Australian writers

Heather Rose, Bruny (#BookReview)

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Book coverIf The yield (my review) was Tara June Winch’s passion project, I’d say Bruny is Heather Rose’s. It’s a very different book to her previous novel The museum of modern love (my review). Not only is it a strongly plot-driven novel, but it’s about something that is clearly dear to her heart, the future of Tasmania and, perhaps more generally, of liberal democracy.

Bruny could be described as a genre-bender. Part political thriller, part romance, verging even towards dystopian fiction, the novel tracks the fate of a bridge being built to join the main island of Tasmania with Bruny Island. In it, New York-based UN conflict resolution specialist, and twin sister of Tasmania’s premier, Astrid Coleman returns home at the behest of her twin brother to ensure that the bridge is completed on time after a bomb had nearly destroyed it. It’s not long, however, before she smells a rat. Just what that rat is, who’s behind it and why, is what keeps us turning the pages.

Now, as this is a plot-driven book – and one underpinned by political intrigue – I am fearful of giving too much away. However, fortunately, it’s not all plot, because the plot serves a purpose. The book reminds me in a way – though I’m not sure Rose will appreciate this – of Richard Flanagan’s The unknown terrorist (which I read long before blogging.) It too is a strongly plot-driven novel from a literary fiction author, and it too was inspired by a clearly passionate political concern. In Flanagan’s case it was how government and the media were handling the terrorism threat, engendering fear and consequently facilitating the scapegoating of people with little or no evidence.

Anyhow, back to Bruny. In the Bruny teaser on her website, Rose describes her book as a “political thriller”, “satire”, “love story”, and “family saga”, which, fundamentally, is questioning the “new world order”. Now, Rose has done something clever, I think, in setting her book just into the future. The American president isn’t named in the novel, but the description Rose provides leaves us in no doubt as to the timing of her novel, which would be around 2022. Astrid says:

‘Right now, America has an isolationist, neo-conservative president who doesn’t believe in American strength being used to stabilise the world. Quite the opposite. He considers it the chief weapon to exert dominance. And he’s in his second term. He’s turned his back on American’s allies because he doesn’t believe in that framework. Now we’re seeing the fallout of that approach and it’s crippling international relations, the global economy, the American economy.’

I say the dating is clever because, being just into the future, we can’t say “that didn’t happen”, but Rose can say “this is what might happen”. Readers, of course, have to decide for themselves whether they agree that what Rose proposes could happen, but I must say she was uncomfortably prescient about cruise ships!

It made the whole front page of the newspaper. BIO-SCANDAL! The whole fiasco of cruise ships and no policing, no ability to quarantine sick passengers and get medical help to them on board. The risk of an epidemic, if they were allowed into our hospitals.

So, what are Rose’s concerns? She is concerned that, with America withdrawing from the field, another power – in this case, China – can step in. She sets up a Macchiavellian plot based on this supposition, but this is as far as I’ll go about that. She is concerned more broadly about the increasing conservatism of governments, on their focus on money (“jobs and growth”) over people (“health and education”). She is worried that unimpeded progress – which is already a concern in Tasmania – will be detrimental to community, to society. She sees the destruction of the arts as weakening our culture and laying us open to outside influence. Government official Edward tells Astrid:

‘ … This government, at a state and a federal level, they’ve hammered the arts for years. They’ve eviscerated it … Every theatre company or film production company in this country – unless it’s making a Marvel movie – has been defunded. That’s our cultural expression, and if we don’t have that, it weakens everything. It’s a bit like leaching. We’re wilting with cultural anaemia…’

Ok, so now you might be thinking this is a preachy novel – as political novels can be – and it is to a degree. There are times when the explanations threaten to take over, but Rose manages not to bog it down too much. The story gradually builds up pace, with most of the messages carried through dialogue. Being told first person helps, too, because we don’t have an omniscient third person telling us like it is, but Astrid sharing her thoughts, concerns, and ponderings with us. Is there something, though, that she’s not telling us? How reliable is she? That little niggle also keeps us reading.

And then there are the characters. Astrid’s family is not exactly your typical one. Her endearing but stroke-affected father says little except to – rather perspicaciously – quote Shakespeare at his family; her prickly mother has terminal cancer; and her half-sister, Max, is the Labor leader of the opposition. Her brother, as I’ve already said, is the state premier, while his wife Stephanie has a warmth and intelligence that belies her supportive political wife demeanour. There is also a love interest for 54-year-old divorced Astrid down there on Bruny! The relationships between all these characters not only move the story and ideas on, but they also provide a little human respite from the machinations. Respite also comes from little touches of humour, much of it drawing from Rose’s deep understanding of Tasmania and Tasmanians. You have to laugh, for example, at the plethora of activist groups, like the Pythonesque Bruny Friends Group, Bruny in Action, and the Bruny Progress Society!

Concluding the above-mentioned Bruny teaser, Rose says “I hope you are entertained by this novel; I hope that you are intrigued by it; and I hope that it also makes you think?” She achieves all of this. The plot and the strongly delineated characters, as befits her satire, make it both intriguing and entertaining to read, while the politics certainly make you think. The Chinese government – together with neo-conservative governments – are the villains of the piece. This makes for uncomfortable reading, and not just because of the truth of the issue but because naming villains this way, as we know, can lead to wrong and dangerous assumptions. The Chinese government is not all Chinese people, just like a certain American president does not stand for all Americans. It behoves thinking readers to make that distinction.

And finally, there’s the ending. Without giving it away, I will say that there’s a certain question of the ends justifying the means, of those believing they are right taking matters into their own hands. It makes you think! Bruny, then, is more than an engaging political thriller. It is a book intended to challenge us to think about the world we are making for ourselves, and to consider what we can do about it.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) enjoyed the novel; Bill (The Australian Legend) also enjoyed it, with some reservations.

Challenge logoHeather Rose
Bruny
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2019
ISBN: 9781760875169
408pp.

