Monday musings on Australian literature: Literary Folk

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Jason and Chloe Roweth perform

Local folkies Chloe and Jason Roweth, in the Trocadero venue, 2011

As I attended my 13th or 14th (losing count now), National Folk Festival* this Easter weekend, I started to think about the relationship between folk music and literature. Some folk music is purely instrumental – think Celtic fiddling and bluegrass picking, for example – but, as a reader, it’s the storytelling side of folk that most draws me in. From traditional English folk songs to bush ballads, from the love songs of singer-songwriters to protest music, folkies tell stories that are sad, romantic, tragic, funny or angry, so  I thought that for today’s Monday Musings I’d write about a very select few Aussie folk musicians whose stories I’ve enjoyed.

Eric Bogle (b. 1944)

Bogle, though Scottish born, is now one of the grand old men of Australian folk. His most famous song is the antiwar song “And the band played Waltzing Matilda“. Another antiwar song, “No man’s land” (also known as “The green fields of France”) was, he told us at this year’s Festival, described by Tony Blair as his favourite war poem. Here’s the last verse:

And I can’t help but wonder, now Willie McBride
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you ‘The Cause’?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Not all Bogle’s songs, by any means, are about war, but this seemed a particularly appropriate one for today’s Monday Musings which happens to fall on ANZAC Day.

Margret RoadKnight (b. 1943)

If Bogle is one of the grand old men of Australian folk, Margret Roadknight is a grand old dame. Each year I think I won’t go see her this time because I saw her last year and there are no many to see, but I usually find myself gravitating yet again to one of her concerts, and I’m never disappointed. The woman just keeps on keeping on the way folkies – like Bogle, Pete Seeger (with whom she’s performed), Joan Baez and ilk – do. She sings her own compositions and those of others. Like most folkies she tells stories about her songs, about why she wrote them or sings them. She’s a social justice activist, but the lyrics I’ll excerpt today come from her “big” hit of the 1970s, “Girls in our town” (written by Bob Hudson):

Girls in our town get no help from their men
No one can let them be sixteen again
Things might get better but it’s hard to say when
If they only had someone to talk to…

The Fagans

If Eric is the grand … well you get the drift … the Fagans have to be Australia’s royal family of folk. It’s a rare festival that you don’t find them together, and/or subsets thereof, performing. They regularly appear in the Union Concert so you can guess that a major theme for them is justice for workers. But, just to be perverse, I’m going to give you an excerpt from Kate Fagan’s plaintive depression era waltz, “Old station sisters”:

Another year passed, we were sweethearts by then,
The government came and they called up our men
To work in the cities, the factories and mines,
The country had no time for dancing.
With three younger sisters, parents to feed
And land that was broken from drought and disease,
Well he had no choice …

Jason and Chloe Roweth

Husband-and-wife team, Jason and Chloe Roweth are folklorists. They research and present Australian folklore, as well as perform original songs. For this year’s festival, which encompassed ANZAC Day, they reprised their show The riderless horse about the First World War. It is the result of significant research into the letters and diaries, not to mention the music and poems, of the era – and finds a good, if traditional, balance, between humour, tragedy and patriotism. The focus is the humanity of war – rather than the history and the deeds. One of the themes that runs through any stories of Australians at war is their anti-authoritarian/egalitarian stance (which was often at loggerheads with the British way of doing things). Here is an excerpt from “The army song”:

Now they give us chicken, they say it is the best,
But we get the neck and the arsehole.
The officers get the rest…

You need to have a laugh every now and then, or you’d be crying…

William Barton at the National Folk Festival, 2011

William Barton, in the Budawang, 2011

The Song Company and William Barton

The Song Company (with indigenous musician-didgeridoo player William Barton) is, really, the “odd man out” in this line-up – but they demonstrate what a wonderfully broad church the NFF is. The Song Company is a classically trained a capella group which, as their website describes, “is equally at home in medieval songs and chants, 16th-century polyphony, 20th-century classics and [which] creates innovative programs that cross the old divide between high-art and low-brow and old/new”. I’ve seen them in a few of these guises and enjoy their eclecticism (not to mention the quality of their execution). What they presented at the NFF was, I think, a version of their show Kalkadunga** Man which they toured with Barton a couple of years ago. Their program included an evocative piece, which Barton called a favourite, “Out there on the dry creek bed”, but I can’t find any lyrics online to excerpt for you. They also performed one of the best known (in white Australia) traditional Aboriginal songs, the “Maranoa Lullaby”:

Mumma warrunno
Murra wathunno,
Mumma warrunno
Murra wathunno.

