Jennifer Forest, Jane Austen’s sewing box

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…and so the current Jane Austen juggernaut rolls on. The latest that has come to my attention is Canberra writer Jennifer Forest’s book Jane Austen’s sewing box. Must admit that I was a little sceptical when I first heard of it, but I saw it, bought it, and was pretty impressed. It’s a nicely produced book and represents a genuine attempt to look at the “crafts” of Jane Austen’s time – as well as being a “how to” book.

Jane Austen Sewing Box, by Jennifer Forest, Book cover

Cover from http://www.jennifer-forest.com/sewing-box.php, using Fair Dealing (I think)

The first thing to note, said the author when she attended my Jane Austen group’s monthly meeting last weekend, is that these are not all simply “crafts”. Many are, in fact, women’s work. Women made clothes, including men’s shirts and cravats, bags and purses, bonnets and so on. There was, in fact, a clear divide between “decorative” work and “useful” work and most women, including Jane Austen herself, did both. In fact, Penny Gay, writing in Cambridge University Press’s Jane Austen in context wrote:

Most houses had several sitting-rooms, in one of which the ladies of the household would gather after breakfast to ‘work’. By this is meant needlework, an accomplishment which was both useful and artistic, and which was considered a necessity for women of all social classes. Jane Austen herself was a fine needlewoman… If visitors called, it was often considered more genteel to continue with one’s ‘fancywork’ rather than ‘plain’ shirt-making or mending.

Forest also talked a little about how Jane Austen uses knowledge and skill in this work as part of her characterisation. In Mansfield Park, for instance, the work of the Bertram sisters is deemed not good enough for display in the public rooms (“a faded footstool of Julia’s work, too ill-done for display in the drawing room”) of the house – a clear indication that these girls are not to be admired. On the contrary, Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey shows himself to be a solid young man and a loving brother by his knowledge of muslin. He could even be seen, many of us think, as the fore-runner of the SNAG (aka Sensitive New Age Guy)!

Forest introduced her talk with the quote that set her thinking about crafts in Jane Austen. It comes from the famous Netherfield scene in Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth Bennet, Mr Darcy, and Caroline and Charles Bingley discuss women’s accomplishments. The aways generous Charles Bingley believes all women are accomplished:

Yes, all of them I think. They all paint tables, cover screens and net purses.

CrewelWiki

Crewel embroidery (from Wikipedia using Creative Commons CC-BY-SA)

Forest went on to describe these three “accomplishments” and more, such as crewel work, tambour work, and knotting. She also brought along a “show and tell” of the objects she had made in the course of writing the book. There is nothing like seeing and touching a hand-made bonnet or a netted purse to understand just how these women spent so much of their time. I am so glad I was born in the time of labour-saving devices!

This might not be a book for everyone. It is not academic but is nicely researched; and it is gorgeously produced with lovely period illustrations. I do have a quibble though – one that is, to me, quite serious – and that is its index. Why have a Table of Contents listing for “Muff and Tippett” and then have an Index listing for the same. If you want to find out what a Tippett is, you will not find it under T. Try M instead. How silly is that? Overall, the index is idiosyncratic and needs to at least double its existing size to be truly useful. That said, even if, like me, you are unlikely to make the 18  items described, take a look. Its readable discussion of “the accomplishments” of the period nicely illuminates the context of the novels – and this can only enhance our enjoyment of them.

Jennifer Forest
Jane Austen’s sewing box: Craft projects and stories from Jane Austen’s novels
Miller’s Point: Murdoch Books, 2009
224pp.
ISBN: 9781741963748

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, 2009

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Nam Le’s The boat has won the fiction category in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Much deserved too I say! Interestingly, the non-fiction prize was shared by two books: Evelyn Juers’ House of exile, and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’ Drawing the global colour line. Lisa, at ANZLitLovers, recently wrote about Juers’ book – you can read what she says here.