Writing War: A panel discussion about war and historical writing

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In its original guise, I would not have been able to attend Writing war: A panel discussion featuring Nigel Featherstone, Melanie Myers and Simon Cleary because it was going to be held in Brisbane’s Avid Readers bookstore. However, in one of those lucky COVID-19 silver linings, the discussion was transformed into an online ZOOM discussion and, hey presto, I could attend for the princely sum of $5. Having read Featherstone’s Bodies of men (my review) and Myers’ Meet me at Lennon’s (my review), and being interested in Cleary’s The war artist, it was an opportunity too good to miss.

Convenor, and author herself, Cass Moriarty, started by introducing the authors and asking them to talk about their novels, particularly in terms of their inspiration or intention:

  • Nigel Featherstone talked about wanting to explore different expressions of masculinity, particularly as expressed under extreme military pressure. He wanted to look beyond the ANZAC mantra that all men are brave, all do remarkable things, and so on. Can being a deserter, he wondered, be an act of bravery?
  • Simon Cleary described his Afghanistan War novel as a homecoming story, as being about soldiers finding a place in their home countries, as looking at the cost to the community of sending people to war.
  • Melanie Myers introduced a new genre (or sub-genre) to me, the “ensemble home-front novel”, which, she said, was coined by writer and educator, William Hatherell. It encompasses books like Come in spinner. Her novel is primarily about women’s experience of WW2.

On the challenge of writing about past wars with nuance

Featherstone immediately turned to the ANZAC idea, asking how do we talk about ANZAC without being kicked out of the country, and how is it that we have created a day that we can’t critique. He referred to Peter Stanley’s history Bad characters, which is about soldiers who were labelled as “bad”. Stanley’s book counterbalances the traditional ANZAC mantra, and taught him that bravery and cowardice can have many meanings.

Cleary liked the word coined by Featherstone for ANZAC, its “uncriticability”! He spoke of something he returned to a few times during the evening, the idea that sending people to war is political act. It means, he said, that writing about war is also a political act. Too many war novels focus on glory, resulting in the more human facets, including genuine human trauma, often being missing.

On that tricky question of the authority to write about war, when you haven’t personally experienced it

Myers talked about the challenge of being true to the times and values you are writing about, while being sensitive to those of your own era. Writing about African-Americans in Brisbane during World War 2, for example, she had to deal with the “N-word”.

Featherstone confronted the question more head on, asking “who gets to tell what story?” He did question his ability to write about war but, essentially, he believes “writers can do whatever they want”, with the proviso that they be prepared to talk about it. However, he also, a little anxiously but generously, shared his experience of inherited trauma (epigenetics), through his grandfather’s experience of World War 1.

Cleary noted that authority can come from various sources – personal experience, the novelist’s imagination and creative experience, and, returning to that idea of war being “a deeply political act”, he argued that “every citizen has a right to an opinion” about war.

Regular readers here will know that I agree, philosophically, with Featherstone, including that authors need to be prepared to discuss their choices. I also liked Cleary’s argument.

On the de rigueur question of research 

Myers explained some of her research process, saying that she starts with secondary sources, before looking at primary ones, and that in the case of this novel, she also walked the city imagining how it was, how it looked.

Cleary said that it was important to know the details – even those not actually needed in the work – to help avoid clangers. He also said – and I loved this – that writing novels is an excuse for learning stuff!

There was discussion about the impact of war on the social and economic opportunities for women, on values and prejudices, on the bonds forged during war, and on the burdens of war. Featherstone spoke of the physical and emotional scars of war. He pointed to a book titled We were there which reports on a survey of 3,700 World War 2 soldiers. A significant lesson from this book was that there can be multiple perspectives. He exemplified this by sharing a returned soldier’s view of his life versus the wife’s rather different view!

On should you write about war and love

Featherstone reiterated his position that there are no “shoulds” and that, anyhow, he wanted to write about love as a force of liberation. Love, he said, is what gets us through. Cleary noted that being in the proximity of death can make people feel vulnerable and therefore open to new things, and that these are the stuff of writing about war. However, he also said that war and gore can be depressing, and that art and love can provide useful “leavening”.

On whether war fiction is a genre

Myers answered that she specifically wrote in the “ensemble home-front genre” while Cleary didn’t see his book as being in the war novel tradition, but as simply being a story about humans dealing with an issue.

And on whether there are any parallels re society’s response to war and to the current pandemic, Cleary suggested that in war, as in the pandemic, humanity is fragmented, that borders are closed and self-interest reins, but, in both situations, he said, you can also “flip it around” to see a spirit of solidarity.

On the importance of documenting war

Featherstone responded that the work of artists is to ask difficult, dangerous, blasphemous questions, that we need artists to ask questions politicians won’t, that artists can “dream their way into answers”. Getting into trickier territory – though it wasn’t further explored – he also said that artists can explore different versions of history, the “what ifs”. (Kate Grenville would agree!)

Myers suggested that the volume of books still being written about World War 2 implies we still can’t make sense of it, that it is still unintelligible, while Cleary believed that it’s easy to forget the past, and that the role of fiction is to explore “the costs and consequences of the past”.

Ending the session

At this point the evening’s co-ordinator, Krissy Kneen, brought the event to a conclusion with some general questions:

  • Their advice to young writers: “if it feels dangerous, it’s worth doing”, “trust your instincts” and “be brave”.
  • War-related books they’d recommend: Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’ Come in spinner (Myers); Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (Cleary) and The honest history book (Featherstone).
Melanie Myers

Melanie Myers (with the three novels faced out behind her)

Given the opportunity to plug their new work, only Myers was brave enough to name her project. I was thrilled to hear it as she’s research pioneering Australian filmmakers, the McDonagh Sisters. I look forward to that. Featherstone simply said he was not going near war for a long time, while Cleary said that he had a project but it was early days!

The hour whizzed by. Moriarty’s questions were focused and intelligent, the panelists’ responses were respectful and thoughtful, and the technology held up! It wasn’t the same as being in the room, but then, I wouldn’t have been, would I, so I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to hear these three writers speak.

Writing War: A panel discussion
20 April 2020, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
ZOOM Online, organised by Avid Reader (bookshop)

Julie Thorndyke, Mrs Rickaby’s lullaby (#BookReview)

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Book coverQuaint title, eh? I really didn’t know what to expect when I accepted this book for review, but accept I did because the publisher is a quality little press and because the author, Julie Thorndyke, although unknown to me, has a track record as a writer, particularly of tanka. Mrs Rickaby’s lullaby, however, is her first novel.

