Anna Funder, Stasiland (Review)

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Anna Funder's Stasiland bookcover

Funder’s Stasiland (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

Anna Funder‘s Stasiland, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, is one of those books that can be reviewed from multiple angles, and I know that when I get to the end of this review I’m going to be sorry about the angles I didn’t get to discuss. But, I can only do what I can do, eh?

I found it interesting to read this book immediately after another non-fiction book, Brenda Niall‘s biography True north, because the contrast clarified for me why I liked True north but loved Stasiland. To put it simply, True north is a well-written but pretty traditional biography, while Stasiland is what I’d call “literary non-fiction”. In other words, in Stasiland, Funder uses some of the literary techniques – relating to structure, voice and language – more commonly found in fiction to tell her story. It’s not surprising really that this is the case, because when I heard her speak last month, she said that she had initially planned to write Stasiland as a novel but, having done the research and interviews, it “didn’t feel right” to turn those people’s stories to another purpose. She was also aware that there were things in these stories that might not be accepted, that might seem too far-fetched in fiction! Such is the fine line we tread between fact and fiction.

At this point, I should describe the book, though its broad subject is obvious from the title. Funder (b. 1966) has a long-standing interest in things German, from her school days when she chose to learn German, and has visited and/or lived in Germany several times. She writes of travelling through the former German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists, that comprises “tumble-down houses and bewildered people”, and she describes feeling a sense of “horror-romance”:

The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past; from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.

And so she decides to try to understand this dichotomy and places an ad in the paper:

Seeking: former Stasi officers and unofficial collaborators for interview. Publication in English, anonymity* and discretion guaranteed.

This is, depending on how you look at it, either a very brave or naively silly thing to do. Funder, who sees writing as an act of empathy or compassion, interviews several Stasi men who answer her ad, as well as other East Germans who suffered at Stasi hands. It might be coincidental, but essentially all her subjects who suffered were women, while the perpetrators were men. In fact, when she visits the Stasi HQ in Berlin, she’s told it only had toilets for men! All this is not to say, however, that men didn’t suffer (or, even, that there weren’t women perpetrators). Indeed, some of the Stasi men she interviewed were themselves bullied, blackmailed and otherwise stood over to keep them in line.

What makes this book compelling are the stories she gathers, partly because the stories themselves are powerful and partly because of Funder’s own voice. Funder places herself in the book. This is not a third person “objective” recounting of the interviews she conducted but a journey we take together to find some answers. When she interviews Herr von Schnitzler, who hosted the Black Channel, a television program in which he presented a Communist commentary on excerpted programs from the West, we are in the room with her, hearing not only what he says, but getting a sense of his personality alongside her. We see her being fearless in sticking to her questions in the face of a man who frequently shouts. “I recognise”, she writes, “this pattern of unpredictable shouting followed by bouts of quiet reason from other bullies I have known”.

It is particularly in the von Schnitzler section that the GDR paradox becomes most clear. Von Schnitzler was, Funder tells us, molded by the injustices of the Weimar Republic. We see how the drive to create a new society not bedevilled by the iniquities – that is, the inequalities – of capitalism (or imperialism as many of the Stasi men call it) resulted in the creation of an authoritarian society where freedom was minimal (or non-existent) and dissent not allowed. In stark contrast to von Schnitzler and his refusal to see any error in, or critique, the GDR, is Julia, one of the “victims”, who had believed in the GDR but, through having an Italian boyfriend, had become caught in the Stasi net. She discovered that the “state can be so dangerous, so very dangerous, without me having done anything at all” and was completely traumatised by the extent of surveillance and loss of privacy she experienced. And yet, having experienced the East and the West, she can still say

you see the mistakes of one system – the surveillance – and the mistakes of the other – the inequality – but there’s nothing you could have done in the one, and nothing you can do now about the other … and the clearer you see that the worse you feel.

The GDR story is, as Funder tells it, one of grand humanitarian aims but one also riddled by paradox and irony. She asks Herr Bock, a recruiter of informers, what qualities he looked for in an informer:

‘… and above all else,’ he says, looking at me, his eyes distorted and magnified through the glasses, ‘he needed to be honest, faithful and trustworthy.’

I look back at him. I feel my eyes too, getting wider.

How can you resist a writer who tells a story like this, who shows without telling exactly what is going on, who can inject sly touches of wit and humour into the tough stuff?

I can’t possibly relate all the stories – many quite horrendous – in this book. All I can say is that it is a book that manages to show how history writing can be intimate while at the same time conveying facts and hard truths. It is a memorable book, and worth reading if you have any interest at all in politics and human behaviour.

Anna Funder
Stasiland
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2002
ISBN: 9781877008917
282pp.

