ABC Radio

Monday musings on Australian literature: RN presenters’ pick reads of the year

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I was going to write my Case for post this week, but I think now that I’ll leave it to January. Life is a bit too busy right now to put proper thought into presenting my case (though I’ve pretty much decided which book it will be!) So, instead, since various media outlets are starting to publish “best” or “favourite” books of the year, I thought I’d share those from the presenters of the radio station that I most listen to, ABC Radio National.

Many did not choose Australian books, but given the theme of this post, I’m only going to share those who did. However, you can see the whole list online at Radio National. Here goes:

  • Helen Garner, This house of grief book cover

    Courtesy: Text Publishing

    Damian Carrick – presenter of the Law Report – chose Helen Garner’s This house of grief. Not surprising, I suppose, that a presenter on law would choose this book about a murder trial. He was concerned, he said, that he might find it too bleak, but “from the opening page I was hooked. It’s a page turner, and as it should be it’s an aching lament to the loss of three lives”. I hate the use of the word “aching” in reviews but regular readers here will know that I liked it too.

  • Jonathan Green – presenter of Sunday Extra – chose Richard Flanagan’s The narrow road to the deep north. I’m glad someone did! He felt that, given it had won the Booker Prize, “anything I say isn’t much more than licking the spoon that somebody else used to put the icing on the cake. Even so, gosh this is a good book”. I agree.
  • Lynne Malcolm – presenter of All in the Mind – chose comedian Tim Ferguson’s Carry a big stick. Again, it’s not a surprising choice for the presenter of a program about the mind and the brain, as this book is a memoir focusing particularly on Ferguson’s being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Malcolm refers to Ferguson’s progress from denial to eventual admission when he could hide the condition no longer.
  • Rhianna Patrick – presenter of AWAYE – chose Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and light. This is a book I have on my TBR. Here’s what Patrick says “Van Neerven is part of what I see as the next wave of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, who are university graduates in creative writing. What’s clear early on is van Neerven’s exploration of indigeneity and sexuality, and whether the two can coexist”. That intrigues me. Why can’t they coexist? Clearly, I’ll have to read it to find out.
  • Robyn Williams – presenter of the long-running Science Show – chose Evie Wyld’s All the birds, singing. He says that “It may be about blokes with beers and rugged times on the land, but the voice is always clear and convincing”. Hmm, blokes with beers do appear but I wouldn’t quite say that’s what it was “about”. However, I like the fact that he appreciates Wyld’s voice. (You can check out my review if you like. I expect it will feature high in my top books – when I do my list in January).

Other choices included Eleanor Catton’s The luminaries, and Eimear McBride’s A girl is a half-formed thing, both of which I’ve reviewed this year. The most interesting choice, from my point of view anyhow, was from Ann Jones, presenter of Off the Track. She chose Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole which she described as “fantastically surreal and brutally real”.

For each of the choices, there is a sound grab (at the link I provided above) that you can listen to which gives you a little more about their reasons. I don’t find them all enlightening, but I do find it interesting at this time of year to hear people’s choices and why they chose them.

Have you chosen your favourite book of the year, or are you, like me, waiting until the year is over? (Even then, I suspect, I won’t be able to choose ONE book to top all the others but I will have some favourites.)

Michael Sala and truthful fictions

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Michael Sala The last thread bookcover

The last thread (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

Michael Sala doesn’t actually use the term “truthful fictions”. That was a character in Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the river. But he could have.

Yesterday I heard Sala interviewed on ABC Radio National‘s Life Matters about his debut novel The last thread, which I reviewed last week. Presenter Natasha Mitchell commenced by mentioning the transitions, secrets and traumas that characterise Michaelis/Michael’s life in the novel. She asked why he had chosen the fictional, rather than memoir, route. He responded that he had started writing his story in first person but got swamped by emotions, and then he read J.M. Coetzee’s autobiographical novel*. He realised, he said, that he could write about the child he used to be “as if he were someone else”. (I love hearing how writers – as I also reported in my Jessica Anderson post – learn from other writers.)

