Monday musings on Australian literature: Listen to Indigenous Australian authors

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BannerSome years, I’ve written an indigenous Australian focused Monday Musings post to start and conclude NAIDOC Week and Lisa’s ANZLitLovers Indigenous Literature Week. I have been researching a topic for this year’s second post, but it’s taking longer than I expected, so have decided to hold it over to next year. Meanwhile, having committed to a second post, I decided to change tack and instead share some podcasts comprising interviews with Indigenous Australian authors …

So, I’ve put together a sample list of interviews conducted this year with Indigenous Australian writers. They are from ABC RN programs (AWAYE!, The Book Show, and Conversations) and The Wheeler Centre. You can search those sites for earlier interviews with these, and other writers.

I am listing them alphabetically by author to make it easy for you to see if your favourite is here! And I am providing website links, but most if not all of these will be available through podcast services on tablets and smart phones.

Tony Birch

Fighting for family in Tony Birch’s The White Girl, The Book Show, (ABC RN), 24 June 2019, 17mins

Book coverBirch speaks to Claire Nichols “about trauma, bravery and writing stories of the past” regarding his latest book The white girl (my review) He discusses, among other things, the “contradictory and unpredictable” way in which the Act (which limited the freedom of indigenous people to travel, and made children wards of the state) was enforced in towns, and how this increased the level of insecurity and anxiety felt by indigenous people, somehting experienced by his character Odette Brown. The reason for this unpredictability could be incompetence in the local police, or the presence of a genuinely benign policeman, or because there was no law in the place or town.

Stan Grant

Book coverConversations: Stan Grant, Conversations (ABC RN), 24 April 2019, 52mins

Coinciding with the publication of his latest book Australia Day (about which I reported in another conversation with him), Grant talks with Richard Fidler about his book, and specifically his thoughts about the push to “change the date” of Australia Day. He believes, as the show’s promo says, “that … for now, 26 January is all that we are and all that we are not” and thinks that there are deeper questions to discuss about who we are than simply changing the date. I like his comment on protest – his dislike of “certainty” and of “slogans” – because I feel similarly uncomfortable, much as I agree with the heart of most protests. “I like to live in the space between ideas”, he says.

Melissa Lucashenko

Melissa Lucashenko in conversation at Sydney Writers Festival, AWAYE! (ABC RN), 11 May 2019, 33mins

Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much LipConversation with AWAYE!’s Daniel Bowning, including Lucashenko reading from Too much lip (my review). The show’s promo says “we talk about our grannies, the meaning of place, the role of humour in serious literary work, the fetishisation of Black suffering and why she would never kill off one of her characters.” Lucashenko talks about how the book is about oppressed people (of whatever ilk) standing up. (As she says on another podcast, “if you don’t fight you lose”.) Because she included some negative depiction of indigenous lives (particularly black-on-black violence), she expected backlash from the black community, but it hasn’t come. She feared being honest about this issue at this time in Australia’s history – was it the right time, she wondered – but then realised that “silence is violence”. She says the job of the writer being “to see what’s going on and write about it”.  Oh, and she wanted to write a funny book – which she certainly did.

Other interviews with Lucashenko on this book are available on ABC RN’s The Book Show, including one after its Miles Franklin shortlisting (12 July 2019, 10mins).

Bruce Pascoe

Book coverA truer history of Australia, AWAYE!, 25 May 2019, 12mins

Pascoe talks about Young dark emu, his junior version of his bestselling Dark emu (my review). It includes a reading by Pascoe from the book. He talks about the importance of teaching the true history of Australia to young people in schools, arguing that “ignorance makes you scared, knowledge makes you wonder”.

Alison Whittaker

Book coverAlison Whittaker in conversation at Sydney Writers Festival, AWAYE!, 18 May 2019, 32mins

Whittaker talks about (and reads from) her latest work, Blakwork, reviewed for Lisa’s ILW week by Bill and Brona. She talks about the “transformative power of poetry” and says her aim is “to provoke and upset white readers because they are the main readers” of poetry. This issue, that we middle class, white, educated people are the main readers of indigenous writing, is something I often think about. It’s a complex interaction, methinks. Whittaker talks about the paradox of using the English language, the language of the imperialists, to convey feelings and ideas from a very different culture.

An aside. I appreciated her discussion of the word “important” as in, “an important book”. I agree with her dislike of it, and avoid it in my reviews, albeit the temptation can be great. She says that “important is not an interesting thing to say”. The challenge for me, often, is to find the “interesting thing to say” that is also succinct!

Tara June Winch

Book coverDocumenting ‘the old language’ in Tara June Winch’s The Yield, The Book Show (ABC RN), 15 July

Winch talks to Claire Nichols about her new book, The yield (reviewed by Lisa/ANZlitLovers), and also reads from the book. In the book, the character Albert Gondiwindi is writing a dictionary of Wiradjuri language. He says that “every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language – because that is the way to all time, to time travel!” Given the current interest in reviving indigenous languages, and the criticality of using our own language to express our own culture, this book sounds really timely.

Alexis Wright

Alexis Wright, TrackerAlexis Wright in conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy, Books and Arts at Montalto, The Wheeler Centre, 14 January 2019 (though recorded in 2018), 1hr 3mins

Wright talks to Elizabeth McCarthy about her collective biography Tracker, which won the 2018 Stella Prize and the Non-Fiction Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. The interview focuses mostly on Tracker Tilmouth himself, rather than on the form of the book, and the approach Wright took to writing it.

Do you listen to literary podcasts? If so, I’d love to hear your favourites.

Stan Grant, On identity (#BookReview)

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Book coverStan Grant seems to be the indigenous-person-du-jour here in Australia. I don’t say this disrespectfully, which I fear is how it may come across given Grant’s views “on identity”, but it feels true – particularly if you watch or listen to the ABC. He pops up regularly on shows, sometimes as presenter, other times as interviewee. He therefore needs no introduction for Aussies. For everyone else, though, a brief introduction. Grant is described in the bio at the front of his book, On identity, as “a self-described Indigenous Australian who counts himself among the Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi, Dharrawal and Irish.” The bio goes on to say that “his  identities embrace all and exclude none“. He is also a Walkley Award-winning journalist (see my Monday Musings on this award), and the author of Talking to my country, which I reviewed a couple of years ago.

