Christos Tsiolkas in Meanjin’s The Canberra Issue

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Meanjin Canberra Issue 2013

Courtesy: Meanjin

I indicated in my recent review of Meanjin‘s special Canberra issue that I would write another post or two on the issue. This is one of those posts. It may, in fact, be the only one, for who knows where the spirit will lead me next? Right now though, I want to devote a post to the second last piece in the volume, “Me and my country, Where to Now?”. It’s a conversation between writer Heather Taylor Johnson and Christos Tsiolkas whose novel The slap was one of the first I reviewed in this blog. While the novel was well received critically – won awards and was short/longlisted for others – it was not universally liked. The Wikipedia article on the novel quotes Commonwealth Writer’s Prize judge, Nicholas Hasluck, describing it as “a controversial and daring novel”. It was that …

Before I continue, I should say that this piece has a fairly tenuous link to Canberra – Tsiolkas lived here for a short time in the 1990s I understand – but its inclusion is justified, I think, for the relevance of the ideas it covers. I don’t plan to summarise the whole conversation, interesting though it is, but pick out a couple of points that got my attention – and they mostly relate to The slap.

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Johnson commences by asking Tsiolkas about the mini-series adaptation of The slap. While recognising that the mini-series was not his work, but the work of those who had “translated and transformed” it for another medium, Tsiolkas talks of his overall intention:

I felt a certain responsibility with the screening of the series, a hope that whatever criticism people had of it, that it would be understood as an authentic voice of contemporary, multicultural urban Australia. I share the frustration of so many people of immigrant heritage in this country who have rarely seen their lives portrayed with any complexity or realism on the Australian screen. I also know that there would be people of that experience who either don’t read fiction or can’t read fiction in English and for whom the moving-image media are the only source for story and representation. I wanted people to be angry, frustrated, enraged by The slap, but I also wanted their arguments with it to be based on an appreciation that the representations were neither patronising nor sentimental. My own view is that the series succeeded in doing that.

Although focused on the miniseries, this statement is also, I think, a manifesto for the novel. It’s a warts-and-all story of people, most of whom happen to be immigrants or minorities in some way, getting on with their often flawed lives.

One of the themes that came through to me in the novel was that of violence. I felt Tsiolkas was saying that violence lies just beneath the surface of many human relationships. Later in the conversation he talks about the principles and philosophies, the “politics”, that drive him – feminism, racial civil rights, sexual liberation, post-colonial and communist. A complicated and, as he admits, sometimes contradictory bunch of ideas. He says:

I think that one of the drives I have in my writing is to express the complexity and violence of this tension. It means that though gender and sexuality are among the themes and ideas I explore in all my work, I can’t give myself over to a liberationist idea that the transformation of the individual can resolve these tensions and contradictions.

Hmm … this is pretty complex thinking methinks and I’m not sure I was able to articulate his ideas at this deeper philosophical level, but I sensed something going on and this helps explain it (to me, anyhow). He continues to say that he believes that “sexuality and the body constantly undermine our attempts at mastery and transformation”. This brought to mind the terrible recent rape cases in India and some angry discussions I’ve just read on Facebook about the current court case concerning the gang rape of the 16-year-old girl in the USA. We are not making much progress.

There is so much in this conversation that I’d love to talk about, such as his comment that much “Anglophone and European contemporary literature is moribund”. He argues that the most electric writing is coming from outside the Anglo-European centre. That must, I suppose, pose a challenge to him given his background. But, I’ll move on.

Johnson asks him about controversy, particularly in relation to The slap. Again his response is complex, but his main point is that “I want to pose questions that are unsettling or troubling”. One of the things that bothered me about the conversations surrounding The slap was that people focused on “the slap” itself  – as in do you or don’t you hit a child, particularly one not your own – and not on the social, cultural and, yes, political issues inherent in the relationships involved. The fact that “the slap” plot is resolved way before the end of the novel tells us that this issue of hitting a child is not Tsiolkas’ main point. In fact, he says in this conversation with Johnson that “the language of moral absolutes … may be having a pernicious effect on much of contemporary writing”. And then he says:

I have given up reading blogs because so many people are dismissing work because they ‘don’t like the characters’ or because the resolution of a book is not neat, is not easy. We are reading for confirmation of ourselves rather than to challenge ourselves and I think that is a real danger.

