Australian writers

Kate Grenville, One life: My mother’s story (Review)

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Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s best known contemporary writers, and is one of that small band to have succeeded both critically and commercially. Most know her for The secret river, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize among other awards. I enjoyed that, and the other novels of hers that I’ve read, with my favourite being The idea of perfection which won the, then, Orange Prize. I also loved her non-fiction work, Searching for The secret river, about researching for and writing The secret river. I was, consequently, keen to read her latest book, One life: My mother’s story, when I heard it was to be published this year.

Kate Grenville, One lifeGrenville’s mother, Nance, was born in 1912, and died in 2002. Sorting through her mother’s papers later, Grenville discovered multiple notebooks containing her mother’s attempts to write her story. Nance apparently tried different ways of writing it – including, Grenville quotes, trying “to write it backwards”. However, her attempts always petered out, never going past her early forties “perhaps because by then she felt less need to look back and try to understand”. And so, Grenville’s book sticks to that, stopping (except for a short postscript) when Nance was 38 and pregnant with Kate. Wah! How disappointing not to be able to read about Kate’s childhood!

When I first heard of the book, I thought of Meg Stewart’s fascinating Autobiography of my mother, which I read a few decades ago. Stewart is the daughter of artist Margaret Coen and author Douglas Stewart (who, coincidentally, was born in 1913, one year after Nance). They are, however, very different books, not only because these two women led very different lives – one an artist married to a writer, and the other a pharmacist married to a lawyer – but because Stewart wrote her book in first person, as if she were indeed writing her mother’s autobiography, while Grenville opted for the more expected third person approach of a biography.

Given Grenville’s mother was not an artist or famous in any way, and given, as I’ve already said, she doesn’t write about her writer-daughter’s childhood, why is this book worth reading? Grenville, in her prologue, admits that her mother “wasn’t the sort of person biographies are written about” but argues that her story is worth telling because “not many voices like hers are heard. People of her social class – she was the daughter of a rural working class couple who became pub-keepers – hardly ever left any record of what they felt and thought and did.” The result, as Grenville – ever with an eye on history – says, is that “our picture of the past is skewed towards the top lot”. Grenville argues convincingly that the stories of people like her mother are well worth hearing, though I do think the argument has largely already been won. Many contemporary historians (and others, like museum curators) are, as we’ve seen in the books now being published and exhibitions being created, demonstrably interested in the lives of “ordinary people”.

The paradox, though, is that Grenville’s mother’s story is not at all an “ordinary” one. She was born to rather mis-matched parents, Dolly and Bert, whose marriage had been orchestrated, in 1910, by Dolly’s mother. Nance and her two brothers were “dragged” around the state as their parents worked on farms, in pubs, in the city, in country towns. Nance was sent away to a convent school, where she was very unhappy, wanting always to be part of a family. They experienced the Depression, and her parents lost their pub in Tamworth as a result. At the end of her teens, Nance wondered:

what would have happened if her parents had been unadventurous and contented with their lot. She’d have grown up in Gunnedah, left school at fourteen as they had, married a farmer and had six children … Yes, she wanted to meet someone, get married, have children. She wanted to be happy. But she knew now that she wanted something else as well.

What that “now” refers to is completing her first year of pharmacy studies in 1930. It is this, I think, that proves Nance, while never famous, to be no “ordinary” woman – but one who was “part of the world of the future, not the faded past”. So she becomes a pharmacist, and, after a few romantic adventures, some of which also prove her to be not quite “ordinary”, she meets Troskey-ite lawyer Ken Grenville Gee, the man she married and with whom she had three children.

It was not an easy marriage. Nance fell in love with Ken, but she gradually realised that he didn’t love her. He was a fair but remote man. He acknowledged women and respected Nance’s intelligence. He was happy for her to return to work – particularly when they needed the money! – though he, for all his forward thinking in some areas, never gave a thought to the necessary childcare arrangements or to the housework that still needed to be done. It might be a devoted daughter’s bias, but Grenville presents her mother as a loving woman, with a strong mind and a wonderful can-do attitude.

Running through the story of a woman is also the story of a time and place, of Australia in the first half of the twentieth century. Nance, from a working class background, comes to agree with middle-class-but-socialist Ken that ordinary people never have a chance. She realises that

what people called destiny was really the system everyone was part of. The ones on the top of the pile kept everyone thinking they could get ahead, when in fact ordinary people never had a chance.

War and the Depression taught her that. Nance also faces the challenges of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Not only was there the expectation that she would manage the domestic realm while working outside the home, but she was treated with unfairness and disdain when she applied for her pharmacist licence, despite having the required qualifications and paperwork.

I loved all this, but I did find it an odd book to read, and I think this is due to the voice, to the fact that while it’s not an autobiography it is far more intimate than the usual biography. Kate’s knowledge – or understanding – of her mother’s motivations and behaviour is so intense that I found the third person voice disconcerting at times, all the while enjoying the insights. Grenville’s prose is simple, straightforward, but not plain. Imagery is used with restraint, with the focus primarily on the story and Nance’s thoughts and feelings. Here’s an example, a description of Nance, always wanting family, returning home between her first and second year of pharmacy study:

Nance leaned on the windowsill of her old room, looking up at the washed-out green of the hill behind town. There was nothing for her here. Only that failing hotel, the cranky mother, the father muddled up with some other woman. If this had ever been any kind of home for her, it wasn’t one any longer.