You can hear a clip from a very scratchy 1950 recording sung by Australia’s first recognised classical indigenous singer, Harold Blair. This recording was among the first chosen for Sounds of Australia (the National Registry of Recorded Sound) developed and maintained by the National Film and Sound Archive …

… of course there’s more, but this seems a fitting way to conclude my little intro to the literary aspects of Folk.

*Folk is defined broadly … as I think it should be … by the National Folk Festival.
** Kalkadunga being the indigenous people from the Mt Isa region of NW Queensland.

Stop Press: New writer Gretchen Shirm shortlisted

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Having cried wolf, book cover

Bookcover (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

I haven’t been reporting all the various Australian literary awards announcements here since Lisa at ANZLitLovers has been doing that so ably, but I have just noticed that Gretchen Shirm’s collection of short stories, Having cried wolf, has been shortlisted for this year’s UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

I reviewed this a few months ago and was mightily impressed. I wish Shirm the best of luck but, whatever happens, it’s a great achievement to have been listed. Meanwhile, I suggest you check it out…

Joyce Carol Oates, Beasts

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Joyce Carol Oates @ The Belmont Library

Creative Commons licensed image by San Mateo County Library via Flickr

If we wanted to be writers we must examine the world with fresh, sceptical eyes.

Beasts is, I’m ashamed to say, my first Joyce Carol Oates. She’s one of those writers who has kept crossing my path but whom I’ve never quite got to read. I bought Beasts a couple of years ago when I saw it on the remainder table of my favourite independent bookshop – and still it took me some time to get to read it, but I’m glad I finally did. I didn’t really know what to expect – and I’m not quite sure what I got – but I nonetheless found it a compelling read that is staying with me.

Take the opening quote, for example. On the surface it makes perfect sense, and yet when we know who says it we see a whole different layer of meaning to it, a layer that doesn’t necessarily remove the fundamental truth but that certainly shows how such a truth can be twisted or, at least, complicated.

The plot concerns a young college student and her obsession with her poetry writing class teacher, Andre Harrow. The novel (novella, in fact) starts some 25 years after the main events of the novel, when our narrator is at the Louvre in Paris and sees a piece of sculpture that reminds her of the work of Harrow’s wife, Dorcas. The sculpture is an earthy totemic piece that is “primitively human” or, in fact, rather beast-like. In this short three page chapter we are introduced to the notion that something not quite right has happened. “It wasn’t burned after all”, the narrator says, and then soon after mentions the horrible deaths some quarter of a century earlier, of “two people I’d loved”. The final sentence of the chapter is:

This is not a confession. You will see, I have nothing to hide.

As soon as you see a statement like that you can be pretty sure you are in the hands of an unreliable narrator, and this is so here – though she’s cleverly disguised and could be taken to be reliable. It’s all a matter of perspective really! The novel is told first person, in flashback, so we do need to be aware that what she is saying may very well be coloured by her knowledge and experience, that what she says she was feeling at the time, may not be quite right. This adds to the complexity of the book. The structure, though, is pretty straightforward. There’s the first chapter in Paris in 2001, followed by a chapter, set in 1976, describing the night of the house fire (in which the two people died). The third chapter takes place four months before that. From this, the novel works chronologically forward again to the fire.

The novel has a smallish cast of characters – there’s the narrator (Gillian), Andre Harrow and Dorcas, and the girls of the poetry class. Gradually a complex picture is built up of surface friendships with secrecy and jealousy lying just beneath. The reason for this is that pretty well all the girls are obsessed with Andre and each it seems, in turn, have their way with him (or, should I say, vice versa). But here the plot thickens … though perhaps I’ll leave it there for you to discover for yourselves.

Let’s just say that this book is an unsettling exploration of the (sexual) games people play, games in which people can and do get badly hurt. It’s easy to see the young women as the victims – and I must say that to a large degree I think they are. Whenever there is a power imbalance (and this is why I disagree with Helen Garner‘s take in her non-fiction book, The first stone), I see the major wrong as being with those in power. However, that does not mean that the less powerful are not complicit in some way, because often they are, and this seems to be the case with Gillian. She says “I was not predator seeking prey, I was myself the prey. I was the innocent party”. But she has choices, and she makes them, knowing ….

I was in love now. I took strength from my love for Mr Harrow. Though knowing, for I was no fool, that it could never be reciprocated.

