I’ve been remiss. I could have solved some of your Christmas shopping challenges by telling you about two books which would be perfect gifts for readers: Shane Maloney and Chris Grosz’s Australian encounters, and Susannah Fullerton’s Brief encounters. Both have “encounters” in the title, but they use the word in slightly different ways, as you’ll see when you read on …

Book cover (Image: Courtesy Black Inc)

Maloney and Grosz’s book is the more light-hearted of the two, and just right for the Christmas season. Every encounter involves at least one Australian, but not all are literary. Some are a little tongue-in-cheek and a couple, even, are not between people. Take for example, Esperance and Skylab. (Australians will know what this is about!). Each encounter is given a page, with text by Australian novelist Shane Maloney, and a cartoon illustration by book illustrator Chris Grosz. I’ll choose just three* to share with you:

• Australian novelist George Johnston and Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1960). Cohen (25 at the time) met Johnston (48) and his writer wife, Charmian Clift, in Greece. Johnston and Clift let Cohen stay in their spare room. Cohen says “They drank more than other people, they wrote more … they helped a great deal. They were an inspiration”.
• Banjo Paterson and Rudyard Kipling (both of whom have been featured in this blog) (1900).  Paterson (36) sat next to Kipling at a dinner in South Africa, where Paterson was visiting to report on the Boer War. They apparently discussed politics and war, and must have hit it off because they met up again a year later in Kipling’s home in Sussex.
• Robyn Davidson and Bruce Chatwin (1980). This was an organised encounter, and occurred in London. Chatwin had heard of Davidson (30) and her camel journey across the Australian desert. You can imagine what these two remote-area travel writers talked about, can’t you? Nomads was one topic, but politics was not. Chatwin apparently found politics boring and preferred to talk about (and mimic) people. Despite this, Davidson gave him contacts in Alice Springs which he would later use for his Australian travel book, Songlines.

This is an entertaining book, great for dipping into and discovering fun facts. I would have loved it if sources were provided for the information in the encounter descriptions, but this is not that kind of book. And, knowing now that these encounters took place, I can always research them myself.

Susannah Fullerton’s book, albeit called Brief encounters, is a longer tome and describes visits to Australia by 11 literati between 1836 and 1939. The book has an index and an extensive bibliography, satisfying my historian-self. The first visitor she covers is Charles Darwin, and the last HG Wells. In between are writers such as DH Lawrence (who wrote and set his novel Kangaroo only a couple of hours from where I live), Joseph Conrad, Agatha Christie (the only woman), Mark Twain and yes, even Rudyard Kipling.

Given Kipling appears in both books, I’ll use him as an example. Fullerton describes how Kipling came to visit Australia. It had its roots, she says, in an unhappy childhood and a consequent difficulty in forming relationships with women. He set off from England in 1891:

The ostensible reason he gave for the trip was that he was going to visit Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa. What he desperately needed was to “get clean away and re-sort myself”.

His first experience of Australia was Tasmania – but only briefly – before he landed in Melbourne on 12 November. On 13 November, The Age newspaper reported him as saying:

This country is American, but remember it is secondhand American, there is an American tone on top of things, but it is not real. Dare say, bye and bye, you will get a tone of your own.

I find this quite fascinating because right now many of us feel there is an “American tone” to things in Australia, whereas back in the early to mid twentieth century the tone was distinctly British. Anyhow, Kipling said quite a bit in this early interview, both complimentary and not. His comments apparently “ruffled feathers” and he worked to smooth them over during the rest of his stay. While in Australia, he also briefly visited Sydney and Adelaide.

Now, here’s the interesting bit that ties us back to Maloney and Grosz’s book. He left Australia, Fullerton writes, rather “unenthusiastic about Australians” but this changed eight years later when he went to South Africa for the Boer War. There he met Australian troops and felt he had discovered “a new nation – Australia”. He is quoted as saying that he had never come across a “cleaner, simpler, saner, more adequate gang of men” and saw Australia as forging its own identity. Oh dear – why it is through war that our identity seems to be formed (at least in the eyes of others)?

Fullerton not only uses memoir, biographies and newspaper reports to track Kipling’s relationship with Australia, but she also quotes from his poetry and stories. One of the most significant of these is the ode he was asked to – and did – write for the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance. The last verse includes the lines:

Then they returned to their desired land,
The kindly cities and plains where they were bred…

Clearly his view of Australia had softened. Fullerton concludes her Kipling chapter with:

Kipling spent only two weeks in Australia and saw very little of the country in that time. The visit may or may not have achieved his purpose of “re-sorting” himself. But it did leave a rich legacy – an ode, the beautiful poem “Lichtenberg” and a delightful explanation of how Australia’s most memorable animal, the kangaroo, came to look the way it does.

Fullerton’s book is well worth reading if you are interested in the authors she covers and/or in Australia as a literary destination! Lisa at ANZLitLovers agrees.

Shane Maloney and Chris Grosz
Australian encounters
Collingwood: Black Inc, 2010
111pp.
ISBN: 9781863955058
(Review copy supplied by Black Inc)

Susannah Fullerton
Brief Encounters: Literary Travellers in Australia 1836-1939
Sydney: Picador, 2009
396pp.
ISBN: 9781405039505
(Personal copy, signed by the author)

* I have left out the juicy bits – you’ll have to read the book yourself if you want to know those!