Queenland has done itself proud with this year’s award winners: Richard Flanagan’s Wanting, Chloe Hooper’s The tall man, Nam Le’s The boat and Adam Elliot’s film script for Mary and Max all won their sections. All great works. Perhaps I should try to read the winners of the other sections. I like how these judges think!
Thanks to Lisa at ANZLitlovers for drawing my attention to the announcement. As she wrote, a full listing of the awards can be found at Matilda.
As I wrote in a past post, I do love a biopic! And this week I saw another one, The Young Victoria. In many ways it covers much the same ground as the 2001 miniseries, Victoria & Albert. Both show Victoria’s lonely childhood, the poor relationship between her mother and Victoria’s uncle the King, her mother’s poor choice of adviser, and the political manipulations from Europe to forge a match between her and Albert. However, while Victoria & Albert, being a miniseries and therefore longer, takes the story up to Albert’s death, The Young Victoria stops at the point where Victoria recognises that she can and should give Albert a “real” role in the palace/the monarchy. The essence of the story is not really spoilt by stopping it here – and, anyhow, the film fills in the rest of their story through a few end-titles.
As a biopic, it’s a lovely romance. As a film, it’s a pretty traditional costume drama. That said, the acting is excellent – with Emily Blunt as Victoria and Rupert Friend as Albert being particularly convincing. The costuming and the sets are sumptuous. The script is crisp and natural. The music is full and strong, but a little heavy-handed in places, a little too traditionally appropriate to an historical royal biopic, if you know what I mean.
From my knowledge, the film is pretty accurate historically, with just a few bits here and there exaggerated for dramatic effect. It deals lightly but clearly enough with the various political agendas running at the time – as they related to Victoria. All in all, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable film…and if it’s about anything (besides, that is, being the story of Victoria and her Albert) it’s about the idealism of youth. What a lovely pair they made.
António Lobo Antunes, 1998 (Photo: Gonçalo Figueiredo Augusto, from Wikipedia, under Creative Commons Licence, CC-BY-3.0)
Virtuosic? Tour de force? These are such clichéd terms to use in a review – and yet, I can find no other words to better describe Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes’ 1992 novel, The natural order of things. This is one of those beautifully written, but rather challenging, books that you know you really should read again to get all those nuances, relationships, and connections that you sense but can’t quite fully grasp. If that puts you off reading the book, so be it, but in doing so you’ll miss something quite special.
As you might expect the title is ironic – there is very little natural order here. The novel does not follow the “natural (aka chronological) order” either of fiction or of life. The characters – including a middle-aged man living with a schoolgirl, a miner who “flies” underground, a girl/woman who spends her life in an attic, an ex-secret policeman who teaches hypnotism by correspondence – do not fit the “natural order” either.
The imagery is rich, evocative and effective in building up a picture (mostly of disorder and decay) and a feeling (mostly of melancholy, if not despair). The rhythm – produced by repetition, and by run-on paragraphs that don’t begin with new sentences – compels you on. The characters are convincingly drawn despite their often mad-sounding confusions. The mixing of the surreal with the real works – as does the weaving of two scenes from different points in time in the same sentence, not to mention the telling of a story by two voices in the same sentence. Somehow he makes it work. Here is an example:
…and eleven months later I met Mr Valadas at a restaurant and liked his double chin, he wasn’t as handsome as the skin doctor who hated Verdi, but I felt sorry for him, always by himself, eating lunch all alone,
and my sister Teresa, who kept looking at you and shaking as if she’d been hit by the world’s worst tragedy, “When is the wedding Fernando?” [p. 186]
Two voices alternating in one long run-on sentence – and for some reason, you go with the flow and know who’s speaking when. But that is the thing to do with this book – go with the flow.
