Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Thea Astley on aging

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Regular readers of this blog will now that I’m a big fan of Thea Astley. One of her last novels (novella, actually) was Coda, a biting story about elderly widow Kathleen who is losing her memory but struggling, with little help from her self-centred children, to maintain some independence and, more, dignity. The book is full of wonderful acerbic insights that make you smile while hitting you in the guts at the same time. The novel opens with ‘”I’m losing my nouns”, she admitted.’

Here are some other excerpts:

… her oddities were increasing with age, her indifference to convention running counter to the refinements and pretentiousness of her children’s lifestyles.

And

… Public Service pension that drizzled brief fortnightly puddles of support into her bank account like a rusty tap.

And

She was scrabbling and rooting about for words in that old handbag of her years.

Astley’s early novels were exuberant, expansive in their imagery – though they too had satirical bite – but her last novels, particularly Coda and Drylands, were tighter, more spare. I wonder if that has something to do with her own aging, with no long having the gift of time?

Alice Joyce in her Booklist review, on Amazon, says “Astley’s high regard in her native Australia is understandable after reading this taut, compelling new novel about a strong-minded widow not yet ready to concede defeat and bow to the realities of her failing memory and the physical limitations of an aging body”. It is truly unfortunate that Thea Astley is not well-known outside Australia.

Leslie Cannold, The book of Rachael

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Bookcover Leslie Cannold The book of Rachael

The book of Rachael (Cover image: Courtesy Text Publishing)

For someone who doesn’t seek out historical fiction, I seem to have read a lot of it lately. Leslie Cannold’s The book of Rachael is the third historical novel I’ve read in succession – and it’s the third with an author’s afterword/postscript, which suggests to me some uncertainty in the writers about historical fiction. Tansley quoted Doris Lessing’s statement that fiction is “better at” the truth than the factual record. Brooks addressed concerns that the imagined record might be interpreted as fact. Cannold takes a different tack. Her book, like Brooks’, involves an imagined heroine telling a story about some “real” historical people, in her case Joshua (Jesus) and Judah (Judas). Cannold writes:

I wonder now whether it really makes sense to call this sort of writing historical fiction. Can setting entirely fictional characters to roam in the landscape of a multi-authored, oft-redacted religious tale really be described as historical? Not if the criteria include scholarly examination of verifiable, chronologically ordered events. So, I don’t think of “The book of Rachael” as historical fiction. I think of it as the bringing to life of a fictional character by evoking the time and place in which the character’s story is set. In “The book of Rachael” I have set the fictional sisters to roam across the historicised terrain of the gospels.

Hmm … I’m not going to get into definition discussions here. It is what it is, regardless of what we call it, and in this case it’s a first person story of Rachael, the invented sister of Jesus and wife of Judas. The rest as they say is (more or less) history … at least as far as the Jesus and Judas story goes. But, of course, there’s more to it than this. Cannold creates a whole life for Rachael from her childhood in Nazareth, as the second daughter of Yosef and Miriame, to her life post-Crucifixion. She’s a girl out of her time – something even her rather hard mother recognises (“Oh Rachael … how hard the world is for you”). She chafes under the strictures of being female (learning “in no uncertain terms what it meant to be a girl”). Like Brooks’ Bethia she wants to learn and so she listens in to her brothers’ lessons when she can. Also like Brooks’ Bethia, she channels some of her intelligence and curiosity into studying to be a healer, as an apprentice of the old crone Bindy. Then she meets Judah, angry young rebel to the gentler, more humble Joshua, and the book seems to shift a little on its axis.

