Karen Viggers, Sidelines (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 23 Comments

I don’t usually start a book review by relating its content to my own experience, but local author Karen Viggers’ latest novel Sidelines invites exactly this. Sidelines is about children’s sport and what happens when the competitiveness gets out of hand. It was largely inspired by Viggers’ own experience as the mother of sporty children, and by an ugly parental brawl at a children’s football match that happened during those years.

My children’s sport experience was blissfully different. Our son played cricket, and his coach’s last name was McPhun – I kid you not. He was the perfect children’s sport coach. His focus was on “phun” and teamwork. He encouraged those kids, was fair about opportunity, did not favour his own son, and we parents had the best time. I loved seeing the enthusiasm with which the kids played, and their resilience when they were out for a duck, despite having gone in to bat with dreams of sixes and high scores. You won’t be surprised, perhaps, to hear that our kids were not in the elite division, but this should not make any difference. Unfortunately, however, it probably does.

So, Sidelines. As Viggers explained at the meet-the-author event I attended – and as is obvious if you read it – her novel has a structure rather like Christos Tsiolkas’ The slap*. This means that the novel’s story or plot is progressed through a sequence of different, third person, points of view encompassing the parents and children involved in the sport. Sidelines is a little different though because in Tsiolkas’ book, the slap occurs in the first chapter and we then watch the fall-out from that action. Viggers’ novel commences with a prologue describing an ambulance arriving at a sports ground where a badly injured child is lying far from the goal-posts. “What the hell happened here?” We then flash back to nine months earlier and, through those sequential voices, we work our way towards what had happened and why.

“It’s not meant to be fun” (a football father)

The novel focuses on two families – the well-to-do Jonica, Ben, and their 13-year-old twins, Alex and Audrey; and the Greek-Australian working class family of Carmen, Ilya, and their daughter Katerina. Into this mix comes Griffin and his single-parent Dad, Lang. Griffin is a natural, and his appearance upsets the team’s sporting and interpersonal dynamics. The characters telling the story are Jonica, Carmen, Audrey, Katerina, Ben, and finally, Griffin. For each voice, there is a thematic word or phrase that provides insight into, and commentary on, that character.

The first voice, Jonica’s, initially made me feel I was reading one of those stories about a dysfunctional family. You know, the well-to-do family with the successful, professional, and controlling husband, the privileged children, and the wife and mother caught somewhere in the middle. And there is some of this aspect in the novel, because, as becomes clear, part of the story Viggers is telling is one of class. So, in Jonica’s story we see the tropes of her class. Everything is laid on in a material sense, but the two females, in particular, aren’t happy. Jonica, like her husband, is a lawyer, but she is frustrated about not working. Ben, you see, “likes having her at home”, and insists she is needed to look after the children. He will “support her” (and the family) while she supports the children. There’s an irony in this word, “support”, which is Jonica’s theme, because, as Viggers said during the author talk, there’s a fine line between “support” and “pressure”. Audrey certainly feels more pressure than support.

The next voice is that of the other mother, Carmen, whose daughter, Katerina, like Audrey, is trying out for a place in the boy’s team where, as Ben had told Jonica, girls will learn “speed and aggression”. While Jonica tries, unsuccessfully, to resist her husband’s pressure to push the children, Carmen is more like Ben. She wants her daughter to achieve where she had failed, and she will manipulate and kowtow as much as is necessary to ensure this happens. Her theme or motif is “goal poacher”, the one who “attempts to shoot goals from loose balls … and uses other non-traditional ways of scoring”. Perfect for the resourceful Carmen.

And so the novel progresses through to Audrey’s and Katerina’s voices, where we see the pressures that their parents don’t. These girls do want to play well, but they also want other things in their lives. They are teens, for heaven’s sake! And Viggers’ rendition of them convinced me.

The penultimate voice is Ben’s, and here, in particular, is where Viggers’ choice of a multi-voice structure shines, because, while he’s still unlikable, we also see his point of view. Ben is the alpha male, no doubt about it, but he loves his family and he’s not so tuned out that he doesn’t sense something is wrong with Audrey in time to take critical action. This is the value of reading, being able to see a situation from another point of view. We don’t have to agree with Ben – I’m sure few of us do – but we can see where he’s coming from and that he’s human. This awareness can be achieved with third person voices, of course, but Viggers has effectively used first person voice here to directly confront readers with her protagonists’ thoughts.

By the end of the novel I was impressed by the careful and sophisticated way in which Viggers had developed and explored her main idea, which is to encourage us to think about our attitudes to and behaviour around competitive children’s sport. She offers no easy solutions. This is not a didactic book. There are many points left open for readers to think about. Can you play for fun, for example, and what does that look like?

In the above-linked interview with Viggers, she said she has realised that she is an issues-based writer. This is exactly what I thought as I started reading Sidelines. On the surface, it departs from her previous, environment-themed novels but, in fact, like those novels, it takes an issue Viggers cares about and explores it through characters who are real on the page. I enjoyed the read, but more than that, I hope it gets read and talked about in places where it matters.

* Interestingly, another Tsiolkas book, Barracuda (my post), starts with elite children’s sport, but while class is also an element, it takes a long view of what happens when things don’t go to plan.

Karen Viggers
Sidelines
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2024
343pp.
ISBN: 9781761470714

Stella Prize 2024 Longlist announced

/ Whispering Gums / 30 Comments

As has happened in the past, this week’s Monday Musings has been gazumped by the announcement this evening of the Stella Prize longlist. I attended the online streamed announcement from the Adelaide Festival Writers Week

As I say every year, I don’t do well at having read the Stella Prize longlist at the time of its announcement. In recent years the most I’ve read has been two (in 2019). This year, like the last two years I’ve read none, but a couple are on my TBR! Is the a start?

