Australian writers

Frank Dalby Davison, Dusty (#BookReview)

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It’s a strange coincidence that my second review for Bill’s Gen 1-3 Aussie male writers week is for a novel titled Dusty, when my first was for a short story titled “Dust”. One of those funny little readerly synchronicities. The title, however, is about the only synchronicity because, although both stories allude to the dusty Australian landscape, Casey’s short story is about miners’ lung dust disease while Davison’s novel is about a part-kelpie part-dingo named Dusty.

A bit about Frank Dalby Davison

Davison (1893-1970) was best known as a novelist and short story writer, and was a significant figure in Australian literary circles of his time. There are useful articles for him in Wikipedia, and the Australian dictionary of biography, and I plan to devote a Monday Musings to him soon. Meanwhile, as background to this post, it’s relevant to say that he was born and schooled in Melbourne, but left school in his early teens to work on his father’s farm near Kinglake. The family moved to the United States in 1909, when he was 16. After working there in the printing trade, he travelled more, eventually enlisting for World War 1 in England. After the war, he took up a Soldier Settlement selection near Injune, in central western Queensland. 

Davison wrote several novels, but his best known is probably Man-shy (1931), which won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Featuring a red heifer, it was my introduction to Davison in my first year of high school in the 1960s. Dusty (1946) is also about an animal – this time a dog – and has been in my sights for some time. Both novels drew on his experiences in Injune. AustLit reports that the manuscript of Dusty, ‘entered under the title “Stranger”, and the pen-name “Tarboy”, won the Melbourne Argus and Australasian Post 500 pound Novel Competition in 1946′. 

Dusty

At the end of my edition of Dusty is a promotion for Man-shy which quotes from H.M. Green, the literary historian who inspired Bill’s “generations”. Green writes:

Although other novelists have made animals their principal characters and drawn them realistically, Davison is the first to make a serious attempt to get inside their minds. The red heifer and the mob of wild cattle to which she belongs stand for the spirit of freedom and dogged, untameable resistance; their struggle is made extraordinarily real to us … Davison has a genuine and individual talent.

This could equally apply to Dusty, which tells the story of a dog, sired by a kelpie to a dingo mother. Violently wrenched from his lair when he was a few weeks old, he is sold to a decent man, a bushman named Tom. Tom is no fool. He recognises the mixed blood, but also sees potential in the pup, and trains him to become a champion sheep dog. Their bond is strong but is tested when Dusty’s “dingo blood” starts asserting itself, and he turns sheep-killer by night. This will not do, and Tom knows it. The novel, however, does not play out quite the way you’d expect, and we are left guessing until the end about what will, indeed, happen to Dusty.

That’s the plot, but like many plots it doesn’t tell you much about what the book is really about, or what makes it a good read. Told in three parts, Dusty is a realist novel, detailing life on Australian sheep stations and cattle properties, and told mostly through the perspectives of Tom and Dusty. Yes, you heard right, Dusty, the dog. I was completely engaged because not only is there none of the sentimentality common in stories about a man and a dog, but there’s also nothing anthropomorphic in the dog’s point-of-view. He feels pure dog, which I thought quite a feat. Early on, for example, Tom, having previously given Dusty his dinner without ceremony, puts the food down and starts some training:

Then followed a series of mystifying events. A hand appeared just above the dish and twitched, giving forth a series of soft snapping sounds; then there was a little soft whispering, and then a voice that, like the hand, kept repeating a small noise over and over again. He could make nothing of it …

This dog’s-eye view of the world, based on his experiences to date, continues through the novel.

Soon, though, bigger issues are at play involving the two parts of Dusty’s being, “the ancient battle between conflicting heredities, and between early influence and present environment; the mother against the father, nature against art”. Then Davison adds something interesting. The dingo is the product of nature, while the kelpie, the working dog, is “a product of art”. But, Davison adds, “nature, if man fails in toil or vigilance, hastens to reclaim her own”.

In other words, beneath this deeply interesting story about a man, his dog and outback farming, is a wider story about “nature”, or the essence of our beings. Contained within Dusty is the struggle between the two forces – that of freedom, of following his instinct, and that of living by his training, by rules and responsibilities. After Dusty’s dingo side becomes apparent to all, Tom knows what must be done but chooses to change his life rather than kill his dog. He becomes a self-employed possum scalper in cattle country, and finds, “without meaning any ingratitude for past kindnesses”, that he relishes his new situation in which he is invited to share a meal as “a guest and not just the hired man”. In other words, as a possum scalper, Tom is freer to be his own man.

But, while I think Tom’s life is part of this wider theme, the main focus is animals, and the idea that, in them, “is a whole scheme of values outside those familiar” to us.

There is no easy ending for Tom and Dusty, and we are left, three paragraphs from the end, with a dingo howl, “a cry of mournfulness and dark mirth, of drollery and love and hate and longing, of the joy and sorrow of life, of the will to live, of mockery and despair”.

Dusty is not a didactic book. There is no moralising, no subjective pronouncements about choices. Instead, with its objective tone, and plain but expressive prose, it feels more elemental, something that examines the essence of who we are and what we do to live. And that makes it feel timeless.

Frank Dalby Davison
Dusty
Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1983 (Arkon ed., orig. 1946)
244pp.
ISBN: 0207133891


Gavin Casey, Dust (#Review)

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I have had to put aside the novel I was reading for Bill’s Gen 1-3 Aussie male writers week, as my reading group book called. I will get back to it, and post on it later, but in the meantime, I wanted to post something in the actual week.

So, I turned, as I have for other Reading Weeks, to The Penguin century of Australian stories, an excellent anthology edited by Carmel Bird. Given Bill’s week encompasses writers working from 1788 to the 1950s, Bird’s anthology offered almost too many choices. Besides the obvious Henry Lawson, there were Steele Rudd, Tom Collins, Vance Palmer, and more, ending with Judah Waten’s 1950 story, “The mother”. I considered several, but Gavin Casey captured my attention because in her Introduction to the anthology, Kerryn Goldsworthy, looking at the 1930s and 40s, commented that Gavin Casey’s “Dust” and John Morrison’s “Nightshift” exemplified the more overtly political stories of this era. She added that:

they are stories in simple, unadorned language … that focus on workers and workplace disasters, on the physical dangers lying in wait for working men and women.

I have been interested in this period – and its socialist-influenced political thinking – for some time, so it had to be Casey or Morrison. Casey it was because I have listed him in a couple of Monday Musings posts but knew nothing about him.

Who was Gavin Casey?

Casey (1907-1964) was an author and journalist, born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, to an Australian-born father and Scottish mother. 

He doesn’t have a Wikipedia article but there is a useful biographical entry for him in the Australian dictionary of biography (ADB). Written by Anthony Ferguson, it says he had a sketchy education before obtaining a cadetship with the Kalgoorlie Electric Light Station. However, he left there to work in Perth as a motorcycle salesman, only to be “forced” back to Kalgoorlie in 1931 by the Depression. He then worked “as a surface-labourer and underground electrician at the mines, raced motorcycles and became a representative for the Perth Mirror“. He married in 1933, but “poverty plagued them, long after their return to Perth next year”.