He has more to say on issues that interest me – including Aboriginal dispossession and public education – but I think I’ll finish here, because I need to think …

in Meanjin 1, 2013, The Canberra Issue
University of Melbourne
pp. 178-188
ISBN: 9780522861938

(Review copy supplied by Meanjin)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Indigenous writing and Canberra

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This is going to be a difficult post to write because, really, my knowledge is superficial, but I figure that if I put out some feelers, I just might learn something from those who read this and, hopefully, comment. I was inspired to write it by – yes, you’ve probably guessed it – Canberra’s centenary, because at last Monday’s “Very Big Day Out” celebration, we were given a beautifully produced program titled Centenary of Canberra: Celebrating First Australians. It describes the major events that are/will be occurring in Canberra over the centenary year involving indigenous Australians. Many of these events involve indigenous people from other parts of Australia – but given Canberra’s role as the nation’s capital it seems right that we don’t narrowly focus on ourselves. There’s a big Australia out there.

To today’s topic though … the first thing I need to say is that the history of indigenous culture in the Canberra region is a complicated one, and is still being researched. It appears that several groups are associated with the area, representing several languages, with the Ngunnawal, Ngambri and Wiradjuri people having the closest association. I don’t intend to write more on these groups and what connections they may or may not have with each other and the land, as it’s not relevant to my main concern here. The important thing is, I think, the conclusion in Our Kin Our Country report published in August 2012 by the ACT Government’s Genealogy Project:

the verification of a distinct regional Aboriginal population that survived, resisted and adapted to European occupation and settlement in the areas surrounding what is now known as Canberra.

Indigenous writers associated with Canberra include the late activist Kevin Gilbert, Jennifer Martiniello who established the ACT Indigenous Writers Group, and Jeanine Leane whose David Unaipon award-winning book, Purple threads, I reviewed last year. Kevin Gilbert and Jennifer Martiniello are represented in both the ACT Centenary anthology, The invisible thread, and the Macquarie PEN anthology of Aboriginal literature.

Kevin Gilbert and Oodgeroo Noonuccal (or Kath Walker) were the first indigenous writers I became aware of, back in the late 1960s. They were both activists who exposed the devastating effect dispossession had on indigenous people. In 1992, Gilbert, a Wiradjuri man, made a speech at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (in Canberra), stating:

You cannot build a vision, you cannot build a land, you cannot build a people, on land theft, on continuing apartheid and the denial of one group of Aboriginal people … (from the Macquarie PEN anthology of Aboriginal literature)

He was a prolific writer of poetry, plays and non-fiction.

Jennifer Martiniello‘s piece in The invisible thread is also highly political, speaking particularly of the impact of loss of language:

I could tell you about growing up in a voided space. What it is like as a child to be an echo, a resonance of something unnamed in the silence. I could tell you about my grandmother’s and my father’s first three languages – Alyerntarrpe, Pertame, Arrernte – and about my own eliminative reduction to one, English. My father’s fourth language, and the supreme evidence of colonial obsession with an abstracted literacy that could not read the forms and expressions of our multiple literacies. I could show you the void of two hundred blank white pages of history unmarked with the black ink of our lives … (from “Voids, Voices, and Stories without End”).

Wiradjuri Echoes

Wiradjuri Echoes, at “The Very Big Day Out”, 11 March 2013

Martiniello is of Arrente, Chinese and Anglo-Celtic descent.

Jeanine Leane‘s Purple threads also has an activist element, albeit couched in stories which are warm and funny as well as sometimes dark. They are set in a world where, she says, “black was not the ideal colour”. (By the way, when I reviewed this work I wasn’t sure what to call it but I have since seen it described as a “story cycle”. That sounds good to me!). Leane, a Wiradjuri woman, has also written and published poetry.

There are, I’m sure, other indigenous writers associated with Canberra, but these are the three best known to me. Identifying writers as belonging to a group – indigenous, migrant, women, gay, and so on – is an uncomfortable thing. It would be good to simply see writers as writers, people as people, but when you are a minority, when recognition doesn’t come easily to your “group”, there is value I believe in overcoming my discomfort … to help bring other ways of being and seeing to the attention of us in the majority culture.

As I was researching this post I came across a comment made by Cara Shipp, a local teacher of secondary English, at the Dare to Lead Conference: Leading indigenous perspectives in the national curriculum (Sydney, November 2010):

I think there is a danger in concentrating too much on the traditional cultural stuff. In terms of the way it is delivered, that can play into the stereotype that Aboriginal culture is dead and past. The only texts suggested for teaching in the draft National Curriculum are Dreamtime stories and I am not sure this is a good thing.

Really? Only Dreamtime stories in 2010? She has a point. I sure hope the final National Curriculum includes some of the great indigenous writing we know is out there.

Meanjin’s The Canberra Issue (Review)

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Meanjin Canberra Issue 2013

Courtesy: Meanjin

Zora Sanders writes in her Editorial for Meanjin‘s Canberra Issue that Canberra has (or, is it had) a reputation for being The National Capital of Boredom. This is just one of the many less-than-flattering epithets regularly applied to Canberra: A Cemetery with Lights, Fat Cat City, and the pervasive, A City without a Soul. For me though it’s simply Home … a home I chose back in the mid-70s when I applied for my first professional job at the National Library of Australia. I was consequently pleased when Meanjin offered me their special Canberra edition to review.