In addition, I was intrigued by the advance description of the protagonist as a “semi-retired botanical illustrator … with a penchant for Mozart”. Well, I love botanical illustrations and I’m a fan of Mozart. Who isn’t? And finally, there was the fact that the novel is set in a “peaceful retirement village”. Being of an age that is eligible for retirement village living, that was a bit of a drawcard too.

So far so good, but what sort of book is it? Well, the back cover blurb provides a hint when it says that Mrs Rickaby’s “tranquility is disturbed when close friend and neighbour brings home a twice-widowed younger man of dubious character, and introduces him as her future husband. Petty theft, vandalism and violence disrupt the peaceful retirement village. How can Mrs Rickaby protect her friend from this con-man lover?”

Now we are getting closer. I think the best way to describe this novel is “cosy crime”, which Wikipedia describes as “a subgenre of crime fiction in which sex and violence are downplayed or treated humorously, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community.” This is not really my genre, any more than any crime is, but Mrs Rickaby’s lullaby turned out to be a light enjoyable read.

The story is told in Mrs Rickaby’s first person voice. She is in her early 70s and had moved to the retirement village after losing her much loved husband. She has two children who, at the start of the novel, are both living overseas, so her most important social contacts are her friends at the village, particularly her neighbour Irene, plus her cat Missy.

It’s a curious book, because it doesn’t, I’d say, perfectly conform to the “cosy crime” genre. Much of it reads like a story about contemporary life, and the challenges of ageing, of losing your partner and having to make a new life for yourself. All this Mrs Rickaby does. Her days are occupied by spending time with Missy, by her involvement in the local Orchid Society, by her free-lance botanical illustration commissions, and by socialising with her friends in the village. It’s only gradually that the crime aspect comes into view as her early suspicions about Irene’s new man, Ralph, start to seem valid. Gradually, the mystery aspect hots up as Mrs Rickaby and another friend from the village, Annette, start nosing around about Ralph in their effort to protect Irene from making a bad, and potentially dangerous, mistake.

I enjoyed reading about Mrs Rickaby’s relationships with family and friends, albeit they were generally easier relationships than those in Charlotte Wood’s The weekend (my review). This is not surprising, perhaps, as most of Mrs Rickaby’s friends are new, and thus free of the years of baggage carried by Wood’s friends who are, coincidentally, in the same early 70s age range. My only demur regarding the characters concerns Irene, “a skilled surgeon” who was still volunteering for Doctors Without Borders”. Could such a person be taken in by such a con man? My initial reaction was not, but perhaps I’m naive? Anyhow …

The narrative is framed by Mrs Rickaby’s love of music. The ten chapters all have musical titles, like Nocturne, Misterioso, Counterpoint, Agitato, and Danse macabre. You can see, by these, how the chapter titles might reflect their content. Threading through all this is one particular song, a favourite of Mrs Rickaby’s, the lullaby “Weigenleid”, which is also the title of the final chapter. Once ascribed to Mozart modern research now suggests otherwise. It is a piece of music that is at once calming and melancholic, making it suited, Mrs Rickaby suggests, to contemplating the end of one’s life …

As you would expect with the “cosy” style, the novel has a light humorous touch. It also has some reflections worth pondering, such as this on loneliness:

It is quite amazing to me how easily habits, both good ones and bad, are formed. The single glass of chardonnay in the evening can easily become a bottle, and then two; one spoon of tiramisu becomes a bowlful; an attentive man becomes a lover to a lonely woman, then her husband, whether or not she wanted or needed one, in her rational mind. But loneliness does odd things to one, and even the simplest of pleasures can become a habit, a need, a necessity.

And this on life from Annette who reassesses her realisation in her forties that “life is short” to:

“Well, now I realise that it’s actually too long … too long and too lonely. The evenings,” she whispers. “Just too many and too long.”

And, this important one:

Investments in friendship are the most vulnerable and irredeemable of assets.

Mrs Rickaby’s lullaby is probably not a book for everyone – then again, what is – but is perfectly suited to those looking for something gentle and reflective, but spiced-up with just a little page-turning twist as well.

Challenge logoJulie Thorndyke
Mrs Rickaby’s lullaby
Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2019
183pp.
ISBN: 9781760417093

(Review copy courtesy the author)

Tara June Winch, The yield (#BookReview)

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Book coverTara June Winch’s novel, The yield, follows her impressive – and David Unaipon award-winning – debut novel Swallow the air (my review). Ten years in the making, The yield could be described as her “passion project”. It makes a powerful plea for Indigenous agency and culture.

I wrote about The yield’s genesis last year, but will repeat it here. It was inspired by a short course Winch did in Wiradjuri language run by Uncle Stan Grant Sr (father of Stan Grant whom I’ve reviewed here a couple of times). Discovering language was, she said, transformative, but turning her passion into a book proved tricky. She started with too broad a canvas, until her mentor, Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, encouraged her to focus on 500 acres of land, telling her she could tell her story through that lens. So, she found her 500 acres on the Murrumbidgee, created fictional places – the Murrumby River, and the towns, Massacre Plains and Broken – and her novel started to take shape.

“that unhandsome truth”

But my, what a shape it takes. It has three, roughly alternating, narrative strands, each quite different in style but each reflecting or enhancing the other two. They are:

  • Poppy Albert Gondiwindi, dictionary writer, first person narrator. He is dying but is also a time-traveller, so, Winch said, his story has elements of magical realism. It’s told through the words in his dictionary, starting at the end of the alphabet, “a nod to the backwards whitefella world I grew up in”. “The dictionary”, Poppy says, “is not just words – there are little stories in those pages too.” There sure are. Through them Poppy tells the story of his and his people’s lives; he passes on as much of their culture as he has learnt and can tell; and he shares his hopes and values:

respect – yindyamarra I think I’ve come to realise that with some things, you cannot receive them unless you give them too. Unless you’ve even got the opportunity to give and receive. Only equals can share respect, otherwise it’s a game of masters and slaves – someone always has the upper hand when they are demanding respect. But yindyamarra is another thing too, it’s a way of life – a life of kindness, gentleness and respect at once. That seems like a good thing to share, our yindyamarra.