One life is a fascinating, engaging book. Grenville’s insights into her parents’ marriage, and particularly her mother’s thinking, reflect the empathy you’d expect from a novelist. How much comes from Nance’s own words, and how much is extrapolation, is not clear, but the book is convincing – on both the psychological level and as a social history. It is well worth reading for both those reasons.

awwchallenge2015Kate Grenville
One life: My mother’s story
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015
260pp.
ISBN: 9781922182050

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Tony Birch and Ellen van Neerven in Review of Australian Fiction 10 (4)

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Review of Australian FictionI have been wanting to write about the oddly titled Review of Australian Fiction for some time. I say oddly titled because, contrary to what it might sound like, this does not contain reviews but short fiction. Established in 2012, it is published, electronically (or digitally), every two weeks. Each issue contains two stories by Australian authors: one by an established author, and the other by an emerging author, chosen by the established author. Funnily, in the issue I’m reviewing here, it’s the emerging author, Ellen van Neerven, whom I’ve read before, not the established one, Tony Birch. But, I’m so glad that Lisa’s Indigenous Literature Week has given me the opportunity to a) finally read something by Birch, and b) finally read Review of Australian Fiction issue.

Tony Birch, “Spirit in the night”

Birch’s story is told first person by a young indigenous boy, the 11-year-old Noah Sexton. He’s dirty, smelly, poorly dressed, and no-one wants to know him – except the new girl, Heather, who invites him to sit next to her. She’s “the cleanest person I’d ever seen” with “no pox rashes, bites or scars like I had”. At lunchtime, Heather offers the hungry Noah a sandwich and engages him in conversation. She asks him why he sits alone, and he gives the classic reply:

‘I sit here because I’m a Sexton.’

She doesn’t know what that means of course. When he discovers that her father is the policeman “in charge of the station”, he assumes:

Our mob was well known to the police, and I knew straightaway that as soon as her father got the story on the family name, she wouldn’t be sitting under any tree offering me a vegemite sandwich.

But, it doesn’t quite work out the way he expected. When he explains to the friendly Heather that he’s from “the only abo family left in town”, she tells him that “abo” is “a dirty word” and that “people like you, we call them half-castes. It’s more proper”. Noah disagrees, telling her that “an abo’s an abo, no matter how black or white he is … Far as whitefella is interested, the shit smells just the same.” Heather shows discomfort at this language, but Noah doesn’t care. He’s “beginning to think she was only another do-gooder”. He tells her about how his people have been treated in town, but Heather tells him her father will be different, that “he’s always fair, to both sides”. Not surprisingly, Noah is (silently) sceptical. Nonetheless, this little bit of kindness from Heather brings out a new sense of self in Noah – he doesn’t wolf down the sandwich, pretending he has a few manners, and when he gets up to go into school after that first lunch he dusts his pants off “for maybe the first time in my life”.

And so Heather spends most lunchtimes with Noah, because she’s a Christian and it’s “a sin to turn away from those in need”. Noah doesn’t like being seen as a “charity case” but is so enamoured of Heather that he’ll “put up with anything”. Understandable, given his treatment at school before.

I won’t describe any more. This is a clever story about do-gooders. Birch has astutely chosen for his protagonist a young boy on the cusp of puberty. Noah, straddling that line between childhood and adulthood, has a sense of his agency, and yet not quite the experience, nor the resources, to insist on enacting it. It’s a story about confused emotions, and about smugness and self-satisfaction. It’s about the right to dignity, and, of course, about power.

Ellen van Neerven, “Sweetest thing”

awwchallenge2015Unique, original, fresh are words I avoid when writing reviews, not only because they feel cliched but because they can be contested by anyone whose reading experience is wider than mine. So, instead, I’ll just comment on Ellen van Neerven’s capacity to surprise. I found it in her Heat and light which I reviewed earlier this year, and in “Sweetest thing”.

“Sweetest thing” is a third-person story about Serene, the child of an indigenous mother and the town’s Dutch baker. She is addicted to having her breasts suckled. It all started in puberty (“that pertinent time of a woman’s life”) with her first experience of having a man suckle her breast occuring with a male tutor when she’s nearly fourteen. He lifts up her shirt:

Beautifully out of herself, she was open and messy and dislocated like a bouquet being readied for a vase, flowers, stems, spores spread everywhere.

Nothing else happens besides this suckling, but Serene feels “bliss” and “knew then that this was what she had been programmed to need”. Slowly, as Serene schemes and positions herself to have her need met, we learn about loss. We learn, for example, about the Kedron pub, which “had refused Serene’s grandparents entry” but which is now

a haunt for women of her mother’s ilk: divorced, discarded, with loose threads of long silent and secret relationships carried under their shirts.

Under their shirts. A reference to their breasts? We learn about the gradual withdrawal of her father as he starts to focus on his “real daughter”. Serene feels anger at “the silence in her life, at his hypocrisy”.

Born into this in-between world – not quite rejected as her grandparents were, but not fully accepted either – Serene believes she deserves “comfort, worship, devotion. Trust and understanding”, but fears “hollowness”.

And so, her life progresses through school and early womanhood into mature adulthood. She has friends, she experiences casual sex, she becomes a masseuse – but still there’s the need for suckling, to have “the most basic of her needs met”. Again, I’ll leave the story here. It’s longer than Birch’s and spans a few decades of Serene’s life, which includes a meaningful relationship and a successful career.

“Sweetest thing” is an edgy story. Serene’s unusual addiction works as a rather confronting metaphor for what all humans need – love and acceptance. What I like about Van Neerven, here and in Heat and light, is that her indigenous characters are not “types”. Their indigeneity is part of who they are, and is fundamental to the challenges they confront, but her characters are also “universal” – that is, they are needy, flawed characters who muddle along, just as the rest of us do, in the lives they find themselves in. It’s powerful stuff.