This is fair enough I think. There are those who like a “memoir”, as it were, to be a “memoir”, but in our post-postmodern world in which we know that truth is a slippery beast at best, what difference does it really make? How important is it to be able to say Michael Sala did this, felt that, experienced such-and-such versus, for example, how does a child navigate abuse and how does such a child translate those experiences into functional adulthood? How important are questions of fact against exploration of these emotional “truths”?

In other words do we need to know the “facts” to understand the truths? I’m thinking now of Kate Jennings. I’ve reviewed two of her books here, her autobiographical novel, Snake, and her autobiography of sorts, Trouble: Evolution of a radical. Snake is a novella that chronicles Girlie’s life in a complicated family. We know it mirrors much of Jennings’s “real” childhood but we can’t be sure what are the facts and what are scenes created to convey her emotional truths. Trouble, described as an “unconventional autobiography”, is a collection of Jennings’ writings – journalistic articles, poems and excerpts from novels – that have been put together in such a way as to convey something about her life. We may not be able to glean from these slippery books a lot of citable “facts” but both tell us a lot about who Jennings is, about where she came from and what she believes.

All this of course begs the more fundamental question of how factual memoir is anyhow? But that is something I’ll leave – for the time being anyhow. Meanwhile, there’s a scene in Sala’s autobiographical fiction in which his mother discusses his problematical father with her sister:

“He’s a wonderful man,” Elfje says. “We’ve become great friends. Oh, he makes me laugh!”
“That’s one side of him,” Mum says.
“Yes, yes, we all have versions of events, stories to tell.”
“Stories?” Mum says. “Is that what you think they are?”
(from The lost thread, by Michael Sala)

Therein lies the rub. Whatever we read, memoir or fiction, we surely must always be aware that it is “one side” we are getting. Could it be, says she provocatively, that something labelled fiction is a more honest recognition of this fact?

* Coetzee has written more than one work of autobiographical fiction but Sala wasn’t clear which he’d read. I’m assuming he at least read the first one titled Boyhood: Scenes from a provincial life.

Why I love Radio National

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ABC Canberra radio and TV studios in the Canbe...

ABC studios in Canberra (Courtesy: Bidgee, using CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikipedia)

One of the best things about retirement for me is being able to listen to Radio National in the morning. For you overseas readers, Radio National is the national radio station of our national broadcaster, the ABC, Aunty, or, if you want to be formal, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Here is the usual morning line-up:

  • 0830: a Report of some sort: the Health Report on Monday, the Law Report on Tuesday, Rear Vision (a look at matters historical) on Wednesday, Future Tense (change) on Thursday, and Movie Time on Friday.
  • 0900: Life Matters: a wide-ranging interview program devoted to current issues relating to social change and social policy, the things that affect our day-to-day lives such as education, health, the environment, and so on.
  • 1000: The Book Show: all things book-ish
  • 1100: Bush Telegraph: things rural and regional

The Book Show is of course of particular interest to me, and today’s show is a good example. It started with a discussion of the Blake Dawson Prize for Business Literature through an interview with Australian business and sports journalist Gideon Haigh who has won the prize in the past. I pricked my ears up for this one as I hadn’t really thought about business writing until I read Kate Jennings last year. Jennings though focused on business fiction. This prize considers the whole gamut of business writing, most of which is non-fiction. Haigh, for example, won in 2006 with his book Asbestos House about James Hardie Industries and the history of its dealings with asbestos (a topic well-known to Australians). Corporate histories (authorised and unauthorised) are not high on my reading priority, but this interview convinced me that I should not dismiss them (nor other types of business writing) cavalierly.

The next spot in the program was about the recent VIDA report on gender in book writing and reviewing. It shows a strong gender imbalance in both authors reviewed by and who does the reviewing at some of the top literary magazines in the US and UK – like Granta, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review and so on. The Book Show decided to check out the situation in Australia and so approached three of Australia’s top literary editors: Susan Wyndham of the Sydney Morning Herald, Jason Steger of The Age and Steven Rommei of The Australian. These three (two men and one woman) did not do a thorough survey of their respective papers but they all found a gender bias, albeit not as pronounced as VIDA had found (which may be accurate or may be due to their less rigorous methodology). They admitted to not being fully aware of their own unconscious (until now) skewed practices – such as, for example, always offering serious history books to a male reviewer. It’s gobsmacking really just how ingrained this gender stuff is!