  • August Gondiwindi, Poppy’s grand-daughter, third person voice. She tells a contemporary story of the 500 acres where the Gondiwindis live, and the challenges faced, including from mining and river degradation. Her story is about finding her place after living overseas for ten years. It’s a quest story, in a way, a little like that of Swallow the air’s protagonist. We meet her in Chapter 2 as she hears of the death of Poppy:

She knew that she had once known the beloved land where the sun slapped the barren earth with an open palm and knew too that she would return for the funeral … go back and try to find all the things she couldn’t find so many thousands of kilometres away.

(“Where the sun slapped the barren earth with an open palm”. Winch’s language throughout is gorgeous.)

  • Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf, Lutheran missionary, first person voice. Winch created him, she said, to “round” out the story. He’s her villain, but she gives some balance, humanity, to him by sharing his own experience of loss of home and mother tongue. His story is told through the letter he writes in 1915 to Dr George Cross of the British Society of Ethnography about his experiences running a mission from the 1880s. The first instalment ends with why he is writing it:

To tell how wrongs became accepted as rights. … I will tell that unhandsome truth, even if it will amount to last words. The circumstances and the times demand it.

His story is the most problematic for readers because he, with good intentions, established the ironically named mission, Prosperous House, near the non-ironically named town of Massacre Plains. Indeed, Poppy writes in his dictionary that the Reverend was “the only good white gudyi” he’d known, gudyi meaning medicine man, priest, conjuror. Greenleaf’s heart is in the right place – having seen the “the vile inhumanity practised by the white-skinned Christian on his dark-skinned brother in order to obtain land and residence, for ‘peaceful acquisition'” – but of course he is a man of his times and his paternalistic actions have their own consequences. August sees the paradox in his “trying to protect those ancestors at the same time as punishing them”, while her aunt Missy takes a harsher stance.

These three stories span over 100 years from the late nineteenth century to the present, with Poppy Albert’s dictionary providing the novel’s backbone, spiritually, culturally, and plot-wise. August’s story, on the other hand, provides its emotional heart, while Greenleaf’s provides important historical context.

The stories don’t, then, just meander along side by side for their own sakes. Each contributes to an overall plot which concerns a proposed mine, and efforts to stop it – a story that is broadly reminiscent of non-Indigenous Australian author Madelaine Dickie’s Red can origami (my review). In both stories the Indigenous people need to invoke Native Title if they are to have a chance of stopping the mine, and in both stories competing interests and loyalties, not to mention a helping of skulduggery, work to prevent the Indigenous owners from progressing their claim.

In Winch’s story, Poppy’s dictionary, which documents not only language but his people’s ongoing connection to the land, together with a collection of artefacts that had been donated to a museum by local rich landowners, and the information in Reverend Greenleaf’s letter, are critical to the Native Title claim. August and her family’s challenge is to realise the relevance of and/or discover and locate these “proofs”, while others try to foil them. It’s the oft-repeated story across Australia when traditional owners, protestors and landowners, with competing or criss-crossing interests, confront development, particularly mines.

Threading through all this is the novel’s heart, August’s journey to find herself and her place of belonging, as she navigates her people’s painful history of being “torn apart”, of massacres and dispossession, of racism, of incarceration, and of abuse from both within and without her culture. These are stories we’ve heard before. However, Winch keeps them fresh and urgent by engaging with contemporary thought (concerning, for example, Indigenous agricultural practice and the idea of slavery) and by creating characters who feel real and authentic, who are complicated like those in Melissa Lucashenko’s Too much lip (my review), rather than simple mouthpieces for ideology.

For all the anger and sadness in the book, it is also a positive – perhaps even hopeful – one. Early on, Poppy’s wife and August’s grandmother, Elsie, tells her, “Please don’t be a victim”. This is, I’d say, Winch’s plea to her people, and is reinforced by Poppy’s dictionary words at the end in which he says the time for shame is over. It is time, in other words, to heal, to be proud, to embrace country with confidence.

The yield is a rewarding read. Its three very different voices challenge our minds to think carefully about what we are reading, while its plot and characters engage our hearts. I would be happy to see it win the Stella Prize next week.

Challenge logoLisa (ANZLitLovers) also loved the book and includes examples from Poppy’s dictionary.

Tara June Winch
The yield
Hamish Hamilton, 2019
344pp.
ISBN: 9780143785750

Rick Morton, One hundred years of dirt (#BookReview)

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Book coverWay back in the early 1970s when I was an undergraduate university student, I did some sociology, and one of our set books was The myth of equality by Tom Roper. It, and the courses around it, have informed ever since my understanding of how our society operates. Morton’s book One hundred years of dirt would have been perfect recommended reading for these studies. At the end of his first chapter he says this:

the single experience of my sister’s road to this point detonates the argument that equality of opportunity is stitched into our nationhood.

One hundred years of dirt, in other words, is not a simple memoir, as it might initially appear, but is, rather, a cry to Australians to see that the ideas, the myths we hold dear, are just that, myths.

But now, back to the beginning. Rick Morton, a thirty-something journalist, grew up tough. Born on a remote outback cattle station to a family of violent men, he experienced more than his share of trauma. Besides the intergenerational violence, he saw, when he was 7 years old, his older brother nearly burn to death and then, while his mother was away with that brother in hospital, saw his father carry on an affair with the governess. Not surprisingly, this caused a family breakdown, resulting in his mother leaving with her three children and no financial support. Poverty was theirs from then on. Morton speaks eloquently of the struggle to make ends meet, making it clear that families like theirs have no time to consider issues of the day, like climate change, when even a mooted $7 Medicare co-payment “could be the difference between eating or not for a person on the poverty line.”

Time, in fact, is an interesting issue – and one that resonated with me, too, as a feminist. Time is a commodity and how we choose to spend it – or are able to spend it – is political. Like hours at the hairdresser for example. (I know I am treading on sensitive toes here, but so be it.) Anyhow, as Morton says, “only some people have the time” to be “woke”. Just “living for so many people in Australia is exhausting“.