And yet, she of course, like the girls before her, lets herself be drawn into a situation that is both thrilling and destructive. Harrow is an aficionado of DH Lawrence – Lawrence was big on campuses in the 1970s as I recollect – and tells his students (with terrible irony) that:

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no ‘morality’. For what’s ‘morality’ but a noose around the neck? A noose? What’s ‘morality’ but what other people want you to do, for their own selfish unstated purposes.

Hmm … this sounds a bit like the Nietzschean conundrum explored in The immoralist doesn’t it, but Oates plays it out in a very different way by exploring its implications across gender, age/experience and power differences to see what falls out.

The novel starts with an epigraph from a DH Lawrence poem:

I love you, rotten
Delicious rottenness

… wonderful are the hellish experiences

Wonderful for whom one may well ask? The ending – or is it the beginning – provides no definite answer but it sure teases out the complexity of “love” running rather amok amongst people who think little about the ramifications of their actions. Damage, as it usually does in such situations, ensues. What price morality, eh?

Joyce Carol Oates
Beasts
London: Orion, 2002
138pp.
ISBN: 0752855921

Monday musings on Australian literature: Reverse expats

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Several months ago I wrote a Monday musings post on Australian expat novelists, so I thought it was only fair to write one on reverse expat novelists, that is, writers from elsewhere who have settled in Australia. Because, yes, some people DO come here as well as leave!

For this post, I’m choosing a few writers who settled (permanently or semi-permanently) in Australia in their adult lives … they are all English or South African born. (I wonder what that says? We are, of course, all Commonwealth countries, which may have some bearing on it all … but after that, I’ll leave it to others to ponder.) And, because I need to choose some order in which to list them, I’ve chosen the order of their arrival in Australia.

Elizabeth Jolley
(born in England in 1923, arrived in Western Australia in 1959, died in Western Australia in 2007)

Regular readers of my blog will know that Jolley is one of my favourite writers. All her novels were published after her arrival in Australia. In fact, like many authors, she was rejected many times before her first books, Miss Peabody’s inheritance and Mr Scobie’s riddle, were published in 1983. All the books of hers that I’ve read, with the exception of the autobiographical novel My father’s moon, are set in Australia though travel elsewhere does occur in some.  Jolley clearly settled well into Australia – and in 1970, when still living in Perth, she and her husband bought a 5 acre rural property outside of Perth. She chronicles this in her delightful “memoir” (if you can quite call it that), Diary of a weekend farmer. It is very much diary-style and starts with the search for land. You might like this one (from 10 October 1970):

Told of another place Mount Helena drove there, like a place in a Patrick White novel 27 acres covered in scrub and burned trees old cars and trucks, washing machines, it was like a dump, several dogs so turned the car as quickly as I could.

A week later, though, they find just the spot. It sounds English by her description (17 October 1970):

Serene. A high verandah, a fig tree, a loquat, honeysuckle, a hedge of rosemary. A gentle slope of bush down to a meadow, stream on land at both bottom corners …

And on 6 November she says “You look across to Tolstoy country. A paddock with horses running …”

It is however Australian – the snakes and bushfires tell us that. And, it is clear, this land, this experience, informed much of her writing, including, specifically, The five acre virgin and other stories, and The newspaper of Clarement Street.

Peter Temple
(born in South Africa in 1946, arrived in Australia in 1980)

Temple is one of Australia’s best regarded crime writers. In fact, his latest novel Truth was, rather controversially, the first genre novel to win our top literary award, the Miles Franklin. As with Jolley, all his novels have been published after his arrival in Australia and they are, at least to the best of my knowledge as I’ve only read two, set in Australia and very much imbued with Australian landscape and culture. His description of the land (in Victoria this time) in The broken shore sounds a bit Patrick White too:

Early settlers planted cypress trees and hedges as windbreaks around their houses. It worked to some extent but the displaced wind took its revenge. Trees, shrubs, hedges, tanks, windmills, dunnies, dog kennels, chickenhouses, old car bodies – everything in its path sloped to leeward.

Nicholas Shakespeare
(born in England in 1957, first visited Tasmania in 1999 and now divides his year between Tasmania and England)

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet read any Shakespeare, but I have Snowleg on my TBR pile and I have been wanting to read The dancer upstairs for some time too. So, I’ll just report on him using an interview with Susan Wyndham in 2007. He said that  “the thing about Tasmania that’s exciting for a writer is how close to the surface history is”. And, guess what, Patrick White rears his head again. Shakespeare tells Wyndham:

In my shed, one of the discoveries I made was Patrick White and The Tree of Man. It is extraordinary the way he took a marriage through all its vicissitude; most writers don’t take on that challenge.