Leslie Cannold was named one of Australia’s top twenty public intellectuals in 2005, and this year she was named Australian Humanist of the Year. She’s an academic, activist and ethicist with particular interest in women’s rights. She wrote The book of Rachael because, she said, “what kind of world painstakingly records the names and stories of important people’s brothers but not their sisters”. She wanted, in other words, to place women in the history, much like Anita Diamant wanted to do in The red tent, but fiction is not her usual métier and I think it shows.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s an entertaining read, and her evocation of the times, her well-researched imaginings of how women’s lives went are engaging and engrossing, particularly in the first half of the novel. But, the writing is often forced. I’m never quite comfortable with first person narrators who describe their own behaviour in terms that are usually used by a third person, such as “sobbing as if my heart would break” and “hissing like a cat, I …”. The romance with Judah is also laid on a bit thick. Almost every time they meet – he is often away fighting – sex is explicitly described. I don’t think I’m prudish, but it did start to read more like a boddice-ripping romance than serious historical fiction. Here’s an example:

Judah blocked my mouth with a kiss. The sort of kiss that involved him sucking my lower lip until my breasts heaved and my skin seemed to sparkle like stars. The sort of kiss where I might forgive him almost everything.

This is just one of many episodes. “Enough already”, I wanted to cry. Yes, feminists are women too, but passion can be conveyed so much better through a little restraint. Just look at Jane Austen, whom Cannold must love, given her sneaky tribute: “It is a truth widely known that the desire of the amorously infatuated to hear their lover’s name, to speak it and hear it spoken aloud, make them tiresome company”.

There are, however, some beautiful descriptions, such as this:

Of these years, little is left to me by way of coherent memory. Instead, what I recall is like a mosaic, vividly coloured tiles affixed at different points on a large white wall: discrete scenes of colour and movement floating in a sea of empty whitewashed space.

Cannold handles the complex stories surrounding Jesus (Joshua) with a lovely subtle restraint, neither labouring their miracle aspects nor discounting them. I don’t want to give away the end – beyond what everyone knows of the biblical history. I found the conclusion for Rachael moving and redemptive but it didn’t have the feminist punch I expected from the way the novel started. Does that matter? Perhaps not. I’d love to hear what others say.

The book of Rachael
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2011
328pp.
ISBN: 9781921758089

Review copy supplied by Text Publishing

Monday musings on Australian literature: Bookseller turns publisher

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Book Stack

Books anyone? (Courtesy: OCAL, from clker.com)

Bookseller-as-publisher (and vice versa) is not an original idea but, in our digital environment with its plethora of production and distribution technologies, this combination clearly offers new possibilities – one that the Australian bookchain, Dymocks, has announced it is going to try. Its aim? To “support Australians with stories to tell” … and, of course, “grow the book industry”.

Dymocks is calling its new publishing arm D Publishing. (Original eh?) Chief executive Don Grover said they do not see it

as building an operation to compete with standard publishers, and he said the systems and service it offered would separate it from other self-publishing companies.

These services include “editing, design, production and printing of finished books”. It’s not, in other words, big-end-of-town publishing, nor is it exactly self-publishing, but something in between …

The service is expected to start in October. According to the news report in Bookseller and Publisher, it is web-based and will work like this. Writers will:

  • upload their manuscript online
  • choose features for their book, including cover design, editing and typesetting
  • decide how to publish: print version using a print-on-demand option and/or e-book

It’s not clear how much input there’ll be from experts in, for example, this editing and design aspect. And there is a bit of a catch. Distribution. Grover does not guarantee that books published through this arm will be sold by Dymocks, and sees it all still as a bit of a work in progress:

It’s something that will evolve over time [and] will start as a tool for people who have a story to tell. As far as distribution is concerned we will wait to see what the market brings forward.

So, what say you? It all depends on the economics, of course, but I can see possibilities for local authors publishing local histories for their communities, family historians producing family histories, schools and local writers’ groups producing collections of writing … as well as of course the novelist or poet (or other writer) trying to break into the market. It sounds exciting but history tells us that it’s not that easy. To what extent will this new model with its more immediate technology make the whole business of getting your story out there easier? Time will, I suppose, tell.

For more on this, read blogger Megan Burke who got to talk to Grover and ask him some questions.

Marion Halligan on fact, fiction and character

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More on playing with that line between fact and fiction… One of my favourite writers – though I have nowhere near read all her works – is Marion Halligan, who also happens to be local to my town. Halligan has been shortlisted for and/or won several signifcant Australian literary awards but I’d be surprised if many readers overseas had ever heard of her. A particularly beautiful novel of hers is The fog garden (2002) which she wrote after her  husband’s death. It’s about love and grief (reminding me of Joan Didion‘s non-fiction work, The year of magical thinking which was published in 2005), but it also explores the nature of fiction, and the relationship between life and art.