So, what is it about? In superficial terms it’s about, as the blurb on my back cover says, “two families and the secrets that bind them”. But really, there’s not a strong plot, though several stories are told. The novel comprises 5 books, each of which is broken into chapters told from two alternating points of view, resulting in 10 voices. The stories are set between 1950 and around 1990 and deal, in their various ways, with post-1974 Carnation Revolution Portugal and the resultant disintegration of Portuguese society (not only in Portugal but in its African and Timorese colonies). This said, the over-riding sense of the book is one of personal stories, of past, present and the way memory works, and not of politics:
Relax, don’t lose your temper, I swear I’m doing the best I can, but that’s how memory is, it has its own laws, its own rhythm, its own whims, … (p. 23)
In a bit of self-consciousness that brings us back to earth, the second last voice in the book, the dying Maria Antonia, says:
I amused myself by imagining that the redheaded girl was the sister of my neighbours at the Calçada do Tojal, I moved her to the house of the Vacuum Oil employee and the imprisoned army officer … my nephew announced with a smile , “You’re going to live forever, Aunt Antonia”, and I nodded so as not to upset him, I stuck a Tyrolean hat on his head and place him in Hyacinth Park of Alcântra, married to a diabetic girl from Mozambique or … [p.263]
because we who are from here but are not from here, who are from a here that no longer exists, have filled up these buildings with the silt of mementos and albums and letters and faded pictures from the past, and our present is occupied by these ruins of memory, not only the memory of those who preceded us, but the memory of ourselves, because we also forget, because names and images and faces get lost in a fog that makes everything equally blurry, … [p. 274] … with me will die the characters of this book that will be called a novel, which I’ve written in my head, fraught with a fear I won’t talk about, and which one of these years someone, in accord with the natural order of things, will repeat for me in the same way that Benefica will be repeated in these random streets and buildings, and I, without wrinkles or gray hair, will water my garden with the hose in the late afternoon, and the palm tree at the post office will grow again, … [p.277-8] … even if we’re not very large trees, and even if they knock us down, we’ll remain in photos, in scrapbooks, in mirrors, in the objects that prolong and remember us, … [p. 278]
And so here is made clear what should already be clear through the way the book is written and structured – though the repetition of phrases, the recurrence of bird and tree images, and the intertwining of stories and voices – and that is that the present and past intermingle and repeat each other, that the real and the unreal both have a place, that nothing really ends or begins, and that, perhaps, no matter how bad things are there is hope. What also seems to be made clear is that this has all been the fabrication of Maria Antonia – or has it? After all it is not she but the redheaded girl (Julieta) who has the last say. Read it and decide for yourself.
(Translated by Richard Zenith)
Oh the benefits (and sadness) of hindsight! This week, during my reading of the 1941 issues of The ABC Weekly, I came across a few references to peace and the need to plan for it. Oh dear! It’s probably just as well they didn’t know how much longer they had to go.
Anyhow, one of these references came in the form of a poem by writer-actor Hal Percy in his regular column, “Hal Percy on Parade”. Hal was not really a poet – more of an all-round performer – but his verse, “Toast to the women” (issue of 8 March 1941), feels like it came from the heart. Here is an excerpt:
When the cease-fire has been sounded, when victory has been won
And the earth no longer trembles to the thunder of the gun;
When historians write the chapter of our fight for liberty
…
When the Nation sings the praises of her gallant sons
The Air Force and the Navy and the boys who manned our guns;
Then let us pause, remembering the women of our race
Whose deeds of love and sacrifice should find an honoured place
In the pages of our history. …
I have to say that I found this rather touching and, in fact, encouraging: that, in 1941, a man would write that women deserved a place in history. The question is, though, how well was his request heeded?
Within the next few weeks I will be reviewing the Australian Classic Library’s re-release of Paterson’s The man from Snowy River and other verses, so this post is just a teaser. It was inspired by a column in The ABC Weekly (of 22 February 1941). Paterson died on 5 February 1941 – and less than three weeks later Australian novelist and critic, Vance Palmer, wrote a short item on Paterson’s impact on him:
I very well remember the excitement that filled me when, as a boy, I came across his new book, “The Man From Snowy River”, and I know that others around me shared the excitement. Here was the life we had known, suddenly given meaning, significance, a fresh interest. … It was as if a word had been uttered that was to awaken a dumb country, giving it a language of its own, and spreading a sense of fellowship between one man and another.