* I’m intrigued by the promise of anonymity because it seems that in some, if not in all, cases, real names are used. I presume the people involved agreed to this.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Two favourite literary journals

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I’ve been wanting for some time to write about two of my favourite Australian literary journals (that is, not specifically book review journals). I don’t  read every issue – too much to read, too little time, and all that – but I’d love to. I admire people who manage to subscribe to magazines and journals and read every issue through and through.

Before I talk about the two I’ve chosen I should say that there are others I know I’d love too. I go into bookshops, pick them up, put them down, pick them up again and then realise I just can’t manage any more so I put them down again. For a useful list of  some of Australia’s best literary journals, check out this Australia Council webpage listing the journals* the Council supports.

Anyhow, back to my two current favourites. Both can now be bought in e-versions, including for the Kindle. They can be followed on Twitter and have Facebook pages, and both make some of their content available free online. And, here they are …

Griffith Review

The Griffith Review is a quarterly journal of “new writing and ideas”, and is now 8 years old. It is published by the Griffith University. Unlike most journals, it takes a thematic approach, with each issue being devoted to a theme. For example, the current issue, no. 37, is themed “Small World”, which its website says “broadens the mind with postcards and intelligence from everywhere at a time when the growth of international air travel has shrunk the definition of proximity and the internet has enabled the globalised media industry to bring distant events and places tantalisingly close”. The contributors on this issue include writers I’ve reviewed here: Murray Bail, Melissa Lucashenko and Chris Flynn.

What I love about this journal, besides the overall quality of the writing of course, is the variety of forms it encompasses on a regular basis – Fiction, Poetry, Essays (including photographic essays), Reportage and Memoir. I love that they include memoir as a regular part of the journal. And, in 2009 (at least I think it was then), they commenced an annual fiction edition. These editions contain more short stories than the other issues, and the rest of the content (essays, memoirs, etc) focuses on fiction. Not quite Granta, but perhaps moving in that direction?

Kill Your Darlings

I’m not an expert on the economics of journal publishing, but the Griffith Review does have a pretty major university behind it. Kill Your Darlings (KYD) on the other hand is a much smaller – braver – affair. First published in March 2010, it is now up to issue No. 10 (which, in print, costs $19.95, but at $7.96 from Amazon for the Kindle, it’s a great deal). This current issue has an interview with Aussie writer Andrew McGahan (whom I like but haven’t read since starting this blog) and an article on one of my favourite Aussie writers, Jessica Anderson, so I let my fingers do the walking at Amazon and in seconds I had it on my Kindle. Gotta love this new technology!

Like most literary journal, KYD’s content is diverse, with its regular sections being Commentary, Fiction, Interview, Reviews – and, sometimes, a Cartoon.

Kill Your Darlings is a smaller, somewhat plainer publication than the Griffith Review, but it is gorgeous with a stylish retro look that catches the eye. It’s lovely to hold. Hmm, why did I buy that Kindle version, again?

I’ll conclude on another article in Issue 10, which comes from Gideon Haigh whose discussion on literary reviewing in the first issue I blogged about back in 2010. In Issue 10, he writes on the economics of writing. Early in the article he says:

Here is a disjunction in Australian publishing: the most enthusiastic and imaginative publishers are the ones with no money; caution grows with size.

That seems an appropriate thought to leave you on methinks.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear from you – Aussie or not – whether you have any favourite literary journals, what they are and why you like them.

* I’m not sure how up to date this list is, but it’s a start if you’d like to check others out.

Brenda Niall, True north: The story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack (Review)

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‘Of course we are mad,’ Bet wrote to Mary, ‘but we live in a mad place.’

Brenda Niall's True North
Brenda Niall’s True North (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

The mad place that Bet – Elizabeth Durack – refers to is the Kimberley region of north-west Australia and the book this quote comes from is biographer Brenda Niall‘s True north: The story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack.

Brenda Niall, along with the late Hazel Rowley, is one of Australia’s best regarded biographers. True North, her most recent book, tells the story of writer Mary Durack (1913-1994) and her younger sister, the artist Elizabeth (1915-2000). I must say that it took me a long time to read this book. I was fascinated by the story but it lacked, in the beginning at least, some of the punch that I found in Rowley’s Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage which I reviewed last year. I think this is because Niall’s style here is a little flatter, a little more like reportage, than I found in Rowley’s book. Both books have two people as their subjects and both books have an overriding theme – the Roosevelts’ extraordinary marriage for Rowley and the sisters’ fascination with the remote north for Niall – but, for me, Rowley’s had a stronger narrative drive which resulted in a more cohesive “argument”. However, I did settle into True North and, in the end, enjoyed it for what it did do.

