Monday musings on Australian literature: on 1925: 2, fostering Australian sentiment

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During 1925, two sets of articles appeared which discussed the issue of fostering “Australian sentiment”.

Australian literature and labour

John Mckellar, 1929
Herald (Melbourne), 27 November 1929, p 16

During the year, John McKellar (1881-1966) gave lectures on topics relating to literature and labour or the working class. On February 12, a newspaper titled Labor Call advised that at the February 17 meeting of the Malvern Branch of the ALP, Mr McKellar would speak on “Literature: Its relation to working class progress.” I didn’t know John McKellar but he has an entry in the ANU’s Labour Australia site. He was an “engineer, trade union official, editor and author”. He unsuccessfully stood for Labor in both state and federal elections and was associated with the Jindyworobak movement which focused on promoting Australian culture. He published books of essays, and historical articles, including one on a Gippsland-based Christian Socialist commune. His political and cultural interests are clear.

Anyhow, on June 11, this Labor Call wrote on another address given by Mr J. McKellar to the ALP’s Port Melbourne branch:

The lecturer prefaced his remarks by instancing the deep and lasting pleasure to be gained from the cultivation of the love of books. He spoke of the wonderful wealth of literature in the English language, and said that a feature of modern literature was that it got closer to the lives of the people.

He said writers like Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and G. K. Chesterton “held the mirror of life by their works”, and recommended other works, including The Communist manifesto. But, reported the paper, he also said that

Too little appreciation was shown for our own Australian writers. One of the planks of the Australian Labor Party declared for the cultivation of an Australian sentiment. This was not, he stated, to be taken only in a political sense. The cultivation of an Australian sentiment was equally the work of Australia’s literary men.

And he apparently named some who had done just this, including Fernlea Maurice (actually Furnley!), R. H. Long, and Vance Palmer. (R.H. Long does appear in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. It says he wrote “wrote topical verse, prompted to do homage to Nature and to denounce capitalism …”)

A few days later, on June 17, The Australian Worker reported on the same lecture. They also wrote of his comments on the lack of appreciation for Australian writers, and on the fact that one of the ALP’s planks was “the cultivation of an Australian sentiment”. They continued:

He might have added that, generally speaking, Australian writers have to go to London for an audience that will appreciate — and pay for — their songs and stories of the land that froze them out.

Ouch!

Australian literature and art in schools

Quite coincidentally, the topic of teaching Australian literature in schools that came up in my 1925 Trove research also came up, briefly, in comments on a #Six Degrees post this weekend – on host Kate’s (booksaremyfavouriteandbest) post, in fact. She linked to David Malouf’s Ransom because one of her children had studied it at school this year (as they had, the American starting book, Shirley Jackson’s We have always lived in the castle). Rose (RoseReadsNovels) chimed in saying her children had, in the past, read another Australian novel for school, Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi. I remember being disappointed when my children were in Year 11 and 12 that there was little if any contemporary (or any) Australian literature in their curricula.

The inclusion of Australian books in school curricula was also mentioned, in passing, in a Canberra Writers Festival session I attended – Poems of Love and Rage – with both Evelyn Araluen and Maxine Beneba Clarke mentioning that their books, Dropbear (my review) and The hate race (my review), were taught in schools. I love that recent Australian books speaking to current lives and issues are being taught. I know it’s neither easy nor cheap for schools to teach recent books, but I believe it is important.

This is not, of course, a new issue. It was discussed in the newspapers in late 1925 – on December 17 in Sydney’s Evening News (briefly) and The Sydney Morning Herald, and on December 18 in Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate (not then part of the SMH group) – after members of the Australian Journalists’ Association (AJA) had met with Mr Mutch, the Minister for Education. They argued that “to foster a pure Australian sentiment” there needed to be “an increased study in the schools of Australian literature and art”.

The best definition of “pure Australian sentiment” came from the critic A.G. Stephens, who, said the SMH, declared that “our literature was the mirror of our lives, and naturally we desired to see reflected in it our own country, lives, and characteristics.” He argued, wrote the SMH, that it was better “for children to read of gum-trees and their 400 varieties than of oak and fir trees” but that children were only learning “scraps of Australian literature, the lives, personalities, and ideals of the writers”.

The AJA also said that “the Australian author and artist were not getting a fair show in their own country”. They wanted the Department to work towards a “proportion at least 50 per cent” of Australian works in the schools. The Minister, a political being of course, disagreed with some of their condemnation but generally agreed with their sentiment! However, he said that “The department suffered from a constant financial malnutrition, and the purchase of Australian books was restricted on this account”. (The NMH&MA described the money issue as “a chronic state of financial stringency”.) Then he offered them another tack. They could

also arrange with the grand council of the Parents and Citizens’ Association that at least half of the prizes purchased for distribution at the end of the year should be Australian-made.

Nothing like passing the buck! But, not a bad suggestion all the same. The Evening News had its own suggestion. It argued that “if Australian literature were used largely in the examination papers, it would be taught as a matter of course in all the schools” and suggested that rather than approach the Minister, the delegation approach the University! I presume examinations were set by the University at that time.

And so it goes … (to use my best Vonnegut).

Thoughts, anyone?

Six degrees of separation, FROM We have always lived in the castle TO …

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If you have ever been to Japan you will know that they are deeply interested in weather. Turn the TV on and more often than not you will get a weather report or a cooking program. This now old Internet article was written by a Canadian who, at the time, had lived in Japan for ten years. It explains it well. My American friend who lived in Japan for around 7 years has told me that the Japanese often open conversations with the weather. I;m telling you this as an excuse for my frequently opening my Six Degrees posts with the weather! Not that I’m Japanese … I will say no more about the weather this post, but next post … wait and see. Meanwhile, on with the meme. If you don’t know how it works, please check Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book, and this month she has given a nod to Halloween, given today is the day after that event. The novel she’s chosen is We have always lived in the castle, and it’s by America’s queen of gothic mystery and horror, Shirley Jackson. Of course I haven’t read it, though I have read her short story “The lottery” (my review).

Horace Walpole, The castle of Otranto

Jackson’s 1962 novel is set in a castle – or decaying mansion. The book commonly regarded as the first Gothic novel is also set in a castle, which is not surprising, given the tropes of the genre. It’s Horace Walpole’s The castle of Otranto (my review), and was written in 1764, two hundred years before Jackson’s novel. Horace Walpole has something to answer for if you ask me.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

You might have guessed from that comment that Gothic horror is not my go-to reading. What is my go-to reading, on the other hand, is Jane Austen. The reason I read Walpole was to familiarise myself with the Gothic from her time because, according to many, Austen’s Northanger Abbey (one of my posts) spoofs the genre. I, on the other hand, see it more as a spoof of readers of Gothic novels, than of Gothic novels themselves, but let’s move on. (This cover doesn’t really emphasise the Gothic does it!)

Jane Austen was a clever and witty writer, as was Elizabeth von Arnim. As I wrote in my review of her novel, Vera, some critics and readers questioned how “playful, witty Elizabeth von Arnim, author of light social comedies” had become “a gothic writer of macabre tragedy”? Good question, the answer to which has origins in her own experiences of a controlling relationship with a narcissistic man.

Elizabeth Harrower The watch tower

Vera was written in 1921. Forty years later, in 1966, another Elizabeth, Elizabeth Harrower, published her own frightening novel about a young woman trapped in a controlling relationship. It’s The watch tower (my review). It has a third protagonist, the wife’s younger sister who lives with the couple and is caught up in it all. She is more conscious of what is happening, and its effect on her sister (and on herself)

Book cover

So, we are going to move on from coercive control to sisters, and Favel Parrett’s There was still love (my review), which is about two Czech sisters who lived through World War 2. One ends up in Melbourne, while the other remains in Prague. Parrett tells their story through the eyes of their grandchildren, Melbourne-based grand-daughter Malá Liška and Prague-based grand-son Luděk.

