This of course doesn’t make any sense

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Foer, 2007 (Photo by David Shankbone, via Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons CC-BY-3.0)

Foer, 2007 (Photo by David Shankbone, via Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons CC-BY-3.0)

Lisa, over at ANZLitLovers, has produced a list of some of the main features of postmodernism. It just so happens that I am also reading a postmodernist book, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is illuminated (from which the title of this post comes). I’ve only just started the book but it is exhibiting those features of postmodernism that I most enjoy:

  • metafiction – in this case highly self-conscious authoring
  • absurdity and irony thinly but uproariously disguising “real” meaning
  • visual playfulness – the titles of chapters by one character typeset in various curvy shapes, while the titles by the other are presented in the usual straight line; use of other typographical features such as upper case, italics, strikethroughs and the like
  • mixed genres – letters (ie correspondence), novel within novel, playscript, and so on.

All these are contained within a comprehensible story-line, once you get into it, and in language that is playful but not so playful that it’s obscure. But more anon. As a character in the novel says:

I do not have any luminous remarks because I must possess more of the novel in order to lumin.

Writing like this makes me laugh out loud…and that is always a good thing.

The value of the imprimatur

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In the October issue of Limelight, conductor-composer Guy Noble has written about that Washington Post experiment in which renowned violinist, Joshua Bell, busked in downtown Washington. Only one person recognised him. No-one else showed much interest and he ended with the princely sum of  a little over $30, $20 of which came from the person who recognised him and felt sorry that he’d been reduced to busking! The point of the experiment, says Noble, was to see how people would relate to fine art outside a fine art institution like a concert hall…and the answer, it appears, is not too well! In other words, it appears that we need the imprimatur of the concert hall, or art gallery, etc, to have confidence in the quality of what we are hearing or seeing.

Image from Clker.Com (Public Domain Clip Art)

Image from Clker.Com (Public Domain Clip Art)

And this made me think of my Review Policy and the question I received regarding why I’ve said that I don’t read self-published works. My answer was that “a book that is ‘formally’ published has gone through some external (to the author) selection and editing process which implies that some sort of standard has been met”. Clearly, I too need the imprimatur of some sort of authority!

Guy Noble concludes his article with the question: “If anyone can record music and anyone can publish themselves on YouTube, who is going to decide for us who is good or not?” My answer is another question: Do we need the imprimatur because we lack confidence in our ability to discern quality, or because in our time-poor world we like to outsource the first stage of the selection process? I like to think it is the latter … but fear it is more often the former. Whatever the reason, the resultant risk is that new “artists” can get lost in the mix. However, I’m sorry to say that this is not going to make me change my review policy! Time is, in the end, too short!

Marion Halligan, Valley of grace

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Valley of Grace book cover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Valley of Grace book cover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Delicious but sly are the first words that come to mind when I think about Marion Halligan’s latest novel, Valley of Grace. Take this for example:

You know, people think flowers are pretty. Sentimental. Frivolous even. But the fact is, everything begins in the garden. Humans. Society. Civilisation. Evil. Things bud, bloom, weather, age, die. There is as much decay as there is burgeoning. Gardens offer emblems of our passage through the world.

Sly because you know she is alluding to the Garden of Eden here but, without the snakes, apples or trees, the garden symbolism is wider, more encompassing than the simple biblical Fall of Man. Delicious because the language flows so beautifully – and it’s typical of the sure writing that’s found throughout the book. The style is relaxed and flowing, even when it is staccato (if that makes sense). It feels conversational, and yet it is not colloquial. And, it contains Halligan’s hallmarks – wonderful descriptions of food and wine, of home and gardens.

The novel is set in contemporary Paris and chronicles a few years in the life of Fanny and her family and friends. At the beginning of the novel she is 25, single, and working with the gay Luc in his antiquarian bookshop, but very soon she marries builder and restorer of old buildings, Gérard, who is 38. There’s no mystery about this – you can see it coming and it comes. What doesn’t come after that is a baby.

There are no big dramas in this book so if that’s what you like, this is not for you. It is however the book for me, because while I can enjoy a book with drama, that’s not what I read books for. I read them for the very things that I got out of this book: astute observation of humans and how we think and behave, combined with writing that delights, inspires and grabs. Valley of Grace explores all the sorts of things that make up human experience – love and friendship, betrayals, secrets, appearance versus reality, and more besides – but most of all it is about babies and children. The having of them, the not having of them, the healthy and the damaged, the child and the god-child, and the wild child are all covered in this neat little book.