So, on the surface, One hundred years of dirt could be seen as your standard misery memoir: Boy from poor and violent background struggles against the odds to make it good as a journalist and successful author, with the help of a loving mother. It is that, superficially, but it’s much more too.

There is a general chronological movement to the story. It starts in the present, when that point quoted above about “equality of opportunity” is made. It then flashes back to the family’s origins on huge cattle properties in southwest Queensland, focusing particularly on grandfather George Morton and his hard, violent ways. From here, Morton moves more or less chronologically through his life, but each chapter is framed around a theme, so the chronology is not exact. The chapters, in fact, could be read as individual essays on their specific topic, such as drug (ice) addiction, mental health, being gay, class, and otherness or outsiderness. For some readers – as some in my bookgroup found I think – this departure from a more typical narrative flow may make the book feel disjointed. However, for me, the clear heralding in the first chapter that One hundred years of dirt was about more than one life had me engaged and ready, perhaps, for anything!

That anything turned out to be a personal exploration of how inequality plays out in contemporary Australia, supported by smatterings of socioeconomic data. Morton is, after all, a journalist, and so he brings his journalistic nose for facts to bear on his and his family’s personal experiences. In doing so, he provides example after example of how out of touch the knowledge class or “commentariat” is with the lives of those at the bottom end of the income stream. He discusses, for example, unpaid internships and the incomprehension that there are people who just can’t afford to take advantage of them. Journalism, which is rife with unpaid internships as a pathway in, has become one of “the most exclusive middle-class professions of the 21st century”. Morton describes the complete ignorance many in the middle-class have about their privilege:

There are those who have had the good fortune to never have felt other than the silkiness of privilege, their bubbles so perfect they cannot feel the gravel underneath.

He also writes:

As a nation, we have convinced ourselves that all of us has the same standing start, but this is neither true for the working class whites from broken families nor for those with black or brown skin. It’s not true for those without a proper education nor for those who were abused.

However, this book is not just bitter medicine. It has a spoonful of sugar. There are some genuinely funny moments – some of them black of course – and there are Morton’s wonderful turns of phrase which illustrate his meaning beautifully. He talks, for example, about working in a workplace surrounded by colleagues from “moderately wealthy and upper class families”:

… my colleagues [whom he did see as “dear friends”] could not fathom the life I had led. There were frequent attempts at empathy but it sounded a lot like people who were reading pre-prepared lines. Imagine a fish turning up to discover her psychologist is a Very Concerned sea eagle.

Love the fish analogy, but ouch, really, ouch! I feel I have a good understanding of inequality of opportunity and the ways in which it underpins disadvantage in Australia, but finding the right language in face-to-face encounters is not easy.

I have probably made this book sound like a sociological thesis or polemic. There is that, but it is still, at heart, a memoir. It’s simply that I have focused on what I see as the book’s main message. However, this message is wrapped up in a story about human beings, and particularly about Rick and his dearly loved mother Deb. He describes her as “the hero of this piece”, the mother who

sees boy as special, tells him he was sent here from that big night sky by beings unknown to report back on what he sees. She invented the aliens because she couldn’t see herself as the protagonist. She outsourced the explanation for her own success as a mother to the aliens out there.

Lovely Deb; thoughtful, provocative Rick. This is a powerful read.

Rick Morton
One hundred years of dirt
Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2018
191pp.
ISBN: 9780522873153

David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short (eds), The near and the far: More stories from the Asia-Pacific region, Vol. 2 (#BookReview)

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Book cover

This anthology, like the first The near and the far volume, stems from a project called WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange), an intercultural and intergenerational program which “brings together Australian and Asia-Pacific writers for face-to-face collaborative residencies in Asia and Australia”. The most recent residencies have been in Indonesia (2018), The Philippines (2017) and China (2016). The editors write in their Introduction to this volume that these residencies provide a safe space in which writers come to trust “in a way that is powerful and unusual, that their bumbling work-in-progress and their wild hopes will be met with kindness.” This is probably why, as Maxine Beneba Clarke describes in her Forward, “the writing in this book veritably sings: it is a cacophony of poetry, essay-writing, fiction and nonfiction”.

This volume is structured similarly to the first, starting with the foreword and introduction, and concluding with some notes on WrICE and a list of contributors with mini-bios at the back. There is also, in this one, a conversation between the two editors. The works are again organised into three sections, this volume’s being Rites of passage, Connecting flights, and Homeward bound. For some reason, I enjoyed more of the pieces in first and third sections, than the second. There are 27 stories, with a little over half being by women; three are translated. As in the first volume, each piece is followed by a reflection by the author – on the writing process, their goals and/or their experience of WrICE.

To tame words with ideas (Nhã Thuyên)

Now the stories. Given the project, the writers are of course a diverse group, coming from Australia (including two First Nations writers), Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. I knew the Australians – Ali Cobby Eckermann, Alice Pung, Christos Tsiolkas, Ellen Van Neeerven – but most were new to me, which feels embarrassing, really.

I’m not sure I could ascertain a strong theme running through this collection as I did last time, but there is an overall sense of writers trying “to tame words with ideas” (“Utterances, by Nhã Thuyên, tr. by Nguyên-Hoàng Quyên), of trying to find the right words to articulate their ideas across diverse cultural spaces. I like this image of taming words with ideas. It suggests to me many things, including that words are hard to pin down, and that ideas/emotions/passions are hard to communicate in words. It is certainly something that you feel the writers working at in this book, some of them consciously, overtly, sharing their struggles with us.

I particularly liked the first section “Rites of passage”, with its pieces about, essentially, identity, though the subject matter includes issues like aging, coming out, postnatal depression, father-son relationships. Christos Tsiolkas in “Birthdays” writes of a gay man, grieving after the break-up of a longterm relationship, and facing aging alone. Told third-person, but with an immediacy that has you identifying with the narrator’s unhappy restlessness, his questioning of who he is, and where he is going, makes a perfect, accessible first piece for the anthology.