I was, however, doing better at reading the winners, having read Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds (2013), Clare Wright’s The forgotten rebels of Eureka (2014), Emily Bitto’s The strays (2015), Charlotte Wood’s The natural way of things (2016), Heather Rose’s The museum of modern love (2017), Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The erratics (2019), Jess Hill’s See what you made me do (2020), Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear (2022). I have the 2021 and 2023 winners on my TBR, Evie Wyld’s The bass rock and Sarah Holland-Batt’s The jaguar, respectively.

This year’s judges include one from last year, and some newbies, keeping the panel fresh as in Stella’s commitment: writer, literary critic, Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival and this year’s chair, BeeJay Silcox; Filipino-Australian poet, performer, arts producer, and advocate, Eleanor Jackson; First Nations award-winning poet and arts board member, Cheryl Leavy; noveslist, occasional critic and full-time dad, Bram Presser; and writer and historian, Dr Yves Rees.

The longlist

Here is the list, in alphabetical order by author, not the order in which they were presented, and with a few scrabbled notes I made as I listened to the list being read out.

  • Katia Ariel, The swift dark tide (memoir)
  • Stephanie Bishop, The anniversary (novel): “genre fiction at is very best … as clever as it is delicious” (kimbofo’s review)
  • Katherine Brabon, Body friend (novel)
  • Ali Cobby Eckermann, She is the earth (verse novel)
  • Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (novel): “triumph of characterisation … gives truth to state sanctioned violence” (Brona’s review)
  • Maggie MacKellar, Graft (memoir/nature writing) (Kate’s brief review)
  • Kate Mildenhall, The hummingbird effect (novel): “speculative fiction at its finest” tackling the issues of our age (Brona’s review)
  • Emily O’Grady, Feast (novel): “country house novel … be wary of deep subjectivity of moral value”
  • Sanya Rushdi, translated by Arunava Sinha, Hospital (novel): “unflinching and insightful work of autofiction”
  • Hayley Singer, Abandon every hope (essays): “no moral shrillness here”
  • Laura Elizabeth Woollett, West girls (novel): “a novel of sad girls that is the antithesis of sad girl novels”
  • Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy (novel) (Bill’s second post): genre-buster, “fierce and gloriously funny – part manifesto, part indictment”

The panel discussion that followed the announcement was wonderfully engaging, with the judges (sans Bram Presser who was home looking after his kids), exploring the individual works, and looking at the “conversations between the books”, that is the ways the books intersected with each other in subject matter and form. They talked about how many of the books critique systems of power wielded over others, how many embodied the idea of the body, how climate change is addressed in different ways, and more. It was too much to capture and listen to at the same time. They talked about form, and how some books were true to form and were great because of that, while in others form was wildly broken (like Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy). The books, they said, are powerful but without sentiment, asking instead for “the dignity of witness”. They are not hectoring, and many are deeply funny.

I am not going to say anything about the selection, because the Stella is such a wonderfully diverse prize that aims to encompass a wide range of forms and styles. There will always be choices we question. But, I will just say, because I can, that I’d love to have seen Carmel Bird’s Love letter to Lola (my review) recognised, because as they spoke about the books they read, I felt that Bird’s collection has the energy, the wit, the heart, and the awareness of “the issues of our age” that their selected books apparently also have. Did they even read it, I wonder?

Opening the session, Beejay Silcox said that the “heartbeat of Australian writing is here” and it’s damning that our writers cannot make a living from their craft. Amen to that.

You can write a different future and dream the culture forward. (end of the Panel discussion)

The shortlist will be announced on 4 April, and the winner on 2 May. You can seen more details on the Stella 2024 page.

Any comments?

Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 44 Comments

Question 7 is the fifth book by Richard Flanagan that my reading group has done, making him our most read author. That surprised me a little, but he has produced an impressive body of work that is hard to ignore – and, clearly, we haven’t.

We always start our meetings with sharing our first impressions. For this book they ranged from those who were somewhat bemused because of its disjointed nature to those who loved it, one calling it “extraordinary”. My first impression was that it’s a book full of paradoxes, and that these started with my experience of reading it. By this I meant that it was both easy and hard to read, easy because it was so engrossing and moving I was compelled on, but hard because the paradoxical nature of the ideas being explored kept pulling me up to ponder what he meant. What I didn’t add, because I feared overstaying my “first impressions” time, was that Question 7 felt like a humane book, a book about who we are and how we are, about what we do to each other and why. 

“The words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything”

I can see how Question 7 can feel a bit disjointed – an effect of its stream of consciousness style – but there is a clear structure underpinning it, one provided by three interwoven threads. The first comprises the Hiroshima story, the role of Wells’ novel The world set free, in which he imagined “a new weapon of hitherto unimaginable power”, and the scientist Szilard. Flanagan uses novelistic techniques to link Wells, his lovers, Rebecca West and Little e (aka Elizabeth von Arnim), and Szilard, whose reading of Wells’ novel set him thinking about an atom bomb, and conceiving the idea of a “nuclear chain reaction”. The idea of a chain reaction becomes one of the novel’s connecting motifs or metaphors. One things leads to another, and, as Szilard was to find out to his horror, once started chain reactions are very hard to stop.

The second concerns the colonisation of Tasmania and, bringing in Wells again, his statement that his novel, The war of the worlds, was inspired by the cataclysmic effect of European colonisation on Aboriginal Tasmanians. Wells’ invading Martians become the novel’s second metaphor, Flanagan equating them with the colonising British. In a neat additional link, we learn that Szilard and some of his Hungarian Jewish scientist peers called themselves the Martians.

The third thread encompasses the story of Flanagan’s Tasmanian-based family, particularly his father’s life and his own. The way these threads, and their linking metaphors, coalesce to explore and expose life’s unanswerable questions makes for involving reading, as Brona and Lisa also found.