And, in fact, as Halligan told us at our bookgroup meeting tonight (to which we’d invited her and she’d wonderfully accepted), children were a major inspiration for the book. She lived in Paris in 1989 and, from her apartment window, could see the church, Val de Grâce, which was built by Anne of Austria as her part of a bargain with God to give her a child (Louis XIV, no less). This story fed into Haligan’s thinking about fertility (the presence of it and the absence of it) and about how in the past women came to “a bad end” if they didn’t have a baby or had a baby at the wrong time. She said that in the 1960s we thought this would all change but in fact it hasn’t quite turned out that way because women are having babies later and the result is more problems (such as infertility, increased miscarriages, “damaged” babies). This book is, then, her meditation on children – who they are, what they mean to us. And the following will show you just what Halligan thinks they mean:

Taking an angry or maybe anguished baby and changing it from a stiff protesting awkward bundle into a relaxed kitten-like creature seems to Fanny as important a thing as anybody could ever do.

The novel is told in third person but from different perspectives in different chapters – with some wonderful set-pieces, such as the story of Sabine and her arrogant philosopher husband Jean-Marie to whom she delivers “the pavilion girls”. Halligan said that telling the story this way replicates the way life goes – we are the heroes of our own stories, but bit-players in those of others. This makes sense – and certainly works well in the book.

There is a luminous quality to the book, conveyed largely through imagery to do with light and colour (mainly yellows). Mostly it is comforting, but sometimes it is not. Here is Fanny in the Val de Grâce:

She looks up at the immensity of the pale grey stone. Even with all the decoration, the cherubs, the frescos, the marble and gilt columns, it has a bareness, a coldness. It’s the colour of concrete, There’s no stained glass. The light is silvery; when the sun shines, lemony. There is no comfort in it, as there is in her house.

And then in her apartment:

She looks at the graceful space of the apartment. At the light, greenish gold today with summer sun and the fresh leaves on the chestnut trees, their milky white flowers buzzing with bees.

It’s a short book – just under 250 pages – and a rather gentle one. It’s sometimes a little sad, but other times it has a wry humour.  It’s well researched, but the research hangs lightly on it. Its ending is one of the most inspired I’ve read for a long time – but you’ll have to read it yourself to see if you agree.

I have read a few Halligans over the years – Lovers knots, The golden dress, The fog garden and The point – and have enjoyed them all. I’ll close this post with a favourite line from The fog garden because I think it describes this book to a T:

Read a wise book and lay its balm on your soul.

William Lane, The workingman’s paradise

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Wealth and Poverty both seem to degrade most of us. (p. 249)

The workingman's paradise (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

The workingman's paradise (Courtesy: Sydney University Press)

So says Bohemian Connie Stratton to the hero Ned Hawkins in William Lane’s 1892 novel, The workingman’s paradise. William Lane, an English-born journalist, union supporter and socialist, wrote under a number of pseudonyms including John Miller, the name he used for this novel which was re-published this year as part of the Australian Classics Library.

Lane writes in his preface that the book was titled and written “hurriedly”, in order to:

  • raise funds for unionists imprisoned during the Queensland Shearers Strike of 1891; and
  • explain unionism to non-unionists and Socialism “to all who care to read or hear, whether unionists or not”.

If this suggests to you that The workingman’s paradise is a social-realist novel, you would be right. It is very much a novel of ideas, which presents a bit of a challenge: shall I focus on the polemics or on the literary aspects? I will try to cover both – but it is worth reading this edition’s new introduction by academic, Andrew McCann, as it rather nicely explores the politics behind the novel.

As with many polemical novels, the plot is pretty minimal. It concerns two childhood friends, Nellie and Ned, who meet up again in Sydney in the 1880s having not seen each other for many years. Both are children of selectors who have struggled and both have become quite politicised, though at the beginning of the novel Nellie’s understanding of politics is broader and her commitment to the Cause (aka Socialism) more complete than Ned’s. Nellie loses no time in introducing Ned to the underside of Sydney life, and to her friends (who include the Connie of the opening quote). It is through these experiences that Ned’s political education is cemented. Oh, and there is of course an attraction between them!