And so, here she is introducing the heroine:

She isn’t me. She is a character in fiction. And like such characters she makes her way through the real world which her author invents for her. She tells the truth as she sees it, but may not always be right.

And here she is, the next page, on keeping your character honest:

A reader could think that, since Clare is my character, I can make all sorts of things happen to her that I can’t make happen to myself. This is slightly true, but not entirely … only if it is not betraying the truths of her life as I have imagined them.

Some readers may not like this sort of self-conscious writing but I often enjoy it … I like the recognition that we are, writer and reader, meeting in a very particular space, that of art (or is it artifice!). I like it that Halligan is here writing fiction inspired by a very personal experience and tackling head on the questions her readers will raise … playing with us, teasing us even, but also teaching us about the nature of fiction.

Geraldine Brooks, Caleb’s crossing

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Geraldine Brooks, Caleb's Crossing

Caleb’s crossing book cover (Courtesy: HarperCollins Australia)

In the Afterword to her latest novel, Caleb’s crossing, which was inspired by the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College, Geraldine Brooks describes the reactions of members of the Wampanoag Tribe:

Individual tribal members have been encouraging and generous in sharing information and insights and in reading early drafts. Others have been frank in sharing reservations about an undertaking that fictionalises the life of a beloved figure and sets down an imagined version of that life that may be interpreted as factual. This afterword attempts to address those reservations somewhat by distinguishing scant fact from rampant invention.

This concern – “an imagined version … that may be interpreted as factual” – should by now be familiar to readers of Whispering Gums. In fact, this book has several synchronicities with my recent and current reads. There must be something in the water! Firstly, the issue of fictionalising the life of a historical figure is something I have raised a few times, but most recently in my review of Tansley’s A break in the chain. And then there’s Scott’s That deadman dance which explores early contact in Australia between white settlers and indigenous people. Very different stories and yet several similar concerns and issues, such as those regarding land, education, and cultural attitudes to material possession and to hunting. And there’s more! My next review will probably be Leslie Cannold‘s The book of Rachael which is set in biblical times and features a fictional woman who loves learning and rebels against the strictures of her gender.

I love it when my reading interacts closely like this, when books enable me to explore and play off ideas against each other – so I thought, given this and the fact that there are already many reviews out there, that I’d tease these out a little instead of my more usual review. But first a brief outline of the plot, which provides a mostly imagined backstory to the real Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk through the eyes (journals) of the fictional white girl/woman Bethia Mayfield. The book starts in 1660 when Bethia is 15 years old, but it quickly flashes back a few years to when she met Caleb while out clamming and it describes the friendship which developed between them, forged by a mutual interest in learning about each other’s culture. Idyllic really, but of course it doesn’t last. Caleb is noticed as a young man with the potential to achieve in the white world and comes to live with Bethia’s family, so he can be taught by her father. Eventually, Caleb and another indigenous student, Joel Iacoomis, go to school and then Harvard along with Bethia’s not particularly clever brother, Makepeace. By a cruel twist of fate, Bethia goes with them as an indentured servant. She’s not too disappointed about this because she hopes to surreptitiously acquire a bit of learning too. That’s the gist of the story … and if you know the history, you’ll also know roughly how it all ends, but I won’t spoil that here.

And so to the first issue, fictionalising a historical figure. Brooks is upfront in saying hers is “rampant invention” inspired by “scant fact”. Like Grenville in The secret river, Brooks uses a real figure to explore how and why it might have been, though, unlike Grenville, she retains the name of her inspiration. This muddies the water for the unwary reader but it is common to historical fiction. How many novels have been written about, for example, Anne Boleyn? I have no problem with this. She and Grenville, unlike Tansley, are very clear about their fiction and are not afraid to imagine where there are gaps. Her Caleb may not be the Caleb of history but he is a Caleb whose motivations makes sense:

You will pour across the land, and we will be smothered … We must find favor with your God, or die.