A commenter on Susan Wyndham’s blog described his book Secrets of the sea as “So Australian with a strong thread connecting to Britain”. I must, must, must get to this writer.

Coetzee, Poland, 2006 (Photo: Mariusz Kubik, from Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

JM Coetzee
(born in South Africa in 1940, arrived in Australia in 2002)

Coetzee, of course, had an established literary career before he arrived in Australia, but his rather stellar career has continued unabated since then. Elizabeth Costello concerns an Australian novelist, and Diary of a bad year is set in Australia. These books tend to the intellectual or philosophical, yet they too reflect on Australian culture often counterpointing international concerns. Coetzee is a rather reclusive man, but I have managed to once hear him speak. He briefly introduced and read from Slow man, and then immediately left the podium. There was, in other words, no opportunity for questions and answers. While that was a pity, I bear him no grudges. He is a writer after all and doesn’t have to join the literary promotion juggernaut if he doesn’t want to!

I’ve chosen these four reverse expats because they are of particular interest to me. There are others, such as British comedian and writer Ben Elton, and best-selling South African born author Bryce Courtenay. Having lived overseas on a couple of occasions, I am fascinated by the decision people make to leave their homes permanently for another country. There are many reasons why people might do so – political (of course), economic, personal (such as having a partner from another country), cultural, and so on. Some of you who read my blog have, I know, made the jump. I’d love to hear your perspectives on being an expat.

Jane Austen’s letters, 1807-1809

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Portrait of Henry IV. Ink and watercolor on pa...

Watercolour by Cassandra, for Austens (juvenile) "History of England" (Presumed public domain, courtesy Wikipedia)

The letters Jane Austen wrote between 1807 and 1809 seem somewhat different to those she wrote later. There are probably a number of reasons for this but one could be that this was an unsettled period for her. Her father died in early 1805 which changed her (and her mother’s and sister’s) life circumstances dramatically. From then until July 1809 they did not have a home of their own. It is interesting that while she had written earlier versions of some of her six completed novels in the late 1700s and early 1800s, none was published until after she, her mother and sister moved to Chawton. This must tell us something, surely, about her state of mind.

The letters, mostly written to her sister Cassandra, are not necessarily easy to read. They are full of pretty straightforward gossip and chat about family and friends. There are myriad names to wade through. (Fortunately Deirdre Le Faye’s edition has an excellent Biographical Index.) If you don’t get bogged down though, you will find some gems, and gain an understanding of life in Georgian and Regency England.

So, what do these letters tell us about her? To make it easy to read, I’ll use headings.

She was a keen, clear-eyed and somewhat acerbic observer of humanity

These letters often make you laugh (though perhaps not so much if you were the subject of some of her comments). Here she is on her oldest brother, James:

I am sorry & angry that his Visits should not give us more pleasure; the company of so good & so clever a Man ought to be gratifying in itself; – but his Chat seems all forced, his Opinions on many points too much copied  from his Wife’s, & his time here is spent  I think in walking about the House & banging the doors, or ringing the Bell for a glass of Water.

And on one Miss Curling:

I wish her no worse than a long & happy abode there [Portsmouth]. Here she wd probably be dull, & I’m sure she wd be troublesome.

And on Lady Sondes (and her second marriage):

…but I consider everybody as having the right to marry once in their Lives for Love, if they can – & provided she will now leave off having bad headaches & being pathetic, I can allow her, I can wish her to be happy.

Austen, it is believed, had a somewhat tricky relationship with her mother. She mentions her mother often in the letters, mostly with cool description rather than warmth, and sometimes rather more pointedly:

My mother has been lately adding to her possessions in plate – a whole Tablespoon & a whole dessertspoon, & six whole Teaspoons, which make our sideboard border on the Magnificent. They were mostly the produce of old or useless silver …

She understood the import of money

This period of her life – post her father’s death, and pre-Chawton and the publication of her books – was her most insecure financially. Consequently, money seems to feature more prominently in this section’s letters. On one acquaintance, she says:

She looks remarkably well (legacies are a very wholesome diet) …

And on some particularly rich people:

They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich,  and we gave her to understand that we were far from  being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance.