ANZ_ILW2015Read for ANZLitLovers’ Indigenous Literature Week.

Tony Birch, “Spirit in the night”
and
Ellen van Neerven, “Sweetest thing”
in: Review of Australian Fiction 10 (4), May 2014

Alice Robinson, Anchor point (Review)

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Alice Robinson, Anchor PointI love it when the book I’m reading picks up ideas explored in my previous book. Alice Robinson’s debut novel Anchor point is, in reality, far removed from Mark Henshaw’s The snow kimono (my review), but the first line of Henshaw’s book – “There are times in your life when something happens after which you are never the same” – could have been Robinson’s first line. Her focus is more personal than Henshaw’s audacious broad sweep, but the point is still made with punch.

Another aspect of this novel that popped out for me is its rural focus. Rural romance is becoming popular here, but not much of our literary fiction focuses on the rural – on farm life, specifically, I mean. In this regard, it reminded me a little of Jessica White’s Entitlement (my review), though they are different books in terms of what drives them.

Have I intrigued you? I hope so, but it would probably help if I now told you a bit about it, rather than the books it reminded me of! The novel starts with a small family on a farm – ten-year-old Laura, five-year-old Vik, their artist-potter mother Kath, and farmer father Bruce. It’s clear there are tensions between the parents, and early in the novel Kath disappears. Interestingly, White’s novel also has a disappearance. Anyhow, young Laura, in a state of anger and shock, makes, as the book’s promos say, “an impulsive decision that will haunt her for decades”. Nonetheless, she fills the gap left – she mothers Vik, takes on the domestic duties, and helps her father on the farm. Robinson conveys beautifully the impact of on her – her pride in helping out, her exhaustion and loneliness, and her realisation of what she is missing. Her childhood, like that of a character in Henshaw’s The snow kimono, was “wrenched” from her. Late in the novel Laura reflects on “what she had lost, what she had cost herself”.

The novel is told third person, in a linear structure. It is divided into parts identified by dates: 1984, 1997, 2008 and 2018. Such a span could suggest saga, but this is a quieter work. It has its dramas, but the tone is not dramatic, which conveys a sense that this is life. Life, in other words, comes with highs and lows, and you just have to get on with it. So we follow the family as Vik grows up and leaves home for university, and as Laura eventually leaves too, at the suggestion of her father. There is always, though, the pull of the farm for Laura – and she does return.

Besides the family drama and the resulting narrative arc to do with Kath’s disappearance, the book is also concerned with farming and the land. Bruce and Laura struggle against drought, bushfires and land degradation to keep the farm going. Climate change hangs over this novel. By 2018 Laura has given up the struggle to regenerate the farm: “the climate had long stopped being something she understood”. This little jump into the future is surely a message from the author, and gives the book a foot in the cli-fi genre.

The other important land issue for farmers – indigenous people and their relationship with the land – is also a thread, introduced early on via Laura’s school friend, the indigenous boy Joseph. This issue is not laboured but bubbles along underneath, coming to the surface in 2018 when Joseph reappears as a man asking for occasional access to the farm for his people. Laura is taken aback:

The land belonged to her and Vik. She thought how mixed up they all were. There was what they believed and what they did, the stories they told. So many truths contained in skin, concentric rings. Laura imagined herself a log, sawn open. How many layers.

She remembers Joseph’s help in the past, and recollects the canoe tree on the property. “‘Course'”, she says, “You can use the place any time you like”.

Like White, for whom this issue is more central, Robinson offers no longterm resolution, but it’s positive to see non-indigenous authors addressing it. (As an aside, I can’t help but think Robinson’s naming one of the farms in the area, the Jolley farm, is a little tribute to Elizabeth Jolley.)

Robinson introduces another contemporary concern, Alzheimer’s. It works well as a plot device, but she does push it a little far. Not unbelievably so, but enough to weigh the novel down a little with issues. On the other hand, it could also work as a metaphor for the way we “forget” what we’ve done and are doing to indigenous people, and to the land.

I enjoyed Robinson’s prose. Here for example is a description of time passing:

The months broke across the year in alternating tasks: clearing, fencing, cutting wood.

And here is a description of the house, when Laura returns after a time away:

The house looked long abandoned, falling into the dry earth. Paint worn away by weather. Verandah sagging. Foundations shifted like rheumatic joints, as though it hurt the wooden skeleton to stay still.

The language, as you can see, is generally spare – sentences tend to be short, and not a lot of time is wasted in long descriptions, just as Laura herself has little time for anything but work.

Overall Anchor point is a tight, well conceived novel. The title, meaning “a safe place”, can be read in multiple ways. Laura does find some “safety” or redemption, but it’s not a simple or easy one for her, and the land itself is far from safe. In the end, it’s all about choices, and, as Laura learns, our choices can create ripples that last long after they’re made. Best, really, to make good choices first off. I’m not sure we’ve learnt that lesson yet.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also enjoyed the novel.

awwchallenge2015Alice Robinson
Anchor point
South Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2015
263pp.
ISBN: 9781922213617

(Review copy courtesy Affirm Press)

Mark Henshaw, The snow kimono (Review)