And yet, there’s more… There is another less visible connecting thread which provides the novel’s backbone and guide to meaning. It comes from Flanagan’s understanding of an essay by a young Yolnju woman, Siena Stubs, in which she discusses “a fourth tense” in Yolnju thinking. As I understand it, this encompasses the idea – in my words – that all time can coexist. For the Yolnju, for example, this means the ancestors were here, are here, will be here. Flanagan uses this concept as a refrain throughout his book, but in different contexts so that we can see its relevance. Thinking about his near-death experience on the Franklin, for example, he writes that “though it happened then it’s still happening now and won’t ever stop happening”. Or, to universalise it, “life is always happening and has happened and will happen” (p. 99). 

A little later on, reflecting on the Hiroshima atrocity, he says:

what if vengeance and atonement both are simply the lie that time can be reversed, and thereby some equality, some equilibrium, some justice had? Is it simply truer to say Hiroshima happened, Hiroshima is still happening, and Hiroshima will always happen? (p. 140)

Further on again, he delves into the horrors of Tasmania’s colonial past and uses the refrain, “we were, we are, we will” to encompass not only the continuation of First Nations culture but the fallout from “the System” that the Martians had created. He concludes this section with another of his paradoxes:

And thereafter it was we who bore the inescapable, ineradicable shame that was not ours and which would always be ours. (p. 230)

Question 7, then, explores some of the toughest imponderables of our existence. It reminds us that once something happens, it doesn’t go away, but is part of the past, present and future, is part of the fabric of our being.

And so, we get to a related idea of memory, which also recurs throughout the novel. Writing about his childhood in Rosebery, Flanagan eschews checking some facts, saying,

This is an account of memory, not fact, and facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory – its tricks, its invasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions – is who we become as we shuffle around in a circle …. (p. 151)

There’s that circle – or non-linear time – again, because, in Flanagan’s mind “only fools have answers”. It is far better to keep questioning. This might be the appropriate place to share Flanagan’s two perfect epigraphs, as they provide a guide to how to read this book:

The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama, or fantasy. It maybe myriad, it may not. The question is put, but where is the answer? 
– Hobart Town Mercury reviewing Moby Dick 1851

and

No, this is not piano. This is dreaming.
– Duke Ellington.

It might also be the time to share book’s framing question, which comes from a short story by Chekhov, “Question posed by a mad mathematician”, in which he parodies a school test problem:

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

Ha! This unanswerable non-sequitur of a question, “who loves longer, a man or a woman”, is another of the novel’s framing motifs, alongside the (almost) throwaway line he uses at the end of particularly tragic or egregious situations, “that’s life”.

So, where does this all leave us, the reader? With a challenge, I think, to reckon with our personal histories and the wider histories we are part of – and to do so with a sceptical attitude to logic and rationality, because “the world  from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world. It is a surface world … beneath which an entirely different world surges.”

Near the end of the book, Flanagan shares some of the rather bizarre responses he received to his first novel, Death of a river guide, and writes,

After that I knew that the truth wasn’t the truth even when it was.

Here, then, another paradox, one that quietly snuck up on me but that embodies the book. Truths, of one sort or another, come thick and fast as you read, but always there are questions. We cannot, in other words, measure Hiroshima or the impact of colonialism. We cannot pretend

… there is some moral calculus to death. There is no equation of horrors … Who do we remember and who do we forget?

Ultimately, as Flanagan wrote part way through his book, the words are not the book, its soul is everything. In Question 7, we see into Flanagan’s soul and, inevitably, have a light shone on our own. Where to from here?

Richard Flanagan
Question 7
Knopf, 2023
280pp
ISBN: 9781761343452

Six degrees of separation, FROM Tom Lake TO …

/ Whispering Gums / 37 Comments

Last #SixDegrees I was in the land of the Wurundjeri Wandoon people of the Greater Kulin Nation, that is in my part of Melbourne, but this month, I’m home in Ngunnawal/Ngambri country. Where will I be next month? Time will tell – and do you care? So let’s get to the meme. If you don’t know how this #SixDegrees meme works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. And this month it is, of course, one I haven’t read. I’m told, however, that it’s well worth my considering, so that I’ll do. It’s Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake.

Now, I had several goes at this meme, but they didn’t lead to where I wanted to end, so, I decided to do one of my #SixDegrees poems. Here goes (with links on titles going to my posts on those books):

Tom Lake*
was discussing Question 7
with Elizabeth Finch,
when Chinongwa cried out,
What if Things fall apart?
Never fear, they replied, there’s a Crossing to safety
in the Valley of Grace.

With thanks to Ann Patchett, Richard Flanagan, Julian Barnes, Lucy Mushita, Chinua Achebe, Wallace Stegner and the inspirational and much-loved Marion Halligan. Her funeral was held yesterday, and I wanted to end this #Six Degrees on this beautiful book by her – after sharing some books that ask big questions.

* And yes, I know Tom Lake is not a person, but for my purposes “he” is. It’s called artistic licence!

I used more filling words than I like to do with these poems, but it’s the best I could do.

We’ve travelled far this month – to North America, Britain, Africa, and Australia – and I’m 50:50 on author gender. How good is that?

Now, the usual: Have you read Tom Lake? And, regardless, what would you link to?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Stella Book of the Month

/ Whispering Gums / 17 Comments

Most readers here know the origins of the the Stella Prize. I have written about it many times before, but it was in my post on the inaugural longlist in 2013 that I described its origins and goals in a little detail. I wrote then that:

The award was created by a group of 11 women, including the writer Sophie Cunningham, in response to what many of us felt was an abysmal under-representation of women writers in Australia’s major literary awards and other literary activity (such as reviewing and being reviewed). The Stella Prize people want to turn this around …

And I then listed their goals as they expressed them at the time. These goals have remained roughly the same but are expressed on their website now in more depth and with clarity about how they are working to achieve them. They make it very clear that they are about more than the prize. Stella, they say,

delivers a suite of year-round initiatives which actively champion Australian women writers, tackle gender bias in the literary sector, and connect outstanding books with readers. (Accessed 26 February 2024)

As most Australian readers of my blog will know, many of the original drivers have been achieved, quantitatively speaking at least. There is better representation of women writers in our literary awards, and in the reviewing sector, as the Stella Counts of 2019 and 2020 showed.