Grant could also be described as a (modern) Renaissance man. I say this because of the way he synthesises his wide range of reading – including philosophy, history, psychology, history, anthropology, and literature – into coherent ideas that support his arguments. He did this orally at the conversation event I attended a couple of months ago, and he does it in this long-form essay called On identity.

In my post on that event, I wrote that his main point about identity was its tendency to exclusivity. In On identity, he explores this “exclusivity”, and its ramifications, starting with those boxes we see on all sorts of forms – including the census – that asks whether you are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. As a person with a keen interest in the pros and cons of “labelling”, I’m aware of the obvious implication of this, that is, that it marks or separates people out. However, as Grant points out, it also, in cases where heritage is mixed (like Grant’s, like many indigenous people’s), forces them to deny other aspects of themselves, to exclude other members of their families.

And so it forces Grant, for example, to deny his Irish grandmother Ivy.

If I mark yes on that identity box, then that is who I am; definitively, there is no ambiguity. I will have made a choice that colour, race, culture, whatever these things are, they matter to me more than my grandmother.

Through her, through this conversation about ticking boxes, Grant introduces his theme of “love”, of growing up surrounded by unconditional love, and how a focus on “identity” becomes a cold substitute for what truly sustains and binds, love. Now, this might sound a bit corny, or simplistic, but bear with me …

Grant then leads us through his argument. He discusses the work and ideas of Noongar author Kim Scott, whose trajectory as an indigenous person, Grant admits, has been quite different from his own. Grant grew up knowing he was indigenous. Scott, on the other hand, was raised with very little contact with Noongar people. On discovering his ancestry and wanting to know more, he felt forced to make a choice – was he black or white? And that decision, Scott writes in his family history, Kayang & me, was a “political imperative”. There are no references to “love” in this book, writes Grant, which confirms, he says, “what I have come to believe is true: identity – exclusive identity – has no space for love”.

Grant “deeply” admires Scott, but feels sad that “in writing himself back into a Noongar identity … it isn’t love that calls him, but politics”. Scott is not oblivious to this, worrying that his decision may strand his children in “no man’s land”, making them targets from both sides of “a historical, racial fault-line”. This concern leads Grant back to his mantra that “identity does not liberate: it binds”. He talks about other writers including Jewish ones (like Kafka) and Irish (like Yeats), about their attitudes to the problematic and limiting notion of “identity”. James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, he says, “knows if he is to write anything he must find freedom; he must shake loose the chains of identity.”

Grant turns to other writers of colour, who have found their “identity” limiting. Toni Morrison sees that the “very serious function of racism” is to distract, preventing you “from doing your work”. Writing for her, says Grant, “has been the struggle to live free from the white gaze”. Similarly, James Baldwin sought to be “free of identity” by going to France:

Baldwin did not wish to escape being black, but he desperately wanted to be rid of other people’s ideas of blackness.

Unfortunately, Baldwin returned to the USA, and got caught up in black protest. Thus, argues Grant, the man “who had been raised in the church … had forgotten the lessons of his own childhood. He had forgotten about love”:

When Baldwin turned to politics, his words lost no power–perhaps they grew more powerful–but he made the worst bargain I think a writer can make: he swapped freedom for identity and the identity writer can only write propaganda.

Strong words, for another day, perhaps! For Grant, it is the Baldwin of France he returns to “because he taught me that a black man could have the world”.

And here, really, is the paradox that I see in Grant’s argument. It’s sophisticated, erudite, and elegantly written. He makes a strong case for his belief that identity binds rather than frees, and that in so binding, if this makes sense, it keeps people divided. But, I’m not sure that he answers for me what can be done about the division (that is, the oppression of people on the basis of race, colour, religion, gender, sexuality, etc) that has given rise to “identity” in the first place. It’s all very well to point to the limitations of and the problems inherent in the politics of identity, but what is the answer to the underlying problem?

Grant returns at the end of the essay to love. He discusses the relationship between totalitarianism and love. Antebellum America, Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and other regimes, he writes, turn unity (collective identity) into totality, and “crush love because it is the surest way to crush freedom”. What he means by this is that “we banish love, when we no longer see ourselves in each other”, when “we see instead an enemy”.

So, Grant eschews any identity that would cage him, any identity that would deny any aspect of himself or that would pit himself against others. But, acknowledging at last my paradox, he does admit that there are privileges in identity – whiteness, masculinity, sexuality – which need to be called out. It’s just that they are political, and he’s not about politics*. All he’ll say is that “we find no liberation behind walls”. Amen to that!

On identity is not simple reading. Neither does it provide answers to the “identity” problem. But what I like about it is that it offers a way to think about identity that is positive not negative, that would bring us together, not divide us. Where to next?

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) and Janine (Resident Judge of Port Philip) have also posted on this book.

* What he actually says is: “I have no desire to be the writer of politics” p. 95.

BannerStan Grant
On identity (Little books on big ideas)
Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2019
95pp.
ISBN: 9780522875522

Tony Birch, The white girl (#BookReview)

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Book coverWe need more novels like Tony Birch’s The white girl and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too much lip. This is not to say that we don’t need all the wonderful Indigenous Australian literature I’ve read and reviewed here over the years, but some of the books, as excellent (and as beloved by me) as they are, can be more challenging to read. The white girl and Too much lip, on the other hand, are accessible, page-turning novels that have the capacity to reach a wide audience, but will they? I sure hope so, because the truths they tell are crucial for all Australians to know if we are to ever become a more mature and united nation.

In other words, it’s not only for their page-turning quality, that I paired these two novels. They have some other similarities, which I’ll briefly address before focusing on The white girl. Both novels are set in rural areas, though Birch’s novel also spends some time in the city, and both have female protagonists, though Birch’s Odette is a grandmother while Lucashenko’s Kerry is a 30-something, not-yet-settled woman. Most importantly, though, both reference long-term issues (the aforementioned truths) that have affected indigenous lives for generations, including, of course, the stolen generations, dispossession and powerlessness, past atrocities, and entrenched institutional discrimination.

However, beyond these, the novels are very different. For a start, Birch’s The white girl, being set in the 1960s, fits into the historical fiction genre whilst Lucashenko’s novel is contemporary. Moreover, Lucashenko’s is more complex and has more humour, albeit of the black sort, than Birch’s more straight drama, so let’s now get to it. Unlike Birch’s previous novel, Ghost river, which is set in Melbourne, The white girl, is set in a fictional town, Deane, and an unnamed city. This effectively universalises the story to suit any part of Australia, making it difficult to shrug off the issues as not relevant to our own places.