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Mark Henshaw, The snow kimonoI wasn’t far into Mark Henshaw’s The snow kimono before I started to sense some similarities to Kazuo Ishiguro. I was consequently tickled when, about halfway through, up popped a secondary character named Mr Ishiguro. Coincidental? I can’t help thinking it’s not – but I haven’t investigated whether Henshaw has said anything about this. I’m not at all suggesting, however, that The snow kimono is derivative. It’s certainly not. It’s very much its own book, one that manages to somehow marry an Ishiguro-like “floating” and rather melancholic pace with a page-turning one. On the surface it’s a mystery story, but in reality is something far more complex. Interested? Read on …

Before I discuss the novel, though, I do want to say a little about the author who is not well known. The snow kimono is Henshaw’s second novel. His first, Out of the line of fire, was published in 1988, and was well-received critically, garnering a couple of awards. The snow kimono won this year’s New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for fiction. Henshaw has worked as a translator, but retired in 2012 as a curator at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, which is where I attended the launch of this book late last year. (PS I lied a bit about this being Henshaw’s second novel. He has also written two collaborative crime fiction novels, under the name J M Calder, with another local writer, John Clanchy, whose Six I’ve reviewed here)

And now, back to The snow kimono. It is set in Paris and Japan, with a brief foray to Algeria, and spans the late 1950s to the late 1980s. It concerns the lives of a Frenchman, the retired Inspector Jovert, and two Japanese men, a former Professor of Law, Tadashi Omura, and his old schoolfriend, the writer Katsuo Ikeda. The novel has a complex structure, moving backwards and forwards in time, and between the two main storytellers, Jovert and Omura.

The story commences in Paris, 1989, with the recently retired Jovert receiving a letter from a woman claiming to be a daughter he didn’t know he had (from a relationship in Algeria some thirty years previously). Coincidentally – or is it? – he is confronted by Omura, who has his own tortuous daughter-who-is-not-really-my-daughter story. The novel comprises the stories told by these two men: Omura of his life in Osaka and friendship with the narcissistic Katsuo, and Jovert of his experience in Algeria as a French “interrogator” and of his wife and son. Early on we discover that Omura is the guardian of Katsuo’s daughter because Katsuo is in gaol for an undisclosed (until much later) crime. Complex “truths” about parents and children, and about about who is really whom, underpin the plot’s narrative. There are lies galore …

“the future changes everything”

This novel is a captivating read – for its language, story and ideas – but it demands concentration. There are many characters, and relationships can be obscure or seemingly convoluted. However, as the two men talk, we realise that, while on the surface a plot is slowly being unravelled, Henshaw’s real interests are deeper. How do you live with the lies you have kept, or told yourself? What is memory, and how does it relate to truth? How meaningful is truth at any one time when “the future changes everything”. What does this mean?

Two-thirds though the novel, Jovert reflects

that he had spent most of his life listening to people, sifting through what they said, weighing, assessing. Trying to fit things together. But life, unlike crime, was not something you could solve. What people told you was not always the truth; the truth was what you found out, eventually, by putting all the pieces together. And sometimes not even then.

This is a clue to the paradoxical nature of this novel, and to one of the reasons why it reminds me of Ishiguro. Ishiguro’s books, like Henshaw’s novel, tend to be about memory, its reliability and what it does or doesn’t tell us about who we are. Of course, memory is not an unusual theme for novelists, but it’s the tone, the use of foreshadowing, and the ground-shifting, the pulling of the rug from under us one way and then another, that connected these two authors for me.

So, in The snow kimono, it’s not only Omura and Katsuo who have been living on secrets and lies, but also Jovert. Confronted by the letter and by Omura’s challenge to him that he should meet his daughter, he starts the process of forcing “his memory to surrender what he has spent decades trying to forget”. He had seen memory as a “sanctuary” that can bind people together, but he now sees this is “an illusion”. Memories can in fact “change, be destroyed, be rewritten”, they can be “shuffled, reshuffled”. And so, the man who, during the Algerian War of Independence, had coldly and brutally encouraged others “to recall things they might have otherwise forgotten. Or said they had” now has to confront the “truth”.

The problem is that:

Memory is a savage editor. It cuts time’s throat. It concertinas life’s slow unfolding into time-less event, sifting the significant from the insignificant in a heartless, hurried way. It unlinks the chain. But how did you know what counted unless you let time pass?

Memory is not absolute. It’s mutable, shifting with time, with perspective, with maturity.

I found The snow kimono a deeply satisfying book for this very reason. It suggests that nothing is fixed and that, moreover, as Katsuo cynically says to Omura, there is no “completion”. What does all this say, though, about how we are to live, because surely, this is what the book is about.

The novel’s opening paragraph states that “there is no going back”. This idea is repeated in the narrative: Jovert states after a brutal time in Algeria that “truth can’t be undone”, and Katsuo says after other brutality that “you can’t undo what you’ve done”. However, Jovert does come to believe that “perhaps it was not too late to atone”. What do you think?

There is so much more to this book that I might be driven to write another post …

Mark Henshaw
The snow kimono
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2014
396pp.
ISBN: 9781922182340

Wendy Scarfe, Hunger town (Review)

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Scarfe, Hunger Town, Wakefield PressA little over halfway through Wendy Scarfe’s novel, Hunger town, one character says to another that “kindness needs to be a political way of life”. It sounds a little naive I suppose, but in recent months the idea of kindness, in the political as much as the personal arena, has been playing on my mind. How different would Australia be (I’m being parochial here), if our leaders espoused kindness, tolerance and acceptance in their sound-bites, and if, heaven forbid, they placed a value on kindness in their policy-making?