By 1936, he was publishing short stories in the Australian Journal and the Bulletin, and in 1938 he was foundation secretary of the West Australian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. His two short story collections – It’s harder for girls (1942), which won the 1942 S. H. Prior memorial prize and in which “Dust” appeared, and Birds of a feather (1943) – established his reputation. Ferguson writes:

Realistic in their treatment of place and incident, his stories showed—beneath the jollity and assurance of his characters—inner tensions, loneliness, unfulfilled hopes, and the lack of communication between men and women.

You may not be surprised to hear that his first marriage failed!

Overall, he wrote seven novels plus short stories and nonfiction works. His novels include Snowball (1958), which “examined the interaction between Aborigines and Whites in a country town”, and Amid the plenty (1962), which “traced a family’s struggle against adversity”. There is more about him in the ADB (linked above).

Ferguson doesn’t specifically address the political interests Goldsworthy references. Instead, he concludes that critics liken Casey’s earlier works to Lawson, seeing “a consistent emphasis on hardship that is tempered, for the male at least, by the conviviality of mates”. Ferguson also praises both for “their perceptiveness” and “their execution”.

The reality of Casey is a bit more nuanced, I understand. For a start, his men are not bush-men but suburban workingmen. Consequently, I plan to write more on him in a Monday Musings Forgotten Writers post, soon. Meanwhile, on with “Dust”.

“Dust”

“Dust” features male characters only, and there are some mates but, while they are important, they are not central. “Dust” also must draw on Casey’s experience of working in Kalgoorlie’s mining industry. It’s a short, short story, and is simply, but clearly constructed. It starts with a physical description of dust swooping through the township, over housetops and hospital buildings, and “leaving a red trail wherever in went”. It sounds – almost – neutral, but there are hints of something else. Why, of all the buildings in town, are “hospital buildings” singled out with the “housetops”, and does the “red trail” left behind signifiy anything?

Well, yes it does, as we learn in the next paragraph. Although this dust comes from “honest dirt” and can do damage like lifting roofs off, it is “avoidable” and is nothing like the “stale, still, malicious menace that polluted the atmosphere of far underground”. Ah, we think, so the “dust” we are talking about is something far more sinister than that flying around the open air.

And here is where the hospital buildings come in. Protagonist Parker and his miner friends are waiting for their six-monthly chest x-rays checking for the miners’ dust lung disease which killed his father. Things have changed since his father’s times, Parker knows. Not only are there the periodic medical examinations, but there are mechanisms to keep the dust down, and a system of “tickets” and pensions for affected miners. But, the risk is still there, and Parker’s anxiety increases as he watches his mates go in one by one, while he waits his turn.

This is a story about worker health and safety – but told from a personal not political perspective. It’s left to the reader to draw the political conclusions. However, it is also a highly relatable story about humans, health, and risky choices and behaviour, because it seems that Parker does have a choice. I won’t spoil it for you, but simply say that the ending made me smile – ruefully.

Gavin Casey
“Dust” (orig. 1936)
in Carmel Bird (ed.), The Penguin century of Australian stories
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2006 (first ed. 2000)
pp. 86-90

Gideon Haigh, My brother Jaz (#Review)

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When I posted my first review of the year – for Marion Halligan’s Words for Lucy – I apologised for starting the year with a book about grief and loss. What I didn’t admit then was that my next review would also be for a work about grief and loss, Gideon Haigh’s extended essay, My brother Jaz. This does not herald a change in direction for me, but is just one of those little readerly coincidences – and anyhow, they are quite different books.

For a start, as is obvious from its title, Haigh’s book is about a sibling, not a child. It was also much longer in the making. Halligan’s book was published 18 years after her daughter’s death, and was something she’d been writing in some way or other all along. Words are also Haigh’s business, but he ran as far as he could from his grief, and it was only in 2024, nearly 37 years after his 17-year-old brother’s death, that Haigh finally wrote, as he says in his Afterword, “something I had always wanted to write, but had suspected I never would”.

Before I continue, I should introduce Haigh for those of you who don’t know him. Haigh (b. 1965) is an award-winning Australian journalist, best known for his sports (particularly, cricket) journalism, but also for his writing about business and a wide range of social and political issues. He has published over 50 books. I’ve not read any, but I am particularly attracted to The office: A hardworking history, which won the Douglas Stewart Nonfiction Prize in 2013. However, I digress …

Unlike Halligan who, to use modern parlance, leant into her grief in what I see as a self-healing way – as much as you can heal – Haigh did the opposite. He did everything he could to avoid it; he worked, he writes, “to flatten it into something I could roll over”. And it affected him. If he, just 21 at the time, was a workaholic then, he doubled down afterwards and work became his refuge, his life:

It was the part of me that was good; it was the only part of me I could live with, and that sense has quietly, naggingly persisted. Go on, read me; it’s all I have to offer. The rest you wouldn’t like. Trust me. You don’t want to find out.

If this sounds a bit self-pitying, don’t fear, that is not the tone of the book. It is simply a statement of fact, and is not wallowed in. It represents, however, a big turnaround from someone who admits early in the book that he was known for his “pronounced, and frankly unreasonable, aversion to autobiographical writing”. This aversion was despite the fact that, “at the same time, trauma, individual and intergenerational” was something he’d written about – and been moved by – for a long time. So, in this first part of his six-part essay, we meet someone who had experienced deep pain, but had shrunk from indulging in a certain “kind of confessional nonsense”, and yet who increasingly found himself “backing towards an effort to discharge this story” to see if it made him “feel differently”.

What changed? Time of course is part of it. Haigh shies from cliches, as he should, but grief will out. It just can’t be bottled up forever, no matter how hard he tried, and so in early 2024, during the Sydney Test Match no less, “something previously tight had loosened” and over 72 hours he wrote the bulk of this essay. A major impetus was the break up of a relationship. It was time for a “reckoning”, he writes on page 76, but much earlier, on page 47, he alludes to it:

Why did I even start this? The only reason I can think of is that it has to be done. It can’t remain unwritten, just as I could never leave Jaz unremembered. I have myself to change, and how am I to do this unless I examine this defining event in my life face on?

This idea of the examined life is something Halligan mentions too in her memoir. She writes near the end of her book that “I do believe that the unexamined life is not worth living, and that an enormous part of that is the recollected life”.

What I hope I’ve conveyed here is the way this essay is driven – underpinned – by a self-questioning tone, more than a self-absorbed one. Even as Haigh writes it, he is interrogating his reasons (and perhaps by extension anyone’s reasons) for writing about the self. That this is so is made evident by the way the narrative, though loosely chronological, is structured by the writing process rather than by the “story”:

“OK it’s getting on to dawn, and I’m going to click on ‘Jasper Haigh [inquest] Reports for the first time” (p. 29)

“It’s raining, but I’ve just returned from a walk. I often walk when I have something to turn over in my head.” (p. 33)

“I’m at the point right now where I just wonder what the hell I am doing.” (p. 47)

“I have picked this up again after putting it aside to draw breath, to consider what next … So, I’m going to stagger on, with the excuse that this is no memoir: this is less a geology of my life than a core sample.” (p. 61)

This approach helps us engage with a writer who prefers to push us away. It finds, in a way, the art in the artifice, and enables Haigh to write something that questions the memoir form while at the same time paying the respect that the best memoirs deserve. It’s a juggling act, and I think he pulls it off.