Sanders describes the issue as being “full of the usual eclectic mix of fact, fiction and poetry” and says it aims to “offer a taste of Canberra as it is now, 100 years after its founding, as viewed by the people who live there, who’ve left there and who never meant to find themselves there in the first place”. The result is something that’s not a hagiography, if you can apply such a word to a city, but that offers a thoughtful look at Canberra from diverse angles – political, historical, social, personal.

With the exception of poetry which is interspersed throughout, the issue is organised straightforwardly by form, rather than by theme or chronology. This is not to say, however, that there is no sense of an ordering hand. The first essay, for example, is, appropriately, Paul Daley’s “Territorial disputes” which explores Canberra’s complex and sometimes controversial indigenous heritage, including the thorny question concerning Canberra’s name. Is it derived from “Ngambri”, which means the “cleavage between the breasts of Black Mountain and Mount Ainslie“?

The issue includes a Meanjin Papers insert comprising an essay by ACT historian David Headon titled “The genius and gypsy: Walt and Marion Griffin in Australia and India”. So much has been written about the Griffins over the decades, and particularly this year, that it’s a challenge to present them in a handful of pages. Headon’s approach is to focus on the Griffins’ idealism, on what drove them to do what they did, and bypass the complex story of what happened to the plan. That story is explored a little later by Chris Hammer in his essay “A secret map of Canberra”. Griffin, like the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman, was, Headon writes, inspired by the prospect of “a prosperous egalitarian future for the new democracy in the south”. He planned his “ideal city” to serve such a nation. It didn’t, as we know, quite turn out that way, but I love that our city has such passion in its genes.

Anthologies are tricky to write about, particularly one as varied as this (despite its seemingly singular subject). The main sections are Essays, Fiction, Memoir and Poetry. There’s also a Conversation and a Gallery – and an opening section titled Perspectives. These pieces provide a fittingly idiosyncratic introduction to the volume. First is novelist Andrew Croome (whose Document Z I reviewed a couple of years ago). He writes of the 2003 fire – Canberra’s worst disaster – and its impact on the observatory at Mt Stromlo. There was a terrible human cost to this disaster but, without denying that, Croome takes a more cosmic view, and turns our eyes to the future. It’s nicely done. Writer Lorin Clarke follows Croome with her cheekily titled perspective “The love that dare not speak its name”. She ferrets out, without actually using the word, some of Canberra’s soul, seeing it in small spaces rather than showy institutions and in, if I read her correctly, the gaps that appear between carefully planned intentions and reality. The third perspective comes from a previous Meanjin editor, Jim Davidson, who, like Clarke and other writers in the issue, starts with the negatives –  “a public service town” etc etc – but suggests that “the city is beginning to acquire a patina”. He argues, rather logically really, that Canberra is still young. Other planned cities, like Washington DC and Istanbul, have got “into their stride” and Canberra probably will too.

These perspectives – and the way they test Canberra’s image against reality – set the tone for the rest of the issue. I’m not going bore you – though the contributions themselves are far from boring – by summarising every piece. There is something here for everyone – and they show that the real Canberra is more than roundabouts and public servants. Dorothy Johnston‘s short story “Mrs B”, though set in Melbourne, reminds us of the hidden world of “massage parlours” and migrant workers, while Geoff Page‘s poem, “The ward is new”, addresses mental illness. Michael Thorley’s poem “Bronzed Aussies” reveres some of Canberra’s (and Australia’s) top poets, AD Hope, David Campbell and Judith Wright, while award-winning novelist Marian Halligan‘s memoir “Constructing a city, Constructing a life” recounts how a move to Canberra for a year or so turned into half a century and still counting. Several pieces describe Canberra’s natural beauty, including Melanie Joosten’s bittersweet short story, “The sky was herding disappointments”. And Alan Gould’s poem “The blether”, pointedly but wittily the last piece in the volume, suggests we could do with less aimless chatter and more of the “sweet unsaid”.

Of course, as this is Canberra, there has to be some politics. I particularly enjoyed Gideon Haigh’s essay, “The Rise and Rise of the Prime Minister”. Looking at the recent development of prime ministerial libraries à la America’s tradition of presidential libraries, he argues that the political landscape is being personalised, resulting in a shift in focus from ideology to leaders and their personalities.

Many of the pieces interested me, and I plan to write separately about one or two of them in future posts, so I’ll end here with architects Gerard O’Connell and Nugroho Utomo. In their essay “Canberra LAB – a mythical biography; or the art of showing up”, they say:

One has to understand that Canberra is a dream. It doesn’t exist. It is an ideal unrealised. A half-finished work on the way to becoming a masterpiece.