The basic plot of The white girl concerns Odette’s determination to save her grand-daughter, Sissy, from falling under the control of white authorities, because this novel is set at a time in Australia when indigenous people came under the Act, an act which meant they could not travel away from where they lived without permission. It also meant that the state was legal guardian of children like Sissy. Things come to a head for Odette and Sissy when a new and more officious policeman, Sergeant Lowe, comes to town to replace the alcoholic, and generally more laissez-faire Bill Shea. Odette feels the time is ripe to reunite Sissy with her mother, Lila, who had left soon after Sissy was born, and who, Odette realises some way into the story, had good reason to disappear.

Birch has set his novel at a time of transition. It’s well into the Menzies era, and indigenous people are becoming more actively engaged in fighting for their rights. Sergeant Lowe, though, is not impressed. When Odette approaches him for the necessary permissions to travel, he refuses, telling her (with the about-to-retire Shea also in his hearing):

‘The whole business of native welfare has been neglected in this district for many years. I will not allow it to continue. Your people need certainty, just as we do, as officers of the Crown. None of this is helped, of course, by those trouble-makers arguing for citizenship of behalf of your people.’

The divisive language (“your people”) and the assertion of absolute power (“I will not allow it to continue”) reflect classic colonial behaviours that ramp up the level of threat felt by Odette. This threat is exacerbated by the presence of a brutal white family in the district, the Kanes, comprising a father and two sons. Lowe is somewhat aware of their trouble-making, but only insofar as it affects another white person in the district, the gentle, brain-damaged Henry who owns the local junkyard. To some extent the book’s characters are stereotypical, but Birch’s story-telling is such that they don’t become – at least not unreasonably so – caricatures. This is partly because they are fleshed out with back-stories. It’s not particularly complex story-telling – the back stories, for example, are common ones – but the novel is believable, perhaps because they are common.

As Lucashenko does in Too much lip, Birch also references traditional culture and its ongoing role in people’s lives. Odette, like many indigenous people, listens to messages from birds (“a morning doesn’t pass without one of them speaking to me”) and to the “old people” from whom she believes her strength comes. Birch also beautifully conveys indigenous people’s resourcefulness in the face of a dominant white culture. For example, Odette’s father tells her, when she’s a young girl, why she should sing in the mission church even though they don’t believe in “their God”:

‘Because it’s best to keep them fellas happy, keep their meanness down.’

And Odette’s response, when asked for her “tribal name” by a patronising white woman who offers her piece-work employment as a card artist, provides a typical example of indigenous response to such self-interested nosiness:

It never failed to surprise Odette how white people were always going on about uplifting Aboriginal people, yet they would demand information about the old ways when it suited them. She looked over to the honey jar sitting on the bread board and read the label to herself. It sounded tribal enough. ‘We’re the Bilga people, ‘ she explained. ‘That’s my tribe. The Bilgas.’

What Birch shows, then, is that survival for indigenous people was (and mostly still is) quite a cat-and-mouse game. It involves “taking a chance with these white people”. This is a risk, Odette and her friends realise, but is often all they have. And that, I think, is the main message Birch wants to leave with his non-indigenous readers. The question is, can we rise to the challenge, and be trusted? Are we prepared to heed the truths being shared? So far, I’d say, the jury is still out.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also liked this book. Read for ANZLitLovers ILW2019.

Banner

Tony Birch
The white girl
St Lucia: UQP, 2019
265pp.
ISBN: 9780702260384

(Review copy courtesy UQP)

Monday musings on Australian literature: early Indigenous Australian literature

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BannerSince 2013, I’ve written an indigenous Australian focused Monday Musings post to coincide with NAIDOC Week and Lisa’s ANZLitLovers Indigenous Literature Week. NAIDOC Week, for non-Aussies out there, occurs across Australia each July “to celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”. One way litbloggers can recognise and celebrate it is to read indigenous Australian writers and contribute to the list of reviews maintained by Lisa on her blog. (Lisa also accepts reviews of indigenous authors from other nations.)

NAIDOC Week LogoThis year’s NAIDOC Week theme is VOICE, TREATY, TRUTH. How better to celebrate this than through a post on early indigenous Australian literature which, like that of today, aimed to share truths about indigenous Australian experience. It’s a tricky topic because it’s only been relatively recently that indigenous Australian stories (novels, poetry, short stories, plays, memoirs) have been published. However, indigenous people have been writing since the early days of the colony.

This post can only be a brief introduction. The best source for the topic is, I believe, the Macquarie Pen anthology of Aboriginal literature (2008), edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter. Indigenous Australian academic Mick Dodson writes in the Foreword that it contains “a range of works that any serious student of Aboriginal history, life and culture will find valuable”. It also, he says, encapsulates Aboriginal “political and cultural activisms”.

The anthology starts with the first-known piece of written text in English by an Aboriginal author, a letter written by Bennelong in 1796 not long after he returned from England. Editors Heiss and Minter write that the anthology contains

writing ranging from the journalism, petitions and political letters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the works of poetry and prose that are recognised widely today as significant contributions to the literature of the world.

They go on to say that “Aboriginal literary writing grew directly from a complex and ancient wellspring of oral and visual communication and exchange”. This is something that at least some non-indigenous Australians recognised. FS, writes in The Age in 1938, for example, about indigenous Australian “rock literature” or “picture writing”. FS is responding to a planned German scientific expedition to northwest Australia which was intending, among other things, to “study … rock carvings, cave paintings and similar work on wood to ascertain whether it is a desultory art or a method of writing” [my emph.] S/he believes this goal is unnecessary, because the “rock literature” clearly demonstrates that indigenous Australians have had a “literature” long pre-dating the English language.

Anyhow, back to Heiss and Minter who discuss the necessary nexus between the literary and the political in indigenous literature. They note that 19th century Aboriginal literature primarily comprised “genres that are common to political discourse” – letters, petitions and chronicles – and that between Federation and the 1960s, political manifestos and pronouncements of Aboriginal activist organisations were added to these genres.