By the end, Haigh is not sure whether writing this work – this raw “reckoning” to re-find his emotional bearings – has achieved anything. It is, he believes, “too early to tell”, but I wouldn’t be so sure. He is a writer, and he has put on paper the defining event – the “core sample” – of his life. That has to mean something.

Gideon Haigh
My brother Jaz
Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2024
87pp.
ISBN: 9780522880830

Marion Halligan, Words for Lucy (#BookReview)

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For my reading group’s tribute to Marion Halligan last year, I had planned to read one of her older novels, Wishbone, which I did (my review), and her last book, the memoir Words for Lucy, which I didn’t. But, I have now. I guess a book born of a mother’s grief for a daughter who died too young doesn’t make the cheeriest start to this year’s reviews. However, such is the life of a reader so you’ll just have to bear with me!

Lucy, for those who don’t know Halligan’s biography, was born in 1966, with a congenital heart defect. She was not expected to survive more than a few days, but she did – for nearly 39 years. In the end, however, in 2004, her heart gave out. I’ve read two other memoirs written by a mother about her seriously ill daughter, Isabel Allende’s Paula and Joan Didion’s The year of magical thinking. They are very different books and in fact, in Didion’s case, her daughter did not die during the book, though she did die young (and Didion wrote a book about that, Blue nights). The reason I am sharing this is that Halligan, Allende and Didion were all published authors, and it shows. As Halligan writes in the opening to her book, “My business is words”. For these three writers, the process of writing was an important part of how they processed their feelings. Halligan’s book might have come out some 18 years after Lucy’s death, but she’d been writing all that time.

While confirming my memory concerning Allende and Didion, I came across the Wikipedia article on Blue nights. It includes a quote from Rachel Cusk’s review of the book. She says “Didion’s writing is repetitive and nonlinear, reflecting the difficult process of coping with her daughter’s death”. While I don’t know about the reason, the “repetitive and nonlinear” description could equally be applied to Words for Lucy. The book is divided into twelve parts (plus a postscript), with each part comprising many small sections. There is an overall chronological arc to the book, in that after briefly describing Lucy’s death, Halligan does start with her birth, and tells of the funeral and wake near the end. What comes in between, however, is, writes Halligan, like “box of snapshots. You find your own way through the story, from random details”. In other words, if you are looking for a traditional grief memoir in which the memoirist works chronologically through the “stages” of their grief, you won’t find it here.

Carmel Bird and Marion Halligan
Carmel Bird and Marion Halligan, 2016

What you will find is a book about mothering and “daughtering”, about living with a chronically-ill child, about making memories and living with memories, about sadness and joy, about loss and grief (because Halligan has had more than you’d think fair), and about writing. It’s also about friendship. Having experienced my own devastating loss (of my sister in her early 30s), I know very well the value of friends. For Halligan, a great friend was the writer Carmel Bird. I was much moved by the role Carmel played in Lucy’s life, and by the love and support she clearly gave Marion.

Now, returning to Halligan’s “snapshots”, I enjoyed how, within a broad thematic structure, Halligan wanders through family life – from the lighthearted like Lucy’s love of things to the serious like her long and complex medical journey that cramped her life so much, from the family’s experience of living overseas to travelling there together later. From these, and more, so many truths emerge. For example, Halligan writes on page 2,

Love is so important to us. We so much need it. We can’t do without it. What we don’t realise at the beginning is the price it comes at.

Right there I knew I was going to like this book, because I was immediately taken back to my first pregnancy, and the fear I had that something would happen to this child I was bringing into the world. Ah well, I reassured myself, I didn’t have him (as the child turned out to be) before and I was fine, so I’d be alright! But of course, as soon as that child came into the world, my life changed and I realised things would never be the same, that if anything happened to him, I would not – indeed, could not – go back to how I was. The price of love…

The price of love isn’t all bad of course, even when the loved person dies, because there are the memories, and it is through memories that Halligan charts both Lucy’s life and her own grief. There is, though, a sort of paradox here that Halligan admits to. It’s what she calls the Janus face of grief. There’s the grief we feel for the person who has gone, for the life they are missing, the things they’ll not see or experience, and there’s that selfish grief the bereaved person feels, the loss, the misery, the wanting that person back in your life to make you happy (in effect).

It’s a complex thing grief – not linear, which Halligan knows and hence her book’s structure, and not all misery either, which Halligan also knows. Happy, joyful memories do pop up. You do laugh. Halligan describes some special memories, and then writes this beautiful thing about them:

Those are perfect memories, I can take them out whenever I like and run their cool and sparkling shapes though my fingers, look at their brilliant colours, the light refracting through them.

These memories may not be “factual”, may not be the same as those of others who experienced the same person or event, but as Halligan would tell her sisters who questioned her memory of some family event, “Write your own narratives … this is mine and I’m sticking to it”.

Throughout Words for Lucy there is the writer’s eye on what is fact and what is truth. Truths can be “different” (indeed, “many”, as Emmanuelle learns in Wishbone) while facts are “another matter”. And so, in the final pages of the book, Halligan, paying her due to “a memoir’s desire for honesty”, shares one last painful fact so that we don’t go away believing some wrong truths about her family.

Words for Lucy was Marion Halligan’s last book. It’s a memoir, and has the honesty that form demands. However, I see it as also containing her apologia, her final statement on what fiction is. For her, and she understood the slipperiness of this, it’s about truth, which is different from fact. “Fiction is always life”, she writes in this book. It means writers using life – including their own – “in all sorts of imaginative ways”. Think Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and her own, somewhat controversial, The fog garden.

Ultimately, whether Halligan was writing fiction or nonfiction, words were her business. And these, her final ones, represent a fitting legacy for a brilliant career as well as a beautiful tribute to a beloved daughter.

Marion Halligan
Words for Lucy: A story of love, loss and the celebration of life
Port Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 2022
218pp.
ISBN: 9781760762209

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 9, Dulcie Deamer

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Dulcie Deamer, like my most recent Forgotten Writer, Jessie Urquhart, has retained some level of recognition – or, at least notability, with there being articles for her not only in Wikipedia and the AustLit database, but also in the Australian dictionary of biography (ADB). I have briefly mentioned her in my blog before, in Monday Musings posts on the 1930s and 40s.

Dulcie Deamer

Born Mary Elizabeth Kathleen Dulcie Deamer, Dulcie Deamer (1890-1972) was, says Wikipedia, a “novelist, poet, journalist, and actress”. ADB biographer Martha Rutledge, however, is more to the point, describing her as “writer and bohemian”, while her contemporary, the journalist and author Aidan de Brune, puts it differently again, commencing his piece with, “Dulcie Deamer has had an adventurous life”. From the little I’ve read of her and her work, it’s clear she was imaginative and fearless.

Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, to George Edwin Deamer, a physician from Lincolnshire, and his New Zealand-born wife Mable Reader, Dulcie Deamer was taught at home by her ex-governess mother. The timelines of her youth are sketchy in places, but Rutledge says that at 9, she appeared on stage, and De Brune writes that she was writing verses by the age of 11. A year after that, in 1902, De Brune and Rutledge agree that her family moved to Featherston, a small bush township in the North Island of New Zealand, where, de Brune says, “she ran wild” for five years, “riding unbroken colts, shooting, learning to swim in snow-fed creeks, and going for long, solitary rambles of exploration through the virgin bush”. It was here ‘that what she describes as “memories of the Stone Age” came to her’. Somewhere during this time, according to Rutledge, she was sent to Wellington to learn elocution and ballet lessons, apparently in preparation for the stage. At the age of 16, she submitted a story to the new Lone Hand magazine, and won the prize of 25 pounds. It was “a story of the savage love of a cave-man” and it changed the course of her life.

Image from eBay seller 7290_stone

This story, “As it was in the beginning”, won the prize in 1907, from around 300 entries, said one contemporary report (The Wellington Times, NSW, 18 November 1909), and was published in The Lone Hand at the beginning of 1908, illustrated by Norman Lindsay. The critical responses were shocked but, mostly, admiring, that such virile writing could come from such a young woman. The story went on to be published in a collection of her stories in 1909, titled In the beginning” : six studies of the stone age, and other stories ; including “A daughter of the Incas”, a short novel of the conquest of Peru. One reviewer of this collection (Barrier Miner, 27 May 1910), wrote that Deamer “writes with a freedom of speech and a knowledge of things in general which must have fairly astounded her respectable parents, one would think, when they first read her compositions”! You get the gist. This work was republished in 1929 in a special limited edition titled, As it was in the beginning. The Australasian (21 December 1929) reviewed this and wrote of that original award winning story:

It was a tale of primitive man and woman, of a wooing and winning and retaining with club and spear— an unmoral tale, utterly pagan, terrifically dramatic. Its paganism was unsophisticated; its dramatic force was the expression of natural gift. Mr. Norman Lindsay illustrated the story. His paganism could hardly be called unsophisticated, but there was no doubt about his dramatic power. 

She was really quite something it seems and I might research her a little more. Meanwhile, Wikipedia picks up the story (sourced from newspapers of the time). As well as writing, she continued her stage career. She married Albert Goldie, who was a theatrical agent for JC Williamson’s, in Perth, Australia, in 1908. She had six children, but separated from Goldie in 1922. Rutledge, writes that

In the crowded years 1908-1924 Dulcie bore six children (two sons died in infancy), travelled overseas in 1912, 1913-14, 1916-19 and 1921 and published a collection of short stories and four novels—The Suttee of Safa (New York, 1913) ‘a hot and strong love story about Akbar the Great’; Revelation (London, 1921) and The Street of the Gazelle (London, 1922), set in Jerusalem at the time of Christ; and The Devil’s Saint (London, 1924). Three were syndicated in Randolph Hearst’s newspapers in the United States of America. Her themes, including witchcraft, gave ‘free play to the lavish style of her writing, displaying opulence and sensuality or squalor of traditional scenes.

Reviewing The devil’s saint for Sydney’s The Sun, The Stoic gives a flavour of Deamer’s writing. “She has style (a little too ecstatic perhaps) and she has a fine instinct for story-telling”, but there is much kissing – quite explicitly described – and “Sheikish stuff”. However, as The Stoic knows, there are readers for such writing, and s/he concludes that ‘If anybody wants romance, with a flavor of the supernatural and plenty of “pash,” this is the book’.

Deamer left her husband in 1922, and lived a Bohemian life in Kings Cross, while her mother brought up her children. She worked as a freelance journalist, contributing stories, articles and verse to the Australian Woman’s Mirror, other journals and newspapers, including the Bulletin and the Sydney Morning Herald. Like other writers we have featured, she often used pseudonyms. Rutledge tells us that Zora Cross described her in 1928 as ‘Speedy as a swallow in movement, quick as sunlight in speech … [and] restless as the sea’. Debra Adelaide writes that she was known as the “Queen of Bohemia” due to her involvement with Norman Lindsay’s literary and artistic circle, with Kings Cross Bohemianism, and with vaudeville. Various commentators and critics refer to her interest in religion, mythology, classical literature and the ancient world.

Deamer was a founder in 1929 and committee-member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. In the 1930s she wrote plays, and a volume of mystical poetry titled Messalina (1932), while in the 1940s she another novel, Holiday (1940), another volume of mystical poetry, and The silver branch (1948). De Brune, writing in 1933, says that she was also hoping “to contribute screen stories to the newly-established Australian film industry” but it doesn’t appear that she achieved in this sphere.

In their short entry on her, Wilde, Hooton and Andrews say that her unpublished biography, The golden decade, “is informative on the literary circles of Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s”. They also say that she features in Peter Kirkpatrick’s 1992 book, The sea coast of Bohemia. Whatever we might think of her novels now, she was a lively and creative force in her time, and worth knowing about.

The piece I posted for the Australian Women Writers Challenge is titled “Fancy dress” (linked below). It provides insight into her interests in the magical and mystical and conveys something of her lively, humorous style.

Sources

  • Debra Adelaide, Australian women writers: A bibliographic guide. London, Sydney: Pandora, 1988.
  • Aidan de Brune, “Dulcie Deamer (1890-1972)” in Ten Australian Authors, by Aidan de Brune, Project Gutenberg Australia and Roy Glashan’s Library, 2017 (originally published in The West Australian, 13 May 1933) [Accessed: 21 November 2024]
  • Dulcie Deamer, “As it was in the beginning“, The Lone Hand (1 January 1908) [Accessed: 23 December 2024]
  • Dulcie Deamer, “Fancy Dress“, The Daily Mail (12 July 1924). [Accessed: 21 November 2024]
  • “Dulcie Deamer“, Wikipedia [Accessed 21 November 2024]
  • Martha Rutledge, ‘Deamer, Dulcie (1890–1972)‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1981 [Accessed: 21 November 2024]
  • William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, The Oxford companion to Australian literature. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2nd, edition, 1994

Sonya Voumard, Tremor (#BookReview)

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As I’ve previously reported, Sonya Voumard’s short memoir, Tremor, is one of the two winners of this year’s Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize. Earlier this month, I reviewed the fiction winner, P.S. Cottier and N.G. Hartland’s novella The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin. Now it’s Voumard’s turn, with her book on living with a neurological movement disorder called dystonia.

While essentially a memoir, Tremor also fits within that “genre” we call creative nonfiction. The judges would agree, I think, given their comment that Tremor is “notable for its compellingly astute interweaving of the author’s personal experience with our broader societal context where people with disabilities, often far more challenging than her own, try to adapt to the implicit expectations and judgements that surround them” (back cover). The interweaving of something personal with something wider is a common feature of creative nonfiction, but what seals the deal for me is its structure. Tremor has a strong – subjective – narrative arc that propels the reader on, with more objective information providing the necessary support.