Cover

For my final book, we are staying with grandmothers, and a story told though the eyes of a grand-daughter. However, while Parrett’s book is a novel, albeit inspired by her grandmothers’ lives, my last link is a biography-memoir, Andra Putnis’ Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me (my review). Her grandmothers, who also experienced the War, were Latvian.

Hmm, five of my six selections this month are by women, but we have again moved across the globe – from the USA to England to Australia with forays in Eastern Europe. We have spent time in the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. And, unfortunately, we’ve met quite a bit of horror with the Gothic, coercive contol, and war. What can you expect, I suppose, with a chain whose starting book was inspired by Halloween?

Have you read We have always lived in the castle and, regardless, what would you link to?

Canberra Writers Festival 2025: 7, All things Austen: Jane Austen anniversary special

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Susannah Fullerton, Devoney Looser and Emily Maguire with Jonty Claypole and Sophie Gee.

The program described the session as follows:

Celebrate all things Austen at this major event! Over 200 years after Jane Austen’s works first appeared, her insights on life, love, and society remain timeless. Join popular Secret Life of Books podcasters Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole as they bring together an international panel featuring Wild for Austen author Devoney Looser (from the USA), Emily Maguire (Rapture), and Jane Austen Society of Australia president Susannah Fullerton. Join the community, and share your love – because, as Mr. Darcy says, “My feelings will not be repressed!”

Are you tiring of Jane Austen 250th anniversary events? Never fear, the year is nearly over, though her actual birthday is still to come. CWF could not, of course, let the anniversary pass without marking it in some way, and they did it with a five-person panel. The convenors’ aim was to steer away from the Austen of fluffy romances and never-ending rom-com (and other genre) adaptations to the disruptive, subversive, unorthodox Austen that we all believe she was.

The session was being recorded for Sophie and Jonty’s podcast, Secret Life of Books, so it had a particular flavour and style, and there was no Q&A. They started with an interactive game called “Never have I ever” in which the three panelists shared a statement that may or may not have happened to Austen or one of her characters and the audience had to vote true or false. That woke us all up, and then we settled down to the serious business!

The discussion was framed around three themes, in this order:

  • Disruptive Austen
  • Disruptive history
  • Disruptive readings

Disruptive Austen

Unfortunately, I had a technical malfunction with this first question, so I have to rely on memory. Essentially, the panelists were asked to share something they believe reflects disruptive (or subversive) Austen:

Emily chose Lydia from Pride and prejudice, noting that Austen never says the words, but we all know that the reason everyone was upset about Lydia was running off with Wickham was that they were having sex without being married. Once they were married, which of course was orchestrated, all was forgiven, and they went on to live acceptable lives. Lydia’s behaviour put her sister’s chances at risk. Austen shows, said Emily, the hypocrisy of her society.

Devoney and Susannah both read small sections from Austen’s Juvenilia (or teen writings), with Devoney reading the first four chapters of The beautifull Cassandra, and Susannah A letter from a young lady. These pieces exemplify the juvenilia overall. They are absurd, satirical parodies, and contain various scandalous acts, but are well worth reading for all sorts of reasons. (In my post on Volume the First, which includes Cassandra, I quote Looser a couple of times!)

The question put to the panel was, why did she leave this subversive writing? Unfortunately, I didn’t capture the full discussion, but one reason was that the Juvenilia was written to entertain the family, whereas the novels were written for a public audience. There was also discussion about Austen crafting her form. (You can wait for the podcast if you want to hear this and the whole event!)

Disruptive history

Susannah talked about Austen living during tumultuous times. Revolution and war in Europe, and England was unsettled, with changing laws. For example, duelling was illegal but still happening. There is a duel in Sense and sensibility. Austen mentions it briefly, with nothing like the detail a male author would use. But, there is a lot of female verbal duelling in the novel. Also, it is telling, she said, that the person who duels, who engages in illegal behaviour, is one of her most respectable characters, Colonel Brandon. Poaching is mentioned in Mansfield Park by Mr Rushworth, but he has no idea that Henry will poach his wife. In other words, illegal things happen in her novels.

Devoney also talked about the uncertain times. The French Revolution happened as she was coming of age, and then things shifted again in the 1800s. Critics often complain that Austen didn’t deal with war, but Persuasion is full of war, and Austen imagines a wonderful female character in Mrs Croft. However, Devoney said that during the 1800s society was clamping down, there was more censorship. Is that another reason why Austen damped down her Juvenilia? Devoney doesn’t think so. She thinks Austen blew up the form she toyed with in the Juvenilia and then put it together again. Devony saw both political and craft reasons for what Austen did.

Emily returned to her illicit sex argument, and that everyone knew it was happening. She shared the story of Lady Worsley (1758-1818), an Austen contemporary, who had a child that wasn’t her husband’s, was involved in a court case her husband brought against her lover, but ended up inheriting her husband’s estate. There was so much ambiguity in society during Austen’s time.

Jane eclipsed writers of her time, but Jonty and Sophie wanted know if the panel could recommend another writer.

Susannah suggested Fanny Burney. Her novels may not be books you go back to, but she was out there where the action was, unlike Austen, and she underwent (and survived) a mastectomy without anaesthetic. Her letters and diaries are worth reading. Devoney agreed with Susannah that no-one can match Austen, but if we widen our view there are women worth looking at, such as Maria Edgeworth (see my post on her Leonora), the Porter sisters (Jane and Anna Maria), and the Irish novelist Sydney Owenson.

Sophie suggested Mary Wollstonecraft, not only her A vindication of the rights of women but her Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. She had child out of wedlock, and died giving birth to Mary Shelley. We don’t know whether Austen read Vindication, but it was in her brother Edward’s library.

The conversation turned to related issues. For example, the first French translator of Pride and prejudice thought Elizabeth was too bold and feisty, so they flattened her.

Disruptive reading

How can Austen be read disruptively? Can she be read against the grain? (Aside: I think my Austen group does this regularly.)

Devoney said she can be read on different levels. Her novels document illicit sex, crime and criminality. She references contemporary issues, such as slavery. There is not enough information about where she stood. Austen was related to people who made money out of slavery, but Mansfield Park was likely named for the man whose judgement played an important role in England’s abolition movement. Not long after Austen’s death, her three brothers were involved in abolitionism. There’s reason to believe that she supported or was moving to supporting that view. Devoney also thinks that Austen did not want to be pinned down, but preferred to leave questions for us to think about. (This feels a modern idea to me, but her novels can support this theory, I think.)

Emily works with teenagers, and loves hearing what they pick up in Austen. They see tiny social signals – a look, a touch of hands – that suggest relationships. Young girls are alert. Looking through the lens of their own culture, they identify, for example, Austen’s “Pick-me” girls, like Miss Bingley.

Susannah spoke to Austen’s feminism, using, for example, Elizabeth’s statement to Lady Catherine that Mr Darcy “is a gentleman, I am a gentleman’s daughter. So far we are equal”. She mentioned Austen’s last poem, “When Winchester races“, written three days before she died. There is a line in it, “But behold me immortal!” Susannah would like to think she knew her own greatness.

And here we ran out of time … so the panel ended with Sophie and Jonty thanking all, and formally ending their podcast.

Not all in my Austen group loved this session, partly because the session was spread rather thin and we didn’t get to hear specifically about Looser’s book. But Mr Gums, my Austen-loving friend Kate, and I enjoyed what was discussed. It was lively, covered some interesting ground, and suited, I think, a broad-based Festival audience.

There will be no Monday Musings this week.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2025
All things Austen
Sunday 26 October 2025, 3-4pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2025: 6, Poems of love and rage

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Evelyn Araluen, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa with Jacqui Malins

The program described the session as follows:

An electrifying highlight of this year’s program, our poetry panel features some of Australia’s most acclaimed and innovative poets putting love and rage on the page. Overland Poetry Prize winner Evelyn Araluen (The Rot) joins Maxine Beneba Clarke with Beautiful Changelings, and hometown spoken word artist Omar Musa. This session delves into the power of love, and the ongoing fight against oppression in its many forms. Don’t miss this powerful event. Moderated by Canberra author, artist and performance poet, Jacqui Malins.