I like that. Meanjin has compiled an anthology that shows, as contributor Yolande Norris puts it, how “rich and strange” Canberra’s history is. It’s hard for me to be objective, but I’d say this volume has enough variety and good writing to appeal to a wide range of readers – whether or not they know or care about Canberra.

Meanjin, Vol 72 No.1 (Autumn 2013); or,
Meanjin 1, 2013, The Canberra Issue
University of Melbourne
191pp.
ISBN: 9780522861938

(Review copy supplied by Meanjin)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Reading about Canberra

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If you’re not already aware of it – through my blog or elsewhere – Canberra turns 100 this year. Tomorrow, Tuesday 12 March, is THE day. How does one date a city with such precision? Well, in Canberra’s case it’s pretty easy because it was (is) a planned city. I suppose a number of dates could have been chosen – the date the location was announced or when the design competition or its winner was announced, perhaps – but the date we use is the date it was officially named, the date a bunch of white people came riding across the sheep paddocks and declared this place would be Australia’s national capital and called Canberra. We have movie footage of the event – and the city has been well-documented in all media ever since.

The invisible thread, by Irma Gold

Cover (Courtesy: Irma Gold and Halstead Press)

I’m not going to dwell long on this, because I’ve talked about it before and will again during the year, but I thought I’d list three useful resources for those interested in the city’s literature:

  • The invisible thread, edited by Irma Gold, is the anthology I’ve written about several times already. It’s not exclusively about Canberra but the 70-odd pieces within are all by writers who have a connection with the city. It includes fiction (short stories and novel excerpts), non-fiction and poetry.
  • Meanjin Quarterly Vol 72 No. 1, 2013, The Canberra Issue. Meanjin, arguably Australian’s most venerable literary magazine, aims in this issue “to take the pulse of our elusive, much maligned-capital”, the city often dubbed, writes editor Zora Sanders, The National Capital of Boredom. Little do they know, we longstanding residents mutter, but quietly so (for we rather like our secret). This beautifully produced issue is organised into sections labelled Essays, Fiction, Gallery, Memoir, and Conversation, with poetry interspersed throughout. The contributors include Gideon Haigh, Drusilla Modjeska, Marion Halligan, Dorothy Johnston and Alan Gould. (Click here for subscription and stockist details).
  • Dinner at Caphs is a blogger whose Centenary project is to “attempt to read in 2013 only fiction that is set in Canberra. I want to try to see this city the way others see it, and to examine how I feel about what they see”. Dani has a page on her blog listing books she has identified as being set in or about Canberra. I’m hoping she’ll update it as she comes across more. My own reading group has decided on a (not exclusive) focus on Canberra-related writing this year so I was chuffed to come across Dinner at Caphs.

I started this post by mentioning how well Canberra’s history has been documented. I’ve mentioned film and writing, but music too has played a part. What better way to close this week’s Monday Musings than on the chorus from popular Australian songwriter Jack Lumsdaine’s song written in the late 1930s and titled “Canberra” or “Canberra’s calling to you”. Click this “Canberra’s calling to you” link to read more about the song and hear some old and new versions. (It’s a bit of a hoot.) The chorus begins:

Like a jewel so rare,
In a setting so fair,
A city of white was born.
With its gardens of blooms and its rare perfumes
That greet each sunny morn,
Australia’s creation the heart of a nation
‘neath azure skies of blue.

Very much of its time of course, but it’s part of our history. I am grateful to our national institutions – the National Film and Sound Archive, the National Library of Australia, the National Archives of Australia and the National Museum of Australia – for the work they’ve done to capture and preserve the history of this city I call home. Roll on the next 100 years …

Meanjin’s Tournament of Books 2012 (2013), Final, or the Winner is announced

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Sorry folks, but I have been slack. Meanjin took a little while to post the final round but I’ve taken even longer to report back to you. February was not a good reading and blogging month for me as my Past Whisperings link shows. I am, however, back now and ready to post the winner which, you may remember, was to be chosen from Thea Astley‘s “Hunting the wild pineapple” and Tom Cho’s “Today on Dr Phil”. I have (now, anyhow) read them both.

And what a pair of stories they are … it’s fitting in many ways that it came down to these two because they are probably the most “out there” of the stories in the tournament. Both take you on wild rides where one minute you feel firmly planted in reality and next you’re not quite sure. They seem grounded in reality but what’s going on stretches your imagination almost to breaking point. Cho’s “Today on Dr Phil” exposes our modern culture’s propensity for public confession, for seeking our five minutes of fame, while Astley explores the violence lurking just below the surface of many human relationships.