Kindness is not exactly the main theme of this Great Depression era novel but politics certainly is. Set mostly in South Australia’s Port Adelaide River district from the mid 1920s to late 1934, Hunger town tells the story of the struggles of wharf labourers to survive as unemployment and hunger took hold. It explores the ensuing political unrest and the growing attraction of leftist political ideologies like communism and anarchism, alongside unionism, in such a volatile environment.

The novel is told first person in the voice of Judith Larsen, who, at the beginning of the novel, lives on a hulk with her Norwegian-born coal lumper father and homemaker-then-soup-kitchen-volunteer mother. Judith (Jude), intelligent, strong-willed and attuned to social justice issues from an early age, develops her drawing skill to become a cartoonist. Early in the novel she meets her well-to-do friend Winnie’s cousin, Harry, who is not so well-to-do, and a relationship develops. However, while their love story runs through the novel, it is not, as in most “genre” historical fiction, the main narrative arc. They marry, with little romantic build up, part-way through the novel. No, the main narrative focuses on the travails of the workers, and on Jude and Harry’s involvement in the politics of their times, Jude through her satirical cartoons, and Harry through the Communist Party.

The question that always comes to mind with historical fiction is why? Why choose to write about a particular time and place – besides, of course, intrinsic interest in certain times? Some readers love to escape to what they see as a more exciting, adventurous or romantic period. But for me, the book has to be more than “just” history. It has to throw light on “the human condition” and, preferably, encourage reflections on the present. What does the history tell us about who we are, how we got here, I want to know, and (yes, I admit it) can we learn any lessons from it?

Scarfe’s book achieves this for me. Not only does it offer a vivid portrayal of the richness and variety of life on the Port Adelaide wharves, but it encourages us to think about the relationship between the political and the personal, and about how governments do or don’t support some of its most vulnerable people, the working poor. It teases out the differences between theory, idealism and realism. It considers the role of violence. And, along the way, it raises issues like freedom of speech, and the role of the artist. All very topical, n’est-ce pas?

You have probably realised by now that this is a “big” book. Scarfe tells her story in 5 parts through a well-defined set of characters. Although relatively long, around 450 pages, the novel is tightly structured. Seemingly unimportant points made early in the novel reappear with significance later. An example is Harry’s “Judith, you are a card”. Once said, it appears as a refrain throughout, and plays a role in the conclusion. Characters are foils for each other – such as the warm idealistic Harry versus the unemotional, theoretical Communist Party organiser, Nathan; or the pretty, emotional, seemingly superficial Winnie versus the no-nonsense, practical, more socially aware Judith. We can also see Harry, who “really did envisage and believe in a socialist utopia” as a foil for Judith, whose cartoons are grounded “in a more savage awareness of what I saw as the gap between dream and reality”.

Scarfe’s writing is clear and direct, but peppered with lovely turns of phrase. The fog lifts, “not all at once but as if the sun took fistfuls and shook it apart”. Miss Marie, arriving at the women’s march

stepped down from her taxi and made her regal path through the crowd like dawn breaking through a mass of sooty clouds. She was a gasp of radiant colour …

There were times, though, when I wondered whether the first-person voice was the best choice for the novel. Judith is an interesting character, with a strong mind and a good heart. She’s also rather opinionated, occasionally taking sets against people with little (initial, anyhow) provocation. It’s probably just me, but I sometimes yearned for a wise third person omniscient narrator to rub off her edges! That said, Judith, who is described by her art teacher, mentor and friend, Miss Marie, as “an instinctive radical but an individual thinker” guides us engagingly through her world.

As the novel progresses and things worsen on the wharves with scab labour brought in to replace the striking workers, Harry heads off to Spain with Nathan, at the time of the Asturian Miners Strike, to see communism in action. Without giving too much away, this results in, a few months later, Judith and Miss Marie setting off in pursuit. Scarfe’s descriptions of France and particularly Spain in the early 1930s are vivid and believable, and tension builds as our two women, posing as the artists they really are, navigate borders and gun-toting guards to move deep into Franco’s territory. After witnessing a brutal event, Jude produces a cartoon, but Miss Marie demurs about sending it off. Jude, the artist, insists, despite the risks:

To not protest would leave a wound on my soul that might never heal.

The novel concludes with a resolution of sorts to the plot line, but leaves the main questions unanswered. This is as it should be, because these questions – how to balance the political with the personal, and what sort of politics will create a better, fairer society – have no simple answer.

I started by referring to the issue of kindness. I’m going to close on another issue that is close to my heart, that of moderation. Early in the novel, Judith meets librarian Joe Pulham who introduces her to the Aristotelian idea of living moderately. It’s an idea she returns to frequently though, as Miss Marie says, “moderation is not easy. It involves compromise, and to compromise, what do we give up?” Darned if I know, but it seems to me that negotiating that compromise is the best way forward?

Lisa Hill at ANZLitLovers also liked this book.

awwchallenge2015Wendy Scarfe
Hunger town
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2014
454pp.
ISBN: 9781743053362

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Ernestine Hill

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Regular readers of my musings will know by now that I sometimes use this spot to explore and share things that I don’t know much about. This post is one such. It was inspired by an article I read a year ago in Inside Story, Swinburne University of Technology’s online journal about current affairs and culture. The article was titled “How American servicemen found Ernestine Hill in their kit bags”, and was written by Anna Johnson, an academic from the University of Tasmania.