They were different times then – The man from Snowy River was first published in 1890, when Vance Palmer was 5 years old. We now have a language of our own, and we are a far more urbanised society than the one Paterson wrote about, and yet, I too have a soft spot for Paterson. Like Palmer, my love for Paterson also started when I was a child – when my father would read Paterson’s ballads to us. And in fact, I shared this Paterson-love only recently in an exchange with American blogger, Waltzing Australia, after she quoted “The Man From Snowy River” poem in full on her blog. We traded some favourite poems and lines, but I have to give her the award for the best response when she quoted these lines from his poem, “An Answer to Various Bards”, in which he responds to poets such as Henry Lawson with “their dreadful, dismal stories”:
If it ain’t all “golden sunshine” where the “wattle branches wave.”
Well, it ain’t all damp and dismal, and it ain’t all “lonely grave.”
And, of course, there’s no denying that the bushman’s life is rough,
But a man can easy stand it if he’s built of sterling stuff…
Yes, I can take a lot of Banjo – and so I greatly look forward to reading the recent re-release with its new introductory comments. Watch this spot!
Dame Mary Gilmore, 1948 (Presumed Public Domain, from the State Library of NSW, via Wikipedia)
Somehow I would not have thought of socialism and patriotism being combined in the same person but, logically I suppose, there’s no real reason why they shouldn’t be. And it does appear they were combined in Dame Mary Gilmore, a famous Australian poet and journalist who was also well-known as a socialist.
How do I know? Well, today in my reading of The ABC Weekly (issue of 22 February 1941), I came across the words and music for a song titled “Australian Battle Cry”. I’m not sure what the copyright situation is for reproducing a song, but I’m going to take a risk and quote the lyrics in full – anything less (and you will soon see why) would seem rather ridiculous:
We’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders,
Sons of the Boomerangland !
We’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders,
We fight for the Boomerangland !
Boomerang, Boomerang, Boomerang*, Boomerang!
(* Pause for effect – as per instructions on the score).
The music was set by Madame (I suppose if you’re not a Dame, Madame will do!) Evelyn Grieg.
Now, the introductory notes to this, Australia’s first, “national battle cry”, calls it “a deep-throated and rousing theme calculated to stir a nation to action in war and effort in peace”. It goes on to say that Gilmore based it on an “Aboriginal corroboree cry” she heard as a child in 1872 in central New South Wales. These notes also inform the ABC Weekly’s readers that copies of the words and music have been sent to “our fighting forces in Africa and Palestine” and have been published in The Education Gazette so that schools can use it “to rally the rising generation in Australia”.
And so now I bring it to you. Consider yourselves (well, the Aussies among you anyhow) rallied!
I have to admit that I’m not one of those readers who gets too hung up about accuracy in fiction. After all, fiction is, by definition, a work of imagination, and not of fact. And so, when I read fiction I’m pretty good at suspending my disbelief. I’m more interested in the world created by the author and whether what is written makes sense (is consistent) within that world. I know this is a simple response to a complex question, but it is the rule-of-thumb I go by and has served me well over the years!
This is not so for all readers…as I have discovered over many years of book discussion. I was thus entertained to come across the following exchange in the “Other People’s Letters” section of The ABC Weekly issue of 15 February 1941 which I read today. It concerns a story, by Australian playwright and novelist Max Afford, that had been serialised in the magazine.
Here is the letter:
Why do authors persistently make their characters wear spectacles with “thick” lenses, such as Edward Blaire apparently needs in your serial Owl of Darkness. No spectacle lenses are ever made thick, as thickness has no effect whatever on the lens power, and would only increase their weight. If it were meant to imply that the spectacles had lenses of high power in them, they could be referred to as “strong” but definitely not “thick”. [Name withheld – by me!]
Here is Max Afford’s response:
It is regrettable that your correspondent is not as careful over facts as he is about nonsensical hair-splitting details. The gentleman is entirely wrong! Sydney oculists assure me that, in some cases, spectacle lenses are ground to as much as 1/4 inch [about 6mm for my younger readers here!] thick.