The Boat – Recap

Back in February I reported on my bookgroup’s discussion of The boat on our group blog, but that was before I started writing here. I won’t repeat here what I said there – as you can read it yourselves. I will note though that one of its stories was included in Mandy Sayer’s recent anthology, The Australian long story. That has to say something! If you haven’t read it yet, think about it now. Nam Le is a new voice on the scene and I certainly hope he isn’t a flash in the pan.

A.B. Paterson, The Man from Snowy River and other verses

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Cover for The man from Snowy River and other verses (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)
Cover for The man from Snowy River and other verses (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

Is there an Australian out there who doesn’t like Banjo Paterson? Who can’t sing “Waltzing Matilda”, or quote a line or two from “The Man from Snowy River” or “Clancy of the Overflow”? While some of the 12 titles chosen for publication by Sydney University Press in its first set of Australian Classics Library might be surprising, the selection of A.B. Paterson’s The man from Snowy River and other verses should not be. Indeed, Peter Kirkpatrick writes in his introduction to this edition that “You’re about the read the most famous book of Australian poetry ever published”. As well as having been published in entirety many times over the more than 100 years since it first hit the streets in 1895, its poems have also appeared in collected works editions and too numerous to count anthologies. This then is not really the sort of book a reviewer “criticises” in the traditional sense of the word.

Perry Middlemiss, at the appropriately named  Matilda, recently reprinted an 1895 Brisbane Courier review of the first edition. This review makes it clear that many of the poems were already well-known and quoted “all over Australia”. And nothing, I’d say, has changed in the intervening century or so! Why is this? In Derek Parker’s  new biography, Banjo Paterson: the man who wrote Waltzing Matilda, Paterson is quoted as saying:

Poetry is older than civilisation … and it will make men laugh or weep or fight better than any acting or speech-making. Of course, this only applies to real poetry, and not to the verse that most of us write. There is a great difference between poetry and verse, and when a man speaks of real poetry, he should always take his hat off.

So Banjo, it seems, didn’t make great claims for art…I’m not so sure about that.

Paterson was 31 when this collection was published. Many of the poems had been published in The Bulletin, whose editor, according to Peter Kirkpatrick, wanted his readers in the lead up to Federation in 1901 “to imagine the kind of nation Australia might become”. Paterson was an important tool in his vision-making armoury. This provides an interesting hook from which to view the poems. What is the Australia and what are the values that Paterson espouses?

Paterson was born in the country but at the time of writing these poems was a city solicitor. Many of the poems, though, romanticise the country over the city, such as “the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city” versus “the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended” (“Clancy of the Overflow”). And many, in a similar vein, champion the underdog – the working man versus the toff or boss. It’s not always simple black and white though. If you only knew Paterson from his well-known poems like “The Man from Snowy River”, “Clancy of the Overflow” and even “The Geebung Polo Club” you would be forgiven for thinking his view of the bush and bushmen was romantic. This is not completely so, though. Paterson in fact chronicles human behaviour in all its diversity. Alongside the hardworking drovers and shearers (albeit some with a touch of cunning) like “Saltbush Bill” and the characters in “A Bushman’s Song” and “The Droving Days”, there are the easily duped “Man from Ironbark”, the rogue Ryan who is helped to escape the law by his loyal girl in “Conroy’s Gap”, and the cheating horse-owners whose attempt to sell off a poorly performing horse comes back to bite them in “Our New Horse”. Having read William Lane’s The workingman’s paradise I was tickled to see a reference to shearers and unions in “A Bushman’s Song”: “‘We shear non union here,’ says he. ‘I call it scab’, says I”.

Many of the poems are humorous: there are characters whose gullibility lets them down as in “Johnson’s Antidote” and others who fail in their attempts at trickery (often to do with horse-racing). Paterson lauds ingenuity, but not when it is deceitful. There are also the nostalgic poems yearning for the romance of the simpler past (before money and business got in the way), such as “On Kiley’s Run”. And then, of course, are the tragic ones, speaking directly of the hardships of life. The saddest has to be one of my childhood favourites, “Lost” (“Though far and wide they sought him, they found not where he fell;/For the ranges held him precious, and guarded their treasure well”). Another is “Only a Jockey” about a 14-year-old jockey who dies in a training accident (“What did he get from our famed Christianity?”).