The problem, though, is less in the methodology than in interpreting the results – as the literary editors above discussed and as The Reading Ape raised in his post on the topic last week. There are so many questions to ask, such as:

  • are fewer women authors published than men and, if so, why?
  • are the books women write less likely to be reviewed by the mainstream literary papers and journals and, if so, why? (One person suggested that women write more genre books?)
  • are  there fewer women reviewers because they are less likely to put themselves forward as reviewers?
  • who are the literary editors (and their “bosses”), particularly in terms of gender, and what drives their practices?
  • how does the literary culture establishment’s bias (as shown in VIDA’s figures) relate to reading practices in terms of who actually buys and reads the books?

And then there’s the question about us, the bloggers: Who are we, in terms of gender? What are we reading and reviewing? What influence do we have?

(After all this, dare I admit that 60% of the authors I’ve reviewed here to date are male?)

Were you an Argonaut?

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Before the sun and the night and the blue sea, I vow to stand faithfully by all that is brave and beautiful; to seek adventure, and having discovered aught of wonder, or delight; of merriment or loveliness, to share it freely with my comrades, the Band of Happy Rowers. (from The ABC Weekly, 28 Dec 1940)

Once an Argonaut always an argonaut!  Erato 30 (aka Cat Politics) has blogged a couple of times about the Argonauts Club , which was a hugely-popular-in-its-day children’s club broadcast on Australia’s ABC radio from 1941 to 1972. You had to be between 7 and 17 to join, and you were given a Ship Name and Number – that is you became one of the 50 rowers on one of Jason’s ships. (Jason and the Argonauts – get it!) Hence Cat Politics was Erato 30 and I, Whisperinggums, was Athos 26. As Cat Politics (or is it Erato 30?) says, avatars existed a long time before the Internet!

The Argonauts Club had a long history, which I won’t go into here. For a good rundown, check my link above to the Wikipedia article. Suffice it to say that members were encouraged to submit contributions – poems, stories, art works, musical compositions – as well as questions to experts such as Mr Melody Man (Lindley Evans). In addition stories were heard, and information imparted on everything from writing to sports, music to nature, all in the spirit of fun, adventure and creativity.

Now, the thing is that we Argonauts are starting to grow old and, while some histories have been written, such as Rob Johnson’s The age of the Argonauts, the ABC apparently does not have a complete list of ship names, let alone of the 100,000 or so members. The Friends of the National Film and Sound Archive would like to rectify this and so have set up an Argonauts Register. If you were an Argonaut and would like to register, here is the form. Please do – our cultural history needs you!

That was one reason for writing this post. My other reason was to comment on the number of significant Australian writers, artists and musicians who passed through the Argonauts Club, either as presenters or writers for the show, or as members. Presenters included poets A.D. Hope and Dame Mary Gilmore, artist Jeffrey Smart, actors John Ewart and Peter Finch, the photographer Frank Hurley, to name a very few. One of the most well-known writers for the the Children’s Session was Ruth Park whose serial, The muddle-headed wombat, is one of the first things mentioned whenever two or more Argonauts get together.

Famous Australians who were Argonauts include comedian Barry Humphries, novelist Christopher Koch, composer Peter Sculthorpe, writer Robert Dessaix, musician Rolf Harris and television writer Tony Morphett, again to name a very few. Morphett is reported as saying that the Argonauts inspired him to see writing as a career: “This is a valid thing to be doing – it’s okay to be a writer.”

As for me, I was not one of those keenly contributing Argonauts who aimed for the Dragon’s Tooth award let alone the ultimate Golden Fleece and Bar, but I loved the show. It was an important part of my childhood. There has, I think, been nothing quite like it since, on radio or TV, that has inspired such a wide age-group for so long. What a shame that is.

Rob Johnson
The golden age of the Argonauts
Rydalmere: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997
270pp
ISBN: 0733605281