The novel is divided into two parts: the first is set in the late 1880s when Ned comes to Sydney and meets Nellie and her friends, and the second takes place a couple of years later, on the eve of the Queensland Shearers Strike, when Ned returns to Sydney to garner support for the shearers. Without giving too much away, there is no real resolution to the plot, something which Lane refers to in his preface: “This plot got very considerably mixed and there was no opportunity to properly rearrange it”. If you read for plot, then, you may be disappointed, but if you read for characters, ideas and a fine use of the English language, this is well worth the effort. And there is some effort involved because, while it is not a particularly long novel, its main focus is its ideas and they require a reasonable level of concentration. There are a couple of places, such as socialist Geisner’s long discussion with Ned, which can become a little heavy-going if the subject is not to your interest.

Lane writes in a high rhetorical style that is rather typical of novels whose main purpose is didactic. He effectively uses such techniques as repetition (particularly anaphora), declamatory statements, and classical and biblical allusions to convey his message. This style can feel unsubtle and old-fashioned to modern ears but in Lane’s hands it has a certain beauty. There is, for example, a sophisticated use of repetition at the beginning of Part 2, Chapter 1: The slaughter of the innocent. Nellie is sitting with and thinking about a dying baby and, after each set of thoughts, is the following repetition:

So Nellie thought, sitting there beside it … (p. 152)

So Nellie thought, weeping there beside it … (p. 153)

So Nellie thought, the tears drying on her cheeks … (p. 154)

And that, you think is the end of them (three repetitions, after all, being the most common style), but then two pages later comes:

So Nellie thought, in her indignation and sorrow …

Through these repetitions we feel the buildup of her pain and see the progress of her thought from sadness to indignation.

The novel comprises more than simple argument though. In a nod to the romantic tradition, it is also a very visual novel with some effective descriptive passages, such as those showing us Sydney at its best and worst:

The streets, some wider, some narrower, all told of sordid struggling. The shops were greasy, fusty, grimy. The groceries exposed in their windows damaged specimens of bankrupt stocks, discoloured tinned goods, grey sugars, mouldy dried fruits; at their doors, flitches of fat bacon, cut and dusty. (p. 24)

and

At their feet the faint ripplings of this crystal lake whispered their ceaseless lullaby and close behind them the trees rustled softly in the languid breathings of the sleeping tree. Of a truth it was Paradise, fit above all fitness to gladden the heart of men, worthy to fill the soul to overflowing with the ecstasy of living, deserving to be enshrined as a temple of the Beautiful wherein all might worship together, each his own God. (p. 185)

The ideas expressed in the novel are simple, yet complex too. Through Ned and Nellie, and through discussions between two “masters”, the conciliatory Melsom and the “Capitalism personified” Strong, Lane explains the master-worker divide, the development of unions, and the “freedom of contract” idea. And through the meeting at the Strattons, and Ned’s later meetings with Geisner and then Connie, he conveys his conception of Socialism as a “religion” that “can only come by the utter sweeping away of competition, and that can only come by the development of the socialistic idea in men’s hearts”. (p. 138) True Socialism is defined by Geisner as “men working as mates and sharing with one another of their own free will [ie. not organised by the State]”. (p. 134) After reading this, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Lane ended up trying to establish a utopian community in Paraguay in 1893.

Using a variety of narrative techniques – including stories of characters met along the way – Lane manages to present a broad picture of working class 19th century Australia: the marine strike, the girls who end up on the street, the piece-workers at home, and the struggle to farm are just some of the stories woven through the book. Reading all this, you would think that Lane was the epitome of all that is humane, but for all the idealism – the arguments for gender equality, for the socialist ideal of equality between worker and master – the book has its discomforting side and this is its racist (specifically anti-Chinese) overtones. From very early in the book, the Chinese are held up, essentially, as the enemy in both city and country:

The fruiterers seemed not to be succeeding in their rivalry with each other and the Chinese hawkers. The Chinese shops were dotted everywhere, dingier than any other, surviving and succeeding, evidently by sheer force of cheapness … The day grow (sic) hotter and hotter. Ned could feel the rising heat, as though he were in an oven with a fire on underneath. Only the Chinese looked cool. (p. 24-25)

and

Then down would come the wages, up would go the hours and in would come the Chinese. (p. 238)

Even idealists, it seems, have their feet of clay!

This is the sort of book that can be read as a work of literature and as a work of political philosophy. While it can happily stand on its own as a literary classic for the quality of its writing, its prime value for me is its evocation of late nineteenth century Australia – an Australia which, you will have realised by now, was no “workingman’s paradise”!

