Poet’s advice to Australian writers, 1940

/ Whispering Gums / Leave a comment

In 1940, Ernest G Moll’s poetry collection, Cut from mulga, was chosen by the Commonwealth Literary Committee as the book of the year. In that same year, in a talk on the ABC, he exhorted Australian writers to stop being apologetic about being Australian.

So, who was Ernest G Moll? He was born in Victoria in 1900, but moved to the USA in 1920 and was appointed the Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon in 1929. He retired from there in 1966, and lived out the rest of his life – he died in 1997 – in California. However, he did return frequently to Australia during this time, including in 1939-40 when he lectured on exchange at Sydney Teacher’s College. I must admit that I am not familiar with Moll or his work but he is clearly of some note – one of his poems, “On having grown old” (don’t you love the way this title is worded?), was selected for the rather gorgeous anthology published in 2008, 100 Australian poems you need to know.

Moll, then, has a certain amount of cred – and presumably did back in 1940 when he gave his talk on the ABC. A brief summary of this talk was reported in The ABC Weekly of 28 September 1940. Here is an excerpt:

If we write of things as they affect us as individuals – imaginatively and not as adherents of a literary tradition or of a relatively impersonal discipline of scholarship – we must write as Australians.

There’s no other way.

Our skies, our seas, our birds and plants, our landscapes, the qualities of our men and women, surely we have an eye for these.

Scientists find them distinctive enough and surely the eye of the artist is not second to the microscope in delicacy, discrimination, penetration?

I’m not sure what specifically prompted this outburst. There were many Australians writing “as Australians” in the 1920s and 1930s – Katharine Susannah Prichard, M. Barnard Eldershaw, Henry Handel Richardson, and Frank Dalby Davison to name a few. However, it is possible that they were working against a backdrop of cultural cringe: M. Barnard Eldershaw, for example, could not find a publisher in Australia for their award-winning novel A house is built, and so it was first published in England (1929).  Perhaps there was some politics behind Moll’s exhortation?

(NB The ABC Weekly column attributes the talk to “Professor E J Moll”. However, my research has not turned up a likely EJ Moll and so, given EG Moll’s background and the fact that he was in Australia at the time, I have assumed that this was a typo.)

BookSeer – is it for you?

/ Whispering Gums / 6 Comments
Jane Austen (surely public domain!)

Jane Austen (surely public domain!)

What do Jane Austen’s Pride and prejudice and Cormac McCarthy’s The road have in common (besides the fact that I mentioned both authors in a recent post that is)? Nothing much, really, except that Amazon.com suggests that if you’ve read Pride and prejudice you may like to read The road. See, I was onto something when I said that Jane Austen could to some degree be described as a spare writer! But, truly, I don’t think that’s what Amazon was saying.

The site at which I saw this suggestion was not the Amazon site, but BookSeer. BookSeer is, apparently, “another literary web project by APT Labs”. What it does is present suggestions for reading based on what you’ve just read. The home page poses the simple question:

You there! I’ve just finished reading …….. by …….. . What should I read next?

When you enter your last read and then click the arrow you get suggestions from Amazon, the Book Army and LibraryThing. I hate to say it, but the algorithms for generating the suggestions leave a lot to be desired. To test it out I said that I had just read Pride and prejudice. Following are the first three recommendations from BookSeer’s sites.

Amazon:

  • Let the right one in, by John Ajvide Lindqvist
  • The Zombie survival guide: Complete protection from the Living Dead, by Max Brooks
  • World War Z, by Max Brooks

Do these selections look a bit odd to you? Well, the reason is that although I typed Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen into BookSeer.com, Amazon decided that what I was really interested in (had read even) was Pride and prejudice and zombies. As my American cousins would say, Go figure! (BTW The road was number 6 in the list).

BookArmy:

  • Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen
  • Persuasion, by Jane Austen
  • The power that preserves, by Stephen Donaldson

Now this looks a little more appropriate, doesn’t it?

LibraryThing:

  • Sense and sensibility (Penguin Classics), by Jane Austen
  • Persuasion (Penguin Classics), by Jane Austen
  • Emma (Penguin Classics), by Jane Austen

Now, this is SO sensible it is perhaps a little boring – after all if you’ve read Pride and prejudice you probably know of and already want to read her other 5 novels!

BookSeer then is an intriguing idea, but until the algorithms used by the sites they draw on are a little more sophisticated – and until I get through my TBR (To Be Read) list – I don’t think I will be a regular visitor to the site. What about you?