The narrative opens on December 3, 2020, the day Voumard is to undergo brain surgery for her condition. It leaves us in no doubt that what we are about to read is a very personal journey. “I am”, she writes on this first page, “a hairless head on top of a flimsy cotton gown and long compression socks”. But then, two sentences later, she opens a new paragraph with, “as I wait to be taken to the operating theatre, I channel my inner journalist. I’m on a news assignment for which I have already gathered some key facts.” And just like that, we are in journalist mode, with Voumard describing her condition and the relatively new treatment she is about to receive, followed by some facts and figures. Around 800,000 Australians, she informs us, experience tremors of the body, and about 70,000 of these have dystonia. A couple of paragraphs later we flash back to early 1960s Melbourne. Voumard is four or five years old, and her personal trajectory begins with an anecdote about dropping a bottle of milk, about being “clumsy, prone to dropping things”, but also being “a risk-taker”.

From here, the book takes us on the two journeys I’ve just intimated. There’s the mostly chronological one tracking her life with dystonia until we arrive – at the end of the book – back at the beginning with her surgery and its aftermath. And there’s her exploration of dystonia, its causes, diagnosis, and treatment. Voumard binds these two journeys together with her astute, and empathetic, reflections and analyses. She knows what it’s like to live with a disability, even if early on she didn’t recognise it as such.

So, for example, she chronicles the tactics she’d use to hide her shaking, in order to get jobs and then to demonstrate she could do them (when clearly she could). She would sit on her hands, refuse offers of drinks, self-medicate with alcohol. Whatever it took to hide her condition. She talks about navigating a medical world that is so “siloed” that diagnoses ranged from the “psychogenic” (due to “some sort of failure of womanhood, an unfulfilled yearning, a cloak for something else”) to the “purely physical” (like a sports injury or from computer use) – depending on the speciality she was dealing with – when it was something else altogether. She touches on the cost of treatment, the overall politics of medicine, the gender issues which see women’s conditions so often dismissed.

And, lest I’ve given the wrong impression, she does this not only through her own experiences, but through those of others – met personally, or found through her research – ensuring that Tremor is not a “misery memoir” but something bigger, that contributes to our understanding of how people navigate a world in which they don’t fit the norm. This navigation has a few prongs: the obvious ones relate to coping with the physical limitations, discomfort, and/or pain the condition brings; and the less visible ones concern managing your expectations and aspirations, while also dealing with how people interact with you. Voumard shares the story of a woman who had suffered for over twenty years from cervical dystonia before she got a diagnosis. While diagnosis didn’t bring a cure, “identifying her condition had helped her to live her life more calmly, to not try to do too much and to understand something of others’ suffering”.

Voumard, you’ve probably realised by now, packs a lot into the 20/40 form (that is, into 20,000 to 40,000 words). At the winners’ conversation, she said there is the assumption that to be marketable you need to write 55,000 plus words. She had the bones, and had then started filling them out, but it was just “flab”. The competition, and then Julian Davies’ editing guidance, taught her that she had a good “muscular story”. So she set about “decluttering”. The end result is interesting, because this book doesn’t have that spare feeling common to short works. Tremor feels tight – there’s little extraneous detail – but not pared back to a single core.

Voumard, in fact, covers a lot of ground. She uses the Eurydice Dixon murder case, for example, to epitomise her ongoing interest in media and reporting, particularly regarding structural disadvantage and social justice. She also contextualises the latter stages of her journey against the 2019 bushfires, the 2020-2021 pandemic and lockdowns, and the 2022 floods in NSW’s northern rivers. Why all this? The subtitle explains it. This book, this “tremor”, is not just about a movement disorder but about something bigger:

My more recent thinking about disability has strengthened my belief in the urgent need to privilege the voices of others more marginalised than mine. But I also cling to the concept of freedom of speech – not as a neoliberal, tabloid-news defender of hate speech – but as someone striving to find ways to respond to the challenges of a democratic society that is becoming more disordered.

Tremor is another beautiful, thoughtful product of the Finlay Lloyd stable. Recommended.

Read for Novellas in November, because, while not a novella, it is a short work.

Sonya Voumard
Tremor: A movement disorder in a disordered world
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2024
129pp.
ISBN: 9780645927023

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.

Shirley Hazzard, The bay of noon (#BookReview)

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Shirley Hazzard’s novella, The bay of noon, has been in my sights for a long time, but finally, this Novellas-in-November year, I managed to get it out of my sights and into my hands. It’s the first of two novellas I read for the month, but the second to review. Such was my November (and we are now well into December!)

Published in 1970, The bay of noon was Hazzard’s second novel. It was one of six books nominated for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. This was a special award created to, in effect, right a wrong which occurred when a change in the Booker Prize rules resulted in books published in 1970 missing out on a chance for Booker glory. The award was decided by public vote, with JG Farrell’s Troubles emerging the victor.

I’ve read three books by Hazzard before blogging, but since then I’ve just read one short story – “The picnic” – for the 1962 Club. In my post on that story, I referred to a review in The Guardian of Shirley Hazzard’s Collected stories. The reviewer Stephanie Merritt writes that “Hazzard’s recurring themes here – enlarged upon in her novels – are love, self-knowledge and disappointment”.

This is true of The bay of noon, which tells of a young Jenny, who, though born in England, had been sent to Cape Town with other young children to escape the Blitz. Post-war she was reunited with her older brother but, realising that her love for him was unhealthy, she leaves England to take up a job with NATO in Naples, bringing me to another of Hazzard’s recurring themes, that of young women leaving home to find their place. I understand from her biography that Hazzard herself worked for NATO in Naples in the timeframe this book is set, so she knows whereof she writes – which is not to say that she is writing her life. This is fiction, so while Hazzard draws on her own experiences, Jenny’s story is not hers.

Anyhow, we are in Naples, and it is some years after World War II, the mid 1950s in fact. Hazzard loved Italy, and her description of Naples at this time is imbued with a love born of knowing a place authentically, not as a sightseer. Naples is poor, and damaged both by war and a Mt Vesuvius eruption in 1944. Hazzard’s evocation of the city is a joy to read. A “through the looking-glass” city of both “apartness” and “continuity”, it also provides a moody, sometimes metaphoric, backdrop for our newcomer Jenny.

The storyline is straightforward. Knowing no-one outside of her work, Jenny follows up a letter of introduction to the charming and welcoming writer Gioconda, whose married lover, and Roman film director, Gianni, she also meets. Soon, however, through her work, Jenny also comes to know a Scotsman, Justin Tulloch, and a relationship of sorts develops between them. These relationships, and how they play out – with their mysteries and betrayals – form the nub of the story, but they are not what the novel is about. That is not so straightforward, but there are clues.