Note on the text: The title page verso advises that the book is “a repaging of text files on SETIS, itself input from the 1892 edition …” I understand this text was input via OCR which is a boon for publishers wishing to reproduce pre-electronic texts but which can also result in a significant number of “artefacts” (misread characters). Sydney University Press has clearly worked hard to clean up the text but a number of these artefacts have slipped through. I understand they will be corrected for future printings.

(Review copy supplied by the Sydney University Press)

William Styron, Rat beach

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I haven’t read any William Styron, though I have seen the movie of Sophie’s Choice, and so was pleased to have the opportunity to read his “Rat beach” for one of my many bookgroups this month. This short story was published in The New Yorker three years after Styron’s death and is about a young second lieutenant in the Marines training on Saipan in the Western Pacific in mid-1945. Their goal is, of course, the invasion of Japan. I should add here that Styron himself did serve with the Marines in the war.

The story starts with:

When I was seventeen, bravado, mingled with what must have been a death wish, made me enlist in the officer-in-training program of the Marine Corps.

He continues that, as they were young and considered “too callow to lead troops into battle”, they were sent to college “where, as book-toting privates, we would gain a little learning and seasoning, and also a year or two of physical and mental growth”. As he was particularly young, he was at college longer than some and so was not in the first wave of second lieutenants sent into battle in the last stages of the Pacific War. He quotes EB Sledge as saying, in his book With the old breed, that “Our officers got hit so soon and so often that it seemed to me the position of second lieutenant in a rifle company had been made obsolete by modern warfare”. And so the scene is set for a young second lieutenant arriving at Saipan with this likely fate in his mind.

The story, then, centres on the “internal conflict” of a young second lieutenant who is “scared” – scared of dying and also scared of failing as a leader of his men. With some pathos Styron writes:

As I lay on my cot, “The Pocket Book of Verse” would slip from my hand, and fear – vile, cold fear – would steal through my flesh…

This book of verse was published in 1945 and contains English and American poems, including those by the war poet AE Housman who, among other things, wrote about the futility of heroism. For our narrator, Housman’s poems contain “a note both stoical and ill-omened”.

In a highly evocative passage he describes the island’s snails – their hard shell covering their great vulnerability. They “were always getting squashed beneath our field boots, making a tiny mess that reminded me of the fragility of my own corporeal being”.  There is also a gorgeously written section in which a “desk admiral” delivers a shallow (to his listeners) motivational “spiel” under “klieg” lights and gesticulating with his “meerschaum” pipe (note the German-derived words in this section!), after which they are led on a wild, head-clearing run in the storm by their unconventional lieutenant colonel, Happy Halloran, who gives his own far more effective motivational speech. He says “I really think the world of you. When the time comes, I know you’ll do your best – that’s the best the Marine Corps has to offer”.

As short stories go, this one is fairly straightforward in its narrative and plot – but this doesn’t mean it’s simple. It’s also a powerful story, not least for the decision our narrator comes to at the end – but that, you will have to read for yourselves!

PS I really should have mentioned, here, the overall irony relating to “the bomb”. I’m not sure why I didn’t because as I read the story I kept expecting the bomb to be mentioned (or to fall, even). Was the gathering going to be an announcement re the bomb? Were the planes heard overhead going to be carrying the bomb? We readers knew that the bomb was going to change everything for the narrator but he didn’t know it. The ultimate irony.

If you look up Wikipedia…

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Back in June I wrote a post on Wikipedia’s fairly rapid rise over the last two years in the credibility stakes … about how it is even being cited as a source by Aunty ABC (Australia’s government-backed broadcaster, for my overseas readers). Well, it has risen even higher than that now. Yesterday, the minister conducting a funeral service I was attending said during his address “If you look up Wikipedia ….”. I was so stunned that I barely heard the rest of his message! I did manage to gather, though, that what I would find in Wikipedia was that, globally, over 200,000 leprosy cases were registered in 2006. Don’t ask me what lepers had to do with the funeral service, except that it was something to do with gratitude!

Now, my question to you is, how much higher can Wikipedia go!?

Truth in fiction?

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One of the things we readers regularly talk about is the notion of the truths we find in fiction. I like to collect what authors have to say about this, particularly in their own fiction, and so thought I’d share a few with you.