Maile Meloy, Liliana

/ Whispering Gums / Leave a comment

[WARNING: SPOILERS IF YOU CARE]

Fun but flimsy was my first reaction on reading the short story Liliana by American writer Maile Meloy. But, after reading it a couple of days ago, I found that it kept popping back into my head. What seemed at first to be a funny little story – about a grandmother who returns from the dead – turned out to have a few things to think about.

It is, I guess, both an inheritance and a second-chance story but with a difference. It is told first person by the thirty-something grandson, recently laid-off work and so functioning as house-father. Inheriting a little of Liliana’s millions would not be unwelcome (to him, anyhow). However, Liliana, the flamboyant independent one has left her money to the RSPCA – that is to animal welfare! When Liliana turns up on our narrator’s doorstep alive and well – at the beginning of the story – our narrator clearly thinks he’s still in with a chance.

In the next few pages – it’s a tight little story – we learn about the complexities of family, about need/neediness and about, really, the failure of imagination. We learn that if you don’t make it on the first chance, you are unlikely to make it on the second – particularly if neither situation is based on sincerity…and our narrator is not exactly dripping with that particular virtue:

…I thought about Jesus and Elvis. People had wanted them back, badly, and still do. But who would have willed Liliana back…

and

My wife, whose family is Jewish, says that I tricked her into falling in love with me by withholding my grandmother’s Nazi-movie past until it was too late, which is entirely true – I’m not an idiot.

Get the picture? This is a man who thinks he might get a job simply by using “new fonts with which to express my accomplishments”.

And so, our narrator, who had lived a somewhat Bohemian life as a child but had yearned for and created a “buttered saltines in front of TV” sort of life, is not the sort of person to engage his grandmother. “Well, you aren’t very much like your father, thankfully … But you aren’t very much like me either”. The story therefore ends much as it begins – no grandmother, no inheritance and no job. He knows he failed, but does he know why? Meloy doesn’t really answer this – and perhaps that’s part of her skill. She drops some choice words, and the rest is up to us.

(PS As well as being published online, “Liliana” appears in Meloy’s latest collection, Both ways is the only way I want it.)

Barack Obama, Dreams from my father

/ Whispering Gums / 4 Comments
Dreams from my father, Australian paperback (Cover: Courtesy Text Publishing)

Dreams from my father, Australian paperback (Cover: Courtesy Text Publishing)

I must be about the last person on earth to read Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from my father. However, that’s not going to stop me adding my voice to the accolades heaped on the book! When it was originally published in 1995, it was subtitled “A story of race and inheritance”. This does not appear on the cover or title page of my 2009 reprint of the 2004 edition. Why is that? Maybe they just thought they’d keep it simple?

Anyhow, this aside, there’s a lot that can be said about this book – and in fact a lot has been said. I don’t really want to go over that ground again. Yes, it has a three part structure (Origins, Chicago and Kenya). Yes, it’s beautifully written with some lovely reflective prose. Yes, it contains the germ of his philosophies about race and politics. But, what did I get out of it?

Well the main thing is that it’s one of the most authentic explorations of identity crisis that I have ever read. Here is a man born of a mixed race marriage, who was brought up by the “dominant” race’s family without any real contact with the minority race family but who, by the time he reaches adolescence, finds that those around him identify him with that minority race. Consequently, much of the book is spent on his working out how to live (and grow) as a black man in a white society. He is very honest in chronicling his path from rather wild, disaffected youth to thoughtful more together young man. He starts to make this transition when, in his early 20s, he leaves the high corporate life in New York for the life of a poor community organiser in the Southside of Chicago. And here I must admit I could NOT get that Jim Croce song out of my head:

Well the south side of chicago
Is the baddest part of town…

Some readers, I know, found the Chicago section slow-going, and  I suppose I did too but that doesn’t mean I didn’t find it engrossing because it is in this section that he really explores the many faces of race relations and starts to work through his own views and values. After all, it is here that he gets first-hand experience of what it is like to be poor, powerless and black and it is here that he not only starts to develop his philosophy but also hone his organisational skills. He’s pretty modest about it but it is clear that he is an empathetic person who engenders confidence in people. The other interesting thing about this identity crisis aspect of the book is that while, unlike many of the people he worked with/for he had not “grown up black”, he is one of the rare Americans to actually have direct African roots, something he explores in the third part of the book. All this actually makes him a bit of an insider/outsider in both white and black society. The resolution, when it comes at the end, is emotional and yet rather ordinary. He writes:

I felt the circle finally close. I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d felt in Chicago – all of it was connected with a small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the colour of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle my birthright.