While all the poems are rhyming, Paterson uses a great variety of rhythms and rhyming schemes to match the tone of his “verse” – from the heroic, romantic and elegaic to comic. There’s also intertextuality (such as Clancy appearing in “The Man from Snowy River”) and a good deal of irony. I like the self-conscious story-telling in poems like “Conroy’s Gap”:

And that’s the story. You want to know
If Ryan came back to his Kate Carew;
Of course he should have, as stories go,
But the worst of it is, this story is true:
And in real life it’s a certain rule,
Whatever poets and authors say
Of high-toned robbers and all their school,
These horsethief fellows aren’t built that way.

Not all the poems work equally well – some are a little awkward and clumsy – but, taken as a whole, recognising the spirit in which they were written, they present an intriguing insight into late 19th century Australia and values, and make entertaining reading as well. Whether you call it poetry or verse, I take my hat off to Banjo!

A.B. Paterson
The Man from Snowy River and other verses
Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009 (orig. pub. 1895)
128pp.
ISBN:9781920899035

(Review copy supplied by Sydney University Press)

Favourite Australian novel

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Matt over at A Novel Approach has brought to my attention the Australian Book Review’s poll to find our FAN, that is our Favourite Australian Novel. Not, they say, Australia’s favourite novel (which would end up with books like Lord of the Rings on the list), nor our favourite Australian book (which could very well result in memoirs like A fortunate life or Mao’s last dancer being on the list). No, we are talking our Favourite Australian (ie written by an Australian, however you personally define that) Novel (ie prose fiction of a certain length) of all time.

ABR is keen to get a good poll going: they are offering some rather nice bookish prizes. So, here is your chance to make a difference – and possibly win a very appealing prize!

I’ve voted. It was hard. I don’t really like making such judgements about something that is so subjective – but the prize was calling. Ha! I wondered whether to go political – and choose a novel by a minority author like a woman, an indigenous person, or a non-English speaking background (NESB I believe they are – or were – called) person. Or, should I be a little iconoclastic, and choose a favourite book that has been forgotten and/or ignored by the literary establishment? In the end, though, I went with my heart and voted for the first Australian novel to grab and inspire me when I was still at school. Care to guess what it was?

Tessa Hadley, Friendly fire

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TessaHadleyMacmillan

Tessa Hadley (Courtesy: Macmillan Books, via their “noncommercial” terms of use)

“Friendly fire”, a short story by the English writer Tessa Hadley, is a simple story of two middle-aged women cleaners in an industrial warehouse, Pam who owns the cleaning business and her friend Shelley who is helping her out for the day. The story focuses on Shelley and nothing much really happens – it’s more about what goes through Shelley’s mind as she cleans the factory floor and its toilets.

The first thing that strikes about the story is the language: the stars are “like flecks of broken glass” and “she let the cold creep into her as if she were made of stone”. Very quickly we get the sense that Shelley is not the happiest person on the planet. Hadley also uses double negatives – “they didn’t make a bad team” and “it wasn’t that she wasn’t proud” – further conveying Shelley’s less than joyous feelings about life.

So, what happens? Shelley and Pam go to the warehouse, clean (one upstairs and one downstairs) and then leave for home. While she is cleaning, Shelley thinks about her son Anthony who is a soldier in Aghanistan, and we realise that it is her fear for his safety that occupies her mind day and night, that colours her emotions. The title of the story comes from her worry that her son might have been involved in a friendly-fire incident. Her husband tells her: “Why d’you have to make up trouble … as if there wasn’t enough already?” In between, she thinks about the ups and downs of her marriage, her daughter’s teen pregnancy, her menopausal loss of libido. Life certainly seems rather circumscribed these days for Shelley. Even her husband’s playful phone messages – about funny place names like the Fishmonger called “A Plaice to Go” – fail to lighten her spirits. Perhaps she’d like to be in a different place?