Mary and Elizabeth, for those of you who don’t know, belonged to the pioneer pastoralists, the Duracks, who had  emigrated from Ireland in the 1850s. They farmed in Goulburn (NSW), then moved to Coopers Creek (Queensland) in the late 1860s, before droving their cattle nearly 5,000 kms cross-country to settle in the Kimberleys (WA) in 1882. Mary told this story in her best-selling (now classic) history, Kings in grass castles, and its sequel Sons in the saddles.

Niall’s book, though, is not about that, but about the two sisters and their lives in the 20th century. Mary and Elizabeth spent most of their childhood and youth in Perth, while their father managed the northern properties, returning south each year in the off-season. However, both separately and together spent time on their father’s properties, particularly in their late teens and early twenties. Niall’s title, “true north”, expresses the sisters’ identification with the north. In 1929, for example, Mary said she returned to the north “like a homing pigeon”. Elizabeth described it, a few years later, as “that wild, wonderful country”. The north was, in fact, the inspiration for their creative output.

Niall characterises the two sisters well. Mary was the calmer, more sociable, reliable one who struggled to find time to write between raising children, supporting various family members, and playing a significant role in the literary life of Perth. Elizabeth was more unsettled, more fiery and perhaps more ambitious. She was frequently poor and depended on the family, particularly Mary, for monetary and emotional support throughout much of her life. Theirs was a close relationship, and included several collaborative books for which Mary wrote the text and Elizabeth did the illustrations. Neither made wonderfully successful marriages – and both, despite their challenges, produced significant bodies of work.

Several themes run through the book, but the most interesting one for me concerns the Duracks’ relationship with Aboriginal people. From early on the family employed indigenous people. According to Niall, the sisters’ father, Michael Patsy Durack, “stressed their value as allies”. For the sisters, their early experiences were positive and resulted in a lifelong interest in and awareness of indigenous people and their issues. Elizabeth spoke many years later about “how lovely it was to go walking with them and to learn about the bush” while Mary wrote of being disturbed by “the shadow people in their humpies on the river banks, humbly serving, unknowing, unquestioning”.  Mary wrote a short story, “Old Woman”, about the harsh treatment of an Aboriginal woman by a station wife. It was published in The Bulletin in 1939 and nearly resulted in a libel suit. Elizabeth wrote in a letter, around 1935,

It’s a question of either opening one’s eyes to the situation and grappling with it with whatever instruments lie within one’s reach or shutting one’s eyes to the whole business and getting the hell out of it.

I don’t have time to fully explore it all now, but I was intrigued by this comment on Mary late in her life:

She found the Aborigines surprisingly objective about the past ‘recalling events with no hint of bitterness’, talking about the white people with neither praise nor blame.’

This brought to mind indigenous writer Kim Scott’s That deadman dance, which I reviewed last year and in which he presents (albeit in a novel but borne out by the records, I believe) a similar generosity or openness of spirit. But, back to True north. Niall argues that the Duracks were respectful and sympathetic employers and friends. Big brother Reg in the 1930s was aware of “the social injustice of use of Aboriginal labour”. Mary, in the 1960s, argued persistently for equal pay, and even though, when it came, indigenous station workers were displaced in droves, she still believed in the principle. Ah, that tricky conundrum: principle versus reality, idealism versus pragmatism.  Why are they so often at loggerheads with each other?

Elizabeth, however, did get into hot water later in her life when, going way further than Mary who wrote a poem in the voice of an indigenous woman, she took on the name and persona of an Aboriginal man, Eddie Burrup, as a nom de brush. Niall discusses the issue at some length teasing out artistic and personal issues versus cultural trespass. She is sympathetic in the end to Durack and her somewhat mixed motivations. The situation was certainly complicated and, while some of Durack’s motivations give me pause, I’d rather not pass judgement, except to say that in the late 20th century it was not a wise thing to do.

The insight Niall gives into an albeit specific pastoral family’s experience of and response to their relationship with indigenous people makes this book worth reading. We do of course only get Niall’s presentation of the Duracks’ experience. Besides a few scattered references to indigenous people’s responses, we know little of the indigenous perspective. The sad thing is that we may never know their side, since few people are left to tell it, and not much is likely to have been documented.

Oh dear, I’ve written a lot about one theme and there’s so much more to tell, but I won’t retain you much longer. Two other major themes permeate the book. One revolves around love of and identification with place, with how place can get under the skin and drive one’s life. The other concerns the challenge women creators face in serving their art while juggling families and the need for financial support.

While I didn’t find Niall’s book as compelling as I’d hoped, the more I think about it, the more I appreciate what she has attempted to do. The Duracks’ story is a complex and somewhat contradictory one. Mary, Elizabeth and their brothers were the children of a “cattle king”, and being such their public image was “one of effortless privilege”. The reality was, in fact, rather different – and it resulted in lives that were challenged and challenging. Niall’s book will not, I suspect, be the last we hear of them – but it makes a valuable contribution.