The other thing I got out of it was the exploration – mostly just subtly alongside other discussions – of the concepts of truth and authenticity. An historian he talks to in Nairobi towards the end of the book says, when discussing the historical challenges facing, say, post-colonial Africans, that “truth is usually the best corrective” and elaborates on this by suggesting that possibly “the worse thing that colonialism did was cloud our view of the past”. There’s much to think about in that statement! On a more personal level she says that what she wants for her daughter is less to be “authentically African” and more to be “authentically herself”. I can’t think of a better point on which to finish this little review of mine!

Australian Classics Library

/ Whispering Gums / 6 Comments

Am I the last to know? I have just discovered that Sydney University Press is publishing a new set of Australian Classics, using a grant from the CAL Cultural Fund. Each title has a newly written critical introduction and, in a nice bit of collaboration, some biographical and bibliographical information from AustLit.

The titles – an interesting lot really – were selected from over 80 titles already sold by the Press and were chosen for “their importance in the canon of Australian literature and their applicability to the education market”. They are:

The commandant, by Jessica Anderson (SUP website, applying their fair dealing statement)

The commandant, by Jessica Anderson (SUP website, applying their fair dealing statement)

The prices, ranging from around $22.95 to $32.95, are a little high I think. Some (though by no means all) of these are still in copyright so that makes a difference, and there’s also the additional editorial material (but presumably that has been covered by the grant?). However, with the recent and very cheap original-look Penguin Classics range, the comparison may put people off, particularly when the covers of these, with their orange and white theme, appear to riff a little off those Penguins.

Anyhow, back to the selection. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve read almost none of these books though I have owned the Cappiello for quite a few years, and bought Maurice Guest a few years ago to fill a gap in my reading. I have read and do like Jessica Anderson – just not The commandant. It’s encouraging, in fact, to see a decent, well 33% anyhow, proportion of women in the list. Oh, and I must admit that I haven’t heard of Price Warung (apparently, according to Wikipedia, a pseudonym for one William Astley, 1855-1911).

The advertisement (and I have to remember that it IS an advertisement) that drew my attention to this new series described it as “12 best-known and loved works of Australian literature”. Hmmm…I have no serious quibble with the selection – after all, it is encouraging to see such support for our classics and any selection is going have a large degree of subjectivity. However, I’m not sure that I’d quite describe this set – fine as it is – as our “12 best-known and loved”. Would you?

Aboriginal women – sacred and profane

/ Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

A regular column in The ABC Weekly, about which I have blogged a couple of times in recent days, was written by Australian writer Vance Palmer. I have only read one novel by Palmer – The passage – and have been feeling recently that I’d like to read it again partly, but not only, because Vance and his wife Nettie were significant players – and mentors – in Australia’s literary scene of the 1930s-50s. Anyhow, back to the topic in hand … Palmer’s column is basically a weekly book review column and on 4 May 1940 the book was anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry’s published thesis, Aboriginal women: Sacred and profane (1939).

Waterhole in the Kimberleys

Waterhole in the Kimberleys

Now, while I did fancy myself a bit of an anthropologist  for a time in the early 1970s when my university anthropological studies excited and challenged me, I don’t pretend to be anywhere near across the subject now. I won’t therefore go into great detail about this work – or its anthropological ramifications. I will say though that it was groundbreaking in its time as, based on her research in the Kimberleys, Kaberry argued that there was not a clear division in Aboriginal society, as proposed apparently by Durkheim, in which men focussed on the sacred and women on the profane. She argued that women had their own sacred ceremonies and, further, that women’s role in their society was not inferior to men’s but complementary.

This is interesting and was of course moreso in its time, but it is not what I most liked about Palmer’s review. What I liked was the fact that he saw Kaberry’s work as making a significant contribution to our understanding of indigenous society. He says that it is not necessarily an easy book to read, particularly as parts of it can be technical, but that it is an important one. He concludes the review with

But knowledge once gathered, gradually sinks into the general mind, and it is necessary that we should understand the pattern of living involved by the people we are displacing on this soil, both for our own good and theirs.

That was in 1940. How well do you reckon we have done since then?

Florence James and journalism, 1940

/ Whispering Gums / 6 Comments

Florence James, with Dymphna Cusack, wrote one of Australia’s most successful novels set in World War 2, Come In Spinner. She was also a literary agent and journalist – and wrote regularly for The ABC Weekly which I referred to in a post a few days ago. In the 23 March 1940 issue was her article titled “Writing for profit doesn’t always pay”. Like Zelda Reed, from my first post on the topic, she refers to women’s ambition to be journalists, but she takes quite a different tack. She commences with:

It seems that there is only one thing standing in the way of half my friends becoming journalists, and that is Cruel Fate.