David Unaipon (State Library of NSW, Public Domain)

It wasn’t until 1929, in fact, that the first book by an indigenous Australian writer was published, David Unaipon’s Native legends. A report of the book’s publication appeared in January 1930 in South Australia’s Border Chronicle. The reviewer says (using the sort of tone and language typical of the time):

Not long since there entered the editorial den a full blood aboriginal who said, in that “moistened” voice that the Australian abo always wears, that he was distributing the only book ever written by an Australian aboriginal in the English language … The legends are told in English that will cause wonder in anyone who has tried to master any speech other than his mother tongue. Claudian, the Latin poet, was born an Egyptian, educated as a Greek, and the world has marvelled ever since that he became one of the great masters of Roman speech. Yet Unaipon, is in his way, as great a marvel as Claudian, since his natural atmosphere differs more widely from that in which he works than did the civilization of Claudian’s Egypt and Greece differ from that of Rome. The style of David’s writing is correct by all the formal rules, but differs widely from ordinary written speech. His legends are fairy tales in color, and in “The Song of Hun garrda”, which is an invocation to the God of Fire, he gets into a highly poetic region. Likewise, he is mysticc and writes of “earthly body subjective consciousness”, “earthly life experience”, as if those things had a real meaning to him, which is more than can be said of some of those who talk on such matters in their native speech. It is an interesting little contribution to Australian letters.

Heiss and Minter say the book is “literary in its adaptation of his cultural imagination to particular modes of authorship and narration”. They see his pioneering role in the development of indigenous literature, saying he “gave subsequent Aboriginal writers a significant precedent by which to imagine their authorship of a culturally grounded future literature”.

Book coverIt would be over thirty years before another book by an indigenous writer was published, although during that time “letters, reports and petitions” continued to be written in support of “Aboriginal rights and constitutional transformation”. One of these activists was the poet and activist, Kath Walker (later Oodgeroo Noonuccal), and she was the author of that second book. Published in 1964, We are going was mistakenly described by The Canberra Times as “the first book written by an Australian aborigine”. Heiss and Minter again note its pioneering role, saying it “marks the arrival of Aboriginal poetry as one of the most important genres in contemporary Aboriginal political and creative literature.”

It took more time, however, before indigenous writers got a firm foothold. Heiss and Minter argue that it wasn’t until the late 1980s that “Aboriginal writing was firmly established as a major force in Australian letters. David Headon writing in the ANU’s Woroni in 1990 would agree:

Certainly Aboriginal literature is a growth industry of substantial proportions. The sheer number and range of books now available is all the more surprising when one considers that the first [!] published work by an Aboriginal writer, Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s (Kath Walker’s) book of poems, We Are Going, was published in 1964, and at the beginning of the 1980s the only black writers with any kind of national profile were Walker, Jack Davis, Kevin Gilbert, Mudrooroo Narogin (Colin Johnson) and possibly Bobbi Merritt and Faith Bandler. None of these were well-known outside their community. Australian literature has been profoundly altered by the emergence of so many Aboriginal texts in the last 10 hectic years.

He reviews an unknown-to-me 1990 anthology, the gorgeously titled Paperbark. It predates Heiss and Minter’s Macquarie anthology by nearly two decades. Published by the University of Queensland Press and described by them as “the first collection to span the diverse range of Black Australian writings”, it includes writings from the 1840s to 1990. The Aboriginal and Islander authors include “David Unaipon, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Gerry Bostock, Ruby Langford, Robert Bropho, Jack Davis, Hyllus Maris, William Ferguson, Sally Morgan, Mudrooroo Narogin and Archie Weller.” Like the Macquarie anthology, it also includes “community writings such as petitions and letters”.

Headon’s review is well worth reading for his references to writings, many of which are new to me, but I’m going to leave him on his following point:

Books like Paperbark are in the vanguard of what will surely be one of the great (Australian) cultural debates of this decade: how long can an ex-colony like Australia allow some of its universities to continue to indulge their colonial habits? How long will Old and Middle English, 17th- and 18th-century English literature be the literature major staples at our universities? When will the dominant pressure be post-colonial? Change, Paperbark proclaims, is afoot.

Good question! Interestingly, in 1984, the ANU did offer a 10-week adult education course in ‘Aboriginal Literature’. It may, of course, have only been run that year.

Anyhow, I hope you have enjoyed this little introduction to what I’ll call the first wave of indigenous Australian writing.

Past NAIDOC Week-related Monday Musings

Six degrees of separation, FROM Where the wild things are TO …

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Book coverWell, I’ve found the solution to breaking my record of not having read one Six Degrees starting book this year: suggest a book to Kate and hope she likes it! I did, and she did, and so it is that I have read this month’s starting book, Maurice Sendak’s picture book classic, Where the wild things are. I figured it might help a few other people too who have found themselves embarrassed, month after month, like me. Haha!

I plan to have a little fun with this one, but first the formalities. The Six Degrees of Separation meme is currently run by Kate, and you can read all the rules on her blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

So, here goes (on the assumption that you all know the story):

Where is Max?

Well, he went

Into the woods

of the Midnight empire,

where he went Troppo with all his wild friends.

They danced around the Cold sassy tree,

and created a rumpus throwing Big rough stones.

But, in truth, in a Nutshell shall we say,

Where they really were all the time was –

Storyland.

(Links on titles are to my posts.)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

(Those of you who can count will have noticed that I’ve cheated. There are 7 books in my chain. But, I couldn’t bear to leave any out, so I gave myself recommender’s licence and kept them all. Anyone care to take me on?!)

If not, let’s move on to my usual questions. Have you read Where the wild things are? And, regardless, what would you link to? 

Miles Franklin Award 2019 shortlist

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Well, good news for me in that I had read three of the longlist, and two of those have made it through to the shortlist. Interestingly, the one that didn’t, Trent Dalton’s Boy swallows universe, has been making such a splash that I rather expected it to be shortlisted. But, as we all know, you can never second guess literary judges.

