn’t have a written constitution? Huh? What about this? But, I guess my main question to Meyrick is what does he mean by “culture”? It’s a rather nebulous term that can range from something quite narrow to something that encompasses pretty well everything about how we live. It’s not clearly defined in the article. I assume he’s focussing on “the arts”. And I think by “sense of culture” he is concerned about something that seems to have been crossing my reading quite a bit lately, the “Australian identity” – or what he calls “the internal order of value that allows us to articulate who we are”. Since “the arts” are the prime means by which we explore and present who we are, Meyrick’s “culture”, as I read him, is the exploration and presentation of the who we are via “the arts”.

At least I think that’s at the bottom of what he is saying, but I could very well be putting my own spin on it. Regardless, his concern is that these arts are constantly being frustrated, by a

situation whereby commercial imperatives block artistic ones because the internal order of value that should keep them in productive tension is not present to the needed degree.

I’m not sure that Meyrick completely explains what he means by this but I think I get his point. He concludes that Australia is good, however, at strong and bold cultural policy, and that all we need is good leadership from the centre. What do you think?

Murray Bail, Portrait of electricity (Review)

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A couple of weeks ago I quoted Murray Bail on compser-house-museums from his latest novel, The voyage. But this isn’t the first time Bail has expressed his attitudes towards turning the home of a famous person into a museum. It was the topic of a short story, “Portrait of electricity” which, as far as I can tell was first published in 1975. And this story, I gather, was probably the inspiration for his novel Homesickness (1980) (though I haven’t yet read that).

I was tickled by the quote because in our recent overseas trip we’d visited the house where Beethoven was born and where Liszt spent the last twenty years of his life, not to mention the residences of writers Goethe and Schiller. We enjoyed visiting these places, because each was well presented providing us with insight into the lives of their erstwhile residents. We probably would have got that from a straight museum, of course, but a museum (usually) needs a building and if it is to be a dedicated museum, why not in a building connected to the subject? The question is, what do you put in that building and how do you present it? The temptation with using a building in which the person lived is to imbue it with an additional layer of “meaning” which can result in what Bail satirises – and that is excessive (defining this is a judgement call of course) reverence, the turning of the space into a shrine.

This is where “Portrait of electricity” comes in. That the story is satirical is pretty obvious from the opening sentences:

There were three guides. One did all the talking, the others nodded in agreement.

Three guides – with only one talking? What were the rest there for? To increase the sense of import?

The visitors/tourists are given special shoes (as we were given in Weimar’s Anna Amalia Bibliotek) but

inside, it was a museum like any other. The rooms strangely impersonal, exhibits arranged in cabinets against the wall, special objects located towards the centre.

It’s hard to imagine how Bail could fashion an 18-page story out of this premise but he does, and it engages. Sometimes you squirm, but other times, fortunately, you are able to adopt Bail’s satirical stance and see how ridiculous such museums can be when taken to extremes – and, being the good satirist Bail is, he takes the fascination for all things belonging to the revered person to rather grotesque extremes. But it would spoil the story to give away here just how far he goes.

The story also satirises the people who visit such museums, including little digs at different nationalities, at gender behaviour, and different tourist types (the sceptical, the smart alec, the unimpressed, the tired, and so on). People take photographs of the chair with its flattened contour “caused by his body weight”, “women put on the expression they use when choosing wallpaper”, and all follow the guides feeling as though they are drawing “closer to him, acquiring greater knowledge”. Meanwhile, the guide conjures up the man’s life in the house, reminding them that “his body travelled through what you see before you”. No object is too small to have meaning. When one visitor asks “Is that worth preserving?” (“that” being a fingernail), there is only one possible answer, “It’s part of him”.

Bail knows his museological stuff, because he also satirising sacred principles such as that of maintaining objects in “original state”. The question behind the satire is whether there should be limits to the collection and presentation of a person’s effects. This is a serious question, one faced by archivists and museum curators every day. Bail’s story is an effective reminder that common-sense should play a role in this decision-making.

I will leave it here. The items the guide draws their attention to become more and more peculiar if not downright absurd, the reliability of the guide’s analysis of the man and the import of the evidence becomes increasingly shaky, while the visitors feel (or hope perhaps) they are drawing towards “important, intimate knowledge”. Can we ever really know a person – famous or otherwise – through a bunch of objects they owned or used? This story is a great read, whether you work in museums or visit them. It may not change your mind about visiting such museums if, like me, you enjoy them, but it will make you think about them next time you do. And in our celebrity-focused, materialist culture that would be a healthy thing.