Most of my posts, however, have been about the annual prize. I have rarely mentioned the other initiatives Stella has implemented, but they are important because Stella knows – we know – that achievement in the social justice arena can never be taken for granted. Their initiatives are many and you can read about them on the Initiative pages on their site. They range in size and reach, but include events, residencies, and a lot of work in education to encourage more reading of books by Australian women writers in schools because, really, that’s where reading habits very often start.

Stella Book of the Month

One of their more recent initiatives was announced in December last year, “the book of the month”. As far as I can tell – as there’s not much that I can find specifically about the initiative – the aim is to shine a light each month on a book which has been listed for, or won, the Stella Prize. We all know how easily books – no matter how good they are – disappear from the shelves and then from public consciousness. With this initiative, Stella is staying true to its aim of keeping Australian women’s writing to the fore, which means not just the latest writing, but the body of writing by women. Of course, the Stella prize is just over 10 years old, so a blip on the radar of Australian women’s writing, but 11 years worth of lists is not inconsequential either, and has a chance of still being available. They list the books on their own site, and on their Facebook page.

It’s a new initiative, so there just three books have been chosen to date:

  • December 2023: Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds (my review): Tiffany’s book, as the prize’s first winner in 2013, is an obvious choice for kicking off this initiative.
  • January 2024: Georgia Blain’s Between a wolf and a dog: Stella introduces this choice by saying it “celebrates … a heartfelt and intelligent book shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize, and the life of its author, the late Georgia Blain”. They say that this, Blain’s last novel before she died, has been republished with an introduction by Charlotte Wood. This is what we like to hear, eh?
  • February 2024: Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The hate race (my review): The reason for choosing this memoir seems to be its having been “adapted to the stage”. It was shortlisted for the 2017 award along with Blain’s novel. Clarke was the first author to be shortlisted for the Stella Prize twice, after her short story collection, Foreign Soil, was listed in 2015

Each “book of the month” page (linked on the titles above) contains useful content about the books, such as interviews, and links to reviews and reading notes. This may not be the most exciting of their initiatives, like, say, their Stella Day Out program, but not all initiatives have to be exciting. They just have to play their part in achieving their overall vision. I have chosen it for my post tonight because we are readers, and we all love a list!

I wonder what will be next – and why? In the meantime, all being well, I will be posting on this year’s longlist next Monday, in lieu of Monday Musings.

What do you think about initiatives like this, and, is there a Stella winning or listed book you’d like to see as a “book of the month” selection?

Karen Viggers in conversation with Alex Sloan

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

When Colin Steele emailed out the schedule, to date, for this year’s Meet the Author series, I immediately marked in my calendar those events I could attend. There weren’t many, as life is busy with yoga, tai chi, reading group and concert subscriptions, but the first I could attend was local author Karen Viggers (who has appeared several times on my blog) in conversation with Alex Sloan about her latest novel, Sidelines.

The conversation

MC Colin Steele, who was so deservedly made a Member of the Order of Australia in this year’s Australia Day Honours, opened proceedings by acknowledging country and introducing the speakers. He then paid tribute to Marion Halligan who had died this week, and who had planned to attend this event. There was an audible sigh in the audience because she really was much loved here. But, moving on, as we must … Colin introduced the conversation, describing Sidelines as “social commentary on modern society”, before passing us over to another local luminary, Alex Sloan.

Alex opened with a point I had planned to make in my post on the book, which is that it’s quite a departure from Viggers’ previous environment/landscape-based novels. Sidelines is set in the suburbs, whereas her previous four novels are set in “wild, rugged places”. But then, on reflection, she added, suburban Sidelines is “rugged” too. It “has teeth”.

However, before asking Karen about her novel, she too paid tribute to Marion Halligan. How could she not, given this week, this place, and this interviewee? Karen responded by saying what a “terrible loss” Marion’s death is. She had been a “huge supporter” and friend, and had lived life right to the end. Isn’t that how we’d all like to go?

Karen then shared a statement made by Marion, in an interview with Gillian Dooley, about what novels are about:

It seems to me that novels are very much about this question of how shall we live, not answering it but asking it, and what novelists do is look at people who live different sorts of lives, and often people who live rather badly are a good way of asking the question.

This is so Marion! Karen suggested that Sidelines looks at people living badly … but not at bad people. There’s a difference – one that people don’t always make, I think.

She also said – and this is the other thing I was planning to raise in my (coming-soon) post on the book – that she realised she is an “issues-based writer“. She can only write what is inside her. This book grew partly out of her thinking of her own behaviour but was also inspired by an Under-12 Canberra football game in 2014, which had ended in parents brawling on the field. Were these, she wondered, really bad parents or parents who had got carried away?

There is a line between support and pressure, and she wanted to use fiction to consider the issue – not just in sport, but in society overall. Where is the line drawn?

Alex asked about the fact that she has said that her first draft was written in anger. Karen explained that she had seen her son, a volunteer referee, cop a lot of abuse which has resulted in his giving up refereeing. This and other injustices she’d seen had made her angry.

Alex then moved to the characters, asking Karen to talk about them and their role in the novel – the well-to-do Jonica and Ben who start the book, and the succeeding characters who include the working-class Greek-Australian family, Carmen and Ilya, and the young talented player Griffin. Alex, as became clear through the rest of the interview, disliked Ben and loved Griffin.

Karen teased out her characters a little. Ben is one of those fathers who have to win at everything. For him winning at sport is all, and it gives social currency. However, Karen wants people to think about what success really is. Sport brings very different people together, people who may not otherwise ever meet each other. Choosing this subject-matter gave her an opportunity to explore class.