So, here is the shortlist:

  • Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Lebs (Nancy’s review) (Hachette)
  • Gregory Day’s A sand archive (Lisa’s review) (Picador)
  • Rodney Hall’s A stolen season (my review) (Picador)
  • Gail Jones’ The death of Noah Glass (Text)
  • Melissa Lucashenko’s Too much lip (my review) (UQP)
  • Jennifer Mills’ Dyschronia (Lisa’s review) (Picador)

Rodney Hall, A stolen season

Some random observations:

  • There’s fair diversity here, with Ahmad and Lucashenko both making to to the shortlist.
  • Three women and three men! That’s neat.
  • Rodney Hall has won twice before, for Just relations and The grisly wife, and has now been shortlisted four more times.
  • Lucashenko has, this year, been shortlisted for the Stella Prize, the Victorian and NSW Premiers’ literary awards, and the Australian Book Industry awards.
  • This will be the fourth time that Gail Jones has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin.
  • And, three of the six books were published by Picador! Congrats to them.

Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much LipStefanie Convery, writing in The Guardian (Australia), reports that:

Judge Bernadette Brennan said this year’s authors were “unafraid to take risks” in their narratives, which addressed “complex, disparate and urgent aspects of contemporary Australian life”.

This is certainly true of the two I’ve read …

Michaela Boland, writing for the ABC News, spoke to Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and wrote this:

While Mr Ahmad said that [winning the Prize] would be welcomed, the honour itself had already eased the insecurity and inadequacy he said was inherent to being an Arab Muslim immigrant in Australia.

“Three years ago our immigration minister Peter Dutton said second or third-generation Lebanese Australians like me are the mistakes of the Fraser government,” he said, after he learned his second book was one of the six short-listed.

It’s so distressing that Ahmad and, clearly, many other Australian citizens have to live their lives feeling this way – and that our government doesn’t seem to think it has a role to play in setting a welcoming, inclusive tone.

Anyhow, the judges, as I wrote in my longlist post, for this year are almost the same as last year’s: Richard Neville (State Library of NSW),  Murray Waldren (journalist and columnist for The Australian), Dr Melinda Harvey (book critic), Lindy Jones (bookseller), and Bernadette Brennan (author and literary critic). Brennan replaces last year’s Susan Sheridan.

The winner will be announced on 30 July in Sydney.

What do you think?

Monday musings on Australian literature: the Australian Common Reader

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The Australian Common Reader is, says its website, “a world-leading database of digitised reading records” which “contains thousands of records of library borrowers between 1860 and 1918.” Initiated by Western Australia’s Curtin University professor Tim Dolin in 2008*, it was acquired by ANU in 2013, and is managed by its Centre for Digital Humanities Research. It was officially launched two weeks ago on June 18 – a fact which was brought to my attention by Bill (The Australian Legend.) Thanks Bill.

The libraries whose circulation records are in the database include:

  • Collie Mechanics’ Institute (WA)
  • Lambton Mechanics’ and Miners’ Institute (Newcastle, NSW)
  • Maitland Institute (Yorke Peninsula, SA)
  • Port Germein Institute (regional SA)
  • Rosedale Mechanics’ Institute (Gippsland, Vic)
  • South Australian Institute (Adelaide, SA)

These are all, I understand, mechanics’ institutes (about which I’ve written before), and are mostly located in mining towns and farming communities. Although these institutes were set up to support worker education and recreation, members of the public could also join.

The database is publicly accessible, making it a rich resource, surely, for all sorts of researchers. Certainly, Dr Julieanne Lamond, who manages the project, argues that we are lucky to have it.

The database has been designed, she says, to facilitate researchers sifting through pages of records to create a picture of Australia’s borrowing and literary history. You can search the database on:

  • Borrower occupation
  • Borrower gender
  • Book title
  • Book author
  • Borrower name

This means, Lamond said, that “you can see what the local doctor or politicians were reading, what books and authors were popular, and a library’s most prolific borrowers”. As a result “we can see that doctors were borrowing more books than solicitors and butchers were reading more than engineers.” (Hmm … I’m feeling quite glad that I’m not a big library user right now! Seriously though, this is pretty fascinating.)

Charles Dicken, c1860

Dickens, c. 1860 (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Stephanie Convery, writing for The Guardian Weekly, reported on the launch and says that the records tell us, for example, that:

Australian butchers in the 19th century preferred to read thrillers, miners loved novels about horse racing, while the most popular author among doctors – and the Adelaide working class in 1861 – was Charles Dickens.

Lamond points out that the records include Mathew Charlton, one of the earliest leaders of the Australian Labor Party. He was, she says, “quite an avid reader, making a total of 264 loans over a 10-year period” and “his favourite author appears to have been Edward Phillips Oppenheim, an English novelist known for writing thrillers.” Oppenheim is, in fact, the second most borrowed author in the database.

She said that the website shows Australians were diverse in their reading habits. They read Dickens, for example, but they also read the latest magazines. They read Australian fiction, as well as overseas authors. And, probably just like now, some were avid readers, while others would “borrow the same book over and over again.”

The records show that male borrowers far exceeded women, but Lamond argues that this is probably due to the sorts of libraries they were. Interestingly, she says, the data “shows that men and women read very widely across all these kinds of genres that now we think of as being quite gendered.”

Nonetheless, the data does show some different favourites. The most popular book for women was On the wings of the wind by Welsh author Anne Adaliza Puddicombe who used the male pen name of Allen Raine. She was one of the bestselling authors of the time, apparently. Woo hoo, though, women reading women! In fact, their research shows that four of the top five works borrowed by women were written by women!

By contrast, the most popular reading for men was a weekly magazine – Household Words which was edited by Charles Dickens (and about which I have also written before.) It was specifically aimed, as I quoted in my post, at “the masses” and it intended to both entertain and “shape discussion and debate on the important social questions of the time”. I love discovering that it was, indeed, popular among the people it was created for.

Overall, Lamond, quoted by Convery, says that

“People’s reading was very diverse, much more diverse than I think most of our reading is now. These people just read incredibly widely. They were reading sporting novels and political thrillers, they were reading George Eliot and Jane Austen at the same time.”

(Hmm, is she basing this comparison regarding diversity today on any evidence? Anecdotally, and defending my era, I’d say there’s a lot of diversity in today’s reading today!)

Convey makes a few other observations, including that:

  • miners were the most abundant profession represented in the data, making up nearly 13%, with the most prolific borrower being a South Australian miner named John Pellew, who borrowed 877 books from the Port Germein Institute.
  • fiction was, overall, more borrowed than non-fiction.
  • the most popularly borrowed author was Cornish Christian novelist Joseph Hocking, reflecting, perhaps the preponderance of Cornish and Welsh miners in the borrowing communities.