She then lists how Cruel Fate has quashed her friends’ ambitions. There’s

  • Jean who “has always had journalism in her bones” but for whom the social round and her work in a beauty parlour have stopped her “get[ting] down to it”;
  • Margaret who writes tediously long letters but believes that she could write a book as against “those little articles of yours” that “can’t take much time to dash off” but doesn’t recognise the time taken in “writing and rewriting, cutting and altering and writing all over again”;
  • Anne who once read testimonials from people who had learnt journalism in two months from a correspondence college and thus wondered how James “could spend a whole day at so simple a job which was so clearly only a pastime for the more gifted”; and
  • the friend who beat her in English at school and who, if she didn’t have her 9-5 job as private secretary to an important businessman, could easily “lead the charming carefree, money-for-jam life of a freelance journalist”.
Writing (from Churl @ Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative License 2.0)

Writing (from Churl @ Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative License 2.0)

None of these friends, she says, will believe that as a freelance journalist she cannot write what she likes, when she likes. They don’t see the times a journalist must miss out on a special event like the ballet or a friend’s wedding because a job suddenly comes in from the editor who is her bread-and-butter. They don’t know the pain of having “your beautiful story … cut down to a quarter of its original size because a cable has just come describing the contents of Lady Muck Tuck’s 39 wardrobe trunks that she is bringing to Australia”. They don’t realise that no matter how good your essays were at school or how much your friends love your letters or how many poems or plays you have in your head, “you have got to write down your inspiration in a form which someone will think is good enough for them to buy”.

There’s the rub [she says]. Believe it or not few journalists are born, and most of them are made by the sweat of their brows. The only way to learn to write is to write and write and write, not at your own sweet will as Margaret writes her letters, not between cooking and serving dinner, not at the call of elusive inspiration, but regularly and faithfully, working towards a standard of publication day in and day out as regularly as you would have to practise the piano if you wanted to be a concert performer.

I like this. It makes me feel it’s okay to keep writing here. Not that I intend to be a journalist but I would like to improve my style. By writing here and by reading other blogs, surely I’ll get better. Better enough that people will want to buy – not with money, but with hits on my page!

Beautiful Kate?

/ Whispering Gums / Leave a comment
Flinders Ranges (Photo: Georgie Sharp @ flickr, used under Creative Commons licence CC-BY-2.0)

Flinders Ranges (Photo: Georgie Sharp @ flickr, used under Creative Commons licence CC-BY-2.0)

[WARNING: SPOILERS, PROBABLY]

Well, I haven’t read the 1982 book by American novelist Newton Thornburg – in fact I hadn’t heard of it – but Rachel Ward has managed to produce out of it a stylish and engrossing film, aided by an excellent cast and gorgeous, often eerie, cinematography. It helps too that the film was shot in the remote but stunning Flinders Ranges of South Australia.

In case you haven’t heard, I’ll get it out now. The film deals with one of those big taboos – sibling incest. It is not sensational, it is not really voyeuristic; in fact it handles the topic with a great deal of sensitivity.  This is achieved partly by telling the story through flashback which, somehow, reduces the shock value and enables us to focus on the circumstances rather than the act. Forty-year old Ned (played with brooding but intelligent restraint by Ben Mendelsohn) returns to the family farm, with much younger fiancée (Toni, played by Maeve Dermody), to see his dying father (Bryan Brown). Also at the farm, caring for their father, is Ned’s younger sister, Sally (Rachel Griffiths). Ned, a writer, is clearly conflicted and has a prickly (to say the least) relationship with his father and so, as we’d expect, returning to the farm releases the ghosts of his past. This past includes a mother who died when he was young, a father who was rather harsh and domineering, and a twin sister (the Kate of the title played by Sophie Lowe) and older brother (Cliff), both of whom had died tragically in their teens. Mostly through flashbacks, the film explores the last summer in Kate and Cliff’s lives, and the events which led to their deaths, events which have reverberated for Ned ever since.

It’s not a particularly innovative film. The transitions between present and past are handled pretty traditionally – mostly fades triggered by an action, object or sound – but they are nonetheless smooth and subtle. The landscape, which is beautiful but stark and somewhat desolate, provides a perfect backdrop for the characters’ emotional lives. And the music, particularly Tex Perkins’, to use a cliché, haunting rendition of “This little bird”, supports the film superbly. The end result is a sureness in the direction belying the fact that this is Ward’s first feature – it might be fairly traditional in style but it is definitely not boring.