Turning to Griffin, Karen talked about how sport can also be a way out of poverty. She wanted to include all the different elements of sport – class, cultural, economic, and so on. She said if a child shows an ounce of talent, parents are sold the idea that their child can play for Australia, but only a tiny percentage do. Later in the conversation, Karen said that the lovely Griffin had been inspired by a particular young player she knew. He provides one of the novel’s epigraphs.

Karen said she had started this novel thinking she was writing about sport, but soon realised that, in fact, she was writing about modern society and parenting.

Alex mentioned the dog Honey and its importance to teen Audrey, noting that there’s always a dog in Karen’s books. Doglover Karen commented that animals are a great support to families, and that we can’t underestimate their role in our mental health. (Yes! Like her character Audrey, I found much-needed solace from my beagle when I was a teen.)

The conversation then segued to how well Karen had got into the heads of teens. We often forget the pressures of being a teen, Karen said, and how something like sport, which is meant to be fun, becomes pressure.

From here, we moved on to writing characters. Karen said she likes it when her characters start to take over and tell her who they are. Her first angry draft was too black and white. It needed more nuance. Alex, still disliking Ben, asked about the writing of badly behaving characters. Karen didn’t see the characters as all unlikable, and anyhow, she said, characters don’t have to be likeable. The structure of Sidelines is like The slap (my post). It is told chronologically but through six different characters, with each character picking up the story from the one before.

Alex mentioned the references to the arts in the novel. Had Karen specifically intended to pit the arts against sport? Audrey, said Karen, is a teenager who is interested in many things. She did want to play for Australia, but she also wanted to try other things like theatre. However, her father had told her to choose what you are best at. The arts vs sports question hadn’t been a conscious theme, but she had pared the novel back to leave gaps for people’s own thoughts. She didn’t want to be didactic.

The conversation turned to specific examples of young talented sportspeople and the role of parents in their lives – like Jelena Dokic (whom the world had watched being abused by her father), David Beckham whose parents had different ideas about their role in his success, and Ellyse Perry whose parents had never applied pressure but had always supported her. There is, said Karen, a wide range of parental behaviours and she wanted to leave space for readers to think about all this, particularly in terms of expectations and ambitions.

Regarding writing about the actual playing of sport, Karen said that watching someone who is really good is a form of beauty, like experiencing poetry or music. Alex suggested that beauty is usually revealed in her novels through nature, but in Sidelines we see it through Griffin.

Given how well Karen had captured teens, Alex wondered whether this novel would be suitable for schools. Karen felt that it could work for, say, Year 10, but is more interested in seeing it discussed in book and sports clubs. She’d like people to think about about how to be better parents, how to be better sports parents, and, more broadly, about our society and its attitude to competitiveness. She shared the story of a child being asked about the best thing about playing sport, and answering that it was the time with her friends before and after their games. If we want children to keep playing sport through childhood and into adulthood – something that is good for people’s health – we need to tap into how to make it enjoyable.

Q & A

On her professional versus writing life, and how the former helps the latter: Karen said her work as a vet keeps her in touch with the real world, and enables her to meet people from all walks of life.

On what talented athletes need besides their natural talent: Karen felt it was all those obvious things, like grit, the inner desire to play, support from others, persistence, willingness to take risks, knowing what to do afterwards (which Audrey points out to Griffin in the novel). In particular, she said, it’s the ability to be a team player, and being able to make the team look great as well as oneself.

On (referencing the Adam Goodes booing affair) being a good watcher: Karen talked about the importance of adults role-modelling good behaviour. When parents and coaches abuse referees, so will children. She hopes her novel will stimulate discussion about these sorts of issues.

On her popularity in France and how she thinks this book will go: The novel is currently being translated. The French love her “big landscapes”, but they also like philosophical questions so she hopes this novel will appeal to them for that.

On whether parents and children have different wants, different attitudes to winning and losing: After some sharing of quotes about winning and losing, Karen said that “how” you win or lose is more important than “whether” you win or lose.

Vote of thanks

Emma Pocock, wife of Federal independent senator David Pocock, gave the vote of thanks. (Pleasingly, it was Emma, not the organisers, who referred to her husband. She was introduced in her own right, as the founder of FrontRunners and an emerging writer). She shared a poem she had written at the end of her husband’s sporting career. It concludes with a reference to all those winning trophies/cups. They are, she wrote, all hollow, and must now be filled with something tangible, something that was really him.

Sidelines isn’t, she said, about neatly sorting characters into good and bad – as she’d initially tried to do – but about our behaviour individually and collectively. It asked her, she concluded, to think.

This was a lively but warm-hearted evening at which the local literary community came out in numbers to hear and talk about Karen’s timely book, to think about its intent, and to share in some camaraderie in a sad week.

ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author
MC: Colin Steele
Australian National University
22 February 2024

Vale Marion Halligan (1940-2024)

/ Whispering Gums / 33 Comments

Such sad news. I have just heard that Marion Halligan, one of Australia’s literary treasures, died yesterday. She has been frail for some time, but the last time I saw, and spoke briefly to, her was at the 2023 ACT Book Awards in December. She was her usual engaged self, though also frustrated with the limitations her health was placing on her life. Getting old, as many of us know, isn’t a heap of fun.

Before I share a few thoughts of my own, here is how I heard the news. It was from Karen Viggers, via Facebook. I hope she’s OK with my sharing this:

It is with infinite sadness that I share the sad news with you today that the wonderful literary champion, Marion Halligan, died peacefully last night.

Marion was just the most amazing, beautiful, graceful, wise and generous person. She always had time to talk to and support other writers and was always generous in her friendships. She had a sparkling wit and personality, was always astute and sharp in conversation and she enjoyed books and literature to the end.

She has had an incredible life and will be very sadly missed.

Marion Halligan Valley of grace

It is so hard to know where to start. I do not want to write an obituary, as there will be plenty of those in the coming days and weeks. Rather, I’d like to share my experience of her, which started in the 1980s when I decided to focus my reading on women writers, and particularly on Australian women writers. I read three of her novels with my reading group, Lover’s knots, The golden dress and Valley of Grace. For this last discussion, Marion attended our meeting. What an absolute treat that was.