My love must wait 2002 cover

Cover for A&R Classics edition

Ernestine Hill (1899-1972) first came to my attention as a teenager with her novel, My love must wait, about Matthew Flinders. Although it was published in 1941, long before my teens, it was still popular at a time when young adult fiction had not come into its own. Primarily a journalist and travel writer, she only wrote that novel. And it’s not, I must clarify, the book that found its way into American servicemen’s kit bags! That book was Australian frontier, published in Australia in 1937 as The great Australian loneliness. Johnson doesn’t spend much time on these kitbags, but the story is that America’s non-profit Council on Books in Wartime, which believed books were “weapons in the war of ideas”, sent “stimulating reading [in Armed Services Editions*] to soldiers so that their leisure time was both educational and enjoyable”. I hadn’t known about this.

Johnson’s focus though is Hill, whom she describes as a “middlebrow” writer. She writes:

Although these so-called middlebrow writers [such as Ion Idriess and Frank Clune] have been frequently scorned by critics and neglected by subsequent Australian literary history, they were very influential cultural brokers who mediated debates about place, race, and culture for the interested general reader.

Hill’s books, says Johnson, were widely popular because they “were perfectly pitched between a sentimental attachment to late nineteenth-century ideas about the bush [..] and great excitement about modern technology and enterprise”. The Great Australian Loneliness, she writes, treads a fine line between lamenting “the passing of the old bushmen and their way of life” and celebrating “pilots and planes whose mail runs ‘have brought the Great Australian Loneliness well on to the map’.” Her writing was often condemned by critics “as romanticised purple prose” but Johnson suggests her books “forged bonds … between people who were geographically, socially and culturally dispersed”.

Hill’s popularity meant that booksellers loved her and promoted her, to the detriment of Australia’s more literary writers. Miles Franklin wrote in her diaries (ed. Paul Brunton) about a dinner held by Ell’s (a Newcastle bookseller) in September 1949:

I was able to note that booksellers, or representatives of publishers know little of the contents of the books they vend. They have not the taste, the ear, or the capacity. Take the case under observation, A & R [Angus and Robertson] boosted Idriess, an old steady, & Timms who is a thruster and insister & whom a person with Dr Mackaness’s literary standards considers an important Australian writer. But they did not bother about my books. I was there because invited by the cultural committee of Newcastle. My book continues to sell steadily though I’ve never had a Christmastide sale, was denied editions during the war boom in favour of E. Hill, who has powerful boosters behind her. I’ve never had a window or even a counter display.

Poor Miles. Hopefully not all booksellers and publishers were the same, but it’s a reminder that being a literary author has never been easy. I wonder how many people read Ion Idriess and EV Timms today?

Anyhow back to Hill. Reflecting her times, she was uneasy about multiculturalism, and wanted more white women, to support white men, in the outback. Johnson writes that her “vision of white Australia was common in the 1930s” and that she was “rarely complimentary to Aboriginal, Chinese, Malay, or Afghan Australians”, although she apparently filled her books with colourful vignettes about the lives of these people. She was, however, more positive about indigenous Australians. Johnson writes that she

attested to violent colonial conditions and lamented the passing of Indigenous lives and histories whose formative role in the nation had largely gone unrecorded. Her books and journalism joined others in modernising attitudes, which eventually saw the liberalisation that benefited Aboriginal people from the late 1960s onwards, even if her ‘modern’ opinions now seem uncomfortably tainted with colonialism.

So, a mixed bunch in terms of her attitudes. Regarding her book being published in America, she was thrilled. Articles by her were also published there. She wrote, in the 1940s, that she was encouraged “to rush my best and most arresting articles on this country to America to make them conscious of what a loss we’d be. Britain has never realised that. We must call Americans here.” Fascinating to see Hill’s vision of the power of literature, and its critical role, as Johnson describes it, in “securing the nation’s geopolitical future”.

Hill was a complex woman. She was also a friend of Daisy Bates, and, according the Australian Dictionary of Biography (link above), there was some controversy over Hill’s contribution to some of Bates’ writing.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any e-texts of Hill’s books, but once again Trove came to the rescue. Here is an excerpt of the foreword from The great Australian loneliness:

It was in July 1930 that I first set out, a wandering ‘copy-boy’ with swag and typewriter, to find what lay beyond the railway lines. Across the painted desert and the pearling seas, by aeroplanes and camel and coastal ship, by truck and lugger and packhorse and private yacht, the trail has led me on across five years and 50,000 miles, a trail of infinite surprises. I have interviewed men living in wurlies of paperbark who read Gibbon and wrote Greek and danced in corroboree, witch-doctors of the Warramunga, lepers and the dying, deep sea divers and prospectors for gold. I have attended Japanese feasts of lanterns, Chinese banquets, black fellow burials, and Greek weddings. Many of the notes have been taken by the flickering of the camp fire—the typewriter has always been with me, dangling from a camel-saddle jingling on a truck, covered with a camp sheet in the rains.” (The Shepparton Adviser, 31/3/1937)

Another book to add to the TBR list.

* A complete list of the 1322 titles is available online.

Kavita Nandan, Home after dark (Review)

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NandanHomeUSPWhen Kavita Nandan offered me her novel to review I was happy to accept because its setting – Fiji, Australia and India – intrigued me. I’ve read several novels set in India, and by Indian writers, but none set in Fiji or by Fijiindian writers. Moreover, as Nandan wrote in her email, and as the back cover blurb says, the novel is “set against the backdrop of the first Fijian coup of 1987”. I certainly hadn’t read any literature about that!

Nandan is, as you have probably gathered, a Fijiindian Australian. She was born in India, grew up in Fiji, and migrated to Australia in her teens after the 1987 coups. She currently lectures in Literature and Creative Writing at Charles Darwin University. This is her first novel, and like many first novels it is told first person and has strong autobiographical elements.