But first I’ll start with one from Richard Flanagan that doesn’t mention the word “truth”, just to get our juices going:

Books were solid, yet time was molten. Books were consistent, yet people were not. Books dealt in cause & effect, yet life was inexplicable disorder. Nothing was as it was in a book…’ (Flanagan, Gould’s book of fish)

This comes from a character who is clearly frustrated with life – and who doesn’t seem to be learning the right lessons from his reading! More to my point, from another Aussie writer, Rodney Hall, is this:

Fiction…is not so much a licence to make things up as…a licence to tell the truth.’ (Hall, The day we had Hitler home)

I love this – this recognition that fiction is, really, about truth. We readers know it – but there are many others who don’t. Flanagan says something similar in Wanting:

…though the story is a fancy, it is a fancy drawn from the deepest truth. (Richard Flanagan, Wanting)

And yet, this issue of truth in fiction can be looked at from a slightly different perspective. Marion Halligan, in her novel The fog garden in which she explores grief after the death of her husband, has a few things to say on the matter:

She isn’t me. She’s a character in fiction. And like all 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. (Halligan, The fog garden)

and:

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 and character as I have imagined them. (Halligan, The fog garden)

Here Halligan tackles head on that problem that so many readers have, particularly in autobiographical/semi-autobiographical novels, of distinguishing “fact” from “truth”; she also explores the wider issue of authorial manipulation of characters. There is more that I could quote but that would get boring, and so I’ll give the last word on the matter to Elizabeth Bowen who, as AS Byatt quotes in her introduction to Bowen’s A house in Paris, is clear about truth and fiction:

The novel lies, in saying something happened, that did not. It must therefore contain uncontradictable truth to warrant the original lie.

And that, as they say is that. Anyone want to disagree?

Time for another gum

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Sydney Blue Gum on the Hastings River

Sydney Blue Gum on the Hastings River

This is, I believe, a Sydney Blue Gum (Eucalyptus saligna) though I could also be wrong as I’m very much an amateur when it comes to tree identification. It does look like: they can be found up and down the east coast of New South Wales, of which the Hastings River is part, and they can grow to 60 or more metres tall which this one certainly seems to be aiming for. Whatever it is, I couldn’t resist photographing it. It rather dwarfs Mr Gums below doesn’t it?

Blue Gums are apparently the trees referred to in Henry Lawson’s 1919 poem, “Chatswood”:

And a little wood was on it, and the trees were tall and good,
And his young wife used to dream there, so he called it “Chattie’s Wood”.

“Chattie’s Wood” has long since gone, and shops are standing in a row
Where the young wife went a-dreaming in a the days of long ago,

Chattie was apparently Charlotte Harnett, the second wife of Richard Hayes Harnett, a North Shore Sydney landowner in the 1860s and one-time Mayor of Willoughby, and she did wander the Blue Gum High Forest of Chatswood West. The trees have long disappeared (from there anyhow) and some suggest that Lawson played a little loose with the specific details of their story but  it is generally agreed that Chattie’s Wood is the origin of the name of the Sydney suburb of Chatswood.

Another poem, “Blue Gum Forest” (1976) by Roland Robinson, was also inspired by these trees:

The blue gums soar, naked
smooth, to where they over arch …

This year Australian composer Matthew Orlovich set this poem to music for a capella choir. I’d love to hear it one day. Anyhow, these are just two examples I found by doing some quick research. It seems that while the Sydney Blue Gum may have made way for shops in Chatswood, they still survive – in both physical and imaginative form. Long live the gum!

Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones (Review)

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Jasper Jones cover (Courtesy Allen & Unwin)

Jasper Jones cover (Courtesy Allen & Unwin)

What is is about coming-of-age novels? Why do we like to read them long after we’ve (hopefully) come of age ourselves? Is it because we like to compare our own experience with that of others? Whatever the reason, it is clear that we do like to read them because they sure keep being written and published. In my few months of blogging I have already written about two, and have now read another, Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones.

Like many, though not all, such novels, Jasper Jones has a first person narrator. It is set in a small country town in Western Australia in the late 1960s, and the protagonist, Charlie, is the nearly 14-year-old son of a high school literature teacher. He is a reader and therefore, almost by definition in the world of teenage boys, not “cool”. The book opens with the town’s bad-boy, Jasper Jones, knocking on his window in the middle of the night and, to Charlie’s surprise and delight, asking him for his help. The plot revolves around the shocking help that Jasper wants, how Charlie responds and the impact on him, his friends and family.