And this brings me to the second synchronicity, that concerning early contact between white settlers and indigenous inhabitants. Brooks (a white Australian author based in the USA) and Kim Scott (a Noongar author from Western Australia) explore similar territory but from different points of view: hers is told in the voice of a white woman, and Scott’s has a more complex narrative voice but from an indigenous perspective. Both explore the complexity in motivations. In white society, we see the whole gamut from altruism through attempts to “get along”/cooperate to arrogance, cruelty and greed. And we see an equally complex response from the indigenous people, from Caleb’s “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” to Tequamuck’s anger and aggression. The end result, as history shows us, is the same … and neither book (nor Grenville’s) is anything other than realistic about it.

Finally, there’s the gender issue. This – like Grenville’s writing about colonial attitudes to indigenous people – is where writers are often criticised for being anachronistic, for putting modern attitudes into the mouths of historical people. It’s a criticism I tend not to share (providing the character is coherent within the text). “New” ideas do not pop out of nowhere. They grow and develop over time, and they grow from exceptional people – not necessarily well-known people, but people who thought ahead of their times – and novelists, almost by definition, tend to explore the “exceptional”. I have no problem believing that a “Bethia” or a “Rachael” lived in their times … just as I have no problem with what some critics have called Thornhill’s “anachronistic sensitivites” in The secret river.

Enough rambling, back to the book! Did I enjoy it? Yes. Did I think it worked? Partly. Geraldine Brooks is a good storyteller and I read this book in quicksmart time. I was interested in the characters and I wanted to know what happened to them. Brooks evokes the era well, using enough vocabulary and phrasing of the period to immerse you in the time and place. Her physical descriptions are beautiful. You know exactly why Bethia would prefer her island home to the streets of Cambridge. The themes – colonial cross-cultural conflict, gender roles, coping with loss – are valid and clear. And her wide cast of characters realistically cover the gamut of attitudes you’d expect.

And yet, I’m not sure she quite pulls it off. My concern is not so much with her vision, with the ideas she puts in the mouths of her characters, but with her mode of telling. She is rather heavy-handed with the foreshadowing. It’s a valid technique given the story is told in retrospect but it feels overused, which somewhat devalues its dramatic impact. I also wonder whether telling Caleb’s story through Bethia’s eyes means we don’t get to know Caleb well enough, resulting in our not being as emotionally engaged with him as we could be. There are hints of sexual tension between Bethia and Caleb but they are never played out. Perhaps doing so would have turned it to melodrama and yet, once hinted, it needed some resolution. I tend to like first person stories and the immediacy they provide, but maybe a different narrative voice (even multiple points of view) would have been better here.

All that said, it’s an enjoyable read. Reasonably early in the book, Bethia writes:

this truth my mother had voiced … that it could not go on, this crossing out of one world and into another.

Near the end she wonders:

If I had turned away from that boy … and ridden back to my own world and left him in peace with his gods and his spirits, would it have been better?

Would it? Now there’s the million dollar question!

Geraldine Brooks
Caleb’s crossing
London: Fourth Estate, 2011
306pp.
ISBN: 9780007367474

Monday musings on Australian literature: Project Gutenberg Australia

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I don’t imagine Project Gutenberg needs any introduction to bloggers and blog readers, but I’m not sure how many are aware of the Australian sister site, Project Gutenberg Australia. This site is not formally connected with the original Project Gutenberg but, like the original, it provides access to international texts that are in public domain – specifically, in public domain in Australia. This means you’ll find George Orwell‘s Animal farm here, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby, and so on. But, due to different copyright legislations (prior to the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement), it also means that you’ll find some texts not yet available via Project Gutenberg, such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the wind,.

However, Project Gutenberg Australia’s main value is that it provides an entrée to Australian material, through various pages (sections) which organise the content by subject/type. One of these sections is the Library of Australiana containing:

ebooks by Australian writers, or books about Australia. There is a diverse range; from the journals of the land and sea explorers; to the early accounts of white settlement in Australia; to the fiction of ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Henry Lawson and many other Australian writers.