On the impact of her own impecunious state which meant, for example, that she had to rely on the favours (and therefore schedules) of others when travelling, she writes:

I shall be sorry to pass the door at Seale without calling, but it must be so … till I have a travelling purse of my own, I must submit to such things …

She thought about writing constantly

We know that Jane Austen had a longstanding interest in writing and this is obvious in these earlier letters – from her (sometimes self-deprecating) comments on her letter writing to her brief but pointed comments on the books she was reading. Through her letters we get a sense of what she thinks a good novel should be. For example, she says of  Sarah Harriet Burney‘s Clarentine that

It is full of unnatural conduct & forced difficulties, without striking merit of any kind.

We also see that she is ever conscious of the act of writing. Often she feels she has no news and mentions how this challenges her letter writing ability:

I really have very little to say this week, & do not feel as if I should spread that little into the shew of much. I am inclined for short sentences …

I enjoyed her praise of another letter writer, Mr Deedes, who

certainly has a very pleasing way of winding up a whole, & and speeding Truth into the World.

There are also descriptions and stories which clue us to her writing and story-telling bent. She describes a fire at Southampton, vividly and with a touch of humour. Always there is humour. In another letter, having discovered that her aspiring-writer niece is also reading her letters, she discusses (with humour again) her increasing awareness of her writing:

I begin already to weigh my words & and sentences more than I did, & am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset, it would be charming. We have been in two or three dreadful states within the last week, from the melting of the snow &c. – & the contest between us & the Closet has now ended in our defeat; I have been obliged to move almost everything out of it, & leave it to splash itself as it likes.

By mid 1809, the family had moved to the “remarkably pretty village” of Chawton, and Austen at last settled down to her writing (but she had only eight more years to live). One of the last letters in this section is to a publisher asking about the non-publication of Susan (later, Northanger Abbey) which she’d sold to them in 1803. She never did see it published. It was bought back by her brother Henry in 1817, and published posthumously… How sad is that?

Note: This is my third post on Austen’s letters. The first looked at her letters from 1814 to 1816, and the second from 1811 to 1813. With this post covering 1807 to 1809, you might be wondering about 1810. Well, there are no letters from 1810. This is probably because they were among those destroyed by family members after her death. Why, we do not really know.

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Thea Astley on oddballs

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Thea Astley is one of my favourite writers and so I thought my next Delicious descriptions should be from her. It won’t be the last because her writing is truly delicious. Up till now, my Delicious Descriptions have been of landscape/environment. This one  is about people. It’s from Drylands (1999), her last novel (or, really, a set of connected stories) and fourth Miles Franklin Award win. Its subtitle is “a book for the world’s last reader” and it’s based on protagonist Janet’s belief that “no-one’s reading anymore”,  that “smartarse technology” was invading people’s lives and resulting in alienation and disengagement. (What would she say about the rise of e-books?) Astley exaggerates, of course, but her belief in the social disintegration that inspired the book is palpable.

It is full of evocative quotable writing, but for this post I’ve chosen one that describes the characters of the town, Drylands, that Janet lives in:

What’s great about these godforsaken holes, Janet decided next morning, leaning over her small balcony and watching the place rub its eyes and start to wake up, are the oddballs. They stand out. You meet them. They enrich. No. More. They furbish the day.

Furbish the day! Thea Astley may have passed on to the big library in the sky, but she left behind an astonishing body of work that can’t help but furbish the days I choose to dip into them.

Monday musings on Australian literature: A message from the remote west

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Cape Leveque

Section of beach at Cape Leveque (rather north of Shark Bay)

Do you look at those airline magazines you find in planes? I usually do … and often find something of interest in Qantas: The Australian Way. Yesterday I left Mr Gums behind and flew west for a week’s work in a remote town in north-west-ish Western Australia. It was a long flight (three actually) so I managed to watch a movie or two, read most of my novel, do a crossword and dip into the magazine. And, I’m glad I did because …

… in it was an excerpt from a new edition of Tim Winton‘s Land’s edge. The article described is as memoir, but the back of an earlier edition called it “an autobiographical meditation about his obsession with the coast”. Whatever you call it, it is clearly about his experience of one aspect of his life. I like writers’ memoirs but have yet to read this one. Its language is, needless to say (well, for me, because I like Winton), delicious:

The land around it [Shark Bay] looks blotchy and beaten. Desert right up to the water, it stains the white beaches vaguely pink. The water is variegated with sandbar whorls, veins of channels, meadows of seagrasses like bruises. It’s here that Europeans first met the Great South Land – Hartog, Vlamigh, Dampier – and they didn’t linger because the landscape seemed to shut its eyes and fold its arm against them: it was inscrutable.