The title offers one clue, particularly, for me, the idea of “noon” as a time when the sun is at its highest, when the light is brightest, and so, perhaps representing a moment of clarity and, perhaps, also, of transition or change? Another clue is in the epigraph from Auden’s “Goodbye to the mezzogiorno” and in the opening paragraphs, both of which encompass ideas about memory and experience. The story is told first person through Jenny’s eyes, and there is a sense as the novel progresses of her working through an experience. Or, perhaps, not so much “working through” as allowing the passage of time to do its work. In the opening paragraphs, Jenny speaks of experiences building up “until you literally sink under them” but is also aware that, with the passage of time, memory, which was once “clouded with effects and what seemed to be their causes”, can become protective. As Auden concludes his poem:

… though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was.

But of course, not all memories are happy – and time can’t make them so. Gioconda, who had suffered loss, says

‘When people say of their tragedies, “I don’t often think of it now”, what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colours everything…’ (p. 67)

Just prior to this, she admits:

‘When I talk of it this way, now, to you, it all comes out as if there were some sequence, some logic, instead of moods, contradictions, alternatives. The design imposes itself afterwards. And is false, must be false.’ (p. 66)

It’s a curious but beguiling novel. The writing has a formal, intellectual – almost dispassionate, and sometimes elegiac – tone. It feels as though it belongs to a much earlier time, earlier in a way than the time in which it is set. This works somehow, partly because of Hazzard’s clear and measured prose, partly because the characters themselves seem to belong to an earlier time, and partly because Jenny is telling us the story from some time in the future.

As I read The bay of noon, I kept trying to place it within a wider literary tradition. It belongs, in part, to those stories about young people being taken under the wing by more experienced elders. Jenny observes the world she is drawn into, gradually becoming a more active and confident player in it. However, an Englishwoman, she remains an outsider, so retains her observer status which, over time enables her to see some realities she had missed in the first flush.

This is not a simple coming-of-age story, as it might look on the surface. Jenny is not an ingenue, but neither is she, at the start, experienced enough to understand the complex emotions and tragedies her older friends have experienced. Moreover, Hazzard has set the novel in a time that was itself complex, as Europe, and Naples specifically, was emerging from the war and – hmmm, was what? I wanted to say remaking itself, but that’s not the sense we get of Naples. It’s more one of being itself.

Towards the end, Jenny, reflecting on that past time in Naples, likens it to a

vineyard that had been left to flourish intact … among the deadly apartment buildings, not so much showing how it was as what has happened to it.

And that is the book’s ultimate meaning for me. It is not about who we are, what we hoped for, or where we have arrived, but about, in the closing words of the novel, “how we came”. Life, in other words, is a process, a journey that doesn’t always take us where we plan or expect.

Read for Novellas in November. Also read by Brona for the month. Read very late for the 1970 Year Club run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book)

Shirley Hazzard
The bay of noon
ISBN: 9781860494543
Virago Press, 2005 (originally published 1970)
182pp.

PS Cottier and NG Hartland, The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin (#BookReview)

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Earlier this month, I posted on a conversation with the winners of the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize, P S Cottier and N G Hartland, who wrote The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin, and Sonya Voumard, who wrote Tremor. On the surface, these books look very different, but conversation facilitator, Sally Pryor, found some similarities suggesting both explore ideas related to identity, one’s place in the world, and how we can be captured and defined by the systems within which we live. Having now read Cottier and Hartland’s novella, and having started Voumard’s memoir, I can see she has a point.

If you didn’t read my conversation post, you may be wondering what the heck this book with its curious title is about. Besides the fact that it’s a novella, which I love, I was attracted to it from the moment I saw it on the shortlist because the description said it “spirits us away on a comedic journey into a world where the reality and absurdity of political power are increasingly indistinguishable”. That sounded just too delicious and I was glad to see it win.

Ok, so I still haven’t told you what it’s about, but be patient, I’m getting there. The novella was inspired, said Cottier and Hartland, by the idea that there are such things as Putin “body doubles”. There is even a Wikipedia page about this “theory” so it is a thing, as they say! The titular “thirty-one legs” belong to 16 of these body doubles whose stories are told in the book. Sixteen, you ask? That doesn’t compute from 31? True, but one of the doubles only has one leg! How can that be, you might also ask, how can a “double” of two-legged Putin only have one leg? Good question, and I won’t give it away, but let’s just say that the idea epitomises the absurdity of the notion.

Now, this is a collaborative novel, and if I understood correctly from the conversation, Cottier and Hartland started by “pushing out” individual Putins. In fact, the novella reads rather like a set of interconnected short stories because each Putin stands alone, with minimal connection between them except they are all Putin doubles and most of them assume there must be others. However, there is a narrative arc to the whole. Each Putin tells us something about their recruitment and its impact on their lives, with some threads recurring through the different Putins, depending on their location and personality. Two Putins also bookend the story. Surfing Putin, Dave McDermott in Western Australia, opens the book in the Prologue and concludes it with his own story, while English Putin Samuel Chatswood starts off the stories proper, and returns with the penultimate story. Each chapter is titled with the name and location of a Putin, so we have, for example, “Maja Dahl, Oslo, Norway”, “Richie ‘The Putin’ Rogers, Cirencester, England”, “Joppe Stoepke, The Hague, Netherlands”, and “Andrei Galkin, Rostov-on-Don, Russia”.

The set-up, or plot, is simple. People from around the world who look like Putin have been recruited to act as Putin doubles should they be so needed. This recruitment has happened over twenty years, but the book is set post the Ukraine invasion, so our doubles suspect they will not be called upon to play Putin. Some are quite edgy about this, while others are more phlegmatic. For all of them, though, being paid – because paid they are, monthly, from an anonymous bank account – comes with questions, if not challenges.

Our first fully-fledged Putin, Samuel Chatswood from London, sets the scene. He tells us about his fears about being a double. Not only is he frequently teased about his resemblance to Putin and asked “why anyone would want to invade Ukraine?”, but he’s anxious because he has been increasingly getting dark looks from strangers since the Skripal poisoning. However, having recently spied another lookalike, he is “comforted” by the idea that “whatever suspicion and recriminations are possible, they are less likely to entangle me if I’m not the only Putin lookalike”. He also heralds the denouement, when he returns to find that such comfort might have been misplaced.

We meet all sorts of Putins, from the fearful, through the deluded, and the thoughtful, to the confident or more upbeat, but all ponder what being a Putin double means for them. For some their own identity gets lost in the role, and some are confused, or at least perplexed, about what’s expected of them. For others, like the resourceful Chilean, Sebastian Soto, it’s a business proposition, while several capitalise on their lookalike-ness. Steve Pinebrother in “International Waters”, for example, not only makes money, secretly, as a double but, publicly, as a performer on a cruise ship. Each one is beautifully individuated, and I find it hard to pick a favourite. There’s much humour in many of their stories, but there’s pathos too, particularly with those who get lost in – or fearful about – their roles. Life is not simple when you accept money without clarity, eh?