Brenda Niall
True North: The story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
Kindle edition
272pp (Print ed.)
ISBN: 9781921921421 (eBook)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some favourite Aussie film adaptations (2)

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A couple of Monday Musings ago I shared some of my favourite Australian films adapted from novels. Today, it’s the turn of Aussie plays. I’m no expert in adapting works but it seems to me that it would be easier to adapt a play to film than it would be a novel. I wonder if that’s true in reality? Does anyone know?

Anyhow, here are some of my favourite Australian films that had their genesis in theatre:

  • Don’s Party (1976) is one of many plays written by satirist David Williamson that have been adapted to film, and I have enjoyed most of those I’ve seen. I’ve chosen Don’s Party because it was one of the first. The play was written in 1971 and is set during a post-election party held by Don for his Australian Labor Party friends. They expect their party to win but things don’t quite go to plan, and tensions develop. The film was directed by prolific Australian director, Bruce Beresford. It beautifully but rather excruciatingly captures the new educated, socially mobile middle class, their (our!) pretensions and the gap between reality and their dreams.
  • Breaker Morant (1980) is one of my favourite Australian films from our film renaissance of the 1970s to early 80s, partly because I am a bit of a fan of courtroom dramas and this is a good one! The film was adapted from a play (first produced in 1978) by a playwright I don’t know, Kenneth G. Ross, and was directed by Bruce Beresford. (Told you he was prolific!). The subject is the court-martial of Lieutenant Harry “Breaker” Morant and two other officers for murders during the Boer War. The film plays to an historical tension between the colonial Aussies and the colonist Brits, as well as to Australians’ reputation for larrikinism or anti-authoritarianism, and it makes a strong anti-war case. It starred Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown and Jack Thompson – and, writing about it now, makes me want to see it again.
  • Lantana (2001) was adapted from the play, Speaking in tongues, by Andrew Bovell. It’s a tense drama centred around a murder, but it’s less a crime story than an exploration of relationships and trust/betrayal. The film was directed by Ray Lawrence. It has a moody atmosphere and an insistent soundtrack (composed by Paul Kelly) that makes it hard to forget.
  • Blessed (2009) was adapted from the play, Who’s afraid of the working class?, written by Andrew Bovell (again), Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas (author of The Slap) and Irene Vela. The playwrights, with the exception of Vela, also wrote the film script. As I wrote in my review on this blog, it’s a gritty exploration of mothers and their often neglected children.

There are many other Australian films adapted from plays, including several by Williamson, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (from Ray Lawler’s classic play of the same name), and The Sum of Us (from a play by David Stevens, who also wrote the filmscript for Breaker Morant!).

When films are adapted from books, we often know because the books tend to be republished (often with a movie image on its cover). The movies provide a great opportunity for books to get another airing. With plays, though, its a different situation. We don’t, as a rule, read plays and we often don’t know, I suspect, whether a film has been based on a play or not (even if it has the same title).

How often are you aware of the theatrical origin of films you like, and do you have any favourite films that are based on plays?

(BTW, My next post on the topic of adaptations will be on television adaptations.)

Dame Mary Durack, Lament for the drowned country (Review)

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Lake Argyle with Crocodile

Freshwater crocodile heading into Lake Argyle

Near the end of her book True north about Mary and Elizabeth Durack, biographer Brenda Niall writes of Mary Durack‘s poem, “Lament for the Drowned Country”, which she says “has been judged her finest poem”.  Of course, with such a statement, I had to read it. I could have Googled* it, but I decided to check my Penguin Book of Australian women poets and, hallelujah, it was there. (Once again this book didn’t let me down!)

“Lament for the drowned country” is a long poem and is presented in the voice of an Aboriginal woman, Maggie, mourning the drowning (for the Ord River Irrigation Scheme) of her “born country”. It’s a poignant poem – for obvious reasons – as it’s about the loss of country (for the indigenous people) and home (for the Duracks, whose Argyle homestead went under the water). But, there’s something else too – an irony, because the idea of damming the Ord River was first proposed by Mary’s brother Kimberley Durack in the 1940s. Mary supported her brother** at the time … but the reality many years later, after her brother’s death, was sad for her.

The interesting thing about the poem is that Durack chose to write it in the voice of an Aboriginal woman. Niall writes of this that:

At a later time, her creation of a first person voice for Maggie Wallaby might have been questioned. In 1972 it was taken as she intended it, as a work of empathy and imaginative identification.