For the final round, Meanjin used three judges all of whom are published authors themselves:

Ryan O’Neill, the Scottish born Australian writer of  The weight of a human heart, wrote that Cho “expertly controls the story until the fitting, chaotic climax, while at the same time posing serious questions about identity and self”. But, he gives it to Astley’s story for “the spikiness of its style, the oddness of its characters, and the vividness of its setting”.

Susan Johnson, author of several novels including Life in seven mistakes which I’ve reviewed, writes of Astley’s “wonderful, theatrical, imaginative flourish”. However, using a horse race metaphor, she gives it to Cho, not only because he manages to make some “brilliant cultural and ethnic allusions” but because “he’s alive, and straining, and needs to get home to eat”.

So, one vote each now. Who will win?

Chris Flynn, author of A tiger in Eden which I’ve also reviewed, has the casting vote – and what a vote it is. I love it because, while appreciating Tom Cho’s wonderful, clever story, he gives it to Thea Astley – and I can’t argue with his reason:

… this is Thea Astley we’re talking about here. If Cho had been up against any of the more realist writers we’ve seen in the competition, some of which he’s already taken out, it would be game over man, game over … But … Astley was the progenitor, the chain-smoking, wise-cracking, jazz-loving four times Miles Franklin-winning champion of linguistic manipulation whose style got on Helen Garner’s nerves and who pushed the envelope of Australian literature when no-one else had the cojones to do so. My vote goes to Thea Astley, as without her, I don’t know where we’d be today.

I love that Flynn recognises and takes into account Astley’s contribution to Australian literature. I hope Cho isn’t disappointed because he was beaten by a real grand dame. He has nothing to be ashamed of – and I will continue to read his short stories in Look who’s morphing. It’s a great collection.

And so the winner of the latest Meanjin Tournament of Books is Thea Astley’s “Hunting the wild pineapple”.

You can read the full judgements here.

Graeme Simsion, The Rosie project (Review)

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Simsion, The Rosie Project

Bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

While I go to films fairly regularly, I rarely think of adapting books to film when I am reading. However, I was only a few pages into Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie project when it occurred to me that it was perfect film material. The feeling got stronger – and then around a third of the way through the novel I decided to look at the publicity sheet Text Publishing sent with the book. I usually read these sheets after reading the book. Guess what? The Rosie project started as a screenplay and has won a Writers’ Guild Award for Best Romantic Comedy.

This brings me to the other thing that crossed my mind as I read it:  how to categorise it. I’ve now read two books in a row that are a little outside my usual fare. Like the previous one, Anita Heiss’s Paris dreaming, The Rosie project is a romance, but it’s not chicklit and I’m not sure it fits the romance genre as a whole either. You see, the protagonist – as the cover may have told you – is a man, one Professor Don Tillman. As I understand it, romance novels tends to involve a female protagonist and the trials and tribulations she meets en route to true love. Movies have a genre called “romcom” but I’m not sure that term is used for novels. It is, however, the most appropriate description for this novel – because it’s a romance and it’s funny.

Now, I’d better give you a brief outline of the plot. It opens with Don Tillman, a genetics professor, about to give a public lecture on Asperger Syndrome as a favour for his friend Gene (ha!), a psychology professor. In the second paragraph, you start to suspect that Don himself has Asperger’s:

The timing was extremely annoying. The preparation could be time-shared with lunch consumption, but on the designated evening I had scheduled ninety-four minutes to clean my bathroom.

Ninety-FOUR minutes!? The novel continues in this vein with Don admitting to being socially inept, to being routine-driven and focused on efficiency over all else, and so on. He knows all this about himself, but never in the novel is he named as having Asperger Syndrome so I won’t either. However, this description of him provides a good introduction to the novel’s basic premise. Don, nearing 40, wants a wife but, not surprisingly given the way he approaches the world, he hasn’t had much success. He starts the Wife Project and creates a 16-page questionnaire designed to help him eliminate unlikely candidates before he wastes time on getting to know them. In comes 30-year-old Rosie, whom he thinks Gene has sent to him as a candidate. But Rosie, he quickly realises, would fail his questionnaire on the first page. She smokes, works in a bar (and so, he presumes, would fall below the required IQ), is not punctual, dresses unconventionally – you get the picture. Yet, there’s something about Rosie … so, pretty soon, Don offers to help her find who her father is, and thus begins the Father Project, which rather puts on hold the Wife Project.