Outside of the reading group, I have read more of her books, including The fog garden and The point, and I have around five others waiting on my TBR. It was through Marion, too, that I met Carmel Bird when she approached me about posting the speech she was making to launch Marion’s novel Goodbye sweetheart.

Carmel Bird and Marion Halligan
Halligan launching Bird’s Family skeleton

Marion lived her writing life in Canberra, and was a member of the “Canberra Seven” or “Seven Writers” group about which I have written. I have seen her at award events, festivals and conversations, sometimes the interviewer and sometimes the interviewee. One memorable occasion was when she interviewed Margaret Atwood back in the early 2000s. Atwood was not easy to interview, but Marion held her ground with grace and humour. I will never forget it. (I was glad it was she and not me in that seat!)

Marion is loved here as our grand dame of literature, and her presence will be greatly missed. Not only did she support local writers generously, as Karen Viggers says above, but she was for many years patron of the ACT Writers Centre (now named Marion partly in her honour), was at one time the chairperson of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and also an organiser of Canberra’s previous writers festival, the Australian National Word Festival.

She was a versatile writer. She wrote eleven novels, several of which won and/or were shortlisted for some of Australia’s best literary awards, and which included a little foray into crime fiction. She was a big supporter of the short story form, ruing their unpopularity with publishers, and she also wrote non-fiction books, as well as journalism, including articles on food. Wikipedia lists her books and awards. Searching her in your browser will retrieve several interviews with her, and she was interviewed by Irma Gold and Karen Viggers for their Secrets from the Green Room podcasts I posted on recently. You can see most of my posts involving Marion on this tag. (There are few reviews here, though, because most of my reading of her books was before blogging.)

I could go on, but this is enough for now. I will close with a quote I’ve shared before on this blog. It comes from one of my favourite books of hers, a work of autofiction, The fog garden. I just loved this book, her cheeky, wry way of telling us that it was fiction not biography. It’s a lesson, in fact, in how to read fiction, and it also has one of my favourite statements about the value of reading. It goes like this:

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

All I can say is, thanks Marion for your intelligent wit, your warmth and your wisdom – and for the balm you laid on our souls. We will miss you muchly.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Lothian Book Publishing Company

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

As I research for my 1924 Monday Musings series, I am coming across articles that don’t neatly fit into 1924-dedicated posts but that I want to document. The most recent one concerned the Lothian Book Publishing Company. It was about a specific initiative, which I will discuss at the end of this post, but I was intrigued to find out more about the publisher itself.

AustLit tells us that, while now an imprint of Hachette Australia, Lothian has a long history, starting well over a century ago, in 1888 in fact, when it was founded by John Inglis Lothian. Then it was a Melbourne-based book distribution company, but it started publishing in December 1905 under John’s son, Thomas Carlyle Lothian. During its first three years, it produced 40 books and four periodicals. AustLit then jumps to the interwar years (the 1920s and 30s) and says that it “was particularly notable” for publishing Australian poets, such as Bernard O’Dowd and John Shaw Neilson. Lothian also represented Penguin Books in Australia until the end of the Second World War. Cecily Close, in her article on Thomas Carlyle in the ADB, provides more information, and adds other authors to their list, like Miles Franklin and Ida Outhwaite.

The company was active, and by 1945, it had offices around Australia and in Auckland, and had literary agents in London and New York. It remained a family-run affair, with Thomas Carlyle Lothian being followed by his son Louis Lothian, and then Louis’ son Peter Lothian.

Austlit says that the company moved into children’s publishing in 1982, which has remained a big part of its activity since. Then the take-overs started. In December 2005, the Time Warner Book Group acquired Lothian and formed the Time Warner Book Group (Australia), with Lothian Books becoming an imprint of Time Warner. Very soon after, in February 2006, Hachette Livre acquired the global Time Warner business, with Lothian Books now becaming an imprint of Hachette Livre Australia. Lothian Books’ CEO Peter Lothian retired in July 2006.

The focus on children’s books has continued with Hachette Australia expanding its children’s publishing, and branding its children’s books with the Lothian imprint. AustLit says that as part of the new arrangement, some adult publishing would continue, as a ’boutique’ list of Australiana titles, both already published and to be commissioned, but I’m not sure that this eventuated, or, if it did, that it lasted. Hachette Australia’s website does not clearly differentiate its imprints.

Lothian stories

It was a story about Lothian that inspired this post, but while researching it, I found another intriguing story, so I’m closing with two little anecdotes about Lothian.

Lothian and Henry Lawson

The State Library of Victoria’s La Trobe Journal carries an article by John Arnold about the relationship between Lothian founder, Thomas, and Henry Lawson. You can read the article yourself as the story is not a short one but, essentially, it started in 1907 when, on a business trip to Sydney, Thomas Lothian signed a contract with Henry Lawson to publish two collections of his writing, one of prose and one poetry. The contract was signed in James Tyrrell’s bookshop in Castlereagh Street, Sydney.

I won’t go into the details but it was a standard Lothian printed contract. The author would receive a 10% royalty for each title. Lawson was to deliver the completed manuscript of both titles to the publisher, two weeks after the signing of the contract, and Lothian was to publish the two books no later than three months from receipt of manuscript. The contract “declared that the author was the proprietor of the copyright of the material proposed to be published and it gave the publisher the world serial, translation and dramatic rights to the material in question”.

This is not what happened, and Arnold writes that “this commercial agreement … was in a short time revised, revised again, then broken, leading to false promises, abuse of copyright, and a falling out between author and publisher. The proposed books were not to appear for six and a half years”.