In “Eulogy for a career”, Asian Australian, Andy Butler explores the challenges of identity in white Australia, of finding his place, particularly as a young Asian-looking boy wanting to ballroom dance! He cynically notes that, after years of ostracism, he is suddenly, in this new pro-diverse world, being offered opportunities. “Progressive white people,” he writes, “can’t get enough of us”. But, he knows and we know how fragile this foundation is likely to be. First Nations writer Ellen van Neerven closes out this section with small suite of poems, “Questions of travel”, riffing on Michelle de Kretser’s novel of the same name. “When we travel”, she writes, “we walk with a cultural limp.” Our identities can be fluid or feral or freer – when we travel – but there are no easy answers to living and being.

In the second section, “Connecting flights”, the pieces are loosely linked by explorations of place and self. Mia Wotherspoon’s Iceland-set short story, “The blizzard”, exposes the moral and ethical complexities of contemporary political activism, while Steven Winduo’s “A piece of paradise” crosses continents, with characters from Papua New Guinea, Australia and the US pondering the possibility of intercultural relationships. Han Yujoo’s “Private barking” is one of the pieces that overtly addresses that challenge of taming words. “Sometimes we need a knife to write. (Or teeth)”, says Korean Yujoo, trying to write with her “little English”.

First Nations author, Ali Cobby Eckermann opens the last set with “Homeward bound”, a home-grounded poem set in a cave where self finds home in place, but knows it’s not secure. Else Fitzgerald’s  “Slippage” is a cli-fi short story, in which grief for the environment is paralleled by grief for a lost love. The very next story Lavanya Shanbhogue Arvind’s “A long leave of absence” is also about a lost love, this one due to a father’s forbidding the marriage, resulting in the narrator turning to alcohol. For each of these writers, home is fraught.

There are several pieces in this section that I’d love to share, but the one I must is deaf writer Fiona Murphy’s “Scripta Continua”. I must share it because it reiterates much of what Jessica White writes about in Hearing Maud (my review). This five-part piece takes us from the idea of “conversations”, which Murphy often feels like she is “peering into, rather than partaking in”, through the “spaces” (and silences) deaf people frequently inhabit, the fatiguing “attention” so necessary for communication, and the “writing” that helped her start to understand herself better, to “Auslan”, the sign language system that brings new, less fatiguing, ways of conversing and inhabiting space!

The final piece, “Wherever you are” by Joshua Ip, is a real treat. A long poem comprising 28 quatrains, it consistently flashed my memory with phrases and ideas that sounded familiar. Well, of course they did, because, as he explains in his closing reflection, “Each quatrain is a response to each writer’s gift, in sequence”! So 27 pieces, 27 quatrains in response, with a concluding one of his own. How clever, and what respectful fun many of them are. “Words span and spin the globe”, he writes. If you are interested in such words – touching, probing, confronting ones – I recommend this book.

Challenge logo

David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short (eds),
The near and the far: More stories from the Asia-Pacific region, Vol. 2
Melbourne: Scribe, 2019
295pp.
ISBN: 9781925849264

(Review copy courtesy Scribe)

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Guardian Australia’s Unmissables

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Although I’d seen it before, it was BookJotter Paula’s latest Winding Up the Week (#110) post that reminded me of The Guardian Australia’s Unmissables series. Initiated last March, Unmissables aims to highlight 12 new releases they deem “significant”.

Before I share the books highlighted to date, though, I’d like to talk about the project’s funding because, as most of you know, how quality journalism is paid for is, currently, a critical issue. The Guardian, unlike some other newspapers online, is not paywalled. Instead, it asks readers to support them financially, by either subscribing, which I do, or, “contributing”, which, in effect, means donating without tax deductibility. Clearly, though, that’s not enough to produce the breadth and depth of content that we readers like. Consequently, they also turn to “outside” sources. They have at least three models: “supported by”, “paid content/paid for by”, and ‘”advertiser content/from our advertisers funding”. Unmissables comes under the first one, and is “supported by” the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. This method is, unlike the other two, “editorially independent”. They say:

Before funding is agreed with a client, relevant senior editors are consulted about its suitability and the editor-in-chief has the final say on whether a funding deal is accepted. A client whose branding appears on editorial content may have a role in suggesting what kind of topics are covered, but the commissioning editor is not obliged to accept ideas from the funder. The content is written and edited by Guardian and Observer journalists, or those approved by GNM [Guardian News and Media], to the same standards expected in all of our journalism. GNM will not show copy to funders for approval.

I’ve written about the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund a few times before, including in a dedicated Monday Musings post. From my observer’s point of view, it seems like this fund is doing some good things to support and promote our literary culture.

Now, though, the books …

Author event: Heidi Sze on her book Nurturing your new life

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Book coverA book primarily intended for postpartum mothers is not really the sort of book Whispering Gums’ readers would expect to see here, but let me explain. Melbourne-based Heidi Sze started her food blog, Apples Under My Bed, the same year I started mine. However, that’s not our link. Rather, it’s that later that year, Daughter Gums also started a blog, through which she met Heidi – first online, then in person. Through that connection, a few years on, Daughter Gums ended up working in the Melbourne-based company co-founded by Heidi’s husband. Got all that?

Anyhow, the point is that over the last few years, I have been following Heidi, mainly via her Instagram account heidiapples. I have watched her gorgeous two children come into being – and then her third “darling child” (as Jane Austen would call it), her book Nurturing your new life: Words and recipes for the new mother. Note the double meaning of the title, “new life” referring both to a new child, and to a woman’s new life as a mother. “Matrescence, the process of becoming a mother” is, in fact, what the book is about.

Consequently, when I received Paperchain bookshop’s email announcing Heidi’s author tour event there, I knew I had to go and meet her in person. (Of course, Daughter Gums had already given me the heads-up, so I wasn’t going to miss it.)

The event …

I arrived early, hoping to say hello to Heidi before it started, as I had to get off promptly afterwards. I recognised her immediately, and was thrilled to be so warmly greeted when I introduced myself. An added bonus was that her two children, Joan (4) and Walt (18 months), and husband Ben were there too, so I got to meet the whole lovely family. Joan, though, as she should in a book shop, was more interested in finding out where the children’s section was. I approved!