“the butterfly of truth does not need questions to emerge from its cocoon of facts”

So, what’s the takeaway. An obvious one is contemporary culture’s focus on appearance and its willingness to monetise looks without much substance behind it. But another is murkier. This novella, I’m tempted to say, could be read as an allegory of the changing world order. No matter where the Putins live, recent changes are unsettling them. The ground is shifting and they (we?) don’t know how to react. Do they bury their heads in the sand, believing it will be alright? Do they wait for the inevitable or, try to withdraw? Or do they take action, and if so, what action can they take? For French Putin, Hugo Fournier,

It matters not, I conclude, what is reality and what is an extravagant theory from a feverish mind. The answer of course is that I should trust no one. I am the only Putin who can, and will, look after me.

Is such isolationism the answer? Through their various Putins, Cottier and Hartland pose serious questions, including, what do we believe and what we can or should we do?

The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin is an audacious “what if” story. Its episodic approach works well in the novella form. Were the book much longer, the conceit would, I think, start to lose its freshness. As it is, there are enough Putins to provide a variety of stories, without becoming repetitive. The tone is light enough to be highly entertaining, but the content is informed and thoughtful enough to engage our minds. This book would make a perfect Christmas stocking stuffer, which is not to say I put it on a par with chocolates and scratchies, but that it is small in size, well-priced, physically lovely, and a thoroughly absorbing read.

Read for Novellas in November.

PS Cottier and NG Hartland
The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2024
115pp.
ISBN: 9780645927016

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.

Marion Halligan, Wishbone (#BookReview)

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My reading group’s last meeting of the year took the form of a tribute to Marion Halligan, who died earlier this year and who had generously attended our meeting when we discussed her Valley of grace (my review). We have done this once before with Helen Garner (albeit she hadn’t died) and it worked well. The process is that we choose something we want to read and share our thoughts with the group. I have read several of Halligan’s books, but I have a few on my TBR, so of course I chose one of those, Wishbone, her fourth novel, published in 1994.

Before I share my thoughts on that, I thought you might like to know what everyone read. Ten members attended the meeting. Some read two books, while others chose a short story or article. It is, after all, a busy time of year. The novels read were, in chronological order, Wishbone (1), The golden dress (2), The fog garden (1), Valley of grace (1), Goodbye sweetheart (2). Three people read her most recent memoir, Words for Lucy, while others read selections from Canberra tales (“Most mortal enemy”), The taste of memory (the first piece), Canberra Red (“A city of mind”), and Shooting the fox (“Shooting the fox”). In other words, we read widely across her oeuvre, resulting in an enjoyable – and occasionally excitable – meeting as we teased out some of her themes and ideas, including how much of her fiction was drawn from life!

“who knows what the hell is going on”

So now, Wishbone. It tells the story of a woman, Emmanuelle, her “motley family”, and the wishes they have for themselves. The novel starts with a young, passionate Emmanuelle having an affair with a married man, but it soon jumps some years hence when she is now married (to a man named Lance), and living in well-heeled Sydney with two children, Maud and William. The rest of the novel follows a period in the lives of these four and others in their close circle – friends, family and employees. During this time, we experience a life-threatening stroke, extra-marital affairs, mistaken assumptions, and a suspicious death, all set within perfectly rendered scenes of domesticity. Halligan can make you gasp with her audaciousness.

As I was reading this novel, a light dawned for me about why I so often use Jane Austen as a benchmark for writing I love. I do like all sorts of writing, but I am particularly drawn to writing that exposes human nature with wit, irony and a generous spirit. This is what Austen does, and this is also what Halligan does. Wishbone is a generous story about messy human lives. Halligan writes with a knowingness about those deep-down thoughts, wishes, and desires we all have, but she is also forgiving about her characters’ foibles and less admirable traits and behaviours. In Wishbone, she explores the tension between our wishes – particularly regarding love – and living with what you’ve got.

There’s something of a fatalist element, here, in the sense that we think we have choice in all this, but choice proves in fact to be elusive. Things happen that we have no control over. Late in the novel, as Emmanuelle sits around the kitchen table with her two children and au pair Mel, in what looks to be a cosy domestic scene, a question – which is both literal and existential – is suddenly proffered, “who knows what the hell is going on”. Who indeed? (And who is asking the question? Emmanuelle, surely, but there’s also an omniscient voice overlaying the characters’ perspectives. At least I believe so. Wishbone slides seamlessly between voices and perspectives in a way that never loses the reader, but that ensures we see multiple sides of things.)

This brings me to style, and how Halligan does what she does. Halligan is a born short-story writer. As I started Wishbone, I almost wondered whether I was reading a book of short stories. Every chapter is gorgeously titled and most felt like they could stand on their own as little nuggets from a life. The opening chapter, The Glade, tells of Emmanuelle’s youthful affair with her married man. It starts:

The difficulty of a love affair between a young woman and a married man may be its logistics. Where can they go? He lives with his wife. She lives with her parents.

They can’t afford hotels, and anyhow it’s too risky as the town is small, but Brian knows “a good place”, a little glade under a cliff. Whenever Brian thinks of going to the glade, he whistles Handel’s tune, “Where e’er you walk”, which “always gladdened his wife’s heart, because she knew her husband was feeling cheerful”. Halligan’s discussion of this song, Brian’s behaviour, and the wife’s response is delicious in more ways than this little irony, but I will just share Halligan’s nailing the point, with “the song told her about the walking and the sitting but what she didn’t know about was the lying”. Just think of the double meaning in that last word! This writing just makes you splutter.

From here, the plot unfolds quietly but surely. Hints are dropped but aren’t heavy-handed, so we are still surprised when certain events occur, which brings me to the title, and its reference to wishes. In the third chapter, The Man in the Train, there is a mostly mundane discussion about wishes until the chapter’s titular, and unnamed, “man” asks Emmanuelle what she would wish for. Her answer?

I would wish for the gift of making dangerous choices.

As the novel progresses, various characters express their wishes. Emmanuelle’s friend Susie idly wishes she were a widow, while au pair Mel wishes she were beautiful. Emmanuelle wants more passion from her husband, while chauffeur Stuart wants money. And so on … What these characters learn, you won’t be surprised to hear, is that their seemingly ordinary, or common, wishes often carry a danger that is not expected. You know that saying, “be careful what you wish for”. But Halligan’s book is no simple moral tale. What Emmanuelle realises near the end, in fact, is that all choices can be dangerous. Susie asks her:

Have you ever wished Lance dead?
I’ve wished him different.
And did that come true?
Not in ways that I’d have chosen.

Where does this leave us? We won’t stop wishing, and we certainly can’t stop making choices, but we can think about our choices and be realistic about the outcomes, whether they are the expected or unexpected ones. In the end, Emmanuelle probably has the answer:

being alive is like reading a book. You might think you’ve got a fair idea of the plot but you don’t actually know what’s going to happen next, you’re as much a mystery to yourself as a character in a novel. Perhaps the secret is just to keep turning the pages.

Reading Wishbone has reminded me how much I enjoy Halligan. I must get back to that TBR.

Marion Halligan
Wishbone
Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1994
235pp.
ISBN: 0855615974

Monday musings on Australian literature: Forgotten writers 8, Jessie Urquhart

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While some of the forgotten writers I have shared in this series are in the category of interesting-to- know-about-but-not-necessarily-to-read, others probably are worth checking out again. Jessie Urquhart is one of these latter, though I’ve not read any of her novels, so don’t quote me!