From here, the novel runs pretty much to a romcom formula. The light tone tells you that it is likely to turn out the way you expect but despite this, the novel engages. This is because, although the plot is formulaic, the characters aren’t. Don is an unlikely hero. He’s aware of his difference and, as the novel progresses, starts to think about whether he can change himself to become more acceptable to people. It’s, dare I say it, poignant – but it’s not saccharine. Don and Rosie are too themselves for that. The novel also has some truly laugh-out-loud scenes. Comedy which involves ridiculing difference can be uncomfortable but again the tone saves it – it’s light and it’s warm. We like Don and our laughter is not so much at his behaviour as at the absurdity of the situations he sometimes finds himself in. I loved, for example, his description of his special treatment by airlines:

As we drank champagne in the lounge, I explained that I had earned special privileges by being particularly vigilant and observant of rules and procedures on previous flights, and by making  a substantial number of helpful suggestions regarding check-in procedures, flight scheduling, pilot training and ways in which security systems might be subverted. I was no longer expected to offer advice, having contributed ‘enough for a lifetime of flying’.

I enjoyed the book. It is a warm, but not stuffily earnest, book about accepting and celebrating difference, about negotiating relationships that accommodate different ways of being. It would make a great film.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also found it fun.

Graeme Simsion
The Rosie project
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013
329pp.
ISBN: 9781922079770

(Review copy supplied by Text Publishing)

Monday musings on Australian literature: University presses

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I was inspired to write this post last year when commenter Wendy Borchers mentioned Catchfire Press and described it as being associated with the University of Newcastle. I’d never heard of it. It is a community-based press primarily run by volunteers, but their covers, they say, are chosen by competition between senior design students at the University of Newcastle. The link is perhaps a little tenuous though there may be other connections not mentioned on their website. Whatever, they look like a delightful press with a wonderful heart doing something good for a local community, and they reminded me to look at the role university presses play in Australian publishing.

So, let’s look at some of the university presses which are out there promoting and publishing Australian literature – and I’m going to focus mainly on fiction. There’s probably a lot going on that I’m not aware of, but there are a few publishers who for me really stand out, and the grandma of them all is …

UQP, or the University of Queensland Press

Way back in the 1980s when I rediscovered Australian writers, and particularly Australian women writers, it was UQP that brought some of the best to me, like the wonderful Olga Masters who died way too early. Their imprint is recognisable and when I see it I know to expect quality. But then, they’re Queenslanders and so am I! UQP has apparently been going since 1948. They started as a traditional academic press but moved into more general publishing of fiction, poetry, indigenous writing and children’s literature. They published the early works of writers like David Malouf, Peter Carey and Kate Grenville and are now moving into digital publishing. Check out the authors page of their website and you can’t help but be impressed at their contribution to the Australian literary landscape.

Now, jump three decades and we come to the next university press to make an impression on me, and that is …

Sydney University Press

This was the first publisher to send me books to review. It was a new thing for me, and Lisa of ANZ Litlovers, and it was new for them. That was in late 2009 and what they sent us was their first lot of books in their Australian Classics Library, some of which they had already captured and published via their SETIS digital program. They introduced me to writers like Price Warung, encouraged me to read CJ Dennis, and gave me another Jessica Anderson to read. Their focus is still, I think, more traditionally academic, but I love and appreciate their commitment to some lesser known Australian classics.

And then, in just the last week or so I heard, via Twitter from bloggers Marilyn and Yvonne, of

Australian National University

And its ANU E Press which is publishing, electronically and free of charge, books in its ANU Lives Series in Biography. You have to buy the print versions but the online versions are free. These aren’t fiction – being biography – but are of interest to me with titles like Maori and Aboriginal women in the public eye and Transnational ties. I need to keep an eye on them.

That’s three but I’m sure other Aussies can point to more … and I hope they do because universities are well placed to offer different spins on publishing as these three examples do. It looks to me as through each is operating under different economic imperatives but achieving something important in our local publishing scene.

And here I will close, well aware that it is now nearly Wednesday … My excuse is that I am currently on the other side of Australia and my personal time clock is out of whack! Or something like that ….

Oh, and I will add more links when I am back in my more comfy computing domain …

Anita Heiss, Paris dreaming (Review)

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Anita Heiss Paris Dreaming

Paris Dreaming (used by permission of The Random House Group Ltd)

Late last year I wrote a post about the inaugural Canberra Readers’ Festival. One of the speakers was indigenous Australian author, academic and activist, Anita Heiss. I wrote then that I bought one of her books. It was her fourth (I think) chick lit novel, Paris dreaming. This might surprise regular readers here, as chick lit is not really my sort of thing, however …

There are reasons why I was happy to read this book. First was that my reading group chose it as part of our focus on books featuring Canberra for our city’s centenary year. Yes, I know, it’s called Paris dreaming, but the heroine starts in Canberra and Canberra is mentioned (not always positively I must say) throughout the book. The other reason is the more significant one, though, and that is Heiss’s reason for writing the book. I said in the first paragraph that she is an activist and her chick lit books, surprising though it may sound, are part of her activism. In fact, I think pretty much everything Heiss does has an activist element. In her address at the Canberra Readers’ Festival she described herself, an educated indigenous Australian, as in the top 1% of the bottom 2.5% of Australia. She feels, she said, a responsibility to put her people on the “Australian identity radar”.