Lamond hopes to obtain funding to digitise more records to broaden our insight into reading habits of the past. She notes that they don’t have good data about metropolitan reading, and that these records are not really in existence:

“The stars have to align for these kinds of records to survive because often they were run by volunteer management committees, and they sat in boxes in people’s attics; they threw them out; they burnt down – a lot of historical library records have gone up in smoke, literally.”

Don’t you hate hearing about the destruction of records?

A little example

Anyhow, of course, I had to have a little play in the database myself, so I looked at the Borrower by Occupation. They are listed in order of quantity, starting with Miners (5,666 borrowings) and ending with six occupations represented by 1 borrowing, including “Authoress” and “Tea merchant”. However, it looks like the occupations were entered “free text” and that the ANU has not tried to concatenate them in any way, so, for example, there are State School Teachers, School Teachers and School Masters (and maybe even more permutations).

Using the “visualisation” option, I found state school teacher, Frances Cairns, who borrowed 326 books, of which 318 were fiction. The author she borrowed most was Scottish author and minister, George MacDonald, but I was delighted to see that she also borrowed a book by the cheeky Australian author Elizabeth von Arnim. One of the eight non-fiction works she borrowed was Daniel Crawford’s Thinking black, which, says Wikipedia, “was recommended reading for those Europeans who wanted to work in partnership with, rather than over, Africans.” I wonder what was behind this? The visualisation option was fun, but probably more useful is the fact that you can also download spreadsheets of your searches to do further analysis.

And here I will close on this fascinating project, but do have a play if you are interested,

* Another report says that the database commenced in 2001! Who knows? Maybe both are right, and it’s a matter of defining “start”?

Mary McCarthy, The group (#BookReview)

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Book coverMy reading group has a few loose “rules” for choosing our reads, but one of the more rigid ones is that each year we like to read at least one classic. This year’s first classic – yes, another is coming – was Mary McCarthy’s The group. As I wrote in last week’s Monday Musings, it was published in 1963 and became a New York Times best-seller. I was initially uncertain about this choice, because I had read it and there are so many classics I still haven’t read, but, as it turned out, I was glad to read it again. This is because it is a true classic, by which I mean it’s a book that you can read again, at a different time in your life, and find new richness.

For those of you who don’t know the story, it centres on the lives of eight women from Vassar College’s Class of ’33 (of which McCarthy herself was a member, so she knew whereof she wrote – Bill!) The novel follows their lives for the next seven years as they, variously, marry, divorce, have children, find jobs, and in the case of one, die. In doing so, it also evokes their era beautifully. This was a time when America was coming out of the Depression, when women’s expectations about their lives were starting to change, when medicine was starting to assert its authoritarian self, when Trotskyism was attracting the radical intelligentsia, and when Europe was moving into World War 2. Our eight women – Kay, Lakey, Polly, Dottie, Priss, Libby, Pokey and Helena – having received a liberal Vassar-style education, are engaged in the issues of their day. Indeed, the role of education is one of the themes of the novel. Early in the novel, Kay recognises that:

That was the big thing they taught you at Vassar: keep your mind open and always ask for the evidence, even from your own side.

Late in the novel, Norine, a friend of the group, and also Vassar ’33, voices the challenge their education has posed for them: “our Vassar education made it tough for me to accept my womanly role”. Some, of course, found it easier to accept than others.

[SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT FOR THE NEXT PARAGRAPH ONLY, BUT THIS IS A CLASSIC SO I’M INCLUDING IT]

I loved the novel – the satire, the writing, the details, the individuation of the characters. What was not to like? Well, there are flaws for some readers. It doesn’t have a strong plot, and the structure is episodic, so that just as you get into one person’s story, you leave her to move onto another. This can be alienating for readers who love to emotionally engage with their characters. I can see all this but, for me, they are not overriding issues. Firstly, while there isn’t a strong plot, there is a narrative trajectory that sees relationships develop and change over time as the girls mature from new graduates to experienced women. Also, the novel commences with the wedding of a character, who recurs more frequently than do others as the book progresses, and it neatly concludes with her funeral. Secondly, despite the episodic approach, I engaged with the lives of each character as she came into focus for a chapter or so. Of course, some engaged me more than others, and, in fact, McCarthy gives some more time than others. What made McCarthy’s approach work for me were the ideas being explored through the various characters, and the writing used to do this. Evocative and/or witty writing expressing interesting ideas or viewpoints will get me every time.

So, for example, the book contains wonderful set pieces that seem to just keep coming, including Dottie’s deflowering and the sociology of the “pessary”, Priss’s (shock! horror!) breast-feeding in hospital under the instruction of her paediatrician husband, Priss versus Norine on child-rearing, Hatton the butler’s management of “his” family, Kay’s time in a mental hospital, to name just a few. These vignettes – which provide such insight into the lifestyles, the political interests, health and medicine, and so on, of these women – make the novel a rich source for social history of the times. Being educated, and generally of a liberal bent, most of the group are actively engaged in the political issues of their day. Some support Roosevelt’s New Deal, while those more radical become involved in socialism, Trotskyism in particular. There are references to World War 2, and the tensions between the America Firsters (sound familiar?) and those who thought America should join the war.

Gender is also an issue. Educated they may be, but these women find themselves, more often than not, controlled by men in what was still a patriarchal society. The women believe that:

It was very important … for a woman to preserve her individuality; otherwise she might not hold her husband.

But the truth is somewhat different. Kay is mischievously committed to a mental hospital by her husband, without her knowledge, and finds she needs his agreement to be discharged, while Priss

did not recommend sacrifice, having meekly given up her job and her social ideals for Sloan’s sake. It was now too late, because of Stephen [her son], but she was convinced she had made a mistake.

And then, as you expect from a classic, these more temporal concerns are wrapped up in bigger, more universal themes, such as juggling love and friendship, managing relationships and work, balancing theory versus practice, or navigating the gap between appearance and reality. Our characters reflect the gamut of human nature, being, variously, conservative, radical, idealistic, pragmatic, confident, kind, empathetic, proud, manipulating, ambitious, pompous, opinionated, naive. You name it, you are likely to find it amongst the eight.

Besides its rich content is the writing. It’s so sly and satiric that it carries you on regardless of the story:

Now, in the chapel, they rearranged their fur pieces and smiled at each other, noddingly, like mature little martens and sables: they had been right, the hardness was only a phase; it was certainly a point for their side that the iconoclast and scoffer was the first of the little band to get married.