So there you have it! Our poor gentleman loses on both counts: he is hairsplitting and he is wrong anyhow! Personally, I’d rather enjoy the story and find something more useful to write to the editor about.
What to say about a film that is so close to the heart of Australia? Balibo is one of those films that leaves you sitting in the cinema for a while after it is over. This is not so much because it is stunning cinema but because of its emotional power.
East Timor (by Mats Halldin from Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons, CC-BY 3.0)
For those who don’t know, the film tells the story of the disappearance in October 1975 of the Balibo Five and of the journalist, Roger East, who went looking for them soon after. The Balibo Five were five young Australian-based journalists who went to Balibo in Portuguese Timor (or East Timor/Timor-Leste) to report on the worsening relations between that country and Indonesia which controlled the western part of the island.
The film chronicles two turbulent months from October to December 1975, and cleverly intertwines the story of the Balibo Five with that of Roger East’s search for them. The Balibo Five are shown to be young, idealistic, adventurous and, I have to say from the standpoint of today, a little naive. Roger East, who was lured to East Timor by Jose Ramos Horta to head up its fledgling news agency, was, on the other hand, an older man. He is conveyed as being, initially, a little unwilling to become involved in East Timor’s troubles but keen to find the young journalists. In the end, however, having discovered what had happened to the five, East remains in East Timor after all other western journalists leave. And that, as they say, is history.
The film, fittingly for its subject matter, has a documentary feel to it. It uses labels to situate us in the appropriate time and place. The story of the five journalists is presented using hand-held cameras and grainy archive-look images, which are intercut with actual archival footage and newspaper images of the time (repeating the technique used in that now classic Australian film Newsfront). And, framing all this, is (the recreation of) a present-day interview with a Timorese woman who met all six journalists when she was a young girl and they stayed at the hotel run by her parents.
The film is all the more powerful for what it doesn’t say – it doesn’t, for example, prosyletise on the inaction of the Australian government, nor does it rail against the Indonesian government. Rather, it tells its story through the horror of the events and the emotions of the people involved…conveyed convincingly by the cast involved.
Some call it a thriller. For me, though, it is too real and close to home to label it with such a “feature film” tag. All I can say is that while it may not be the “best” film I’ve seen this year, and while the story may not be fully clear to international audiences, its emotional truth is real, and that is what I will remember when the details have faded.
I don’t think so actually. I am referring to Wikipedia’s plans to introduce “flagged revisions” on articles for living people. This really could just be seen as an improvement on the current practice of protecting or semi-protecting articles that are continually “vandalised” with false and sometimes scurrilous information. The trouble is that this “protection” practice is a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, as it usually only occurs when significant vandalism has been occurring for some time.
I have been involved in such a situation, albeit way milder than some of the examples cited in media discussions of the policy change. It all started when, as a reasonably new editor, I removed from an article (whose subject I won’t name, for obvious reasons) the following: “He has a reputation for ruthlessly and warrantlessly savaging younger scholars, perhaps out of professional jealousy and a profound insecurity”. This removal resulted in increasing attempts by an unregistered editor to “weight” the article with negative assessments. The end-result was “semi-protection” by an administrator, whom I had called on for advice when I didn’t know how to handle the situation. This administrator, a volunteer of course, took a lot of flack for his decision, but in the end we brokered an agreement and the semi-protection was lifted. A whole lot of pain, not to mention wasted time, could have been prevented by this “flagged revision” policy.
Jimmy Wales. Shared under: Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0
This policy is currently only planned for articles on “living people”. I assume that it may, if it works, be applied to more types of articles. I don’t see this as a problem – except, and this is no small exception, for the potential of a revision backlog, resulting in out-of-date data AND multiple similar revisions to be sorted out as, say, 10 editors all try to update in a close space of time Tim Winton’s article with his Miles Franklin win! It will be up to the Wikipedia community to design a model that will facilitate rapid throughput of revisions – but, however they do it, the plan is that the previous version of the article will be available for users to search and read.