It is an excellent resource.  Some of the explorers whose journals are available include Gregory Blaxland (who, with Wentworth and Lawson, found a way over the mountains west of Sydney in 1813), William Bligh (famous, or is it infamous, for the Mutiny on the Bounty), and James Cook (who claimed our Great South Land for England back in 1770).

But, my main reason for writing this post today is that for readers here who find it hard to locate classic Australian fiction it’s a treasure trove. Some of the writers and works available are:

Coastal view south of Bermagui

South of Bermagui

The Library of Australiana also includes books by foreign authors but set in Australia, such as DH Lawrence‘s Kangaroo. Lawrence completed this novel while living in Thirroul, on the south coast of New South Wales. This is the coast nearest to my inland city, so I’ll conclude with an excerpt from another foreign writer on this coast, Zane Grey:  

It seems, as the years go by, that every camp I pitch in places far from home grows more beautiful and romantic. The setting of the one at Bermagui bore this out in the extreme. From the village a gradual ascent up a green wooded slope led to a jutting promontory that opened out above the sea. The bluff was bold and precipitous. A ragged rock-bound shoreline was never quiet. At all times I seemed aware of the insatiate crawling sea. The waves broke with a thundering crash and roar, and the swells roared to seething ruin upon the rocks. Looking north across a wide blue bay, we could see a long white beach. And behind it dense green forest, “bush,” leading to a bold mountain range, and the dim calling purple of interior Australia. (American angler in Australia)

Grey captures perfectly the reason I, whose preference is for mountains over coasts and who has no interest in fishing, love the south coast. It’s beautiful. And so is Project Gutenberg Australia (in function, if not in look!). Try it next time you are looking for something Australian that is in public domain. There’s a good chance you’ll find it.

Ginny Jackson, The still deceived

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Brother Gums and his partner, who live in our southernmost state, Tasmania, often give me books by local writers, many of whom I may not easily come across on “the mainland”. Their offering last Christmas was one of these, The still deceived, a collection of poems by Ginny Jackson. It was published by one of Australia’s wonderful, small independent presses, the Ginninderra Press. Tragically, Jackson died before the book was launched, though she did, I am told, see a copy. The cover image is a somewhat cryptic lithograph titled “High noses” by Jackson – a talented woman clearly – and the cover design is by her son Evan Dowling.

The title is that of the last poem of the book, and it puts a seal on the overall theme of the collection which has to do with the challenges we humans face in trying to understand, to make sense of, the life we find ourselves in. The last three lines are:

Even the less deceived
don’t seem to get it –
mortality, eternity.

There is a melancholic (“the slow crank of a melancholic tune”), even bleak, thread running through the poems. I don’t think this means that all the poems were written in the shadow of her imminent death. However, the last poems in the book do confront mortality head on, which could suggest that the 65 poems are presented chronologically in the order they were written. But maybe not. The idea of death is also a logical way to conclude a collection that deals, as this one does, with the challenges of existence.

And so to look at the collection a little more closely. The first poems could be loosely described as vignettes from a life though they are not so much about particular experiences as about the ideas and feelings engendered by the things we experience. The first poem, “Scientific method”, rather archly sets the scene for her exploration of the ways we humans misunderstand or misinterpret the things we see and experience:

When you’re first sent to the frontier
…
the sketches you bring back
will really be of your own world

and in doing so we “miss the hum of truths”.

The middle poems are about life cycle – about love, pregnancy, motherhood, and middle age, and about aging relatives. Some of her lightest poems are here, such as in her descriptions of babies (“Joy comes combing up your limbs” in “Baby love”) and children. “Domestic” conveys the monotony of housework in a nursery-rhyme-like jingle: “In the kitchen with the grimy doors/the pot is calling the kettle black”.

Moth (Courtesy: Myriorma, from flickr, using CC-NC-BY-SA 2.0)

Moth (Courtesy: Myriorma, from flickr, using CC-NC-BY-SA 2.0)

And then of course are the final poems which deal very specifically with death. I particularly like “Getting off the bus”:

It’s hard to get off right,
with dignity, it’s hard to leave
as they pull off from the curb,
a swaying cargo, brightly lit
of all the living, trundling on,
into their future lives.