Moreover, McCarthy can skewer character with just a few words. Candace Bushnell, in her Introduction to my edition, writes that “Readers who desire ‘likeable characters’ in their fiction above all else may be disturbed to find that every one of her characters is flawed.” This is true, and is, in a way, what I liked best. There’s no perfection here, there’s just young women struggling to make lives for themselves with an education that didn’t always make it easy for them to live in the world they found themselves. Here are couple of McCarthy’s character descriptions:

she had an image of herself as a high-bred, tempestuous creature, a sort of Arab steed in an English sporting primitive. (Libby)

fat cheerful New York society girl with big red cheeks and yellow hair, who talked like a jolly beau of the McKinley period, in imitation of her yachtsman father. (Pokey)

a solemn, ashy-haired little girl who looked like a gopher and who felt it her duty to absorb every bit of word-of-mouth information that pertained to consumer problems. (Priss)

In the last chapter, Polly, the most sympathetic of the women, thinks “how young and superstitious they had all been … and how little they had changed.” Perhaps, though I think she’s being a bit hard and that some wisdom had been achieved. Regardless, the ending, when a certain male character gets his comeuppance, is delicious – and was loved by the members of my group!

Mary McCarthy
The group
London: Virago (Hachette Digital), 2009 (Orig. ed. 1963)
438pp.
ISBN: 9780748126934

Chris Womersley, A lovely and terrible thing (#BookReview)

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Book coverDescribed as “twenty macabre and deliciously enjoyable stories for readers of Fiona McFarlane and Lauren Groff”, Chris Womersley’s newest book – his debut collection of short stories – wasn’t necessarily a natural fit for me. I haven’t read Lauren Groff, but I have read and really liked Fiona McFarlane’s clever, memorable, The night guest (my review). However, the macabre is not something I naturally gravitate to. Still, I did like The great unknown (my review), edited by Angela Meyer, and I have been wanting to read Chris Womersley for some time, so I decided to put aside my reservations and give it a shot. I’m glad I did, because although there certainly is an element of the macabre here, the stories aren’t all so macabre that I felt the need to strap in for a shivery ride as the promos were also suggesting. This is not meant to put off those who like shivery rides, but to encourage those who don’t. It’s meant to say, in other words, that there’s something for most readers here.

The stories, in other words, do offer some variety. Most are told in first person male voices, but these voices range from children to teens to grown men, from sons and fathers, to brothers and friends, to husbands. There’s a hunchback, a junkie or two – and three stories use female voices. Despite this variety, however, there is an overall similarity in tone – somewhat melancholic, somewhat reflective. Many, in fact, are stories about something that happened in the past so they have that tone of – hmm, regret, or, if not that, of an uneasiness that has carried through to the present. Or sometimes, it’s just resignation. If you like nostalgia, this is not for you, as the first story makes clear:

My God, those suburban evenings, so full of hope and all its little victims. (“Headful of bees”)

So, what are they about? Fundamentally, and not surprisingly, they are about relationships – families, friends, neighbours, strangers, and, particularly, fathers and sons. Many relationships are under some sort of internal or external stress, or are unusual in some way. Most of these stories can be simply weird and, in some cases, even hopeful. But in other relationships, there’s power at play, and it is more often in these that the macabre, if not downright horror, ensues. In some stories, then, like the opening “Headful of bees”, a young person is mystified by the behaviour of an adult neighbour, while in others, such as the second one, “The house of special purpose”, a well-intentioned or naive person is cruelly taken advantage of by those who wield power.

The stories have been ordered in a way that manages our emotions. The truly macabre stories are interspersed with others, which reduces tension a little but also keeps us guessing. Will this story, we wonder, disturb and unnerve, or simply sadden us? There are a few truly shocking stories, and they include my favourites. Naming them, however, would spoil their impact. As one character, not from one of these stories, says:

You think you know people, but they always have something hidden away. It’s an awful lesson, corrosive … (“The age of terror”)

Fortunately, the collection ends on a story that, while containing tragedy, also offers hope about humanity. It’s not a happy story, but neither is it a complete downer, so we close the book feeling at least a little reassured that our journey has not been completely in vain.

Of course, there’s more to enjoying this book than the variety in and challenge of its stories. There’s also the writing. Womersley’s plotting and language is exquisite. I enjoyed his wordplays, and his use of metaphor. In “The middle of nowhere”, the drug-addicted protagonists are both literally and spiritually lost, and in “Growing pain”, a young adolescent girl’s grief and sense of alienation is manifested in a strange, physical way. Water features in many of the stories, as is signalled by the epigram from Moby Dick which ends with “as everybody knows meditation and water are wedded forever”. However, as everyone also knows, water is a paradoxical element – “another dimension, a netherworld” – that can both give and take. And so it is in these stories. Some of the most gruesome of them have water (or a place of water) at their core.

I said above that the stories are about relationships, which they are, but of course these relationships are explored through stories that deal with the things that confront us as humans. There are grieving parents and children, and people with regrets and failed aspirations. There are dreamers, junkies and mentally ill people. There’s birth and death, there’s deep love and desire for true connection, but there’s also revenge, child abuse and cruelty. Many of the stories explore, in some way, “the chasm that exists in all of us – between who we imagine ourselves to be and the person we truly are” (“The mare’s nest”). A character in “Dark the water, so deep the night” tells the young protagonist that “We tell stories to impose order upon the world, to give things meaning. To give us hope.” If there’s one thing we learn here, it’s that stories, on their own, can’t impose order. More often, they illuminate the chaos!

Of course, I didn’t love them all equally, and there is, as I’ve already said, some sameness to them. The tone is similar, and many are told by a narrator remembering the past. Also, many of the protagonists are young people trying to comprehend the adults around them, though there are older protagonists, including a 79-year-old woman in “The age of terror”.

However, I didn’t find one of them boring. This is not surprising because, although A lovely and terrible thing is Womersley’s first collection, he has been writing short stories for a long time. Sixteen of the twenty here, in fact, have been published before, from 2006 on, in some of the best literary magazines around, including Granta, Meanjin, The Griffith Review. Not a bad record, eh? The stories are, to be a little corny, lovely and terrible things. They take us, as another title in the collection suggests, to “the very edge of things”. What I like about them is that they do this with such control that, even when they push us to the limit, they feel true. Highly recommended.