It was a tortuous process, due largely to Lawson’s “erratic behaviour” but also affected by Lothian’s busy and ambitious workload. Arnold concludes his article with:

Despite his unrewarding and frustrating dealings with Henry Lawson, Lothian was still willing to chip in when the Lawson hat was sent round after the author’s death. In 1928 he became a Life Member of the Footscray-based Henry Lawson Memorial Society, and in 1931, as one of Lawson’s publishers, wrote a one-page testimonial to be read at the society’s annual meeting.

The handsome certificate with which Lothian was presented by the Henry Lawson Society in 1938 stated that Life Membership was awarded for ‘Unselfish and Generous Services rendered to this Society and Australian Literature generally’ …

Lothian and Nettie Palmer

Finally we get to the article that inspired this post, the announcement in The Argus of 8 May 1924 that Nettie Palmer had won a “prize of £25 offered by the Lothian Book Publishing Company for the best critical essay dealing with Australian literature since 1900”. Her essay was titled “Australian literature in the Twentieth Century” and was to be published in June. On 18 July, The Albury Banner and Wodonga Express, reports on this work, now titled Modern Australian literature, describing it as ‘an interesting “measuring up” of Australian literary work from 1900 to 1923’. Vivian Smith, editor of UQP’s Nettie Palmer anthology, which includes this work, says the piece “is significant for what it reveals of the expectations and hopes of the time”, and also that

Nettie, like Vance, was concerned for the relationship between a national literature and the national experience behind it, but both explored this relationship in a tentative and programmatic way and had no readymade formula to account for it.

Nettie has appeared here several times, and will again, but I’ll leave her here for now. (Except, I’ll share that the Goulburn Evening Penny Post (23 October 1924) reported that she gave her prize money to the “Blinded Soldiers”.)

My initial idea was to write a post about this Lothian Prize, but I’m not sure it continued. However, I’ve written posts about publishers before, and Lothian seemed perfect for another.

Lucy Mushita, Chinongwa (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 29 Comments

Where to start with this complex, unusual and gorgeously written novel that manages to convey the horrors of child marriage, of colonialism, and of patriarchal cultures, without eulogising or demonising the characters involved? It’s quite a feat, and it made this book a deeply involving read.

The place to start, I suppose, is the beginning, which is that Chinongwa is the debut novel of Zimbabwean author Lucy Mushita. Published most recently by Australia’s Spinifex Press in 2023, it was originally published in 2008 in South Africa, under the author name of Lucy Michot (which I discovered when searching for the book cover in GoodReads.) Its eponymous protagonist, Chinongwa, is 9 years old when the novel opens:

Chinongwa Murehwa was nine, but her age was not vital. Just her virginity. Though she was not yet washing, her fruits were already protruding. That was a relief for her family. Anyway, she was the only one they could use.

And there you have it. For a reason that soon becomes obvious, Chinongwa is to be “used”, that is, married off to save the rest of her family from starvation. The root cause of this starvation is colonialism – the arrival of the “kneeless” or vasinamabvi and the fact that Chinongwa’s family ended up with the poorest quality land in the village because her paternal grandfather had stood up to the vasinamabvi and arrived late at the place their community settled.

So, in Book 1 of the novel, 9-year-old Chinongwa is “hawked” around neighbouring villages by her father and aunt, with little success. Can you imagine it? She is starved and thin, not one of those “juicy” nubile young women men desire and are happy to pay for with cows and grain. At last, however, a childless woman, Amai Chitsva, for reasons of her own, offers to take Chinongwa as a second wife to her own husband. Not only is this husband, Baba Chitsva, thirty nine years her elder, but he does not want a second wife. Regardless, Book 1 ends with Chinongwa about to start her new life with her new family.

Now, before I get to Book 2, I should explain that this book is a novel, but one based on the life of a real person. I say this because a Chronology is provided at the beginning of the book. It tells us that Baba Chitsva was born in 1871, and Chinongwa in 1910, that Baba Chitsva died in 1935, and, finally, that “Chinongwa is telling all” in 1940. There are other dates, but these are the most relevant in terms of grounding the book.

So, Book 2. Unlike Book 1, which is told from the third person voice (albeit mostly through Chinongwa’s eyes), Book 2 is told in the first person voices of Amaiguru (Amai Chitsva) and Chinongwa, with one chapter in Baba Chitsva’s voice. This shift works because in Book 1 Chinongwa is a child, so not fully aware of the ways of the adult world, whereas in Book 2 she grows up – very rapidly. It’s a heart-breaking story of a young woman who is essentially groomed to seduce a man who doesn’t want her, a young woman who subsequently has her first baby at the age of 11.

For the first few years she and Amaiguru make it work well enough, as we hear through their individual voices. Chinongwa has no other real option, while Amaiguru tries to make work what she had started. But things turn sour when, upon her mother’s death, Chinongwa finally realises she is on her own, and that it’s time to be more independent:

I now had to take my destiny into my own hands: I would have to return to my jail and fight for my freedom from within.

And so she does with disastrous results.

What makes the novel such good reading is that Mushita is able to convey the culture, how and why it tolerates the practice of child marriage and polygamy, including the economics of it all – how cows are passed back and forth between families, for example – while simultaneously recognising the humanity of those involved. These men and women – the mothers and fathers, the child-brides, the first wives and second wives, the husbands, the aunts, the villagers – are human beings with the full range of social and emotional behaviours. Some are kind and some cruel, some are envious, some are sensible, some are weak, some are manipulative, some are scared, some are wise, and so on. Chinongwa eventually recognises this truth:

At first I refused to accept what life had dealt me. I said that my load was too heavy. But, with time, and as I look around me, I decided that one will never know the weight of one’s neighbour’s load. Maybe if I were to carry it, I might ask for mine back. Only that one who carries it knows its weight.

In other words, people will be people. They are rarely to blame for the system in which they find themselves. Some will survive and some won’t, but that’s not the point. The point is the system, and its complex historical and cultural interconnections. The point, too, is that child marriage still happens, and that patriarchies still govern much of women’s lives. In Chinongwa, Mushita conveys the economic, social and cultural imperatives that underpin these practices while also showing the personal costs. It makes compelling reading.