At the end of the day, they return to the car and “the sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no colour”. Muted like her sense of her life! So, what is it about? Primarily, it is about the worries of a mother for her son engaged in an arena of war. It’s not dramatic, but it’s a nicely observed story that conveys the wider implications of our engagement in war, and how women – the mothers – bear much of that.

Murray Bail, The pages

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The pages, Paperback cover (Image: Courtesy Text Publishing)

The pages, Paperback cover (Image: Courtesy Text Publishing)

It’s not surprising that someone who calls herself Whispering Gums loved Murray Bail’s previous novel, Eucalyptus, and so it was with some enthusiasm that I picked up his latest novel, The pages, a few days ago. My edition, unlike the one imaged here, is the hard cover one and, funnily enough, it looks like the bark of a tree (like, say, a eucalyptus!). That makes sense I suppose since trees are the source of paper.

It is, I have to say, a bit of an odd book – but I did like reading it nonetheless. Plot-wise, it’s pretty flimsy. Middle-aged Erica, a philosopher, goes outback with her friend, the psychologist Sophie, to stay with brother and sister graziers, Roger and Lindsey, in order to examine their late brother Wesley’s “philosophy”.  This gives the novel two narrative strands – the women’s experiences as they stay with Roger and Lindsey interspersed with the told-in-flashback story of Wesley and how he came to write his philosophy. Both strands are told in third person until near the end when, as Erica starts to read some of Wesley’s writings (his “pages”), his strand switches to first person.

Occasionally inserted between these strands are funny little digressions on topics such as hospitality in relation to philosophers and psychoanalysts (Ch. 8), and psychoanalysts, philosophers and their chairs (Ch. 23). Juxtaposition may partially throw light on these but I’m not sure it does fully. Bail seems to want to say something about psychoanalysis (which Bail says is typified by the “endless sentence”) versus philosophy (“the long sentence”) but I’m not sure exactly what it is. He seems more negative about psychoanalysis, but philosophy is also found wanting.

I like the characterisation. Bail’s characters are very comprehensible as people and as types: the socially awkward but dependable Erica, the self-centred flirtatious Sophie, and the practical no-frills Lindsey, for example, are recognisable but interesting too. I also like the language, the description of the setting in particular is evocative but not overdone:

Through the window she saw a tall pale-grey eucalypt surrounded by a darker cluster of pines, elms, cedars. It pronounced a solid leave-it-or-take-it way of being. The simple strength of the tree: stand it alongside the lack of statement, on her part. For a moment – before looking away – Erica saw herself as resolute only in a few minor things.

There is humour in it too, mostly of the ironic or sly type. The solicitor, for example, is described as having “pursed lips from the many years of putting words in parentheses”. And, as you can see from that, there’s play on words, about words, and with words (and language): the sandstone “weathered and worn smooth by the never-ending revision of ideas” and the ambition of philosophers to “build a word-model of the world, an explanation, parallel to the real world.”

The book is rather elliptical (in both its literal and literary meanings). Wesley goes from country to Australian city to foreign cities and back to the country in search of a philosophy, a new way of understanding the world. During these journeys we are tantalised with “glimpses of clarity”  as he tries to comprehend what might comprise his philosophy while at the same time he is confronting (seeking?) something way more human – love. In these later moments he wonders whether  “the ambition to supply the answer to everything is a form of madness” and suggests that “philosophers have been unsatisfactory in the examination of emotions”. Meanwhile, Erica moves from the city to the country (a physical and metaphysical “interior”) to, she hopes, find a new philosophy in Wesley’s “pages” but what she actually finds, in the country, is love. Somewhat akin to Wesley’s questionings she comes to wonder “what possible dent could philosophy make on the fact of existence?” Contrasts and contradictions underpin the book.