Chris Womersley
A lovely and terrible thing: Short story collection
Sydney: Picador, 2019
270pp.
ISBN:

(Review copy courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Books banned in Australia

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Book coverThis week, my reading group will be discussing an American classic, Mary McCarthy’s The group. Published in 1963, it sat on the New York Times best-selling list for five months. It also has the honour of having been banned in Australia! I realised that I’ve never done a Monday Musings on banned books, so now seemed a good time …

Last year, in Banned Books Week, The Canberra Times’ Karen Hardy wrote on the subject. She quotes Meredith Duncan, Library Manager at the ANU, as saying that the main type of books that used to be banned in Australia were those “seen as obscene”. She told Hardy that our attitudinal changes towards sex and sexuality have shaped literary censorship over the years:

“In the introduction to one of the editions we have here of the Kamasutra, which was banned in Australia for many years, reads ‘This is only to be read by married men or medical professionals’.

“A lot of censorship revolved around the idea of women taking charge, a lot of men weren’t comfortable with that.”

As times changed, she said, “homosexuality became a hot topic”.

However, as a National Archives of Australia (NAA) blog post says:

Literary and scholarly works made up only a small proportion of the publications banned by Australian Customs. The bulk of prohibited imports were pulp fiction novels, comics, magazines and pornographic material. These items were considered to be a threat, not only to our morals, but also to Australia’s literary standards. They were banned by Customs under special provisions introduced in 1938 to address the growing number of cheap books and magazines entering the country.

Consequently, in the 1940s and 1950s, those popular pulp fiction crime and detective thrillers with their “themes of both sex and violence” were frequently banned by Customs. (Do check out the blog post to see a selection of these, such as Darcy Glinto’s Road floozie!) Adult magazines, too, “were often subject to blanket prohibitions lasting years”. Playboy, for example, was banned here from 1955 to 1960.

Most of the information below comes from posts on the NAA’s Banned blog which they published over 2013. It is worth checking out, as it includes a wonderful selection of primary source documents. Use this Books page link to check out individual banned books.

Ten books banned in Australia

  • James Baldwin’s Another country: partially banned in 1963, until 1966, allowed only for “the serious minded student or reader”. Among the comments made by Kenneth Binns, of the Literature Censorship Board, was that the description of a homosexual incident “on pages 367-375 would both shock and offend the average Australian reader for he is not as sex conditioned as are readers in most other countries”. (Oh, we innocent little Aussies!) He was also concerned that a ban might “even be associated with Australia’s misunderstood ‘White Australia’ policy and her refusal to support UN condemnation of South African Apartheid”. (Poor misunderstood Australia!)
  • William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch: banned 1960 to 1973. The last work of fiction to be banned in Australia, it was banned for being “hard-core pornography”. It was reviewed by the Commonwealth Literature Censorship Board in 1963 after Clem Christesen, Meanjin’s founder, applied to import the novel. The Board allowed Christesen’s request but unanimously agreed to retain the ban on the general sale of the book. Chairman Kenneth Binns said that “there is no need to note any particularly objectionable scene or passage for the book is so full of them and the general writing so extremely coarse that one need only consider the general character and tone”.
  • Aldous Huxley’s Brave new world: banned 1932 to 1937. Ireland was the only other country to ban it. The ban, says the NAA, was supported “with great gusto by church-related associations and temperance movements” but opposed by librarians (of course) and publishers. The NAA writes that the ban was lifted after the appointment of an Appeal Censor, and that “a sexually permissive culture did not follow, nor did a seditious and morally bankrupt one”. (Funny that!)
  • DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s lover: banned 1928 to 1965, for, says Duncan, being “sexually obscene, with explicit relationships”.
  • Mary McCarthy’s The group: banned in Australia, Italy and Ireland, says Wikipedia, for “being offensive to public morals.”
  • Grace Metalius’ Peyton Place: banned 1957 to 1971, after initial approval and dissension within the Board. Positive comments about its depiction of small-town America were set against opinions like those of, yes, Kenneth Binns. He thought the novel’s “profanity and obscene expressions” were excessive, and wrote that “It is unfortunate that Mrs Metalious is so flustered with sex, for she often writes well”.
  • Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: banned 1955 to 1965, though in 1964 its prohibition was appealed when the ANU’s Dr Bob Brissenden added it as a text for his course on American literature. Apparently, a member of the Liberal and Country Party State Council “wondered why students should not study books such as the Bible, or works by Milton, Shakespeare and Dickens” even though this was a course in American literature!
  • Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s complaint: banned 1969 to 1971, and the last work of fiction to be taken to court in Australia. The National Literature Board of Review called it “obscene”, “filthy”, while Chipman of the Department of Customs and Excise noted that it was a bestseller in the America where “permissiveness is unlimited”. (Take that, Americans!) However, literary experts, including Patrick White, argued that it had merits. Its banning history is interesting regarding the role of the states.
  • JD Salinger’s Catcher in the rye: banned 1956 to 1957, although it had been circulating in Australia since publication in 1951. Talk about after the horse bolting! As with most bannings, it resulted in discussion in the media. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote in 1957, that “this country has one of the most arbitrary – and perhaps one of the most inefficient – systems of book censorship in the world”. The Commonwealth Literature Board could, but didn’t have to, review books banned by Customs. In this case, the Board had “no hesitation” in releasing it!
  • Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber: banned 1945 to 1958, for its “crude and obvious appeal to the sexual instinct”, for lacking literary merit and over-emphasising sex. Customs Minister Senator Richard Keane said, “The Almighty did not give the people eyes to read that kind of rubbish”.

Counter-arguments for not banning, or for lifting bans, included practical ones, such as that the book was too expensive for many readers, and that the book was not likely to be of popular interest. (Of course, if they banned it, it would certainly become so!)

Finally, Karen Hardy reminded us in 2018 that there are several non-fiction titles still banned in Australia, including two guide books – Dr Philip Nitschke’s voluntary euthanasia one, The peaceful pill handbook, and The anarchist cookbook, on how to make explosives and weapons, and manufacture drugs. Further, some books remain restricted. Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel, American psycho, for example, cannot be bought in Queensland by those under the age of 18.

As a librarian, I support the freedom to read (freedom of information.)

Comments anyone?