This made me think of Thomas Keneally‘s The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1972. It was written in the voice of the Aboriginal protagonist, but Keneally has since said that he wouldn’t presume to do that now, and would tell the story from a white point of view. This says something, I think, something positive, I hope, about Australia’s cultural development. In the 1970s and before, indigenous voices were hard to find. This is less so now – and will hopefully only get better bringing us more voices, and a greater variety of story representing the diversity of indigenous experience.

Anyhow, back to the poem. According to Niall, the poem was inspired by Mary seeing Maggie “catching fish and unaccountably throwing them back into the [new] lake”. Mary saw this – realistically or romantically, who’s to say? – as signalling hope. She has Maggie saying:

I sit along river coming down from my born country.
That heart place! I got to talk to that water.
I got to tell that fish: ‘You go back – you go back now –
talk strong my country. You tell him that spirit can’t leave ’em.
You tell him – Wait! Hang on! This is not the finish!
…’

Later in the poem, Maggie talks of the land drying, the sun coming once again to warm it, and the animals and birds returning. Maggie also makes a reference to the Durack homestead:

You go back up there, that old station – Argyle station –
(poor fella my old boss, my old missus. Nothing left that
house, where I sweep’m every day!) You look out that house,
you look out
windmill, tank, garden, kitchen, saddle shed.
…

The remarkable thing about the poem is how well – or so it seems to me – Mary Durack captures the cadence, the intonation even – of Aboriginal speech and story-telling. I shouldn’t be surprised though, because Durack spent much of her childhood playing with Aboriginal children and spent her adult life, when she could, not only arguing for but working with indigenous people in their fight for equal rights. According to Niall, as Mary Durack left the north for the last time, “the Aboriginal women, knowing they would never see her again, began to beat their heads and wail inconsolably”. We all know the psychology of master-servant/white-black relationships is a complex one, but that doesn’t deny the fact that amongst it all there can genuine feelings and mutual respect.

I’ll be writing more on the Duracks, and particularly on Mary whose love for the land of her birth was, like Maggie Wallaby’s, absolute:

she can’t forget ‘im, my country, she all day heart-crying.

Meanwhile I recommend this poem …

Mary Durack
“Lament for the drowned country”
In Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn (ed)
The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets
Ringwood: Penguin, 1986
pp. 65-68.

* I did Google it too, to provide a link for this post, but I only found excerpts rather than the whole poem. Hence no link here. I guess it’s too recent to be in the public domain.

** Kim Durack was an agricultural scientist. He apparently loved the land and was committed to improving it after the damage caused by years of over-grazing.

The Griffyn Ensemble’s paean to the weather

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It’s pretty much a given that a Griffyn Ensemble concert will be both entertaining and challenging – and their latest concert, Cloudy With a Chance of Rain, was no exception. But this concert had an added fillip: it was unashamedly political in addressing the thorny (for some) issue of climate change. Good on the Griffyns I thought.

Before I continue though, I’ll list the current line-up:

  • Kiri Sollis (Flute, etc)
  • Matthew O’Keeffe (Clarinets)
  • Wyana O’Keeffe (Percussion – hmm, it seems there’s been another wedding amongst the Griffyns as Wyana was previously Etherington)
  • Meriel Own (Harp)
  • Susan Ellis (Soprano)
  • Michael Sollis (Director, Composer, and Mandolin, etc)

That’s six, where there was once seven. I wonder what has happened to Carly Brown, their French Horn player? Anyhow, for this concert there was a seventh – geomorphologist and ex-weather presenter, Rob Gell.

So to the concert, which was described in the program as including works “spanning geography and genre contextualised through the four seasons, from the ancient ice ages to the distant future.” It commenced with Rob Gell introducing the climate theme by talking about the ice age and leading us nicely into the first part of the concert, labeled Winter, because the concert was organised by the four seasons. It was, in fact, the four seasons without the Four Seasons! Now that’s original programming, though poor old Vivaldi probably turned in his grave!

The music itself was highly varied, as we expect from the Griffyns. The concert started with a moody, contemporary piece, “White Scenery”, by Latvian composer, Pēteris Vasks. Originally a piano piece, it had been arranged by the Griffyns for harp, mandolin, flute and vibraphone. The other wintry pieces were Debussy’s “Snow is Dancing” played on harp, and Schubert’s song “The Linden Tree”. We then moved through the seasons, hearing a mix of traditional classic, contemporary, jazz and popular music. I can’t possibly list all the pieces now (which, in addition to Europe, came from places as varied as Japan, Uruguay and the southern US) … so will move onto …