The novel starts with a story about the Colonel’s involvement in saving the main character Kamini’s life from choking, and then jumps 18 years to the coup when that same Colonel places Kamini’s father, a politician in the Fijian parliament, under house arrest along with other Fijiindian ministers. The stage is set then for a story about the fine balance between love/loyalty and betrayal. There’s humour, as well as pain, in Nandan’s description of the coup:

Most of us only had a vague idea of what a coup was and even after it happened, the word sounded foreign in our mouths as we ignorantly clucked out the “p” like chickens on my cousin Ravi’s farm.

Nandan conveys the unreality of the coup (or coups), but it was not a happy situation and, as Wikipedia says, it resulted in a strong wave of migration from Fijiindians. Nandan (and her character) were part of that wave.

The narrative tos-and-fros a little – taking us to her childhood village life in Fiji and her grandmother’s home in India – but it is mostly chronological. In chapter 3, having set the scene with the coup, Nandan jumps the story forward to when Kamini is 35 years old and returning to Suva, with a husband, to work at the University as a lecturer. It becomes quickly clear that her relationship with her husband, Gavin, is fraught. Gavin suffers from depression and hasn’t worked since their marriage three years previously. This, it appears, is not a marriage of mutual support and respect, and most of Kamini’s family do not understand why she had married Gavin in the first place.

It’s an interesting story, though I wondered at times why Nandan had decided to write it as a novel. This is a critical decision, and one I’ve seen several authors discuss and change their minds about. Kate Grenville, famously, started her novel The secret river as a non-fiction work about her ancestor, but felt she had too many gaps in knowledge about the things she wanted to explore, so turned to fiction to explore them. Anna Funder, on the other hand, intended Stasiland to be fiction but, having done her research, felt the best way to honour the stories was to make her book non-fiction. Nandan’s book is strongest in her descriptions of life in India and Fiji, and less so in the story of the relationship between Kamini and Gavin, which I suspect is the main fictional component of the novel. Kamini is negative about Gavin most of the book, while continuing to want to make the marriage work. It didn’t quite gel emotionally for me, so the links Nandan tries to draw between the personal and the political felt tenuous.

Nandan does, however, have some evocative turns of phrase, such as this of the relationship between her Indian grandmother, Nani, and her aunt:

She had always craved better connection with her youngest daughter, but what passed through the gap was mostly cold air.

Or this, about the pull of the past:

I had run my fingernail along those ancient walls of memory and now I was being disturbed by strange echoes.

And she understands the paradox of immigration. Here’s her description of her great-grandfather leaving India on a boat for Fiji:

He felt his back alert and alive. His legs held their ground on a swaying ship. His entire body was seeking a new life.

The act of leaving his parents, his sisters, his brothers, his old grandmother and voyaging to a faraway place changed my grandfather forever. Building upon the memories of the old, he created the foundations of a new home and a new language. His single intent had been a courageous one. He was not to know that the new shore would give not only life but a new kind of death to his children.

Early in the novel, Nandan writes:

My father created a universe of hope through books and reading. But he was careful to remind us that life was always more important than anything read in books.

In Home after dark, the most powerful sections are those that seem to be drawn most closely from life, that is, those detailing the effect of multiple migrations on an extended family. It is in this theme of dislocation and loss, rather than in the story of a relationship, that Nandan’s heart is clearest, her hand surest. I’d like to see her develop it more.

awwchallenge2015Kavita Nandan
Home after dark
Suva: USP Press, 2014
185pp.
ISBN: 9789820109216

(Review copy supplied by the author)

Emma Ashmere, The floating garden (Review)

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Emma Ashmere, The floating gardenI had a little chuckle when, fairly early in Emma Ashmere’s novel, The floating garden, we discover that our main character, Ellis Gilbey, writes a gardening column under the name Scribbly Gum! Good name, I thought. If it hadn’t been for my school song inspiration, this would have been the name for me!

There’s another synchronicity for me, though, and it relates to the setting of this story. Last week I did a presentation on old Australian ads for an organisation I’m involved in. One of those ads was The charmed cup*. It was made in 1929, runs for around 8 minutes (can you believe it?), and is for Bushells tea. It also, coincidentally, contains footage of the Sydney Harbour Bridge mid-construction. It’s this construction which sets the scene for Ashmere’s story … so now, let’s get to it.

The floating garden is set in Sydney in 1926 when construction on the Sydney Harbour Bridge had started and houses in Milson’s Point on the north of the harbour were being  demolished with little or no compensation to the residents of those homes. One of those residents is middle-aged Ellis Gilbey, who has run a boarding house for over twenty years. At the novel’s opening the last of her boarders has left and she, with other residents in the street, is hoping against hope that some compensation will be offered. Meanwhile, in a well-to-do part of Sydney, south of the harbour, is 30-something Rennie Howarth, a young English artist who had “taken the outstretched arm of an Australian man she hardly knew and had sailed from everything cold, sad and stale”. Unfortunately that Australian man, Lloyd, who had brought her to a life of luxury, was also abusive.

Part 1 of the novel alternates the story of these two women, with more of the chapters devoted to Ellis. Whether these two women are connected, or are going to be connected, we don’t discover until Part 2 of this three-part novel. While we are wondering about this, Ashmere is busy drawing some parallels between the women – both have experienced brutal men in their lives, Ellis her father and then an employee in a house where she’d lived as a young woman, and of course Rennie her husband; both had toyed with theosophy; and both find themselves house hunting. Another parallel occurs within Ellis’s life when, destitute, she is taken in by an older woman, and then, when that doesn’t work out, destitute again, she is taken in by another older, but this time kinder, woman. These parallels are not laboured, but provide a subtle foundation to the story being told, and help hold it together.