For this event, we hardy festival attendees had to leave the warmth of the National Library building (or whatever building we’d previously been in), and walk through a little rain to a marquis on the Patrick White Lawns. It was worth the effort. Actually, it wasn’t that cold and wet, and the venue, with chairs on the grass and some lovely potted trees, made for a nice change.

As this session included poetry reading and performance, your scribe had a bit of a break from intense scribbling, but the notes I took have still ballooned. After acknowledging country, Jacqui asked each of the poets to choose a poem to read (or perform) that explores rage.

On rage

Evelyn explained that her collection is all love and rage, that it was written in the context of love of communities, network and solidarity, but informed by rage, by the futility of witnessing genocide from our phones while the government continues to provide material for weapons. She was thinking specifically about global capitalism. She read her poem “Girl work” from The rot. As I’m sure you all know, there’s something special about hearing a poem read by the poet. They know what nuances and rhythms they intended for their words. This is a deeply satiric and ironic poem about girls and work, girls and girly aspirations, set against “the machine” that will swallow them up. It’s confronting (“girly, you glisten in your soft tailoring … your coolgirl cleangirl chic”) and confrontational (“o girly, lift your head…”). The words are cleverly angry.

Jacqui commented on its exploration of how to live in the face of the onslaught while also trying to live day-to-day. She likes the thread in the collection of what to do with our hands, the twitching to act.

Omar, poet, novelist, musician and artist from Queanbeyan, “Palace of the Palarang, Venice of the Eden Monaro”, has published four books of poetry (the last being Killernova, see my post on its launch). A performance poet, he performed rather than read two poems, “To burning” (which you can see on YouTube performed with music by his wife Mariel Roberts) and an older one I’ve heard before, “UnAustralia” (on YouTube too). He too is enraged by politics which cares more about money than people (particularly brown, Muslim, and “other”) and the environment.

As Jacqui said, his poems contained an “extensive catalogue of rage” that hasn’t changed over the years since they were written.

Maxine, reading from her just published book, Beautiful changelings, took us to somewhat different places. Like Araluen’s book, her focus is women. Araluen’s is described as a “liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism” while Clarke’s is about “ageing, womanhood, motherhood” with “wrecking-ball revisitings of the myths, mantras and fairy tales fed to girls” (from back covers and promotional materials). The first poem she read, “A good wait”, was inspired by her role as chauffeur for teenage children. It is more humorous than overtly angry, but has a layer of anger all the same for parents, particularly women, who are expected to put their needs – including their work/careers – second to those of their children.

She then read a section from a longer poem, “Major complications”, which explores rifts in contemporary feminism. It was inspired by feminist witch t-shirts and the Salem witch-hunts, and draws on the story of Tituba, “the witch that would not burn”. I loved the line – I think I got it right – “Tituba made sure they got the complication they asked for”.

On writing poetry inspired by rage

Omar grew up angry. Ppoetry was is pressure relief valve. He talked about his Malaysian inheritance and a way of expressing yourself that alchemically transforms rage to a different state, that enables you to legitimate anger. (I missed the details because I didn’t catch the Malaysian word.) It’s reductive to delegitimise rage.

For Evelyn, rage was explicit to her project. Referring to the success of Dropbear (my review), she said what an enormous privilege it is for a poet to be read. It’s unusual. Her book is in schools, and she hears from teenage girls. This made her think about her responsibility to her audience. She feared she could be immobilising girls into despair. She was inspired by Revolutionary letters, a poetry collection by Beat poet Diane di Prima, who turned practical things into revolutionary action.

Maxine (whose memoir, The hate race – my review – is also in schools) related to this audience idea. She talked about being a woman and getting older, and the rage that brings. There’s poetry and reaching for poetry. Bigots, she said, aren’t going to pick up poetry. Further, more than with prose, people come to poetry with openness. An interesting point. How, she said, does she make sure that her rage is poetry.

Jacqui wondered about rage turning into polemic, and love into sentimentality. Are these risks ?

Omar said not necessarily. “UnAustralia” is a polemic poem. He hopes poems can work on different levels, such as rallying the base and educating others. Poets use their tools to smash open the door, using different weapons for different battles. Jacqui agreed that preaching to the converted has a role.

Evelyn commented that “people like shitting on sincerity”, that the elite will say they “hate slam poetry” but don’t go into those rooms and see the work. This is “cringe culture”, at work. We have a bad relationship with sincerity. (This idea spoke to me.) Performance offers a strong introduction to poetry, performance poets put their whole heart into their work. What is it that brings people through the door? How much affect is effective? Research suggests that the most significant trigger for engaging people is to activate emotional sensibilities.

Maxine added that in 2025 earnestness is not cool, but then people will perform emotions on Instagram!

On love

Jacqui asked the poets to end with a poem written through the lens of love. Maxine read her tribute to being an aging woman, her love letter to growing older, “I want to grow old”. It mentioned several older women models, like the late Toni Morrison, and included lines like “speaking slow and exact and only sense” and “I want to grow old spectacularly”. Omar read two poems, one to his cellist wife, and one to a childhood friend (noting that friendship can be our greatest love affair.) Evelyn, who at first feared she didn’t have one, read the last poem in her collection, “I will love”.

This event was in a small venue, but had a decent-sized audience. Poetry always moves me a little out of my comfort zone, but I’m glad I took the risk!

Postscript: It was notable that the three poets were people of colour, albeit from very different backgrounds. Interestingly, of the 7 sessions session I attended, five comprised only white (I believe) participants, and two comprised all people of colour. I did, however, only attend 7 of a large number of sessions, so mine may not be a good sample. Nonetheless, shaking it all up a bit – people’s backgrounds, genres, forms, and so on – could energise discussions.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2025
Poems of love and rage
Sunday 26 October 2025, 12-1pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2025: 5, Our worlds, our way

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Evelyn Araluen, Jasmin McGaughey and Lisa Fuller with Casey Mulder

The program described the session as follows:

Join this exciting First Nations panel including Evelyn Araluen, Jasmin McCaughey and Lisa Fuller to explore how culture and Country influence each author’s writing. Spanning poetry, YA and children’s novels, how do Indigenous worldviews emerge? As First Nations writing and publishing thrives in Australia, this event offers a unique chance to look across genres and celebrate creativity and connection. Moderated by Ballardong Noongar educator and writer Casey Mulder, co-curator of Rivers Flow.

Casey Mulder asked Lisa Fuller to acknowledge country, which of course she did, and then introduced herself as from Noongar country but having been a high school English teacher in the East Kimberley, before obtaining a mentorship at Magabala Books. She is now a freelancer editor.

She then introduced the three panel members:

  • Jasmine McGaughey, Torres Strait Islander and African American writer who has written the YA fantasy novel Moonlight and dust and Ash Barty’s Little Ash series.
  • Evelyn Araluen, Goorie and Koori poet, editor and researcher, born and raised on Dharug Country and in the Western Sydney Black community; writer of two poetry collections, the Stella winning, Dropbear (my review) and The rot.
  • Lisa Fuller, Eidsvold Murri writer, now living on Ngunnawal and Ngambri lands; writer of children’s literature, short stories, poems and memoir, including YA fantasy novel Ghost bird, picture book Big big love (with Samantha Campbell, and winner in the 2025 ACT Literary Awards, my post), and the middle grade fantasy Washpool.

Then the conversation began … I’ll add first though, that I kept thinking this session was “our words, our way”. As it turned out, it was all about Worlds and Words.