I love that description of the landscape. It’s actually a wide open landscape but it “looks” empty and mysterious, rather beautiful but also somewhat unwelcoming. These days though, people flock to Shark Bay because this is where Monkey Mia is, the place where you can swim with dolphins. I haven’t been there yet, but I’m planning to:

This is the only place in the world you can do this naturally, expect to stand in the water, before breakfast, in the middle of the morning, just before sunset, and touch a free dolphin, feel its powerful bulk, look it directly in the eye and feel it slide back out of reach, unafraid. This is what all these people have caught planes and buses or spent 10 hours in a hot car for. Because none of this is normal, and the ritual has gone on since 1964, before Flipper, before environmentalism, before the New Age came slinking upon us. Generations of humans and dolphins meeting on land’s verandah.

And I think I’ll leave it at that …

Nine, just 9, books by female authors at the top of a 20th century list?

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Portrait of Virginia Woolf, 1902

Woolf, 1902, by George Charles Beresford (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

The Reading Ape, in his February Literary Fact of the Day compilation, included the following tidbit:

There are only 6 female authors on The Modern Library‘s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century.

In fact, in the Modern Library’s Board’s list (over 10 years old now), a woman doesn’t appear until slot 15, and it’s Virginia Woolf‘s To the lighthouse. By contrast, a woman – Ayn Rand no less – occupies the first two slots of the Modern Library’s Readers’ List. Granted, this list is old news now as it was published at the end of the 20th century and was well raked over at the time. But, the Reading Ape reminded me of it and it seemed to me to be worth another look, 10 or so years down the track.  Here are the women:

  • 15. Virginia Woolf’s To the lighthouse
  • 17. Carson McCullers’ The heart is a lonely hunter
  • 58. Edith Wharton’s The age of innocence
  • 61. Willa Cather’s Death comes for the archbishop
  • 69. Edith Wharton’s The house of mirth
  • 76. Muriel Spark’s The prime of Miss Jean Brodie
  • 84. Elizabeth Bowen’s The death of the heart
  • 94. Jean Rhys’ The wide Sargasso Sea
  • 95. Iris Murdoch’s Under the net

Oh, that’s actually 9. The Reading Ape can’t count! Still 9% is pretty poor isn’t it? There are only 2 in the first 50, and did you notice that only one of these authors is represented by more than one book? That’s not the case with the male authors. I’m not going to be thorough about this but Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Ford Madox Ford, EM Forster, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh are just some of the male authors represented by two or more novels.

Anyhow, back to the women. I’ve read all those authors, and 7 of the books. I would agree with the inclusion of most of them, but let’s think about who’s missing. Well, for a start, there are quite a few Nobel Prize winners, including the following who write in English (which seems to be what this list is – Top 100 English language novels):

  • Pearl S. Buck
  • Nadine Gordimer
  • Toni Morrison
  • Doris Lessing (Nobel granted in 21st century, but her main body of work was written in the 20th century)

Surely each of these has at least one novel worthy of inclusion and could, say, replace one of DH Lawrence’s 3 (THREE!) inclusions? And what about Christina Stead, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner, AS Byatt to name a few other significant female authors of the 20th century? What about Keri Hulme’s The bone people? Or a novel by Thea Astley? (Because, another feature of the list is that it’s very America-England centric)

Given that we are now over a decade into the 21st century, it might be interesting to reflect on a list compiled at the end of the 20th century. What do you think of the balance, and do you think there are novels by female writers which should have been included in the top 100 of the 20th century? (Let’s not get too bogged down in what we’d eliminate – that’s much less fun!)

Leah Swann, Bearings

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Bearings bookcover, by Leah Swan

Bookcover (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

When I read a collection of short stories, I look to see whether there is an overriding theme. It’s not essential that there be one, of course, but it can add to the satisfaction, if only because looking for a theme forces me to think a little more about what I’ve been reading. Well, I didn’t have to look too far with this most recent collection, as the title pretty well gives it away. Bearings, by Leah Swann, is a collection of seven short stories and a novella and, as the back cover blurb says, is about “challenging the course of our lives and keeping a foothold during unpredictable times”. That’s a pretty good description and, I must say, it’s appealing, for a change, to have a short story collection whose title is not that of one of the stories within.