Desert south of Woomera, South Australia

Desert south of Woomera, South Australia

What I, a reader who enjoys music, particularly love about the Griffyns: there’s always a literary element to their concerts and they always credit writers in their simple but useful programs. In this concert there were songs set to works by Wilhelm Müller (“The Linden Tree”), Ruth Valadares Corrêa, Rainer Maria Rilke and Herman Hesse among others, as well as an original work inspired by Patrick White. This work, “Mirage”, was composed by the group’s director, Michael Sollis, for piccolo and glockenspiel. It was inspired, the notes say, by “Patrick White’s image of the harsh Australian desert landscape – full of emptiness, desolation, relentless heat, and an unnerving sense of ritual”. Now, if I was intrigued and impressed by how the comparatively high registers of the flute could convey the depths of winter in Vasks’ “White scenery”, I thoroughly enjoyed the piccolo’s representation of a mirage for this summer piece. The piece played out a little like a cat-and-mouse game between the two instruments, with, surprisingly for the subject matter, an element of humour. Kiri Sollis and Wyana O’Keeffe did a lovely job with what was a musically and intellectually challenging but evocative piece. It was in the Summer narration that Gell made his strongest points about climate change, sharing some now well-known but still scary data about increasing temperatures, increasing rain, and the havoc these will cause.

I would love to list all my favourite pieces from the concert, but that would be most of them. While Vivaldi, thankfully really, wasn’t there, another obvious selection was – “Summertime”. I also loved Susan Ellis’ rendition of another favourite of mine, “Autumn Leaves”. The notes describe it as a 1945 French song made famous by Edith Piaf, but I know it best in a version by the lovely Eva Cassidy.

It was a good concert. It may have had a rough spot here and there, but it had life, and it teased our minds and moved our hearts. I’ll close with some words from Wilhelm Müller’s “The Linden Tree”:

When dreaming there I carved
Some words of love upon the bark
Both joy and sorrow
Drew me to that shady spot

“Joy and sorrow” in a “shady spot”. That just about says it all.

Monday musings on Australian literature: National Bookshop Day (Belated)

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Saturday 11 August was National Bookshop Day here down under but I decided to delay writing about it until this week’s Monday Musings as it seems a worthy subject. However, Lisa of ANZLitlovers and Louise of A Strong Belief in Wicker did their posts in a more timely way.

National Bookshop Day is a new concept here. In fact this was its second year, having been inaugurated last year by the Australian Booksellers Association. Its logo is “celebrating bookshops in the community” and its aims are, I think, both celebratory and promotional, regarding bookshops, literature and, more generally, culture. I guess it doesn’t take much thought to work out why they feel the need to have such a day, what with the internet ‘n all?

I like this comment from Bite the Book, the blog of Pages and Pages* bookshop in Mosman, Sydney:

The internet makes it easier for everyone to find what they are looking for but what a boring place the world would be and how uninteresting our lives would be if we only ever found what we were looking for. As much as I enjoy reading the next book from one of my favourite authors there is nothing quite like that feeling of reading a book you found from left field through a recommendation or the serendipity of finding it on a shelf.

I like this because it recognises that there’s no turning back the clock. Technologies change. The three-volume book gave way to the single volume, paperbacks brought book-buying to a new level, and now e-books are on the rise. The point is they are all books and one thing remains the same: People continue to read. A day that celebrates this while also promoting one of the places that we readers love the most can only be a good thing. Browsing an online store, while possible and getting smarter, is nothing like browsing a bookshop surrounded by other booklovers and by books of all shapes, sizes, colours and contents.

I’m embarrassed to say that, unlike Lisa and Louise, I did not get to a bookshop on THE day, but I do go to bookshops regularly. Bookshops have had a tough time in the national capital over that last few years with significant chain stores disappearing view: Collins, Angus and Robertson and Borders. Just two chains survive, Dymocks and QBD. It’s good to see them survive. Chain bookshops** have their place after all, but they are not my bookshops of choice. My favourites tend to be independent stores, particularly:

  • Paperchain – has the best remainder table I know, as well as other great books of course, and many author events
  • Electric Shadows – has a particular focus on film, media and the performing arts as well as a good selection of Aussie lit, and also has author events
  • Smiths Alternative – has books you don’t always find elsewhere including a good selection of translated fiction, and in line with its alternative, socially-conscious vibe, holds a variety of events in fiction, poetry and music
  • National Library of Australia’s Bookshop – is the one I frequent the most. It’s in a beautiful building belonging to our premier literary institution, specialises in Aussie literature,  and offers a generous discount to Friends of the Library. And there’s a gorgeous cafe across the foyer. What’s not to like?

Just for the record, I have recently bought books from a bookshop (the National Library one): Luke Davies‘ Interferon psalms (book of poetry, for me), Robert Newton’s When we were two (YA novel, for my nephew), and one I won’t name because it is a gift that hasn’t been bestowed yet.

Did you, if you’re Australian, attend a bookshop on National Bookshop Day? I’d love to hear about it. And, if you’re not Australian, is there something similar where you are? Are bookshops in your area thriving?