Earlier, around the middle of the book, it is said of Wesley that he “was finding a gap existed between the clarity of his chosen subject, and the softer unavoidable intrusions of everyday life”. It seems to me that, by the end, he has not closed that gap OR, rather, he finds that true philosophy lies IN the gap. The final line of the novel is that “we are philosophers; we cannot help being”. I love the wordplay on the last word: “being” as in “existing”, and “being” as in “being philosophers”.

Somewhat similarly, Erica says near the end of the novel:

One of philosophy’s functions has always been to shine light into the dimly lit, the imprecise, the hopeful.

What we find reflected in Bail’s The pages, then, is “a glimmer of clarity” that, for we readers as for the characters, comes and goes with the “light”. And, isn’t that pretty much how it is in life?

Murray Bail
The pages
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2008
199 pp.
ISBN: 9781921351464

Note: I’ve read a small number of reviews since reading this book, seeking a more complete understanding. These reviews are more erudite than mine and most are longer so delve a little more deeply, but none, really, offer me a better understanding. The one I like the best, because it most closely reflects my understanding of and reaction to the book, is by Hermione Lee.

Flight of the Mind: Day 1, Summary

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Geraldine Brooks, 2008 (Photo: Jeffrey Beall, via flickr, under Creative Commons CC-BY-ND-2.0)

Geraldine Brooks, 2008 (Photo: Jeffrey Beall, via flickr, under Creative Commons CC-BY-ND-2.0)

Today I went to the National Library of Australia’s Flight of the Mind conference – and, well, my mind took flight! The conference title comes from Virginia Woolf:

The old problem: how to keep the flight of the mind, yet be exact. All the difference between the sketch and the finished work.

Today’s program focused largely on the nexus between fact and fiction (or imagination). The sessions were:

Session 1: Kenneth Binns Lecture

Geraldine Brooks set the tone – as of course she must, being the key-note speaker – by arguing the value of historical fiction. It’s just as well Inga Clendinnen wasn’t there because, like Kate Grenville, Brooks argues that there is validity in “putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes”. She argued that in historical fiction we get “the constants of the human heart” even though the “material world” might be different. She said that the things that divide us – race, gender, creed, time, place – are less significant than the things that unite – love, pity, fear, compassion, and so on. I like her view of the world! I felt like asking her whether she agreed with Inga Clendinnen’s statement in The history question: Who owns the past? (Quarterly Essay 23) that: “It is that confusion between the primarily aesthetic purpose of fiction and the primarily moral purpose of history which makes the present jostling for territory matter”!! Basically, Clendinnen disagrees that novelists can make a contribution to history through, what Grenville described as, “empathising and imaginative understanding”. I’m simplifying a bit of course but, as I understand it, this is the nub – and I fundamentally disagree with Clendinnen (much as I admire her!)

Session 2: Creating fiction from fact: History as inspiration

The three speakers in this session essentially continued along Brooks’ theme, arguing about the truths that can be explored through fiction, with Goldsmith going so far as to say that as well as creating fiction out of fact, novelists can create “fact from fiction”. Rodney Hall talked a bit about the process of writing historical fiction and quoted Robert Graves who once told him to “write first, research later”. Hall suggested that it is important to get the facts right because once a reader stumbles across something they don’t believe, it interrupts the reader’s ability to lose themselves in the text. Fair enough I think – but clearly there are facts that need to be “right” and facts that can be “toyed with”. Otherwise, how could Hall get away with writing a novel titled The day we had Hitler home in which Hitler comes to Australia? It seems to me then that whichever way you look at it, readers of (historical) fiction need to understand in the end that they are reading FICTION!

Session 3: Recreating a creative life

This session focussed on the challenges of writing biography – of finding information, of making selections regarding what to include, and so on – and there were some interesting issues discussed but I’ll leave those for now.

Session 4: Writing across boundaries

Felicity Packard, who teaches creative writing as well as being a practising writer, made some points which clarified things nicely. She talked about working within the conventions of dramatic writing (such as Aristotle’s classic 3-part structure and the need to focus on just a couple of main questions) and the conventions of form (such as the 13-part television series). The other two speakers also referred to the issue of form. It made me realise that the writer of historical fiction works within two constraints – that of form, and that of the history they are working with. It can’t be easy!