I do though have a small quibble with the story. I saw the film with two other people and all three of us struggled a little to understand Kate and the motivation for her behaviour. (Of course we are seeing it all through Ned’s eyes, but it does appear from other clues in the film that his eyes are reliable). Was it being motherless? Was it their isolation (their father insisted they be home-schooled through School of the Air)? Was it indeed this harsh remote father? Or, was it jealousy? This is a bit murky and spoils a little our full understanding of the situation – and, rightly or wrongly, it seems to lay much of the blame for what happens at her feet. That said, Kate is not demonised. Rather, she is presented (and played beautifully by Lowe) as charismatic, lively and risk-taking, but as trapped on a stage that is too small for her energies.

The resolution is pretty traditional but is not mawkish – we can’t help feeling glad that Ned comes to some rapprochement with his father, that he has put his ghosts to rest and that he may now move onto a more settled future. This is a gutsy feature debut for Ward – I look forward to her next one.

Advice to would-be women journalists, 1930s style

/ Whispering Gums / 11 Comments

While I was researching something completely different today, I came across a wonderful – you’ll see why soon – article titled “Not much fun in being a woman journalist – or is there?” in the second issue of The ABC Weekly published on 9 December 1939 by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The article was written by Zelda Reed, an American who was working her way around the world as a journalist. The editor says that Miss Reed has directed the article “to ambitious Australian girls who think, perhaps, that JOURNALISM IS SUCH FUN” (their stress).

Miss Reed starts by describing how “the talkies [that is, movies] have discovered that there is glamour in the newspaper business” and goes on to give a rundown of the typical plot involving “cheeky young females” who “peck perkily at their portables and indulge in gay repartee with that winsome character, the Editor”. HOWEVER, Miss Reed warns, young women dreaming of such a career should first “well study the seamy side of the journalist’s lot”.

She says would-be reporters should be aware of:

a curious paradox in the minds of practically all editors. These men are liberals by temperament and feminists by conviction. They will do everything to help women break down the prejudice against their sex – everything, that is, except hire them as general news reporters.

Dorothy Dix (released to Public Domain, at Wikipedia)

Dorothy Dix (released to Public Domain, at Wikipedia)

She says that the real paying jobs are not the adventurous ones – and cites Dorothy Dix as one who makes very good money without ever having to move from her desk. This leads her into the traditional areas in which women do well – because “nobody else wants them. The women’s page editors, the society editors…” and so on. You know the drill.

Then she dashes any hopes of romance! She says that

Gallantry is not a strong point among the men who work on newspapers. Except when salaries are involved, these are the men who believe in equality of the sexes and act on it!

Hmmm…what does that mean? They believe in equality but don’t want to marry it? Well, she goes on to say that newspaper men have “none of the elementary requirements for a good husband”. In other words, “men reporters … go in for irresponsibility as an art” and “lack material ambition, and are proud of it”!

So, the positives? Well, there’s never being bored in a newspaper office because “entertaining companions, with a rich store of anecdotes, will always drop their work to share a coffee with you”. And a female reporter “will have her scrapbooks filled with forgotten scoops [and] a reputation as a ‘top journalist for a woman’. But that is a Bohemian reward which perhaps one woman in a million finds satisfactory”. Well…

Her conclusion is that

the rest [the other 999,999 women in a million, that is] would do well to run like rabbits whenever the urge to work on a newspaper creeps over them – they’ll pay a price that is exorbitant for the doubtful privilege of being the uninvited guest at a social function, or meeting a few front-page characters face to face.

Miss Reed, it seems, doesn’t think much of the career that is taking her around the world! I’m sure there’s truth in what she says – and I’m sure things have changed since then. All I can say is that I’ll stick to blogging. May not be as adventurous but I can have the fun of writing what I like while steering clear of all those non-materialistic irresponsible male writers!

Kath Walker aka Oodgeroo Noonuccal

/ Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

I fell in love with Kath Walker, as she was known then, in my teens and bought her book of poems, My people. I loved her passion for her people and the intensity but accessibility of her poems. Every now and then I look at them again. Today, however, my mum gave me a dear little illustrated book produced by the National Library of Australia called Little book of dogs. It contains a small selection of Australian poems on, well, dogs. One of them was also in My people, and is called “Freedom”. It’s a powerful little poem about man’s (and the implication is white man’s) desire to tame “all things wild and tameless”.

Brumbies on the run in Central Australia

Brumbies on the run in Central Australia

For copyright reasons I don’t believe I can quote the whole poem – it only has four verses – but here is the first verse:

Brumby on the wild plain
All men out to break you,
My warm fellow-feeling
Hopes they never take you!

Simple stuff really but, if you have a message you must get across to as many people as possible, simple is sometimes best.