On their experience of storytelling when growing up and how country speaks to their work

Lisa spoke of her origins in a small place inland of Bundaberg, brought up by a single mother and with no internet or mobile phone. She grew up with books. Washpool is fantasy, so she did not need go through the permissions and protocols which First Nations writers do when writing about country. However, she’s been told the book has a strong sense of country, which the panel agreed is because the First Nations worldview of country as alive seeps through it. The book was written for her “niblings”, and was intended as fun.

Evelyn started by commenting that her niece loved the pink cover of Washpool. She grew up within the diaspora Aboriginal communities between the Hawkesbury Valley and Blacktown in Western Sydney. Her great grandfather is from Bandjalung (near Clarence River). Her mother’s side is from Dirty Swamp near Molong in Wiradjri country but due to aggressive pastoralism (colonisation) they don’t know their clan name. Fragments of culture are coming back through oral traditions. The country she grew up on is being destroyed by industry, and she has lost family through mesothelioma. She, like so many, didn’t grow up on country, because of the colonial project. Many in her diaspora community do not know where they come from. People on missions learnt songs from each other, and are transmitting songs and stories that belong to other nations. It is a constant process of healing and repair, as oral traditions are shared and passed on. The biggest “place” in The rot is the Internet, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Bandjalung.

Jasmine grew up in Cairns, but with a father from Alabama, and a mother from the central islands in the Torres Strait (low lying sandy islands, which are dying because of rising water). She currently lives in Darwin, but misses Queensland, which she described as a “casual version of Australia”. That got a chuckle from the audience. (I loved hearing her story because of my recent trip to Cape York and the Torres Strait, and because I am Queensland-born.) She has a “love-hate” relationship with Cairns, but believes it doesn’t get enough “page-time”. There were no stories for her to read about TI when she was growing up. Storytelling is big in her family. Her mother would try to find books with people like her. Then she made the point of the session for me, which is that the stories told in fantasy and sci fi, with their plots of colonisation, of dispossession, are their lives. Lisa Fuller’s Ghost bird felt like her life, because it was about teen adventures, but they were still connected to family. (How lovely is that.)

She then referenced the State Library of Queensland’s black&write! program, which she described as best practice for First Nations publishing. Casey agreed, saying it is great having First Nations people involved in editing and publishing, rather than always having to educate white editors and publishers.

On their writing and story-telling practices

Jasmine spoke, somewhat laughingly, of being a millennial so was “a Twilight girl”. She mentioned Lisa Fuller’s article, “Why culturally aware reviews matter” (see here), which articulated the tension she was dealing with. She wrote a short story, “The breaker”, which became a novella, and then her novel. It is nothing like Twilight!

Lisa spoke to how culture is embedded in work. She was struggling with writing Ghost bird. She was in Canberra, surrounded by other cultures, and couldn’t write, so she had to go home. She wrote for the teenagers who want to see themselves in books. She talked about books in libraries, about romances set on stations in which First Nations people were either invisible, or idiotic station workers or the noble savage. Her niece asked for her book to be in the school library, but Lisa has never been asked to speak at the school. First Nations kids need to have books that show good things about their lives and cultures. Fantasy speaks to otherness and the post apocalyptic world they live everyday! (There’s that point again.)

Evelyn spoke to where “our world, our way” fits into her practice. Drop bear was all about colonialism, about things like May Gibbs’ little white bush babies getting about on First Nations lands. The Rot is about how young girls are configured socially, politically, economically; about the fetishisation of their deaths; about Palestine, and the constant documenting of the brutalisation of bodies on our phones; about the compulsion in western media to tell some stories and not others, to fixate on pain and violence. She talked about the glorifying of youth, the devaluing of women as they age, and that she is loving growing older as a woman. She wanted to understand the damage she felt, and the resentment she had (through reading things like Wuthering Heights at the age of 11.) She sees her role as doing analysis. We weren’t imagined as readers, she said. She wants to make First Nations people visible, and to make visible the impact of the erasure they’ve experienced.

The discussion turned to white writers asking about writing “Aboriginal characters” because they see a problem and want to fix it! Evelyn tells such writers is to read all the work they can by First Nations writers, and then they won’t ask the question. They’ll see that the best they can to is to lift and support First Nations writers. Casey added that white Australians need to go on the journey ourselves, and not ask them to do it for us.

There was some sharing of pet hates, such as being asked, “if we write Aboriginal characters, is it an Aboriginal story”, or describing a fantasy written by a First Nations person as allegory. First Nations editors and publishers don’t make these mistakes.

Q & A

I’d like to write high fantasy from different cultures, can I (or should I not) include First Nations cultures? The response was that the question to ask is, why do you want to do it? Without educating yourself, you will inadvertently write stereotypes. You would need sensitively readers. You need to think about what harm you might do, because you want to lift up, not put down. The panel admitted that even coming from a culture, there are things they don’t know. There are permission and protocol processes because First Nations cultures are community-based.

Is there an international community of First Nations writers supporting each other as there seems to be within Australia? The panel mentioned various initiatives and experiences, but noted that Australian is remote. There is Red Room Poetry’s anthology Woven, comprising poems from First Nations poets from around the world; and the Trans-Indigenous literary studies movement that started around 2012. There are communities and networks, and members of the panel had their own connections, such as Jasmine finding peers in the Oceanic region. Despite what we think about the US, they are ahead in what they are doing, publishing-wise.

This was valuable session, but hard to write up. I hope I have been respectful and accurate.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2025
Our worlds, our way
Sunday 26 October 2025, 10-11am

Canberra Writers Festival 2025: 4, Finding Elizabeth Harrower

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Susan Wyndham with Julieanne Lamond

The program described the session as follows:

A literary biography can be a truly fascinating exploration of the life of an author beyond their pages, and so it is with Susan Wyndham’s Elizabeth Harrower: The woman in the watch tower. Harrower wrote some of the most original and highly regarded psychological fiction of the twentieth century. Then she abruptly stopped writing in the 1970s and became one of the most puzzling mysteries of Australian literature. Why didn’t she continue? What part did her circle of famous friends play? Why is her work now enjoying a remarkable renaissance? Join ANU Associate Professor of English, Julieanne Lamond and writer, journalist and former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Susan Wyndham for this conversation.

Julieanne Lamond, who teaches English at the ANU, introduced Susan Wyndham, journalist, literary editor and author, most recently, of the biography of Elizabeth Harrower: The woman in the watch tower.

There wasn’t a lot that was new for me in this session, because I’ve read a good proportion of her letters with Hazzard (not reviewed yet, because not finished) and Helen Trinca’s Harrower biography (my review). But I’ll document my notes for the record – and, reiteration always helps the memory.

Julieanne started with the obvious question to a biographer …

Why write about Elizabeth Harrower?

Susan first heard of Harrower when she won the Patrick White Award in 1996, but didn’t read her books until 2014 when Text was publishing her novels, including talking Harrower into publishing the shelved novel, In certain circles. This was Susan’s impetus to read and interview Harrower. She found her novels vivid, and was stunned by their power. But, over the years, she had many questions that were left hanging.

After Harrower’s death in 2020, her papers became available. Susan also knew that Brigitta Olubas was working on Shirley Hazzard with whom Harrower had a long and deep correspondence, so her interest was sealed.

On her childhood – and its influence on her writing

Harrower, like Trinca, found many holes in Harrower’s story. She was able to fill some through her research, but not necessarily fully. Harrower painted over her origins, saying she was born in Sydney not Newcastle. She always called herself a “divorced child” and said she “never saw happy marriage” when she was young.

Susan jokingly said that if you are writing a biography, pray for a messy family, because stories about divorces, crime, deaths will be documented in government and other records. After her parents’ divorce when she was 4, Harrower lived with her grandmother, which inspired her novel The long prospect (my review). She was an only child, and solitary, though Susan did track down a childhood Newcastle friend. Overall, she had to make her own way through her childhood – and was a great reader.