Kevin Brophy also talked about the issue of plausibility. He said that journalism needs to do little to achieve plausibility, while fiction needs artifice to reach the same goal. And this brought me back to Geraldine Brooks’ reference in her key-note address to journalism being “the first rough draft of history”. Journalists, she said, get down the facts that are available at the time; then historians go back later and fill in the gaps using the additional records available to them after the passing of time. After all this is done, though, there are still voids – voices that are missing, such as, for example, those of the inhabitants of the plague village of Eyam upon which her novel Year of wonders is based. The historical novelist is, she said, “the filler of voids, the teller of lies” that convey “the emotional truths … the constants of the human heart”. I do wonder what Clendinnen would have said had she been there…but, in my view, today’s speakers did a good job of balancing “the exact” with their “flight[s] of mind”.

Oh, and if you would like a summary of Day 2, don’t look here. Due to other busy-ness, I only booked to attend Day 1.

George Orwell, Bookshop memories

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I do like to read a bit of Orwell every now and then – and for that reason, though I have other books of his to read in my TBR pile, I recently bought his essay collection, Books v. cigarettes, in Penguin’s delightful Great Ideas series. I blogged about the first essay a couple of months ago. Tonight I decided to read the second essay, “Bookshop memories”, in which he draws on his experience of working in a second-hand bookshop. It was published in 1936.

There’s a nice little Wikipedia article about the essay, giving the background to his writing it and a brief summary of its content, so I won’t repeat all that again here. Rather, I’ll just comment on a couple of observations he makes that tickled my fancy, and these relate to one of the sidelines of the bookshop: its lending library. He says that in a lending library “you see people’s real tastes and not their pretended (my emphasis) ones, and so, he notes that:

  • “classical English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen*, Trollope etc into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out”. Dickens, he says, “is one of those authors people are ‘always meaning to read'”
  • there is a growing unpopularity of American books (but he doesn’t give any reason for this)
  • people don’t like short stories because, for some, “it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with every story”. Orwell says on this one that the blame lies as much with the writers as the readers: “Most modern short stories, English and American”, he says, “are utterly lifeless and worthless”. Those that “are stories”, such as by D.H. Lawrence, are, he says, “popular enough”.

I don’t think the second point is true today (at least in Australia), but I suspect that the first and third still have some credence. Again and again I hear in bookgroups, “let’s not do a classic” and “I don’t like short stories”. Of course, there are exceptions (my bookgroup, for example, likes to do a classic a year!) but I think the rule still applies. Will it be ever thus?

* Have you noticed how Jane Austen is more often than not referred to with both her names while the fellas often aren’t? We comfortably talk about Shakespeare, Dickens, and Wordsworth, but far less so of Austen. Chivalry? Sexism? Odd isn’t it?

Snow gums

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Give me a home among the gum trees (from song by W. Johnson and B. Brown)

Every Australian should have a gum in their yard somewhere! Pretty well every home I’ve lived in, and I’ve lived in a few, has had one in the yard or in the street just outside. My current home, in which we’ve lived for 12 years, has a lovely Snow Gum or Eucalyptus Pauciflora, and here it is:

Eucalyptus Pauciflora

Eucalyptus Pauciflora

Pauciflora means “few (or poor) flowers” and I suppose that’s true. Our tree does produce flowers in season – creamy white ones – but, while you can see them, they don’t jump out at you, partly I suppose because of their muted colour and the height of the tree. According to the article at the Australian National Botanic Gardens, another name they go by is Weeping Gum. I think you can see why when you look at ours. It has quite a lovely drooping habit (and would have had more if I’d been able to stop Mr Gums having a go at it last year!)