Bearings is the fifth book in Affirm Press’s series, Long Story Shorts. (I reviewed the fourth one, Having cried wolf, a few months ago.) It’s a gorgeously produced series. The books are a little more squat than the usual paperback, and each has a cover designed by Dean Gorissen. They are books you want to hold (fondle even) and look at.

Anyhow, on with the show. This is a varied bunch of stories. Some are told in first person, some third, and the first story is told in the less common second person. The subject matter includes broken families, suicide, grief, foster children, and motherhood. That is, all those things that happen in people’s lives to challenge them. However, as the title suggests, the stories are not totally depressing. Sad at times, yes, but not hopeless. They are more about finding ways to survive the challenges.

The stories grew on me. It’s not that I didn’t like them from the start because I did, but I think the writing got surer and more interesting, less predictable, by the end. Whether, of course, they are presented in the order written I have no idea. Probably not, but that’s how it feels. Of the first few stories, I especially liked “All the mothers”, a first person story about a foster child. He starts off as a naive narrator, not quite understanding what is happening as he moves from “mother” to “mother”. Take, for example, Mr Gordon who sometimes gives him an Eskimo Pie “especially if I have a cuddle”. When Mrs Gordon catches him on Mr Gordon’s knee one day, she pulls him off but he’s mystified: “I keep saying I’m okay, but she doesn’t believe me. Or maybe she’s not listening”. Gradually, of course, he becomes less naive and, more angry. It’s a well realised, psychologically real, slice-of-life story.

The central novella, “Silver hands”, is a little predictable. You can see most of it coming before you get there, but it’s nonetheless a good read because the characters are engaging and the language is fresh. I enjoyed descriptions like this:

His laugh goes up and down the scale like a hammer on chimes.

And this one on a woman starting to see signs of aging:

My skin is drying like the pages of a manuscript lettered with childbirth, lovemaking, nicotine and alcohol, and under it all the bones are losing density. But the letters of my true being are not written here. I am not only my body. I’ve never believed that yet here I am mourning it, sucked into that great big lie, measuring myself by flesh more than ever.

This is (obviously) a first person story. The set up is a marriage in the process of breaking down, but it’s more about how experiences in our past can come back to bite us if we don’t properly address them at the time. There are some “mysteries” for the reader to uncover and Swann plots them nicely. An enjoyable read.

My very favourite stories though are the last two, “The Easter Hare” and “The Ringwood Madonna”. Many of Swann’s protagonists are artists – potters, musicians, painters, writers – and this is so in these two stories. “The Ringwood Madonna” is about an artist who is struggling with motherhood, about how she meets a homeless tagger and engages in her own little act of rebellion. She creates a Madonna poster which she pastes like graffiti on a railway cutting wall. It attracts a lot of attention but an art expert says that holy images should not be sprayed around town. However,

Her graffiti Mary was  – to her – a beautiful lamp in suburban ugliness. A gift. Subconsciously she’d hoped that by creating Mary she would create beauty inside herself, she could see that now. And she had felt warmth when she was creating. Yes. Even joy.

The story’s conclusion nicely resolves some of the conflicts in her life while also making a comment on art as being not only about expression but communication too.

“The Easter Hare” takes place over Easter (of course) and beautifully reflects on the Easter story of death and redemption through a loose parallel describing a suicide and the response of strangers to it. It’s a finely told tale, and its conclusion brought tears to my eyes.

Swann describes the mother in “The Easter Hare” as wanting to write an Easter story for her children that is not “bloody and harsh” like the Crucifixion story, as wanting, rather, to “create something gentler for them”. This seems also to be what Swann wanted to create for us. She chronicles the challenges, sufferings and miseries of life but, as her title suggests, her worldview is a positive one, one that believes we can all find our “bearings” if we just take the time to look for them. This collection would be a good place to start.

Leah Swann
Bearings
(Series: Long Story Shorts, 5)
Mulgrave: Affirm Press, 2011
198pp.
ISBN: 9780980790429

(Review copy supplied by Affirm Press)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Writers from our Deep South

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

Yes, Australia has a “deep south”, though we may not necessarily call it that. It’s Tasmania, an island hanging off the southeast of mainland Australia. Like Western Australia, it can sometimes feel like another country. You have to go over the sea to it – and when you get there, you sometimes find yourself saying, “In Australia …”. Very embarrassing when you catch yourself doing it, but it does reflect how “different” Tasmania can seem. It can feel a bit English – it’s cooler, greener and more compact. And, because of its relative insularity, there are, I have to say, jokes about the mental acuity of its inhabitants (like those you also hear of about places like Appalachia). Totally unfair of course! Not only does my brother live there, but Tasmania is home to some significant Australian writers, not to mention creators of all persuasions. Peter Sculthorpe, who is arguably our most famous composer, is a Taswegian.