Her childhood was divided in two parts – up to 12 in Newcastle, then she joined her mother in Sydney, with her mother’s new partner (and perhaps husband). This “stepfather”, R.H. Kempley was the model for Felix in The watchtower (my review), a book which still feels modern, and certainly relevant.

Julieanne segued into asking about Felix and Harrower’s intense psychological portrait of a coercive controlling relationship. Susan didn’t want to take away from Harrower’s creativity, because she was a great observer of people – hence the biography’s title. Indeed, Harrower said, “I wouldn’t have survived if I experienced everything in my novels”.

Susan described R.H. Kempley, whose name she tracked down through a brief mention she found in Trove about Harrower’s parents expecting her arrival back from England with her friend (and cousin) Margaret Dick. Her research into him found much evidence of crime – selling moonshine and blackmarket alcohol, debtor’s courts, and the like. Harrower felt shame, but he was a gift to her as a writer if not as a child.

Harrower, Susan believes, ran away from domesticity, determined to be independent and not controlled by anyone, but money was always a problem.

On whether she saw herself as a feminist

Harrower resisted the term, didn’t connect with it, but the way she wrote and lived her life showed she “knew it all”. Anne Summers included her in Damned whores and God’s police in her chapter on women writers.

On the shape of her career or, why she didn’t become the writer she set out to be

Those of you who know Harrower’s trajectory will know that she did not publish a novel after The watchtower in 1966, until Text Publishing republished her novels in the early-2010s, and talked her into publishing her unpublished manuscript, In certain circles (2014, my review).

There is no easy answer to this question said Susan (as Trinca also explored). Her novels were well received critically, and after The watchtower, which was published in Australia, everyone was waiting for her next. She received a Commonwealth grant, but was uncomfortable about it. She always said she wrote under difficult circumstances. She did write short stories and plays, but Susan thinks she’d lost her drive. She was trying something different, but it didn’t “come from her heart or her guts in the same way” as the four published novels had.

She was disappointed not to win the Miles Franklin Award for The watchtower. Also, her mother died, which paralysed her emotionally. She never got her momentum back. She became emotionally involved in politics. Having always been a great Labor supporter, she threw herself into supporting the party with Whitlam’s win in 1972. She was visiting Christina Stead in 1975, when the dismissal happened and was outside Parliament House when Whitlam made his speech. Also, she was enjoying her social life.

On seeing other writers through the lens of Harrower

However, although she only published one novel in Australia after her return from London in the 1960s, she moved in literary circles. She was not a big personality, but people loved her parties and she was a devoted, loyal, “almost too attentive” friend.

This is where her letters with Shirley Hazzard – from the 1960s to 2008 – come in, with their coverage of Harrower’s significant role in caring for Hazzard’s mother Kit. It took up a lot of time. She was willing, but resentment did build up. The supportive picture we see in her letters to Hazzard, is not the same one seen in her letters to and conversations with others. She didn’t like conflict, but she didn’t like feeling put upon, either. This – along with the fact that she was a giver but didn’t like accepting generosity – was probably behind the break in the friendship that occurred during her visit to Hazzard and her husband on Capri.

Harrower had many writer friends, including, significantly Patrick White, Kylie Tennant and Judah Waten. There was some discussion about these, particularly about White who was “a bit of a big brother figure”. They talked on the phone every Sunday, went to shows together, shared an intellectual life together. During the Q&A, Susan added that they had arguments, and shouted at each other, but, although he hurt her at times, she was a peacemaker. It was a genuine friendship.

On Susan’s research, including her Fellowship at the NLA

The National Library not only has Harrower’s papers but those of many in her circle, which provided a wonderful mosaic that offered different ways of looking at Harrower. Cross-referencing enabled her to solve mysteries, such as who she went on a cruise with – a cruise to Japan from which she jumped ship in Brisbane. (Harrower doesn’t provide the person’s name in her Hazzard letters, but did elsewhere. She was “annoyingly discreet”, and didn’t always name people. In this case, she named “Kylie” in a letter to Christina. Her relationship with Kylie was long and fraught.)

Unfortunately, like many writers, Harrower also destroyed papers, such as diaries and letters to her mother.

Q&A

On her relationship with readers: back in the 1950s and 60s, there were no public events, but she was reviewed and did have champions in the literary world. However, after being republished in the 2010s, she did her first ever public events, always with her publisher Michael Heyward, and she loved it. Her responses were always “beautifully formed, but left a whole lot out”. The 2017 Adelaide Writers Week was dedicated to her. She said there, that the greatest human quality was kindness.

On not continuing to write: Susan reiterated some of what she’d said during the conversation, but added that caring for Kit was probably also an issue. Susan thinks nothing was going to get her to write.

On which book to start reading Harrower: Probably The watchtower (her fourth novel), and then The long prospect, which is exactly my order! But Susan is becoming more fond of The Catherine wheel, the only one set in London

I enjoyed the session, though more on biography-writing itself would have been interesting. I could have asked a question, I guess!

Canberra Writers Festival, 2025
Finding Elizabeth Harrower
Saturday 25 October 2025, 1-1:30pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2025: 3, Reckoning

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Kate Grenville and Paul Daley with Craig Cormick

The program described the session as follows:

Kate Grenville’s ancestors were ‘the sharp edge of the moving blade’ of colonisation through the Hawkesbury region – the subject of her bestseller The Secret River. Now in Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place, she reflects on the reckoning that comes with truly confronting the past and her family story. She’s joined by Paul Daley, whose novel The Leap examines fear and violence in a frontier town. Two years after the Voice referendum, this timely conversation is about non-Indigenous Australians doing the work and personally reckoning with the past. This conversation, moderated by author Craig Cormick (Warra Warra Wai) will reflect on the role of non-Indigenous authors in contemporary writing exploring Indigenous issues.

You know you are not with the zeigeist when the session you choose is not in the big venue. This was the case for me with my last two sessions of the day, and to be honest, I was unsure about whether I wanted to attend this session. Did I want to hear more of us white peole talking about our guilt. It’s not about us. And yet I’m a white person so I decided there might be something new for me to think about, or another way of thinking about the issue. As it turns out, there was … read on …

Craig Cormick started the usual way – by acknowledging the traditional owners but also asking us to say hello – Yuma – in the local language. He then introduced the writers, noting in particular that Kate Grenville’s The secret river was ranked 20 in the ABC’s Top 100 books of the 21st Century. He then explained that we would be talking about white fellas writing black stories, black history.

On how a white writer writes respectfully about black issues (to Kate)

There is no simple answer, but it involves a big cloud of context requiring awareness – of truthful knowledge of a dark history, of what might be the effect of what you write on First Nations people (which can include grief, insult, rage), and of how non-Indigenous readers will read what you write. The respectful way might be not going there, or engaging in consultation, or …

Do we need more than good intentions (to Paul)

Paul thinks of the journalists and anthropologists who wanted to save, hoard stories and culture – the equivalent of what literary writers want to do – so he asks himself the question “why am I going there?” He turned to fiction after years of journalism, as medium to tell about an Australia that is not seen enough. He said that both fiction and nonfiction requires respect, but fiction can be more “arbitrary”. Who do you consult when you are writing a character. It can be laborious. You need to forget deadlines.

On writing from an Aboriginal perspective (to Kate)

She never has – except very briefly in her novel Joan makes history. She wouldn’t do that now. She wrote 25 drafts of The secret river. The consciousness of the book was based on her white ancestor, but is about his relationship with local indigenous people. She started by giving them some dialogue, but felt she was othering or diminishing them, so she tried to individuate them without stepping into their world. Her latest book is nonfiction involving a road trip, which sort of mirrors Craig’s (in Warra warra wai). It was about private soul-searching, which she feels must be done before we talk to First Nations people.