What a devastatingly apposite image. And “Moths” whose behaviour is described as:

Like the story of this life
which flings itself at timelessness
while overhead the speedy flash
of multiple sunrises clash
with quick uncomprehended dusks.

There is a welcome and refreshing variety in the poems – in form and tone, as well as in subject. She uses rhyme at times – including, even, rhyming couplets – which provides a lovely change of pace. Much of her imagery draws from nature (“even the flight of a bee/forms a tacking jig with destiny”) and several poems describe Tasmania albeit often contrasting the power and permanence of nature (“and yet the tree’s roots grasp the rock,/the sea forever smashes on the shore”) with change wrought by humans (“where forests, still, are daily trashed”) and “our insect brevities”. But then there’s the occasional more industrial image, as in “Metal”. There are poems that don’t quite work, which may be because the image is too obscure or the logic not quite right, or simply because the connections don’t work for me. Poetry is such a personal thing. I enjoyed this collection for its world view, its intriguing imagery and the challenges it offered me.

I’m tempted to compare Jackson with Dorothy Porter who put her collection, The bee hut, together as she, too, was dying of cancer, but they are different. There’s more action and anger, and, paradoxically, also more joy in Porter’s poems, than in Jackson’s quieter, more resigned poems which see humans as either powerless (at best) or foolish (at worst). I’ll end though on a positive image. It’s a poem (“On planting”) praising trees, and it ends thus:

I wish we could all be as loyal.
If we could talk
only as that bright rush of leaves,
a haze of sun or moonlight
on our heads, softly embracing
one another and the sky.

If indeed …

The still deceived
Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2010
72pp.
ISBN: 9781740276122

Delicious descriptions from Downunder: Isabella Bird on Nikkō in Japan

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Woodwork on temple in Nikko, Japan

Carved birds and animals at Toshō-gū Shrine, Nikkō, Japan

This is one of those Delicious Descriptions that is from Downunder but is not of Downunder, if you know what I mean. It’s actually of Japan – as you observant readers will already know given the title of this post – and it comes from Isabella Bird‘s Unbeaten tracks in Japan to which I referred in my first Japan trip post in May.

One of Bird’s first stops after leaving Tokyo was Nikkō, now designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its astonishing complex of shrines and temples. It was, it appears, no less astonishing in the late 19th century than it was for us when we visited it in 2006. Bird spends quite a few pages describing it, but I thought I’d share this one for now:

The shrines are the most wonderful work of their kind in Japan. In their stately setting of cryptomeria, few of which are less than 20 feet in girth at 3 feet from the ground, they take one prisoner by their beauty, in defiance of all rules of western art, and compel one to acknowledge the beauty of forms and combinations of colour hitherto unknown, and that lacquered wood is capable of lending itself to the expression of a very high idea in art. Gold has been used in profusion, and black, dull red, and white, with a breadth and lavishness quite unique. The bronze fret-work alone is a study, and the wood-carving needs weeks of earnest work for the mastery of its ideas and details. One screen or railing only has sixty panels, each 4 feet long, carved with marvellous boldness and depth in open work, representing peacocks, pheasants, storks, lotuses, peonies, bamboos, and foliage. The fidelity to form and colour in the birds, and the reproduction of the glory in motion, could not be excelled. (Letter VIII)

It is, as Bird says, simply marvellous, full of wonderful details that you can spend hours wandering around. However, during Bird’s stay:

there were two shocks of earthquake; all the golden wind-bells which fringe the roofs rang softly, and a number of priests ran into the temple and beat various kinds of drums for the space of half an hour.

Nikkō apparently means “sunny splendour”, and it sure is that – but how vulnerable it is.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Reading about Australian women writers

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Books about Australian women writers

Some favourite books about Aussie women writers

In the 1980s my interest in Australian literature, which had been initially kindled by my parents and school, was renewed.  In the 1980s, too, women writers started to flourish again. Consequently, this second wave interest of mine was drawn particularly to these women.