A little contribution to Bill’s Africa Project. Lisa also enjoyed this novel.

Lucy Mushita
Chinongwa
Little River, Vic/Mission Beach, Qld: Spinifex Press, 2023 (orig. pub. 2008)
235pp.
ISBN: 9781925950816

(Review copy courtesy Spinifex Press)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 3, Marion Simons

/ Whispering Gums / 4 Comments

Back in 2021, I started a Monday Musings sub-series on forgotten Australian writers, but to date have only written on two – Helen Simpson and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop. I have been intending to get back to it and with this year’s slight revamp of Elizabeth Lhuede’s and my contributions to the Australian Women Writers blog, now is the time. In the revamp, Elizabeth and I are going to focus on sharing public domain works published in 1924 – or written by writers who died in 1924. My first contribution was by Marion Simons.

This post expands on that blog post – but doesn’t include the piece written by Simons, a short column titled “To the old gumtree”, that I included there. To see that, please go to AWW. It is a short piece and worth reading!

The more we research Australia’s earlier women writers, the more we become aware of just how many used pseudonyms – sometimes more than one. Marion Simons was one such. Using pseudonyms was, as we know, not uncommon for women. Often it was to hide their gender, so they would be published and/or read, or to protect themselves from criticism for stepping outside the expectations of their gender and daring to write in the public domain. Sometimes, though, writers used pseudonyms – still do, in fact – to keep their different styles of writing separate. Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot about Marion Simons, so we can’t be sure of her motivation. However, she did use several pseudonyms, and some at least seem to have been used to differentiate different writing personas.

Marion Simons

So, who was Marion Simons? Most of what I’ve found has come from the (partly paywalled) AustLit database, and from Trove, mostly from pieces by her and but I did also find the occasional brief reference to her. The fourth of seven children, Simons was born in 1883 in Crystal Brook, South Australia, and spent her childhood years there and in Port Germein and Port Pirie. She never married, and when she died in 1952, she was living with one of her brothers in Mile End, a suburb of Adelaide.

It’s difficult to know exactly when or how her writing career started. AustLit, which describes her as a freelance radio script writer and journalist, says that she wrote radio plays for school broadcasts for the ABC between 1939 and 1949, including adaptations of classics. For these, AustLit says, she used her birth name, “Marion Simons”, but they add that she also wrote short stories and articles under the pseudonym “Stella Hope” and radio talks as “Lady Tulliver” (a reference, it seems, to George Eliot’s Milll on the Floss character, Maggie Tulliver). She used other pseudonyms too, including Quilp, Robin Adair and Nardoo. These were difficult to research, “Quilp” and “Nardoo”, for example, being used by more than one writer.

Book cover

Simons was clearly versatile – she probably had to be to make a living as a writer – as she also wrote plays for the theatre, including  “Casablanca”, which won the 1932 Repertory Prize, and a small 1941-published book, The Innkeeper’s wife, that was based on the Thomas Hardy poem “The oxen”. Adelaide’s News (22 November 1941), reported that this story, then unpublished, won first prize in a short story competition conducted by the South Australian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. (Read it online at the State Library of Victoria). It’s not clear exactly when she moved to Adelaide, but from Trove, I’d day she was there by the early 1930s, if not in the 1920s. Simons was active in Adelaide’s literary society, with various Trove articles dated from the 1930s to the 1950s reporting her being on the Poetry Society’s Council, the last librarian of the University Shakespeare Society (before it folded), Vice-President of the Adelaide Dickens Fellowship, and President of the Y.M.C.A. Dinner Club which would feature speakers at their dinners.

In addition to revealing her involvement in the above organisations, Trove also told me that she was cousin to one J.J. Simons. She may not appear in Wikipedia, but he does. He was born in Clare, South Australia, in 1882, and, says Wikipedia, “was an Australian businessman and politician, best known for establishing the Young Australia League” (in 1905), which started as a football league but, says Wikipedia, “diversified to include literature, debating, band music, sport and theatrical performances, as well as outdoor pursuits such as hiking and camping”. It still exists. He was also active in publishing, but all this was in Western Australia where he moved in 1896, and I am digressing a bit too much now, so back to Marion. (You can read about him at ADB, if you are interested.)

Given Simons’ use of pseudonyms, it’s difficult to identify her earliest writings. However, Port Pirie’s Recorder (10 November 1934) says that she wrote as “Quilp” while living in Port Pirie, and I found a “Quilp” writing the “Comment and Criticism” columns in the Port Pirie Recorder and North Western Mail of 1906. I believe this is Simons because this “Quilp” mentions not having been long out of school. (I found some earlier columns by a “Quilp” in a Port Augusta paper but they were dated 1902 when Simons was 19 and they seem to have been by an older man.) In late 1907, “Quilp” seemed to be also writing a column “Odds and Ends from the Oracle” in the Quorn Mercury and the Petersburg Times. A letter to the editor, referencing one of “Quilp’s” columns, describes “Quilp” as “your comic writer”. Certainly “Quilp” used a humorous tone used for reporting local events and activities, much as you find in modern columnists. Take for example this from her “Comment and Criticism” column in the Port Pirie Recorder and North Western Mail (of 5 December 1906):

I went to a garden fete the other day and helped to damage a very nice garden…

“Quilp” was also referenced in another (1907) report as delivering a paper on David Copperfield to Port Pirie’s St Barnabas Literary Society.

The “Stella Hope” by-line appeared in South Australian newspapers in the early 1920s. These pieces included general interest columns, also delivered with a touch of humour, and short stories. The first piece I found was “February the Fourteenth, St Valentine’s Day” in The Journal (17 February 1923).

My first in this series were novelists, which Marion Simons was not, but she was prolific enough across a number of forms to make her worth including here. I’d love to know more about her life but, despite her active involvement in Adelaide’s literary community, I have not yet located an obituary. I’ll keep looking though.