On writers not including First Nations people in rural noir (to Paul)

The three main reasons writers give are: they don’t want to locate their book, or, they don’t want to upset their conservative readers, or, it’s just too hard! But, said Paul, many books are about white people’s crimes against white people on lands owned by others who are never mentioned. The leap is like an update of Wake in fright, which was reflective of the white male Australia of the time.

Is it too hard to go there (to include First Nations people) (to Kate)

She looked at Eleanor Dark’s 1941 The timeless land, in which Dark entered the consciousness of an Aboriginal character. It would be wrong now, but at the time Dark was “writing into a profound silence”. She was, in fact, revolutionary.

But, as long as white writers are aware of boundaries, they can “go there”.

Are there boundaries writers shouldn’t cross (to Paul)

Yes, he wouldn’t write in a First Nations first person voice, would not get into secret sacred areas/places/topics, and would not embed a story in a First Nations community.

The conversation then further explored this idea of boundaries, and issues like consultation.

Craig shared a comment made by Harold Ludwick (with whom he collaborated on the novel On a barbarous coast, my review) that “we earnt your way of thinking more than you learnt ours”.

Kate said that with her road trip, she did not speak to First Nations people. She believes that we want to jump too quickly to reconciliation, to forgiveness, but she believes we need to do soul-searching (a bit like you do in “time-out”) about what it means to be a non-indigenous person in Australia. She didn’t want to ask for things from First Nations people, like asking them to explain their feelings to us or to forgive us. She talked about the first time she asked Melissa Lucashenko to read a book (as a sensitivity reader I presume). Lucashenko said, “Sure, but pay me”. Another time, she said, “Yes, but first read White privilege“. In other words, she asked for something in return.

Paul picked up this idea of “wanting” things from First Nations people. He said he will ask friends to read his manuscript. He realises it is burden, and he explains that the end product is his, not their responsibility. If, after consultation, they say they don’t want him to do it, he wouldn’t.

Paul drew an analogy between Australian writers’ current concern about AI ripping off their work, and how First Nations’ people’s stories have been ripped off for so long.

The discussion turned to some examples of “ripping” off, such as last year’s controversy over Jamie Oliver’s children’s book, and its egregious depictions of First Nations people and their practices.

Overall, consultation is a difficult thing. Who you consult, can be a fraught issue. It is often, for example, not the Land Council. They do not necessarily represent the elders. Consultation can exacerbate divisions. (Some of this issue about who speaks for whom was covered in Wayne Bergman and Madelaine Dickie’s Some people want to shoot me, my review.)

There was a Q&A, but most of it revisited ground already covered. For example, one audience member spoke of writing a story inspired by a First Nations person. He had consulted the relevant elders and descendants, and they were comfortable. He had checked his motivation. But AIATSIS had said it wasn’t his story to write. The panel agreed this was difficult. There are no answers. Sometimes, said Kate, you just have to take a risk. Paul agreed, but gave the example of Jesus Town. He had a misgiving on the eve of publication, so pulled back, reworked and published later.

There was agreement that it was great to see First Nations people now telling their own stories, and about experienced writers doing all they can to help them.

The discussion ended on two points that encapsulated the discussion perfectly and validated my decision to choose this session:

  • that writing in the voice of a person in which you don’t have lived experience [however you define that] would not be adding to the sum of human knowledge
  • that in relation to our history, there is no atonement. We have to live with that.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2025
Reckoning
Saturday 25 October 2025, 12-1pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2025: 2, What happened in the outback

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Garry Disher and Gail Jones with Michael Brissenden

The program described the session as follows:

Join two of Australia’s most highly regarded writers speak about the lure of the Australian outback with its landscapes, characters and unsettled complexity. Here we have different tales of desperate searches to uncover what has happened to two women in the outback. Stories multiply. Heart and horror beat in tandem. Cops try to do their best. Gail Jones (The Name of the Sister) and Garry Disher (Mischance Creek: The new Hirsch novel) will together explore the power of beautifully written outback crime. Moderated by Michael Brissenden (Dust)

Journalist and novelist Michael introduced the authors, outlining their work and achievements before getting onto the discussion which centred, of course, around two concepts – the outback and writing about crime. It was an intriguing if sometimes slightly odd discussion, with Gail Jones talking almost as much about Disher’s work as her own, and an underlying (but also explicitly explored) tension between literary writing and crime (or genre) writing.

The session started with the usual question asking the writers to précis their novels. Gail Jones described hers as non-genre, and said it was set in Sydney, Broken Hill and Berlin. It starts not with a death of a woman but with a woman being found. It doesn’t have a traditional crime plot, and is about people whose stories and identities are lost.

Garry Disher’s book, on the other hand, does have a crime plot. It’s the 5th in his Hirsch series, but Hirsch doesn’t match the common tropes of crime. Most crime fiction, for example, is closely related to place – think Bosch in LA and Rebus in Edinburgh, for example. Hirsch, however, is from Adelaide, and is an outsider in the small town he has retreated to (though of course, the novels are imbued with this new-to-him place). Most crime fiction protagonists are relatively senior in rank, but Hirsch is lowly. And finally, most crime protagonists are troubled, dark, while Hirsch is genial.  The driver for the novel, Garry said – though it was written before the 2025 Porepunkah incident – was the idea of sovereign citizens and their capacity for violence, but there is another plot involving a woman who has come to town, unhappy with the investigation into a case concerning her parents.

The discussion proper then started with that question that won’t go away concerning whether a distinction still exists between literary and crime fiction. Gail said “good writing is good writing”, and that the concept of “literary” is less a judgement of writing than about subject and mode. She is interested in writers who “don’t stay in their lane”. She has also been interested in crime and guilt for a long time, but is less interested in plot than in exploring consciousness, and the covering over or hiding of crime, and secret guilt. When it was suggested to her that she write a crime story, she thought about loss and the dissolution of marriage (which she admitted is probably a more common “literary fiction” subject). Her novel intersects between crime and literary.

Garry addressed Brissenden’s question concerning how crime fiction is changing and where it is now. He delved back into the past, and how in planning for the Spoleto Festival (which has now morphed into the Melbourne Writers Festival) he had suggested inviting Peter Corris, the popular and successful Sydney crime writer at the time, but was firmly told “no, this is a literary festival”. There is still a sense of this divide. He would like to talk about fiction more broadly but he is always invited onto crime panels at festivals – organisers, take note! He senses that there’s a feeling crime writers would embarrass other writers if they appeared together (though didn’t explain what he meant by “embarrass”). His early writing was not crime, and writing craft is important to him. What matters most to him is the characters not the plot.

The conversation then got onto the outback, the session’s subject. Garry said that the term “outback noir” was coined by a journalist talking about the early work of Jane Harper and Chris Hammer, but feels that it has had its day. Writers jumped on the bandwagon, resulting in some copycat (my word) novels that were not necessarily good. Good crime, all agreed, deals with prevailing social values and conditions – well-written and in an entertaining way, said Brissenden.

So, what is this thing called the outback, and to what degree does it play into the concept of place and character? This is where the session became particularly interesting to me, because we bandy around this term, often without a great deal of thought.

Gail thinks it is an antiquated term that she believes began with Lawson’s 1893 poem “Out back”, which has words like “blistering”, “furnace”, and concludes with “Where the bleaching bones of a white man lie by his mouldering swag Out Back”. The poem implies “out back” is homicidal to white men, and “extinguishes”, said Gail, First Nations people. It flattens and reduces the land to one idea, one, more often than not, reduced to a sort of psychodrama. It’s interesting that we (as in non-Indigenous Australians) use “outback” rather than “country”. Our usage – incorporating a sense of being in “the middle of nowhere” – denies the fact that it is other people’s “somewhere”.

Garry agreed with Gail, building on it and adding his own thoughts. Most of us, he suggested, have a vision of the “outback” as vast and encompassing long drives, but also with a mythical overlay, as reflected in “we of the never never” (Mrs Aeneas Gunn) and “the great Australian loneliness” (Ernestine Hill). The sense – also conveyed in paintings by artists like Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan – is that it is remote, not pleasant, even though it is home to someone. The outback (like the beach) suggests loss – lost children, lost travellers, the lost women in their novels. On the other hand, there’s the “outback” that is romanticised by travel companies.