* On National Bookshop Day, Pages and Pages donated $1 for each book sold to the Indigenous Literary Foundation. Many bookshops held events, offered discounts and prizes. Let’s hope, for all their hard work, they attracted some new customers to their fold.

** My favourite chain in Australia has to be Kinokuniya. Its depth of fiction, from many nations, is simply hard to beat – but we don’t have a store in my city.

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Mary Durack on Patrick White

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I am slowly – very slowly – reading True North, Brenda Niall‘s biography of Mary and Elizabeth Durack. Life is rather getting in the way of reading at present so, contrary to my normal practice, I am going to post a Delicious Description from it before, rather than after, my review. For those of you who don’t know, Mary and Elizabeth Durack belonged to the Durack pastoral dynasty which made its name in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Mary wrote the best-selling Kings in grass castles which tells her family’s story starting with her ancestors’ migration from Ireland in mid-19th century and following them through New South Wales and Queensland to their pioneering life in the Kimberleys.

But, Mary also wrote novels – including children’s books which were illustrated by her sister Elizabeth – and worked as a journalist writing articles, columns and reviews. I loved coming across, in Niall’s book, a discussion of her review of Patrick White‘s The tree of man in Westerly, in 1957. I’m always interested to hear what writers, who are contemporaries, think of each other. I was thrilled to discover that Durack liked and appreciated White, because some literary luminaries of the time, like AD Hope and Florence James, were not impressed with his modernist style. According to Niall, Durack said that “the critic who dismisses [White’s] often broken and unfinished sentences” would also have to dismiss much of Joyce and Faulkner.

Niall also quotes this excerpt from Durack’s review:

I have little doubt that this is a book destined to become an important part of our literary tradition. It probes deep below the surface to the inner lives of men and women, the emotions, the sensations and dreams they cannot express, either through diffidence, or because they lack words in which to embody them … It is full of the beauty and poetry of nature, the turn of the seasons and the passing for the years expressed in words that ring as clear and true as the stockman’s Condamine bell.

And she was right! Not only has White entered our pantheon of writers, but he is the only Australian to date to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The more I read this book, the more I’m liking this woman…

Monday musings on Australian literature: Some favourite Aussie film adaptations (1)

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In support of Australia’s National Year of Reading the National Film and Sound Archive is, later this year, holding an exhibition on film adaptations. And that made me think about my favourite film adaptations, which in turn made me think it might be a good Monday Musings topic. So, here I am. This post will focus on films adapted from novels and short stories. I will write other posts in future on adaptations from plays and adaptations for TV.

The Australian film industry, like most, has drawn from novels, plays and stories since its early days. Some of Australia’s best known silent films are adaptations, including The sentimental bloke (1919) (CJ Dennis), On our selection (1920) (Steele Rudd), and For the term of his natural life (1927) (Marcus Clarke). For this post, however, I’ll be focusing on my favourites from the last few decades.

Are you one of those people who refuses to see a film until you’ve read the book? I’m not really, though if it’s a book I’m keen to read I do prefer to read it first. I take a pretty free and easy (wishy-washy, did I hear you say?) approach to film adaptations. That is, I don’t expect them to replicate the work they are based on and am very happy for artistic licence to be taken. Film and Literature are different media and it’s impossible, in my view, for one to replicate the other. This might sound a bit ingenuous, but I’m just not too fussed about getting my knickers in a knot over the issue. I care more about whether I enjoyed the film (and, of course, whether I enjoyed the book).

I have to admit that some (though my no means all) of my favourite Aussie film adaptations are of books or stories I haven’t read or that I read after seeing the film. However, they are still adaptations and they are films I like, so I’m going to list them here (with the work they are based on). Like all lists it’s going to be hard to limit it, but limit it I must, so here goes, in film date order …

  • Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is credited with kickstarting the renaissance of Australian film in the 1970s. It was based on a novel of the same name, by Joan Lindsay. It was quite controversial at the time – not the film itself – but the question of whether it was based on fact or not. It wasn’t! It’s a great story, beautifully filmed by Peter Weir – and has become pretty much an iconic Aussie film.
  • My Brilliant Career (1979) was based on Miles Franklin‘s novel of the same name. It was made during a period when the Australian film industry was dominated by nostalgia (or period drama). When you’re on a good thing, stick to it, and all that … but this film had something special. It spoke to the second wave of feminism in its story of Sybylla who gives up a man to stay true to her dream of being a writer, and it launched the career of pioneering woman film director, Gillian Armstrong.
  • Three dollars (2005) was based on a novel of the same name by Elliot Perlman whose latest novel, The street sweeper, I’ll be reading and reviewing  later this year. I love this film (and book, which is one of those I did read first) because it’s about a man who sticks by his principles, who won’t let corporate greed or urban apathy get in the way of his humanity despite significant cost to himself. And it starred David Wenham (aka the luscious Diver Dan from a favourite television series).
  • Jindabyne (2006) is a bit of a ring-in here because it was based not on an Australian work but on a short story by the American writer, Raymond Carver. The story is titled “So much water so close to home” and has been transplanted to Australia and overlaid with an indigenous theme, but the essential story about men who, on a fishing trip discover a dead (murdered) girl and, rather than hike out to report the death immediately, continue their trip, remains the same. It’s a taut, tight, visually beautiful film about moral responsibility.
  • The eye of the storm (2011) is based on Patrick White’s novel of the same name. White is often described as “unadaptable” – and later this year I plan to write on the saga behind an attempt to make a film of Voss. We are still waiting – though it was adapted for opera, with David Malouf the librettist. Meanwhile, I reckon The eye of the storm effectively shows that White can indeed be adapted to film. The film had an amazingly long run (in my city anyhow) for not-the-best-known book by an author generally regarded as “hard”.

These are just five of many that I’ve seen and enjoyed over the years – I might also have mentioned Bliss, Candy, Looking for Alibrandi and Romulus my father, for example – but for all those I’ve seen, I wonder about the ones that haven’t been made. Over the years, we hear books are optioned – like Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River, Thea Astley‘s Drylands, Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, and Tim Winton’s Dirt Music – and we wait, and wait, and wait to see them, but they never appear. Given that adaptations can often guarantee an audience (though perhaps less so of literary fiction), it’s surprising to me that so many of our wonderful novels have not yet been adapted. I can only wait and hope…

Meanwhile, do you enjoy film adaptations, and what are your favourites?

Melissa Lucashenko, The silent majority (Review)

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I have reviewed many individual short stories by Americans (through the Library of America), but not by Australians. Time to rectify that a little, and why not with a short story by Melissa Lucashenko, an Australian writer of European and indigenous Australian heritage. She is an award-winning novelist and an essayist, but I hadn’t read her – until now.

You might be wondering why I chose her and this story? But it’s obvious really. I was pottering around the web and came across this:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, Jo decided, that a bored teenager with a permanent marker is a pain in the bloody neck.

How could I go past it? I had to read it to see what it – and Lucashenko whom I was keen to read – was all about. It’s a short, short story, well suited, I suppose, to publication in a magazine like the Griffith Review. Jo is a single mum of indigenous heritage and during the course of the story is mowing the grounds of the cemetery in the small northeastern NSW town of Mullumbimby. Her teenage daughter Ellen is supposed to be babysitting her young nephew Timbo while Jo does her mowing but, like a teenager, gets bored and “tags” Timbo with slogans such as “Better Conditions or I ring DOCS*” and “Pay me a living wage”. The daughter is needling her mother, but there is of course double meaning for the reader in these slogans, messages about the conditions many indigenous Australians face.

The story mainly comprises Jo’s thoughts as she gets on with her mowing. She reflects on those who lie in the ground beneath her – the Protestants and Catholics, in their separate sections. They are the literal “silent majority” of the title, and she wonders about their stories, now lost with the erasure by time of their details on the gravestones. Jo wonders about

These stories that had once been so important to the town, that had needed carving in granite: where were they now.

Stories, though, are important to Jo – and, in my experience, are an important treasured part of indigenous Australian culture. Jo is a little worn by her “previous life and its discontents” in which an Eeyore-like man Gerry kept dragging her into “his tight white world”. In fact, she appears not to have much time for people, with her “favourite humans living in the pages of books” and her preferred living creatures being horses. She quotes Walt Whitman – I found that interesting – on horses:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
… not one is demented with the mania of owning things.

Hmmm … this certainly conveys to me a sense of cynicism about humans, of all colours. But the real point of the story comes in the third last paragraph, with her pondering on what the land was like before, when it was

not yet doomed by the axes and greed of men who – months and years from anything they thought of as home – had tried to slash and burn their way to freedom here.

So what we have here is a meditation, in a way, on stories and their importance, on animals and land, and on walking a line between white and indigenous culture. It’s not all melancholic, as what I’ve said here might suggest. There are some touches of humour. Overall, I was intrigued by her writing and I liked the story, though it felt a little undeveloped. I understand that Lucashenko’s next novel is set in the Mullumbimby area. I wonder whether this story is part of it – or, at least, whether Jo appears in it. I hope so.

Melissa Lucashenko
“The silent majority”
Published in the Griffith Review, Edition 26, November 2009
Available: Online at the Griffith Review

*The Department of Community Services which is feared by struggling parents for fear their children will be taken away.