However, there are articles for her in Wikipedia and the AustLit database, and I have mentioned her on my blog before, so this must all count for something in her favour. My reference was in a Monday Musings on Australian women writers of the 1930s in which I discussed an article by Zora Cross. She talked about, among other things, writers who had achieved success abroad without leaving home. One of those she named was Jessie Urquhart, who, she says, “will not, I think, do her best work until, like Alice Grant Rosman, she  relinquishes journalism for fiction”. I commented at the time that this was interesting from someone who, herself, combined fiction and poetry writing with journalism. I also wondered whether Urquhart needed her journalistic work to survive. (I suspect she did.)

I also wrote earlier this year about Urquhart on the Australian Women Writers (AWW) blog, as did Elizabeth Lhuede last year. This post draws from both posts and a little extra research. In my post, I shared a 1924-published short story titled “The waiting”. It is an urban story about a very patient woman. It’s not a new story, but Urquhart writes it well. … check it out at AWW. You might also like to read the story Elizabeth posted, “Hodden Grey”, which is a rural story. Like many writers of her time, Urquhart turned her head to many ideas and forms.

Jessie Urquhart

Novelist, short story writer and journalist Jessie Urquhart (1890-1948) was born in Sydney in 1890, the younger daughter of William and Elizabeth Barsby Urquhart. Her father, who was a Comptroller-General of NSW prisons, had emigrated from Scotland in 1884. She joined the Society of Women Writers and was secretary for 1932-33. She had an older sister, Eliza (1885–1968) with whom she emigrated to England in 1934 (years after Zora Cross’s article!) There is much we don’t know about her life, though her father’s obituary does say that neither of the sisters married.

In an article titled “Women in the World” in 1932, The Australian Women’s Mirror includes a paragraph on Urquhart, because they were about the serialise her story Giving Amber her chance. They say she “started writing very young, and in her teens had a novel, Wayside, published; she is now a Sydney journalist. Short stories and articles from her pen have appeared in the Mirror, her latest contribution being “The Woman Prisoner” (W.M. 8/3/32), based on her knowledge of the Long Bay women’s reformatory.”

Elizabeth’s thorough research found that Urquhart had turned to short story writing and journalism, in the 1920s, with most work published in The Sydney Mail, but she was also published in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Woman’s Mirror, The Australian Women’s Weekly, The Sun and Queensland Figaro. Elizabeth read (and enjoyed) many of her stories, and wrote that they cover “a broad range of settings and topics, giving glimpses into the lives of modern Australian urban and rural women and men, encompassing the adventures of spies, adulterers, thieves and deserters; the faithful and unfaithful alike”.

According to Elizabeth, Urquhart’s first publications actually appeared when she was in her twenties, including a series of sketches titled Gum leaves which was published in The Scottish Australasian. The Goulburn Penny Post quoted the paper’s editor, who said that:

The sketches represent her initial effort, and indicate that she has the gift of vivid description and the art of storytelling in a marked degree. All the delineations show power and a creative facility which promises well. Some are indeed gems. [The author shows] promise of a successful literary career.

Her novel Wayside appeared in 1919, and is probably based on these sketches. (She was not a teen in 1919, so I’m not sure about The Australian Women’s Mirror’s facts.)

Anyhow, according to Elizabeth, Urquhart had “a year’s study abroad” sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and wrote more articles on her return. She lived in Bellevue Hill, Sydney, and continued to publish what Elizabeth nicely characterises as “her quirky short fiction”. She also wrote more novels. Giving Amber a chance, serialised in 1932 in The Australian women’s mirror, was published in book form in 1934. The Hebridean was serialised in 1933, but was not published in book form though, wrote Elizabeth, it was “arguably” the better novel. She liked “its setting and its depiction of class tensions” and believes – a propos my introduction to this post – that it deserves to be more widely read.

Another novel, Maryplace: the story of three women and three men, was published in 1934, but unlike the previous novels does not appear to have been serialised. Elizabeth found a contemporary review, which she liked for the sense it gives of the debates surrounding Australian writing at this time, including a reading public “mistrustful of its own novelists”. The author of the review writes that Maryplace is

a story which takes the art of the Australian novel to a new plane of modernity of treatment and universality of appeal.

In style, in theme, and in the power of characterisation and analysis this book is far above the work of the average of our novelists. It is deserving of the highest recommendation. Despite the fact that the scenes of Maryplace, with the exception of one period, are laid in a New South Wales country town, the story will be of equal interest to any reader of novels anywhere. That, after all, is the real art of the novel, and it is one which is not so frequently cultivated by our writers that we can afford to ignore it when we encounter it.

The reviewer believes there’s been too much self-conscious talk about “an Australian story-art”, that all literature is naturally a product of the country which produces it and the life and times in which it is produced. In other words, says R.N.C.,

All stories have their roots in the soil. They will be true of a nation and be part of a national contribution to art without ceaseless striving to label them and brand them as ‘Australian’ on every page and in every paragraph.

Urquhart’s story, R.N.C continues, has the “unselfconsciousness that gives her book a real Australian atmosphere and setting” but that also “makes it a story of absorbing human interest and power so as to be a world novel for the world”. (I like R.N.C.’s thinking.)

The novel apparently deals with the class tensions, and a changing order which sees “the local butcher or grocer” no longer willing to deliver their goods to “the back door”. This is part, says R.N.C. of “any fast changing democracy, and Miss Urquhart in her Maryplace has drawn it with pitiless detachment, giving to her theme sympathy and understanding but the touch of irony and satire which it demands”.

After she went to England in 1934, Urquhart’s stories continued to appear in the Australian press, but whether she published elsewhere is not clear. She was clearly still active in writing circles in 1941, because she was chosen as Australia’s delegate to the PEN conference in London. She and her sister survived bombing during the war, and Jessie sent regular reports about life in London to The Sydney Morning Herald.

In 1944, the Herald reported that “gossip of London theatres, the Boomerang Club, books and their authors comes from Miss Jessie Urquhart, formerly of Sydney, who went to England before the outbreak of war”. It says that “during the first great blitz, she was an A.R.P. telephone worker” but was now “a reader for Hutchinson’s Publishing firm”. She and Eliza had been “staying with novelist Henrietta Leslie in Hertfordshire for the past three months”. Wikipedia tells me that Leslie was a “British suffragette, writer and pacifist”, which makes sense when you read in the next sentence that Jessie had “just been re-elected to the committee of the Free Hungarian Club Committee” which was chaired by Hungarian writer and exile, Paul Tabori.

She is an interesting woman, and would surely be a great subject for one of Australia’s literary biographers!

Anyhow, in 1945, another Sydney Morning Herald paragraph advised that Jessie and Eliza Urquhart would “probably visit Australia” again in 1946, and that they had reported that London was “beginning to recapture its old smartness”. I suspect Jessie never did get back to Australia, as she died in a nursing home in St John’s Wood, London, in April 1948. Eliza died in 1972.

Sources