Gail added that the challenge is learning about the Indigenous world view, their knowledge of and regard for land. White Australia has not come to terms with the mysticism and animism associated with First Nations’ understanding of the land, a place rich with meaning. The travel idea of “adventure” misrepresents what the land is, but has extraordinary persistence. Similarly, she said, the ideas of “noir” and “gothic” (which originated in 18th century England and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto) come from other lands and cultures, and are a mismatch with the outback. She likes that Garry’s Hirsch is richly human and that his novels include women and Indigenous people.

We then moved onto the idea of loneliness in a sparse place. Garry reiterated that Hirsch is an outsider, without deep friendships (though he has a lover living outside the town). He has to be all things to all people. Gail’s character Angie is a freelancer which can be a lonely occupation, but Gail is more interested in solitariness rather than loneliness.

Gail didn’t want to have cop character in her novel because she doesn’t know police stations and procedures, but she had to “get out of Sydney”. She is interested in mining towns – her father was a miner, one of the “labouring poor” – so she could relate to the harshness of Broken Hill. She commented on the profound masculine overlay there created by films/novels like Wake in fright and the Mad Max movies, while Hirsch, she said, despite being a male cop in a small town, is aware there are other meanings – layers – in the place. She likes crime that has this social complexity.

Talking fathers, Garry said his told him that farming was a mug’s game and to get an education, which he did. This included researching the landscape writers of the 1930s with their complicated messages about the outback (including towards Indigenous people who were either feared or treated as children). However, his brother became a small town cop. He can go to him for practical questions (like would a paddy wagon be air-conditioned?)

There was more, including readings by both from their novels, and a comment from Gail about liking it when policemen/detectives in crime novels are also readers! Hirsch for example mentions Helen Garner’s diaries.

Oh, and for those interested, there will be another Hirsch novel, but he does write standalone novels in between. The next one draws on children’s fears (like his in the 1960s about Russians and communists.)

There was no Q&A. And we didn’t really need it after this thoughtful, deep dive into “the outback”.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2025
What happened in the outback
Saturday 25 October 2025, 10-11am

Canberra Writers Festival 2025: 1, ACT Book of the Year

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A preamble

The Canberra Writers Festival is back in 2025, with a new Artistic Director, author Andra Putnis whose biography-memoir, Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me I reviewed earlier this year. The Festival’s theme continues to be “Power Politics Passion”, albeit not as dominating in promotion as it used to be.

The ACT Book of the Year

The ACT Book of the Year is broad-based award, meaning that it encompasses fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. It is presented by the ACT Government, and was first made in 1993. I have written on this award in a Monday Musings, so won’t say more here!

The winner announcement has been made in various ways over the years. In 2023, for example, I attended the presentation at Woden Public Library. This year it was announced during the first full day of the Canberra Writers Festival, which feels fitting.

But first, there was the shortlist, which was announced on 7 September:

  • Theodore Ell, Lebanon days: memoir, based on Ell’s experience when he accompanied his wife on her diplomatic posting to Lebanon and witnessed a country on the brink of collapse
  • Andra Putnis, Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me (my review): biography/memoir about the author’s two Latvian grandmothers, their experiences during the war, their subsequent emigration to Australia and the family they built here.
  • Qin Qin, Model minority gone rogue: memoir, by a young high-achieving Asian-Australian woman and her break from suffocating expectations to find the life she wants to lead.
  • Darren Rix & Craig Cormick, Warra warra wai: history, focusing on First Nations people’s experience of James Cook’s exploration of the east coast of Australia in 1770, in order to ensure the complete story is told.

All shortlisted books this year, are nonfiction, three being memoirs.

The panel

The event comprised two parts – a panel discussion featuring the shortlisted authors followed by the winner announcement.

Cover

So, the panel. It was moderated delightfully by science fiction writer, Daniel O’Malley. His questions were perfect for the shortlisted books, and generated some enlightening responses. Unfortunately – or fortunately, for those of you who know how longwinded I can be – I had some technological challenges so didn’t capture some of the thoughtful ideas and experiences shared with us. Hmm, this has still ended up being long!

On their 30-second pitch for their books

Darren said it all when said he would tell people Warra Warra Wai was “a great read”. This is true, I think, for each of the books.

On whether the book they produced was the book they started out writing

Darren and Craig started travelling up the east coast of Australia gathering stories, wanting to contribute to truthtelling, to expose the history of dispossession and share the story of rebirth, to “record history in the right manner”, but it ended up being a much bigger story. Qin Qin said she always wanted to be a writer, but that her story started to take form and gel during COVID when Chinese people were being demonised. Andra was in Darwin and can pinpoint the time when she decided to write her story, when she realised that what she wanted to write was how her family came to Australia and become the people they were (are). Theodore probably had the most circuitous route. His book started as an essay that was more successful than he expected. (In fact, my friend, the writer Sarah St Vincent Welch, told me, that this essay, “Façades of Lebanon”, won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize). He realised he had more to tell. He could have writte more essays, choosing a theme at a time, but he realised that Australians know little about Lebanon – its history and its beauty – so a book it was.

On what they did and didn’t include

Theodore provided the most intriguing answer. His book is written in five parts, and he wrote it backwards, that is, he started with part 5 which covered the most recent memories. Then he worked on part 4, and he knew what was needed to set up part 5! Ingenious. Andra knew she wanted to include the arc of her grandmothers’ lives. What she cut was a lot about herself! She realised she only needed enough about herself to sustain interest in the grandmothers. Qin Qin spoke like the Type A person she admits to being. She kept a diary as a child, and this provided some content, but her publisher and editor helped a lot. When she submitted her draft, hoping it was pretty much done, she was told she could write good dialogue and that it read like something written to get an HD! That brought a laugh from the audience. However, with editorial guidance, she eventually produced something that broke open her heart. Darren and Craig talked about their process, which included Craig doing the archival research, and both interviewing First Nations people up the coast. Darren said they interviewed young people as well as elders, to get a full picture.

On major challenges or any resistance they experienced

Qin Qin described her writing as “one continuous showdown” involving her constantly deprogramming herself from the limiting pressures and expectations she felt as the eldest daughter. She said anyone writing about race will get pushback, and at one stage she contacted the police about emails she was getting. Andra said she had been very afraid about how her story would be perceived, by the family and the Latvian community. The fear was so great she nearly gave up. But the response has been good, and the family has responded with such grace. Theodore did not face any real opposition or obstacles but there were ethical challenges. He’s not Lebanese, no one in his family is Lebanese, so he has no true stake in what happens to Lebanon. He wanted to avoid ventriloquising Lebanese points of view. The ethical core of the book is what people told him, in their words, but to protect their privacy he gave them pseudonyms. Also, as his wife is a diplomat – the reason he was there – he had to be careful about doing anything “unbecoming”. Even the simplest thing can be spun the wrong way, so he had a delicate path to tread. Fortunately DFAT was happy with the manuscript. Craig said the commonality between all the shortlisted books is that they are open to pushback, but books threaded with a respectful element of truth are protected. He and Darren said that some communities rejected their approach, but that with many, once they sat down and explained what they were doing – that they weren’t from “the government” or “a university” – they were accepted. This was then passed on, like traditional message sticks, to other communities. They explained they wanted to produce a woven black and white history. Also, many communities had not been asked these sorts of questions by an Aboriginal man.