Murray Bail
“Portrait of electricity”
Published in:
Marion Halligan and Roseanne Fitzgibbon (eds), The gift of story: Three decades of UQP short stories (1998)
and in
Murray Bail, Contemporary portraits and other stories (1975) (and various other Bail collections)

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Jane Austen on politics

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I was going to label this post “Jane Austen and plus ça change” but then decided to be provocative, because Austen is regularly criticised for not discussing politics, what was happening in her time, in her novels. Of course, I disagree that novelists have to specifically write about the political background to their stories. Those living in her time would have known, for example, about the Napoleonic Wars and their impact on society, about ongoing discussions regarding slavery, parliamentary power, free trade, and so on. Austen didn’t need to explain that background, and those issues weren’t the matters that she wanted to write about. She had something bigger in mind – human nature.

Nonetheless, I was tickled when reading one of her juvenilia pieces, Catharine, or the bower*, the other day, to come across the following**:

the Conversation turning on the state of Affairs in the political World, Mrs Percival, who was firmly of opinion that the whole race of Mankind were degenerating, said that for her part, Everything she believed was going to rack and ruin, all order was destroyed over the face of the World, the house of Commons she heard did not break up sometimes till five in the Morning, and Depravity was never so general before; concluding with a wish that she might live to see the Manners of the People in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, restored again. “Well, Ma’am,” said her Neice [Catharine aka Kitty], “but I hope you do not mean with the times to restore Queen Elizabeth herself.”

“Queen Elizabeth,” said Mrs Stanley, who never hazarded a remark on History that was not well founded, “lived to a good old age, and was a very Clever Woman.” “True, Ma’am,” said Kitty; “but I do not consider either of those Circumstances as meritorious in herself, and they are very far from making me wish her return, for if she were to come again with the same Abilities and the same good Constitution She might do as much Mischeif and last as long as she did before-.”

Of course, this doesn’t address specific political events or situations, but it suggests (to me anyhow) that politics and history were topics of conversation in Austen’s neighbourhood, and that she was well able to satirise the quality of that discussion. It also demonstrates Austen’s ability to describe and satirise her characters through their own mouths!

Oh, and despite – or in addition to – my comments above, I would argue that Austen’s novels can have a political reading, can show how political debate and events were shaping her world, but that’s a topic for a different post.

*Written in 1792, her 17th year
**This rather idiosyncratic-looking text is based on the original manuscript in the British Library from the Oxford World’s Classics edition published by Oxford University Press (on my Kindle)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Reading Australia

/ Whispering Gums / 19 Comments

You know how when you go to a conference you pick up all sorts of pamphlets and brochures advertising this and that? Well, at the Writing the Australian landscape conference I attended back in August, just before I went overseas, I picked up an interesting leaflet from Australia’s Copyright Agency. The leaflet is titled: Reading Australia: Sharing great Australian stories. I decided then that it should be a Monday Musings topic so, here I am, nearly three months later telling you about it.

Reading Australia’s aim is “to promote the study of Australian works in the classroom”. It has kicked off with “the First 200” works selected by the Australian Society of Authors. The selection includes

stories from Indigenous Australians, from the colonial past and rural epics through to the cosmopolitan melting pot of the cities … classes and new favourites

The list, which is available on the Copyright Agency’s website, covers fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry, and includes selections for primary and secondary schools. From these they have selected a subset of 20 – split 50-50 for secondary and primary schools – and created teacher resources which they say will be trialled “later in the year” (which must presumably be now).

English: Chloe Hooper.

Chloe Hooper. (Photo credit: Ottre, released to Public Domain via Wikipedia)

The selection for secondary students, which is the area that most interests me, is nicely diverse, and is not dumbed-down. It includes the major forms (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, short stories), classics and contemporary titles, and works representing indigenous and multicultural Australia. The ten are:

The project is an initiative of the Cultural Fund of the Australian Copyright Agency, with the Australian Society of Authors and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature as partners.

I was disappointed by the dearth of Australian literature taught to my children at school and so am delighted to see this initiative.  I don’t know, however, how well it is being promoted, how easy it will be for teachers to incorporate into their existing curricula, whether schools can resource providing the books, but I do hope it gains traction.

The Role of the Arts Critic: a Childers Group Public Roundtable

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Last week, I reorganised my Friday Lunch Group’s schedule in order to attend a public roundtable on the role of the arts critic organised by the Childers Group. This group, formed in late 2011, describes itself as an “independent arts forum … committed to the long-term viability and vitality of the arts”. It aims to advocate for the arts across government and private sectors. Last week’s roundtable was, I think, the third public forum they’ve held. All have been well-attended, which hopefully bodes well for the arts!

The event ran for two hours and featured a large panel of local critics/reviewers, administrators and practitioners in a wide range of the arts. They included the universally well-known, like Robyn Archer and Marion Halligan, and more local luminaries such as arts critic Helen Musa and Canberra Times editor-at-large Jack Waterford. It was emceed by writer and arts administrator Yolande Norris, who put questions herself and managed contributions from the audience. The ideas and viewpoints flowed – with a lot of concordance but some differences as well. Below is my summary.