The event basically comprised Heidi telling us about herself, how the book came into being, her intentions for the book, and how she structured and wrote it to meet those intentions. It was a small audience, comprising mostly mums and dietitians/nutritionists, given Heidi is a professional dietitian with a Bachelor of Nutrition and Dietetics from Monash University.

Would-be authors might be interested to know how she came to write this, her first book. She explained that a literary agent, who had been reading her blog and liked what she was writing, contacted her and suggested she write a book! Obviously, this isn’t going to happen to every blogger, but it shows that well-written clearly focused blogs can lead to other things – in Heidi’s case, also to being a recipe columnist for ABCLife (a lovely editor of which I also met at the event.)

Back to the book, though. It took Heidi seven months to prepare her book proposal, which included planning out the chapters and what each one would cover. She obviously did a thorough job because she got a book contract with HarperCollins.

Heidi also shared her career trajectory, explaining how, after the birth of her first child, she moved from general nutrition to a pre and postpartum focus. She also explained how in her early private practice she found she was doing as much counselling as specific nutrition advice. Through this, she had become increasingly aware of the damage that diet culture does. With her awareness of this and of the hard time women give themselves in general, Heidi underpins her book with one important message – that no two experiences are the same, so comparing yourself with others is not helpful. (A message relevant not just to new mums, eh?) She recognises, however, that it’s hard to live by this with “all the noise out there”.

Heidi supports this message in her book with practical advice for new mothers, two of which are that new mothers need support (Chapter 3) and that self-care is critical (Chapter 4). “We are not meant to do this alone”, she realised early in her new-motherhood. Indeed, the trickle-down effects of no support are immense, she said. And she’s right of course. Each generation does it differently, but each generation needs to recognise this important fact. It does take a village to raise a child. You are not a failure as a woman or a mother, if you can’t do it all because, in fact, you CAN’T do it all.

Related to the idea of support is the idea that new mothers need to take care of themselves, that fitting in self-care is not a luxury, but “a necessity and should be treated as such”. So, to tak self-care as an example of how the book works, Heidi not only provides sensible suggestions for how to achieve it, but, understanding from her own recent experience how hard it can be, she nurtures her readers along, encouraging them not to reach for the stars but to work out what’s manageable for them. Analyse your day, she says, to work out when you might slot in some time for yourself; think about when and how your partner can help; and so on. Self-care, she says, can be as simple as having a quiet rejuvenating shower. It’s partly in the mindset. In the end, she says:

Just do what you can and pray the stars align more often than not. And remember, you may need to make sacrifices – be it accepting piles of laundry or cancelling non-essential obligations – so that you don’t sacrifice yourself.

I didn’t find it hard to let the housework go, I must say!

Of course, being a nutritionist/dietitian, she includes recipes. Heidi said her goal was to create recipes that were easy and nutritious, that provided left-over opportunities for later meals, and that use up ingredients to reduce shopping expeditions. The recipes are great, and include things like banana oat smoothie, kedgeree (something I love), and slow-cook beef casserole.

If you have a new mother in your life, this warm, practical, non-judgemental book is for her – and, it wouldn’t hurt dipping into it yourself for ways to help. And, of course, if you are a new mother, this book is definitely for you.

Challenge logoAuthor Event: Heidi Sze on Nurturing your new life
Paperchain Bookstore, Manuka
27 February 2020

Carmel Bird, Field of poppies (#BookReview)

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Book coverThere are some writers whose personalities shine through so strongly that I have taken to characterising them in just a word or two. Jane Austen, for example, I think of as wickedly witty, and Helen Garner as heartbreakingly honest. Carmel Bird is another of these. I describe her as seriously cheeky, by which I don’t mean she is really cheeky, but that there’s seriousness beneath her surface cheekiness. The cheekiness makes me chuckle, but ruefully, suspiciously so, because I know that waiting nearby is very often a skewer of some sort. Her latest novel, Field of poppies, is no exception. Even the title is paradoxical, alluding as it does to both Monet’s pretty painting, Field of poppies in Argenteuil 1873, and the poppy fields of Flanders.

Field of poppies, then, has all the hallmarks of Bird’s writing – a light tone, and all manner of allusions and digressions, underpinned by a clearly-focused intelligence. If you are lulled, early on, by narrator Marsali’s chatty, friendly tone, you’d be advised to check the epigrams and preface. The very first epigram tells you, in fact, exactly what this novel is all about:

We are within measurable, or imaginable distance of real Armageddon. Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators. (Henry Asquith, Secretary of State for War, July 24 1914)

Can’t say plainer than that. The epigrams, which include one by Bird’s signature fictional novelist Carrillo Mean, are followed by an incisive preface which offers a vision of the modern world and where it’s heading. Mixing visions of disaster (“Crops failed, dried out, withered, died”) with those annoyances we love to comment on (“People forgot how to punctuate or spell”), it further cements the book’s intention.

The novel is told first person by retired interior designer Marsali Swift who, with her husband, the semi-retired doctor William, made a tree-change to the perfectly named, prosperous ex-goldfields town of Muckleton. I mean, Muckleton! That suggests something too, doesn’t it? However, in the opening paragraph, Marsali also tells us that she and William had given up their country idyll after seven years and now live in a high-rise apartment in Melbourne, called, ironically, the Eureka. The tree-change hadn’t met their expectations, because of two events, a robbery at their loved home Listowel, and the mysterious disappearance of local eccentric musician, Alice Dooley. The arrival of a new gold-mine doesn’t help, either, with its disruptions and environmental threat.

Now, if you know Bird’s writing, you will know what to expect, but if you don’t, let me say that this is not a book you read for plot – though there is a plot about the missing Alice. Rather, it’s one you read for the joy of engaging with a lively but concerned mind and all the insights such a mind can offer. Isn’t that, really, what we read for? As one member of my reading group described it, reading this book is like having “a conversation with a quirky, artistic, intelligent friend”. That’s exactly how I feel when I read Bird. I feel my mind engaging with hers, pondering where it’s going and what it’s trying to tell me, and really enjoying the ride. She can be so sly, such as this about the missing Alice’s Silver Sisters group of witches:

The Silver Sisters still exist, to the best of my knowledge but Alice certainly does not. I understand the SS were always a harmless lot …

Whoa? The SS, harmless? Well, of course, the Silver Sisters were, but referring to them as SS can’t help but remind us of another SS, can it? This is what Bird does – and I love it. She makes me feel alive as a reader.