On where they write and how (a writer’s question)

Andra can’t write just anywhere, but needs a place to base herself. She started with vignettes, like squares in a patchwork, which she then assembled. She was helped by the fact that Nana Aline had already started reflecting on her life. As for Qin Qin, it’s a lovely thing when, as you sit through panels like this, authors reveal themselves as the real – and individual – people they are. So, her response was not surprising. She said the writing process was an ongoing journey of becoming more aware of herself, but she finds it easier to let herself, rather than others, down. So, she needs deadlines, which her publisher gave her regularly. She then wrote anywhere, anytime, to meet those deadlines. She works best when there’s accountability. Darren and Craig spent lots of time together in planes and cars, during which they talked about what they were doing, their structure, the way they would incorporate different timelines (like dreamtime and white time). Once they got the structure, the writing was easy. Makes sense to me. Theodore said he must have a room. He has a room at home and one at the ANU. The latter is where he does the hard yards, the welding of the words.

On what was most satisfying

For Darren it was travelling country, particularly those he hadn’t been to before. Craig added that communities wanted their own stories in a form they could read, and their book has provided this. Qin Qin said that with each rewrite she felt she shed layers, she felt weight lifting. Her book is a spiritual memoir, one about deprogramming herself from living up to expectation. She was glad to find she had her own voice. Andra said getting to the end was satisfying, but she also related to the idea of shedding layers. What moved her most, however, was when Nana Aline told her that she had felt “seen” by her granddaughter. Theodore had two. One was that while much of his story is dark it also contains fun, because Lebanese people are witty and satirical. These scenes and those of real friendship mean a lot to him. Also, he liked, during revision, how much spontaneously came back in memory, enabling him to relive the many stunningly beautiful places.

On their next project

Craig and Darren are working on two books, which they call “batmen” (about the Aboriginal cricket tour of England in 1868) and “Batman” (about Treaty, involving Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales)! Qin Qin’s sole (deprogramming) journey is to have no goals, so she will see what comes up. Andra can’t wait to write something else but didn’t say whether she had a project, while Theodore’s main longterm project is a biography of Les Murray.

The announcement

Michael Petterson, ACT Government’s Minister for Business, Arts and Creative Industries, made the announcement, including sharing comments from the judges, but this is long enough. He did say, however, that there was a record number of 56 books entered for this year’s award.

The winning book was Darren Rix and Craig Cormick’s Warra Warra Wai, which the judges praised for providing a “unique lens on history, land and identity”. Theodore Ell’s Lebanese days was highly commended. I hope the ACT Government will share the judges comments on their website.

At the end of the announcement Craig said that he and Darren had decided that, should they win, they would pronounce it a four-way tie, which they did, and handed each author a medal to document it! The audience loved this spirit.

The session ended with afternoon tea served in the National Library foyer. A lovely treat for us who attended this free event!

Canberra Writers Festival, 2025
The ACT Book of the Year
Friday 24 October 2025, 2:30-4:30pm

Olga Tokarczuk, House of day, house of night (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 37 Comments

About 30 pages into Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, House of day, house of night, I turned to Mr Gums and said, I have no idea what I am reading, which is unusual for me. I certainly don’t pretend to understand everything I read, but I can usually sense a book’s direction. However, something about this one was throwing me, so …

I had a quick look at Wikipedia, and found this “synopsis”:

Although nominally a novel, House of Day, House of Night is rather a patchwork of loosely connected disparate stories, sketches, and essays about life past and present in … a Polish village in the Sudetes near the Polish-Czech border. While some have labeled the novel Tokarczuk’s most “difficult” piece, at least for those unfamiliar with Central European history, it was her first book to be published in English. [Accessed: 1 October 2025]

That made me feel better! I am more than comfortable with “loosely connected disparate stories” but am only generally-versed in Central European history. So, I decided to relax and go with the flow. From that point on, I started to enjoy my reading more, but it was slow going, because the “disparate stories” demand attention. It’s not a book you whizz through for story, but one you savour for thoughts and ideas, and for the connections you find along the way.

Tokarczuk calls it, in fact, a “constellation novel”, which I understand builds on thinking by the German critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). According to academic Louis Klee, who has written on “the constellational novel”, “these novels are recognizable by the presence of a first-person narrator committed to drawing affinities and making connections among disparate things”. They can be non-linear and incorporate various forms of writing from essayistic to lyrical to fragmentary, and encourage readers to find their own connections (like finding patterns in a constellation).

This well encapsulates House of day, house of night. It comprises numerous individually titled chapters (or sections or parts), some just a few paragraphs long, and others several pages. At first it felt disjointed, but it wasn’t long before an underlying structure started to reveal itself, one held together by a first-person narrator, a woman who had come to live in a small Polish village with her partner R – just like Tokarczuk and her husband did – three years before the novel opens. She tells of life in the village, and particularly of the relationship she develops with her neighbour, a somewhat mysterious old woman named Marta, who embodies a wisdom that she sometimes shares but other times must be gleaned from what she doesn’t say.

Interspersed with our narrator’s story, are other stories – some real, some magical, some past, some present – about the region and people in it. There’s a gender-fluid monk named Paschalis who is writing the life of the female saint Kummernis. There’s the unnamed couple who think they have it all, until each is visited by the same lover, a female for “he” and a male for “she”. There’s a religious community called the Cutlers who make knives and believe that “the soul is a knife stabbed into the body, which forces it to undergo the incessant pain that we call life”. There’s the wonderfully named Ergo Sum who had tasted human flesh in frozen Siberia, where he’d been deported in 1943, and believes he is turning into a werewolf. And so on. Some of these stories continue, for several chapters, woven around our narrator’s story, while others stand alone. Some are about people who think they have life worked out, while in other stories, the people don’t have a clue.

There’s more though, because scattered through the stories are ruminations on disparate things like dahlias, nails, comets and grass allergies. And threading through it all are various motifs, usually providing segues between chapters, encouraging us to see links and to ponder their meaning for us. These motifs include dreams, names, time, death, borders, mushrooms (potentially deadly), and knives. The more you read, the more connections you see between them and the stories. Many are philosophically-based, but are not hard to understand. In other words, the challenge is not in understanding, but in how we, individually, process the links we see. You might have already noticed some in my examples above, such as the idea of identity. Even the mysterious Marta, who disappears every winter, is unsettling. Who is she really?

“people are woefully similar”

This is the sort of book you would expect of a Nobel prizewinner. The writing is simple but expressive, and is accompanied by a rich, dark, and often ironic humour. We have border guards who don’t want to deal with a dead body so they quietly shove it to the other side of the border. And Leo the clairvoyant who says “Thank God people have the capacity for disbelief — it is a truly bountiful gift from God”. That made me splutter.

Underpinning all this – the thing that gives the book its heft – is a quiet but somewhat resigned wisdom. It interrogates some big questions – our willingness (or not) to see what is happening in front of us, our relationship to place, how we comprehend time, and who we are. These are explored through universal binaries, not only the night-and-day contained in the title, but life and death, change and stasis, ripening and decay. How do we live with – and balance – these parts of ourselves, of life?

But, House of day, house of night is also set in a particular place and time, southwest Poland, just post World War 2. This area, explains the Translator in her note, was part of the German Reich until 1945, when the Allies agreed to move Poland’s borders west. Many Poles left their old lands of the east (now part of the USSR), and resettled in this once German area in the west, occupying homes left by the evacuated Germans. This specific history is also found in the book, with Polish families hopefully, greedily, digging up German treasures, for example, and Germans sadly returning to see their old places.

House of day, house of night offers no answers, but it sure asks a lot of questions – about how, or whether, we can move forward into more humane, and hence more fulfilling lives.

This brings me to the ending. I won’t spoil it – it’s impossible in a story like this anyhow – but we close, appropriately, on the idea of constellations and finding patterns, and a hope that it is possible to find a pattern that explains it all. It is deliciously cheeky. And, on that note, I will end.

Olga Tokarczuk,
House of day, house of night
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Melbourne: Text publishing, 2025 (Orig. pub. 1998; Eng trans. 2002)
298pp.
ISBN: 9781923058675

Review copy courtesy Text Publishing