Wikipedia, as Jimmy Wales is quoted as saying, has “become part of the infrastructure of how people get information”. Those of us committed to it are glad – proud even – that this is happening. But, the model is now getting close to a decade old. Is it wrong to reconsider some of its original practices? Should Wikipedia stay put while all else in the information/communication technology world changes? I think not.
That said, given the proliferation of “wiki” practice throughout the web, this policy change will be watched closely. What will be the ramifications … and how will they affect the exciting and ever-changing world of information creation and distribution?
The Times 1785 (must be public domain!)
Did you know there was an information highway in Jane Austen’s day? Well, there was – and it was forged by roads and newspapers. This is the springboard for Dr Gillian Russell‘s talk, Everything Open: Newspapers in Jane Austen’s Fiction and Letters, which she gave to the Canberra group of Jane Austen Society of Australia this weekend. She argued that the increase in the publication and distribution of newspapers in the late eighteenth century contributed to the development of a new style of nation – and in support of this quoted Henry Tilney’s statement to Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey:
Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What are you judging from? … Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? … Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?
Dr Russell argued that this provides evidence that newspapers – supported by the roads which made transport of the papers easier and faster (because this was also the era of the Turnpike trusts) – were at the centre of a new style of openness and transparency in Austen’s time.
But, to provide some context. Jane Austen was born in 1775 – and the 1770s, Russell said, was the beginning of the heyday of newspapers. In 1790, some 60 newspaper titles were published in England; by 1821 there were 135. Newspapers comprised just four pages – the first page was primarily advertisements, the second page reported political (and war) news, while the third and fourth pages contained miscellaneous news, often more domestic in nature. Formal access to these newspapers, though, was gender and class-based. Men – of the gentry or middle-class – comprised the majority of subscribers. However, she argued – pretty convincingly, using the writings of Jane Austen, William Cowper and Leigh Hunt – that once newspapers were in the home, they were readily available for women to read. She described how newspapers were passed on from those who could afford them to friends, neighbours, relations. And Austen reflects this in her novels: the Dashwood women, in Sense and sensibility, received their papers from their generous landlord, Sir John Middleton; and Mr Price, Fanny’s rather impoverished father in Mansfield Park, likewise received his papers secondhand from a neighbour, signalling his lower position in the social pecking order. The fact that the Musgrove men in Persuasion read the paper while the foppish Sir Walter Eliot didn’t conveys a lot about the sorts of men they were. Anyone who’s read Persuasion will know that Sir Walter Eliot is not the one we admire!
Russell’s argument is that, while most historians study newspapers in order to understand the politics of their times, these early newspapers epitomise what Samuel Johnson called “intelligence”, which he defined as the commerce of information – that is, the way information moved around society and the role information played in that society. Austen’s writing shows how newspapers brought people together through sharing information: they promulgated domestic/family information regarding births, deaths, marriages, elopements and such, and, during the Napoleonic wars, they published naval information of critical interest to families at home such as who was promoted to what rank, who was on what ship and where the ships were. By publishing information of mainly domestic interest, newspapers validated families’ position in society. Mrs Bennet’s concern, in Pride and prejudice, about the inadequate reporting of Lydia’s marriage, for example, indicates her recognition of the importance of such reporting to establishing (or reflecting) the family’s social standing. Through this process, Russell said, newspapers played a significant role in nation-building, particularly in establishing the middling order as a bigger “player” in the life of the nation.
And, just as we have today, there was a complex information infrastructure in place to support this “commerce of information”. Papers were read by men in clubs, taverns and coffee houses. They were moved quickly from city to country via the roads and complex networks of tradespeople (one rural subscriber for example picked up his paper from the butcher). Reading rooms were an important feature of resort towns (a bit, perhaps, like the Internet Cafes of today?).
In other words, during Austen’s time newspapers became a more central part of the daily lives of the middle classes and the gentry. Papers were major bearers of domestic news and in this way, argued Russell, mirrored what Jane Austen’s novels did – that is, they conveyed information about the way the world worked and in so doing demonstrated that all forms of information exchange (domestic and political) had a public meaning. In this new world, as Henry Tilney said, everything was laid open, transparent. Except, and here’s the rub, men were still the gatekeepers…
Whispering Gums 