Saltwater River penal settlement ruins

Ruins of penal settlement at Saltwater River

Tasmania has a rather dramatic history, from the early days of white settlement when it was home to some of our worst convict prisons to more recent times when it has been at the centre of some of our most dramatic conflicts over the environment. It is also where one of the worst shooting rampages in the 20th century occurred (in 1996). Add to this the fact that it contains some of Australia’s most beautiful and inaccessible wilderness, and you can see why gothic is part of its literary tradition.

Probably the state’s two most famous writers are Marcus Clarke and Richard Flanagan, and Gothic influences can be found in the writings of both. Marcus Clarke wrote what is probably regarded as the Australian convict novel, (For the term of) His natural life (published in 1874). It tells the story of a young man wrongly transported for murder, and it documents the worst of the convict system. It is an Australian classic – and has been adapted to film and television.

Richard Flanagan is a contemporary writer and environmental activist. Most of his books are set in Tasmania. Gould’s book of fish (2001) is another convict novel and is inspired by convict artist, William Buelow Gould. It’s some years since I read it but I’d recommend it for its evocation of the horrors of colonial Tasmania in a voice you don’t quickly forget. Here he is on George Augustus Robinson (Chief Protector of Aborigines in Tasmania, 1839 to 1849):

Robinson treated the savages as though they were his entourage, & the savages treated him like he was one of the many stray dogs they picked up on their travels. Neither seemed to notice the earth falling away beneath them as a breaking wave.

No indeed… Gould’s main subject, though, is not the plight of “the savages” but his own survival in a world not kind to the poor and powerless:

For as Capois Death said, if shit ever becomes valuable, the poor will be born without arseholes. That was our fate, & I didn’t pretend I could alter it. I only wished to survive as best I could …

It is hard to find excerpts from this wild novel that make sense out of context, but I hope these two will give you a sense of the language and black comic tone. Flanagan’s latest novel Wanting (2008) also deals with Tasmania’s early colonial days and is similarly worth reading.

As with my post on Western Australian writers, I’m not going to give you a long list, so I’ll just mention a few other writers. High on my TBR is Jessie Couvreur (or Tasma). She migrated to Tasmania with her family as a young child in the early 1850s and lived there until her marriage. The book I have is her A Sydney sovereign and other tales (1890), but she also wrote novels. Anyhow, the first story in my book is titled “What an artist discovered in Tasmania” and concerns one Richard (“who is an artist, perhaps, more in sentiment than in execution”) and his trip to Tasmania (from England) to find “the most hardened criminal on earth” to sit for a portrait. When he announces his plan, his sister Polly asks where Tasmania is, and here is the narrator’s response:

Kind Tasmanians – whose blossom garlanded isle is the original Eden of the Anthropoghagi; whose aromatous breezes greet the pallid stranger, and efface from his recollection the haunting odours of Yarra* bank noisomeness – do not stigmatise Polly for her ignorance. She had been through a course in  school geography, and had mastered, you may be sure, the latitude and longitude of Hobart Town, just as she had mastered the latitude and longitude of Acapulca; but somehow the whereabouts of Tasmania had escaped her.

There is a delightful tongue-in-cheek tone to the story of an artist who doesn’t quite find what he went looking for … I must read the rest of the book.

Other writers from Tasmania worth checking out (but they aren’t the only ones) include novelist-essayist Amanda Lohrey, poet Gwen Harwood, and novelist Helen Hodgman (who emigrated from Scotland with her family, when she was a teenager, and some of whose novels are now being re-released by Text Publishing).

How I dreamed of Paradise,
this southern land at the world’s edge,
weeks of blue water separating old from new.
I tasted air in my dreams,
faint hills, mounds of whales;
the beginning of things.
(from Jane, Lady Franklin, by Adrienne Eberhard)

For all its ferocious past, Tasmania is a place many Australians dream of as our little Paradise down south. If you never have a chance to get there, you could do worse than check out some of its writers.

* With apologies to Melburnians. This is Tasma writing, not me!