Does this book do it, and if so how? Well, one of her points is that 30% or more of indigenous Australians are urban and this book, as its genre suggests, is about young urban indigenous women. Anita Heiss manages I think (though I’m not the target demographic so can’t be sure) to present characters that both young indigenous and non-indigenous women can relate to. Our heroine Libby and her friends are upwardly mobile young professionals. They care about their work; they love fashion, drink and food (this is chick lit remember!); and they wonder how to marry (ha!) their career goals and romance.

Indigenous design vase, on hall table, Governm...

Indigenous art vase, Government House, Canberra

So what’s the plot (besides the obvious chick lit formula which this book certainly follows)? At the start of the novel  30-year-old Libby, manager of the education program at the National Aboriginal Gallery, is on a man-fast. She’s been bitten one too many times and has sworn off men, much to the dismay of her tiddas (her “sisters”). She is, though, keen to develop her career and wants a new challenge – all part of the chick lit formula – and so pitches a proposal to her boss that she mount an exhibition of indigenous Australian art at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. Of course, her boss approves and off she goes to Paris where, following the formula, she falls for hunky, sexy Mr Wrong while Mr Right watches on, spurned (and spurned and spurned). But, of course, I don’t need to tell you how it comes out in the end do I? This is not subversive chick lit because that would not serve Heiss’s purpose …

Did I enjoy it? Yes, but not so much as a piece of literature because my reading interests lie elsewhere, but as a work written by a savvy writer with a political purpose. This purpose is not simply to show that young, urban, professional indigenous Australians exist but, as she also said in her address, to create the sort of world she’d like to live in, a world where indigenous Australians are an accepted and respected part of Australian society, not problems and not invisible. She is therefore unashamed about promoting indigenous Australian creators. She names many of them – artists, writers, filmmakers – and discusses some of their work, educating her readers as she goes. Most of the people, works and places she mentions are real but there’s an aspirational element too. The National Aboriginal Gallery does not exist but she presents it as a significant player in the Canberra cultural institution scene. Good for her!

I’ll probably not read another of Heiss’s choc lit (as she, tongue in cheek, calls it) books, but I’m glad to have read this one – and I’ll certainly look out for works by her in other genres (including her memoir Am I black enough for you?). Heiss is a woman to watch.

Anita Heiss
Paris dreaming
Sydney: Bantam, 2011
313pp.
ISBN: 9781741668933

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Stella Prize longlist

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Miles Franklin
Miles Franklin, c. 1940s (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

I have mentioned the new Stella Prize before but, for those of you who may not be across this new award on the Australian literary scene, here is a brief recap. It is named for Miles Franklin – her full name was  Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin – and is “for the best work of literature (fiction and non-fiction) published in 2012 (for this inaugural one) by an Australian woman”. The prize of $50,000 will go to one author.

The award was created by a group of 11 women, including the writer Sophie Cunningham, in response to what many of us felt was an abysmal under-representation of women writers in Australia’s major literary awards and other literary activity (such as reviewing and being reviewed). The Stella Prize people want to turn this around and, as they say on their website, to:

  • raise the profile of women’s writing
  • encourage a future generation of women writers
  • bring readers to the work of Australian women.

The judging panel is a varied lot and should, I think, do an interesting job:

  • Kerryn Goldsworthy (Chair): author, writer, academic and critic
  • Kate Grenville: best-selling and award-winning Australian novelist. (Surely she doesn’t need any further introduction?)
  • Claudia Karvan: actor, producer and television scriptwriter
  • Rafael Epstein: television and radio journalist who has won the prestigious Walkley Award twice
  • Fiona Stager: bookshop owner and past president of the Australian Booksellers Association.

And, in fact, I think they have if the longlist – quite different to most literary prize longlists I’ve seen before – is any guide:

  • Romy Ash, Floundering: a debut novel on contemporary themes
  • Dylan Coleman, Mazin Grace: an historical novel about mission life, by a Kokatha-Greek writer
  • Courtney Collins, The burial: a debut historical crime novel which has apparently already been optioned for film. It reimagines the life of  Australia’s ‘lady bushranger’, Jessie Hickman
  • Robin de Crespigny, The people smuggler: described as “a non-fiction thriller and a moral maze” and I think I’ll leave it at that!
  • Michelle de Kretser, Questions of travel: the fourth novel by an award-winning Sri Lankan born writer. I’ve read two of her previous novels and am keen to read this one.
  • Amy Espeseth, Sufficient grace: novel by a Wisconsin born writer. It won an unpublished manuscript award back in 2009.
  • Lisa Jacobson, The sunlit zone: a verse novel which writer and reviewer Adrian Hyland describes as combining “the narrative drive of the novel with the perfect pitch of true poetry”
  • Cate Kennedy, Like a house on fire: a collection of short stories by one of Australia’s best short story writers. I’ve only read a couple of hers but need to find time to read more.
  • Margo Lanagan, Sea hearts: a fantasy or speculative-fiction novel about selkies and the like that also appeals to non-genre readers (I believe). Her prose is said to be beautiful.
  • Patti Miller, The mind of a thief: a memoir exploring issues around native title.
  • Stephanie Radok, An opening: subtitled “twelve love stories about art” this one sounds hard to classify but fascinating to read. I think the judges called it “mixed genre”.
  • Carrie Tiffany, Mateship with birds: the second novel by the author of the truly splendiferous Everyman’s rules for scientific living. This is waiting patiently in my TBR.

What a fascinating list eh? It contains few of the usual suspects – even among our somewhat maligned women writing fraternity, we do have some “usual suspects” – but some great sounding works. By longlisting such a diverse collection the judges are surely sending out a message about the depth and breadth of women’s writing in contemporary Australia. Some of the books have been reviewed by participants in the Australian Women Writers challenge. Paula Grunseit has provided a brief survey of these reviews at the challenge site. If you go there you can enter a book giveaway at the same time!

The shortlist for the 2013 Stella Prize will be announced on Wednesday 20 March. and the inaugural Stella Prize will be awarded in Melbourne on the evening of Tuesday 16 April. I’ll keep you informed.

Thea Astley, The monstrous accent on youth (Review)

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I was going to start this post with that well-known quote by Sophocles – or was it Plato – complaining about the young people of today, but a little bit of research turned up the fact that that quote is somewhat spurious. It was probably inspired by Plato’s Republic in which he presents a dialogue with Sophocles about the ideal education, advocating a “stricter system” to ensure young people “grow up into well-conducted and virtuous citizens”. It was not a tirade on “the youth of today”. That permutation was the work of variously identified twentieth century writers/speakers.

So, instead, I’ll dive straight into Thea Astley‘s essay, “The monstrous accent on youth”. It was written in 1968 and reproduced in last year’s Meanjin anthology which contains a selection of essays organised by decade, starting with the 1940s. I plan to dip into the anthology over the year as there are essays by writers like Patrick White and David Malouf, poems by Judith Wright, and so on. A treasure for dipping into.

I was, I suppose, surprised by the Thea Astley essay, though in retrospect I probably shouldn’t have been. She was never one to go lightly and she sure doesn’t here in criticising the youth of the 1960s. She talks of discussing moral dilemmas in a “middle-class girls’ high school” and being horrified by her students’ callous responses to her questions about conscription during the Vietnam War:

Girls, like female spiders, want to have their men and eat them, too. I was appalled by the selfishness of their reactions and wondered if this were merely a by-product of thinking in a Liberal Party voting area.

She suggests that the generation of the 1960s were frank and (by implication “progressive”) about sex and drugs but had a “hard conservative core”. She then talks of discussions at Macquarie University and says attitudes were more liberal there, “particularly noticeable in the nuns”. (I went to Macquarie University in the 1970s and had many nuns and seminarians in my tutorials. She’s right. They were usually thoughtful tutorial participants.) But, she’s discouraged by the narrowness of the reading. Her students hadn’t read, she said, “Compton Burnett, Cheever, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov, Gordimer …”. Hmm, must say that, with the exception of Nabokov, I hadn’t read those writers then either – in fact, I didn’t even hear of Gordimer until the 1980s – and yet I called myself a reader.

She ponders the reading issue, wondering if that generation spent more time drinking than reading, and worries that “their livers are in more danger than their morals”! I found this fascinating given the current concerns about drinking and the young …

Anyhow, I started to be concerned that the essay was simply going to be a rant against the young and, while it is that to a degree, her main concern is more to do with social change, I think. She writes:

The permissiveness of our generation to the younger has created the monstrous over-rated importance of youth. Oldies – pregnant, sick, reeling – can tremble vertical upon trains and buses while thick-thighed youngsters cling to their seats.

“Thick-thighed”. That sounds like Astley. But, back to the argument. Here in this paragraph near the end of the essay is her main point: “life is so easy for the young and, because of this, so difficult”. She is, in other words, not completely critical of the young. She sees their behaviour in a wider social context, as something that’s partly of her generation’s own making. Perhaps she would have approved of Plato’s “stricter system”?

Thea Astley
“The monstrous accent on youth” (1968)
in Meanjin Anthology
Melbourne University, 2012
(Kindle ed.)