But, the thing they are most famous for is their wonderfully coloured bark, particularly on the subspecies (at least I think it’s a subspecies) that grows in Australia’s (admittedly not very high) alpine regions. These alpine ones can also be stunted, often into quite amazing shapes. As a result, if you search for “snow gums” on the internet you will find many gorgeous photos (both amateur and professional). I may as well add to them: it was taken on the Dead Horse Gap Walk in Kosciusko National Park in the Snowy Mountains. Judging by the little off-trail detour path to it, I’m not the only one to have photographed it:

Snow Gum trunk

Snow Gum trunk

This trunk, after rain, would be wearing a more intense technicolour coat of creams, browns, olives, and greys. And, just to bring this back to books, think of these (and other) gums when you read my next review (coming soon) – A.B. (Banjo) Paterson’s The man from snowy river and other verses.

Favourite writers: 3, Thea Astley

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I love its densely woven grammar, its ingrained humour, its uncompromising politics, and its undimmed outrage at human folly, stupidity and greed (Kerryn Goldsworthy on Thea Astley’s writing)

and

Great story, great characters … Stylistically, however, this book is like a very handsome, strong and fit woman with too much makeup on … This kind of writing drives me berserk” (Helen Garner, on Astley’s “An item from the late news”)

Despite winning four Miles Franklin awards along with several other major Australian literary awards, Thea Astley (1925-2004) has to be one of Australia’s most underappreciated writers. The two quotes above, from two significant Australian literati, give us a clue why. She was uncompromising and gutsy in her subject matter and she took risks with her style. This made her a pretty controversial writer. It also makes her great for discussion by reading groups (if they’re prepared to give her a try!)

Before I continue, though, I need to be honest. Her career spanned over 40 years and some 15 or so novels, as well as countless short stories, essays and articles, but I have only read about half of the novels and a few short stories. I’ve read enough though, from her mid career A kindness cup (1974) to her last novel Drylands (1999) to know that I like her and want to read more.

Take Drylands, for example. It covers a lot of the things important to Astley. Two major ones are words and their importance/their power, and people’s cruelty to each other. Subsumed in this latter one are some recurrent issues for her – gender, race, and other power imbalances. She has several targets in this book: she’s not too fussed on computers, television, or our sports-mad society; she’s also critical about how women are treated, not to mention indigenous people and ‘oddballs’. She’s a writer with a strong social conscience – and, for example, tackled race issues head on in books like the ironically titled A kindness cup (1974) and the gorgeously titled The multiple effects of rainshadow (1996).

But it’s not her subject matter that loses her fans so much as her writing. It can be dense…though it can have a sly humour too. She once said in an interview with Candida Baker that “I can’t resist using imagistic language. I like it. I really don’t do it to annoy reviewers”! It’s how she thinks. Here, for example, are some lines describing a town and its “barbaric” Christmas from the first page of the novel, An item from the late news (1982), referred to by Helen Garner in my opening quotes:

…the beer-gut belchings and the rattle of schooner glasses that always discover the Christmas crib and soothe the infant with whack yoicks seem to me to have a muckworm style. All towns. Not just this one. Because this one is smaller, a mere speck on the world’s glassy eye, the grossness is horribly apparent.

Time usually diminishes the memory; but for me it has done nothing but magnify that swollen moment of history when Wafer had the wax on his wings melted from flying too close, not to the sun, but to the local grandees.

Astley, as you can see, is rather critical of small town Australia…and small towns are the common settings for her books. I’m not sure why I, an optimist, like her jaded view of the world. Perhaps being an optimist enables me to take on board her concerns – concerns that are hard to argue against – without being ground down by them?  Anyhow, in 2002 she won a much-deserved, I think, special award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for being ‘a trailblazer’.

I hope, if you haven’t read her before, that this has whetted your appetite. I’ll say no more but end with a favourite line, with which I identify, from Drylands :

… she had never been harried by the glamour of any possessions but books.

(Note: You may notice that some of the content of this blog is also on Wikipedia. Please don’t accuse me of plagiarism: what I’ve used here is material I put there!)