It is  a pretty dark and gritty story, and Silvey, mostly, controls it well, though there are times when he pushes the melodrama button a little too heavily. Silvey teases us at the beginning with the notion that the book will be a re-setting of Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird. There’s a death, an indigenous person likely to be blamed for it, a much maligned apparently “mad” person,  an apparently thoughtful and wise father AND Charlie’s own regular reference to the book and to how Atticus Finch might think in particular situations. However, fortunately I think, Silvey is a little more sophisticated a writer than that and Harper Lee’s book functions more as a frame for the story and the ideas being explored than as a direct model for the plot.

One of the things I like in the novel is the friendship between Charlie and his Vietnamese refugee school-mate, Jeffrey Lu. I’m not a teenage boy but I have known some in my time! The dialogue between the two boys rings pretty true – their puns, their ribbing of each other, their jokey arguments. True too is their uneven burgeoning interest in the opposite sex – Charlie is attracted to classmate Eliza Wishart  and to enjoying some “sassytime” with her, while Jeffrey’s focus is on making the town cricket team.

The novel is neatly plotted – and while some of it is predictable it is not all so. The fact that Charlie fears insects seems to be resolved when we discover that his love-interest Eliza has a similar fear – but it reappears again, cleverly, in the denouement. The story is well-paced, and it deals with a range of side issues, such as racism (against the Vietnamese refugee family, and the “half-caste” Jasper Jones), on top of the usual coming-of-age ones, such as loss of innocence (in several meanings of the word). Many of the characters could be seen as stereotyped – the “bastard” cricket coach who aligns himself with the “boorish” bully boys, and the cold-hearted status-seeking shire president, to name two – but most of them work despite this. Charlie’s mother though stretches the imagination a little too much: she has married down, she has been forced to live in a country town too small for her, and she has lost a child. This does seem a bit of overkill and the panning out of her part of the story feels a bit like one too many layers in the book.

One of the concepts that Charlie explores is that of “timing and chance”. He learns that despite your best laid plans, time and chance sometimes take over and there’s not much you can do about it. Another issue that runs through the book is that of reading, words and language. Early on Jasper Jones tells Charlie he trusts him because:

But I hope you might see things from my end. That’s what you do, right?  When you’re reading. You’re seeing what it’s like for other people.

With this coming near the beginning of the book, it’s not surprising that Charlie’s ability to empathise, to see things from other points of view, is pushed to the limits as the story progresses. Charlie, whose ambition is to be a writer, also learns about the limits of words, about when they are useful and when they are not, and about finding the right ones to use when they are.

There are many thematic and stylistic things that can be talked about in this book, making it a good one for discussion but, in the end, it is a fairly traditional coming-of-age story in its style, tone and structure. That said, if you like such stories, as I do, there’s a good chance you’ll find this a compelling and entertaining even if not a particularly challenging read. And is there anything wrong with that?

Craig Silvey
Jasper Jones
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009
368pp.
ISBN: 9781741757743

Kendall’s favourite son

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Statue of Henry Kendall, on an inclement day in Kendall, NSW

Statue of Henry Kendall, on an inclement day in Kendall, NSW

…is the Australian poet, Henry Kendall. Except, he’s not REALLY a son – he was not born there,  and he only lived there for 6 years, from 1875 to 1881, when he was New South Wales’ first Forest Inspector. But, you know the story, when you are on a good thing…! And, anyhow, as a lover of Australian literature, I’m not going to argue against naming a town after one of our favourite poets. Anything that keeps our writers front and centre is fine by me.

Henry Kendall’s most famous poem is “Bell-birds”. It’s not quite as famous as Dorothea Mackellar’s “My country” and Banjo Paterson’s “Waltzing Matilda” but it is definitely up there. It is, for example, included in last year’s anthology, 100 Australian poems you need to know. It was written in 1869, two years before he went to Camden Haven (ie, Kendall as it was then known) and it reflects his love of nature – the sort of temperate forest landscape he would have found around Kendall. You can imagine the bell-birds in this scene can’t you? The first verse goes like this:

Driving towards Kendall

Driving towards Kendall

By channels of coolness the echoes are calling,
And down the dim gorges I hear the creek falling:
It lives in the mountain where moss and the sedges
Touch with their beauty the banks and the ledges.
Through breaks of the cedar and sycamore bowers
Struggles the light that is love to the flowers;
And, softer than slumber, and sweeter than singing,
The notes of the bell-birds are running and ringing.

And I will close on this little Henry Kendall taster … posting from an iffy Internet Cafe in sunny Port Macquarie (about 30mins drive from the little village of Kendall).