I read their books of course (I’m thinking particularly of Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters, Beverley Farmer, Jessica Anderson, Thea Astley, Kate Grenville and Helen Garner), I attended talks where I could, and I read books about them and their predecessors. I loved the books about them! Not all of these books will still be available for purchase but they will be in libraries (in Oz anyhow) and so I thought this week I’d share some of my favourites, listed in their order of publication.

  • Drusilla Modjeska‘s Exiles at home: Australian women writers 1925-1945 (1981) is the one I don’t have, but I have borrowed it a few times from the library. She looks at the challenges confronting the women writing in the earlier part of the twentieth century. I have reviewed and/or mentioned a few of these women in past posts. They include: Miles Franklin,  Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw (who also wrote jointly under the name M. Barnard Eldershaw), Eleanor Dark, Jean Devanny, Dymphna Cusack and Katharine Susannah Prichard. Most of these women were politically engaged, with Prichard (for one) specifically identifying herself as Communist.
  • Jennifer Ellison’s Rooms of their own (1986) which of course takes its title from Virginia Woolf’s wonderful, pleading book on behalf of women creators. This book comprises interviews Ellison conducted with significant writers at the time. I still dip into it every now and then. She interviews: Blanche d’Alpuget, Jessica Anderson, Thea Astley, Jean Bedford, Sara Dowse, Beverley Farmer, Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, Elizabeth Jolley, Gabrielle Lord, Olga Masters, and Georgia Savage. Naturally, the gender issue is explored, but other issues relating to writing, publishing and the role of writers in society are also discussed.
  • Debra Adelaide‘s A bright and fiery troop: Australian women writers of the nineteenth century (1988). The great thing about this book is that it shows us the depth of women’s writing in Australia. It comprises essays by literary experts, most dealing with specific writers like Louisa Atkinson, Catherine Helen Spence and Ada Cambridge. It also includes an essay by Elizabeth Webby on nineteenth century women poets.
  • Debra Adelaide’s Australian women writers: a bibliographic guide (1988) was published, appropriately, by Pandora Press. It’s the driest of the books I’m listing as it is a bibliography – but it is lightly annotated with a brief description of each writer. In the mid 2000s, I used this book to help populate Wikipedia’s listing of Australian women writers. I thank Debra Adelaide for making that task so easy!
  • Gillian Whitlock’s Eight voices of the eighties: Stories, journalism and criticism by Australian women writers (1989). This one is, really, an anthology of selected writings by the writers included but there’s a good  introductory essay and a brief introduction to each of the writers. The writers are, well, pretty much the usual suspects: Kate Grenville, Elizabeth Jolley, Barbara Hanrahan, Jessica Anderson, Beverley Farmer, Thea Astley, and Helen Garner. In her introduction, Whitlock quotes Jolley as describing the 1980s as “a moment of glory” for the woman writer, a time when as Whitlock writes, “women writers and readers … entered the mainstream”. What a shame it is that in terms of writers, at least, things seem to have slipped backwards (yet again).

There are more books and bibliographies on the topic – many dealing with individual writers. Just do a Trove (National Library of Australia) search on “Women authors, Australian” or “Australian Literature – Women authors” or similar keywords and you’ll retrieve a goodly list. Meanwhile, the books keep coming. The most recent addition to my little collection is Susan Sheridan’s Nine lives which was published this year and covers post-war writing by women in Australia. I haven’t read it all yet but you will probably see a review in the future.

Do you like to read about writers and writing, and if so do you have any favourites?

Tangea Tansley, A break in the chain: The early Kozminskys

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Bookcover for Tansley's A break in the Chain

Book cover* (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

In the postscript to her novel A break in the chain, Tangea Tansley quotes Doris Lessing‘s statement that ‘fiction is better at “the truth” than a factual record’. This gets to the nub of my challenge with this book, which is a fictionalised account of three generations of the author’s family, particularly her great grandparents and grandparents. As I was reading it I was reminded of Kate Grenville‘s discussion in Searching for the secret river on how she commenced writing The secret river as nonfiction and ended up writing fiction. But more on that anon.