“Such a state of affairs is clearly a fantasy”

Various motifs run through the novel, including the aforementioned poppies, dreamhouses, and Alice in Wonderland. Each contributes in its own way to the idea that all is not as it seems, that we may, in fact, be living a fantasy. Marsali spends some time dissecting Monet’s painting, but as she draws us into its seemingly idyllic beauty, she inserts something sinister – not only the poppies and their dark reminder, but the possibility of a gun pointing out of a window in the lovely house nestled in the background. Bird’s meaning is clear: our dreamhouses, our country idylls, may not be what they seem at all. Dreams, she says early in the novel, are dangerous. For a start, they can lure us away from reality.

Later in the novel, Marsali’s description of returning to Muckleton for bookgroup makes her meaning clear:

When I go there for Mirrabooka nights I drive past the gate to Listowel and catch a glimpse of the house itself behind the trees. It’s really so very like the house in the distance in the Monet, the dangerous fool’s gold of the old lost dream house.

For Marsali, there are glimmers like these of the truth beneath the fantasy, but will she and William – who, we must see, stand for many of us – really change their ways?

Bird also refers in the novel to several literary texts, and in particular to Alice in Wonderland. Carroll’s Alice works beautifully as a foil for the missing Alice Dooley. Without spoiling the ending too much, both disappear into the deep, but Alice in Wonderland survives while Alice Dooley doesn’t. However, this foil isn’t a case of simple opposites, because, although Carroll’s Alice survives, the world she enters is chaotic.

“This is my memoir”

Another thing Bird does in this book is play with the idea of fiction. Marsali keeps reminding us that this is her memoir. It’s dangerous, she writes, for fiction writers to include dream sequences in their narratives, but as this is her memoir, she will include some! Similarly, “it’s hard to make coincidence work in fiction”, but again, because this is her memoir, she has them since “coincidences happen quite naturally in real life”. It’s “a nice coincidence”, Marsali writes, that Alice Dooley was called Alice! She pushes our acceptance of coincidence even further by not only involving kangaroos in the two road accidents that start and end the book’s drama, but also having the second accident’s driver spending time at a pub called The Kangaroo before he sets off on his fateful drive:

Look, it was called The Kangaroo. I can’t help that. It just was.

Well, look, that made me laugh. She is so blatantly cheeky.

I’d love to go on, because this book is rich in commentary, satire and jokes about contemporary life – and I’ve barely touched them.

However, I will close here, and will do so on this from the book:

Beauty always falls in love with the Beast, who always turns out to be the Prince, but that’s only the end of the telling, not the end of the lives of Beauty and her Beast-Prince. Life goes on until it doesn’t. Cinderella died in the end, and so did Snow White.

Fantasy, fairy tales, even fiction, in other words, are just that. They do not tell the whole story. Which world are Marsali and William living in, and which, indeed, are we?

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed this novel.

Challenge logoCarmel Bird
Field of poppies
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2019
241 pp.
ISBN: 9781925760392

Review copy courtesy the author.

 

Delicious descriptions: Madelaine Dickie on Indigenous language and Uranium

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Book coverMy recent post on Madelaine Dickie’s Red can origami was getting too long – and I just couldn’t cover in detail all that I wanted to, so I’ve decided to do one of my rare Delicious Descriptions posts to expand some ideas from the book.

Concluding my post, I commented that the novel is an effective consciousness-raiser as well as a great read. One of the many points Dickie makes concerns the intrinsic significance of language to cultural identity. (This issue, in fact, was discussed much during last year’s International Year of Indigenous Languages.) Here is Dickie in Red can origami (and do note the second person style – “you’re invited to sit …”):

You’re invited to sit in on a Burrika language session at Gubinge District High. It’s the first week of term one and the session’s being funded through the community benefits package. The language teacher is fishing-club-Keith’s wife Kylie, an intimidating, bearded old girl, with a deep wrinkle line between her eye. She stands in front of a class of teenagers. She explains that in Burrika, there are six words to describe anger, four words to describe jealousing and that there’s even a word for someone who’s a serial liar. Here, she looks pointedly at a young woman wearing heavy eyeliner. Then she says some people think the Burrika language is only used to describe things like berries and barramundi. Here, she looks pointedly at you.

Language comes from country, she tells the kids. Language comes from the rocks, the desert waterholes, from the creeks that twist through the mangroves. Language comes from the sky. When you don’t know your language, you can’t tell country you are coming, and you can’t look after your country. (p. 195)

With Indigenous language revival programs popping up around the country, some of which I’ve mentioned in my blog, Dickie was spot on to make this point in her book.

The issue of uranium mining and its potential for problems, if not disaster, underpins the novel’s plot. It also provides a good example of how Dickie teases out different attitudes from the various stakeholders – the Indigenous people, protesters, the people of Gubinge, the mining company employees, and Ava herself as she navigates spin versus facts and reality. And as Ava ponders the issue, the second person voice brings us on her journey with her. Whenever we hear “you”, there’s that little initial reaction, “who, me?” Anyhow, Burrika leader Noah patiently tells a radio presenter,

No-one wants to see a uranium mine on their country. Not the mob at Jabiluka, not the mob in South Australia, and not the people in Gubinge. But when you’re under duress, when you are given a choice between something and nothing, you choose something.

These are the sorts of real-world challenges that are posed by the novel.

At the book’s launch, Dickie referred to Japan’s involvement in uranium mining in Australia, and mentioned the Fukushima disaster. She quoted from the letter written in 2011 by Yvonne Margarula of Kakadu’s Mirarr people to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon concerning the Fukushima disaster:

Given the long history between Japanese nuclear companies and Australian uranium miners, it is likely that the radiation problems at Fukushima are, at least in part, fuelled by uranium derived from our traditional lands. This makes us feel very sad.

The sense of extended community responsibility expressed in this letter is surely something we could all learn from – and this, I’m sure, is what Dickie hopes her book will encourage its readers to consider.

Madelaine Dickie, Red can origami, Fremantle Press, 2019.