Trader in ideas

Lucy – with a self-deprecating “I’m a poet so you won’t know me” – Alexander made the point of the day, for me. Late in the panel, she (from the audience) suggested that the critic is a trader in ideas. By this she meant that, in looking at a work, the critic picks up the ideas contained within it, weighs them, and explores what they might mean for people.

Another arts practitioner from the audience said, along similar lines, that she values information and insight into what is going on – into what the creator may have intended and what the critic actually “read”.

Somewhat related to these ideas, Marion Halligan said earlier in session that she regularly reads reviews (or criticism) of books, plays etc, she doesn’t expect to see or read, because “a critic tells you what’s going on” and gives you “a sense of the arts landscape”. A critic, therefore, she and others said, needs to be able to write (or speak) authoritatively and engagingly.

All this neatly sidestepped discussions about negative and positive criticism and got to the nub – to my mind anyhow – of the real value of criticism. While negative or constructive “criticism” of a work may be useful for the creator, Alexander’s point captured the bigger picture value of criticism. And it reflected, I think, what Robyn Archer meant at the beginning of the session when she suggested that “the arts” comprises three prongs: artist, audience, and the dialogue between them. These three need to be in balance she said for there to be a strong culture.

There was some discussion about the form of this dialogue, with film critic Cris Kennedy suggesting that dialogue is easier in the digital age. Robyn Archer queried the role of expertise in the digital age. She was concerned about the rise of “a new cultural democracy” – the world of “likes” and “unlikes” – and the resultant attitude that “if it’s popular it’s good”. I suspect there has always been this tension – but I guess it’s increasingly visible in our social media dominated world, isn’t it?

Overall, it was agreed, at least as far is there was agreement, that the critic should be knowledgable, that criticism should be “artful”, but that the important thing is opening dialogue.

What is criticism?

There was, of course, quite a bit of discussion about what criticism is. The point was quickly made that a review or criticism does more than describe. It takes up broader questions relating to the art form being reviewed, and should involve a studied reaction drawing on knowledge. It should illuminate and “bind things together” and requires a “critical” frame of mind. This was contrasted to “opinion” which seemed to be defined as “judgement” without a firm basis of knowledge.

Jack Waterford suggested that a lot of cultural discussion is occurring, such as on local ABC radio, but that this isn’t necessarily the same as criticism. Related to this, an audience member mentioned the issue of public art in Canberra, suggesting there’d been a lot negativity in the news pages and not enough criticism in the arts pages of the newspapers.

There was discussion about the need for disinterest, and that this was tricky to achieve in a small arts community like Canberra. (Marion Halligan suggested most arts communities are small – take England, she said, where the writers all review each other!)

One contributor suggested that food criticism is currently leading the way, and that the arts could look at what’s happening there! (There wasn’t discussion, however, on what this criticism entails and how it is leading the way.)

Who is criticism for?

The general view was that criticism is for the reader, though who the reader is wasn’t fully teased out. Those writing for papers and journals clearly see the reader as their public, and feel a responsibility to inform. One panel member made the point that criticism written for, say, a specialist dance journal should be different to that written for a general newspaper. An audience member pointed out that in the online world, the audience is international, and that this can (should) impact style and content.

There was also some discussion about creators and the role of criticism for them. Many appreciated constructive criticism, but quite a few said they use trusted friends to vet criticism, as negative criticism (that written from a point of ignorance) can be destructive. Criticism is also affirmation that people are looking at their work. As Marion Halligan said, the worst thing is silence. No review, she said, is worse than a bad review.

What is the aim of criticism?

In addition to the ideas implied above – contributing to the culture, informing the consumer and increasing people’s knowledge, providing constructive feedback to creators – it was also suggested that “the critic is a cog in the marketing machine”. I wouldn’t like to think that “marketing” per se is the critic’s role – and I don’t think that’s quite what was meant. But the critic does help promote the culture, can function as an advocate – in both cultural and political spheres.

This is certainly how I see my blog – as an advocate for Australian (in particular) literature . Of course, I’d like to think my reviews encouraged people to actually buy books, but my specific goal is to raise awareness about Australian literary culture.

Conclusion

Hmm … this is the hard part. Did the roundtable come to any final agreement or resolutions? No, I wouldn’t say it did. But I assume the organisers will take away the ideas presented and feed it into their future activities.

Near the end, it was suggested that it’s time to start populating the digital media with criticism and dialogue. This is an area that was not really tackled – that was just played with around the edges – and is possibly a good subject for the Childers Group to take up for their next roundtable.  What is happening in the online world and how can it best be harnessed to support and promote the arts. What impact does the growth of the amateur reviewer/critic have? Is there a difference between reviewer and critic?

Finally, returning to the opening idea of the critic as a “trader in ideas”, I liked the related suggestion that arts criticism is about the big things, about living and who we are. Can’t say better than that, eh?

A big thankyou to Nigel Featherstone and the Childers Group for holding this roundtable.