There’s a lot to like about this book, particularly if you are interested in Australian social history. It starts in Prussia in 1856 with a young man, Simon Kosmanske (later Kozminsky), playing violin to the cows on his father’s dairy farm. His father, Moses, does not think Simon is taking his work seriously enough, and so orders him to “Go to Australia and make an old man proud”. Australia, at the time, was of course at the height of the gold rush and was many a man’s destination. Simon, though, didn’t want to go, but go he did – and he eventually established Kozminsky, the fine jewellery and objet d’art store that still operates in Melbourne.

The novel chronicles in five parts the story of Simon, his marriage to Emma, and of his son Israel and his marriage. The first part which describes Simon’s trip to Australia and his first years in the colony as he tries to establish himself is fascinating. And then the story moves into the main drama which gives rise to the title. This drama centres on Judaism, its observance, and decisions made to marry within or outside of the faith. It is an intriguing story with some strong and interesting characters. However, as Tansley explains in her enlightening postscript, there are many gaps in knowledge about some of the key characters, particularly Emma. She writes:

For a family of journalists and writers, my family has left behind a sad lack of primary source material: no journals or diaries or letters and a dearth of documents of any kind. This meant that what was originally planned as a documented biographical work became instead a hybrid – a family memoir laced with fiction.

Those of you who know the Kate Grenville saga regarding The secret river will see why I was thinking of it as I read this book. I’m not sure that Tansley has pulled it off quite as well as Grenville. I wonder whether, in fact, she kept too close to the “facts” while aiming to write fiction. She writes, again in the postscript:

I resisted the temptation to write Emma into a fictional background, although Kozminsky family stories present a number of alternative lives for Emma.

Grenville, on the other hand, moved more thoroughly into fiction, changing the name of her protagonist from that of her ancestor, which freed her to explore more creatively just what might have happened in the lives of settlers like her ancestor. She did this because she found her factual account wasn’t working. Grenville says:

I was determined to write a book of non-fiction, but the only parts of this ‘assembly’ that were interesting were the ‘flights of fancy’ where I’d created the flesh to put on the bones of research. Where, in a word, I’d written fiction.

Grenville started off researching Solomon Wiseman because she “needed to know” what had happened in the early settlement, particularly between the settlers and the indigenous inhabitants. Tansley wrote her book to search out the “truth”, for past and future generations of her family but also “to fill what I see as a gap in the settler history of Victoria”. These goals she achieves pretty well, particularly the latter one, but I think she has used the story-telling mode of fiction to give us the “facts” rather than get to those larger “truths” that we can find in fiction. And this is probably because the story’s drama is hampered by her decision to not tackle the central mystery: what was Emma’s past that affected her so, and why, without giving anything away, did the family react as they did to Israel’s marriage? It is in this, I think, that the “truths” can be found. Without them, we have an interesting story, a good social history, but we don’t understand the real “truth” behind the “break in the chain”.

Overall, though, Tansley’s style is sure. She uses a chronological narrative structure, with a third person point of view in which the perspective shifts occasionally from character to character. These work well for the story she wants to tell. While there’s the occasional misstep in the writing (a forced image, or a too-obvious statement), she also writes some lovely descriptions particularly as the novel progresses and she warms to her story. Take this for example:

Bending to the ground he pulled at a shoot of grass only to find  that an entire yard of runner came loose with it. He flung it away. Damned rhizomes. They had a lot in common with extended families. Not much to be seen on the surface, but underneath you could be sure there was a vast network of tentacles working away in their subterranean hideout, linked for the term of their natural lives in dark and closeted conspiracy.

My final assessment? Well, it’s interesting for its social history. It’s also engaging for Tansley’s generosity towards her characters despite their flaws and the mistakes they make. And I enjoyed the opportunity it has given me to further tease out my response to the history-as-fiction question. I’ll conclude though on another question. Emma says to Israel that “the past is only good for the experience it provides”. Does this imply a duty to share the past (something Emma herself doesn’t do)?

Tangea Tansley
A break in the chain: The early Kozminskys
Mulgrave: Affirm Press, 2011
315pp.
ISBN: 9780980790467

Review copy supplied by Affirm Press

* The cover image is a detail from Frederick McCubbin‘s Study in blue and gold. The subject is Eileen Kozminsky, Tansley’s grandmother.