Ashmere’s main focus is Ellis. In her story, we shift between past and present, while Rennie’s story is focused on her present. Ellis, we discover, had run away from her farm home, when she was a teen, after her mother died, and had found herself, rather by accident, in the home of theosophist, Minerva Stranks, aka Strankenstein, around the turn of the century. It was out of the frying pan and into the fire for Ellis, as Minerva is a cruel taskmaster and a charlatan, to boot. Ellis is sexually attracted to Minerva’s other protégé, the pretty Kitty Tate. Her belief that Kitty cares for her helps her survive her time in the house until … well, I won’t give this away, but by the novel’s opening, Ellis had been carrying guilt and regret for twenty-seven years.

We are not given the same depth of background for Rennie’s life before the present, but we learn that she’d had a couple of exhibitions in London before fleeing to Australia with Lloyd, and that she’d been a lively, fun woman before her marriage to a man who physically abused and emotionally manipulated her. In Australia her art changes from “polite English watercolours” to “bolder, flatter, earthier colours” that are all-round too confronting for Lloyd. She represents, as Ashmere explained in an interview on ABC’s Books and Arts Daily, the new modernist art movement, a movement which rejected tradition for something bolder. That’s certainly Rennie.

So, despite the parallels in their lives, Rennie works largely as a foil for Ellis, not only because of their class difference, but because she’s lively and risk-taking against Ellis’ more cautious approach to life, which is understandable given her greater age and particular experiences. If I have a frustration with the novel, it would be that Rennie’s story is not as developed as Ellis’s and that perhaps her main role is to be this foil or plot-device to move Ellis on rather than a character in her own right. This is more observation, though, than complaint, because overall the writing is evocative without being overdone, and the characters are engaging,

What I particularly enjoyed about the novel is that Ashmere does for the underprivileged of 1920s Sydney what Ruth Park did for the 1950s in Harp in the south. They are very different books in terms of their narratives and themes, but both exude warmth and sympathy for their motley crew of marginalised characters, and both are valuable for their social history. In The floating garden this includes evoking the about-to-be dispossessed Milson’s Point community, the charlatan fringe of theosophy, the colour of Paddy’s Markets, the energy of the artistic/bohemian community, and the opening up of land in the rural outskirts of Sydney, in Lane Cove.

The novel’s overall theme has to do with memories, guilt and grief, with the idea that you really can’t move on if you haven’t resolved your past. Late in the novel, as Ellis starts to understand the truth of what had happened all those years ago, Ashmere writes:

She’d grown used to her memories for all these years and now her grief – her guilt – had grown around them in the same way a tree’s trunk grew around a rock until both the rock and the tree risked mutual destruction if prised apart.

But sometimes, there can only be progress if they are prised apart – and prised apart they eventually are, of course.

The floating garden is a very enjoyable book. It deals with real issues honestly but gently, and it brings to life a past world in a way that enhances our understanding of the present.

awwchallenge2015Emma Ashmere
The floating garden
North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2015
243pp.
ISBN: 9781742199368

(Review copy supplied by Spinifex Press)

* Unfortunately, the ad is broken into three clips on this page. Clip 2 contains the Bridge footage.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Black Inc’s Best 100 Poems

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I’ve been feeling rather guilty about a book sent to me in late 2013 by Black Inc. I’m usually very conscientious about reading and reviewing books that I’ve accepted for review – not so much for those sent to me “on spec” – but I slipped up with Black Inc’s The best 100 poems of Dorothy Porter. As I recollect, it came just after a major overseas trip and got caught up in the run-up to Christmas. I did read much of it, but just didn’t bring it to conclusion in order to review. So, I thought I’d talk about it “right here, right now”, to use some current vernacular.

The bee hut, by Dorothy Porter

Cover image (Courtesy: Black Inc)

Black Inc, which won ABIA’s Small Publisher of the Year award this year, is a small publisher that actively supports Australian poetry. Not only have they now produced three “best 100 poems” volumes, but they have published the annual Best Australian poems volumes for several years, as well as individual poetry collections like Les Murray’s Waiting for the past, Robert Gray’s Coast road, and Dorothy Porter’s The bee hut (which I reviewed a few years ago now). All these books, as far as I can tell, are published in print and electronic format.

Now, the topic in hand. Here are the three “best 100 poems” volumes published to date, listed in order of publication.

The best 100 poems of Les Murray (2012)

I bought the e-version of this after hearing Murray (b. 1938) speak last year at Poetry at the Gods. As the only living poet of the three, Murray made his own selection. Unlike the Porter collection, in which the poems are grouped in some way, Murray’s selection is simply (though some thought is sure to have gone into the order) a list of 100 poems with no reference to their original context. Murray’s oeuvre is huge – his career has been very long – so without extensive research I don’t know where every poem comes from or how each fits into his career. As you would expect from a “best 100” they  are diverse in subject and style.

The first poem is “Driving through sawmill towns”, from the 1990s I think. Read it and see what you think. I like its understanding of human behaviour – the “tall youths look away” while “it is the older men who/come out in blue singlets and talk softly to you”. Meanwhile, “all day in calendared kitchens, women listen/for cars on the road/lost children in the bush,/a cry from the mill, a footstep -/nothing happens”. I like the sense of resignation in the inhabitants, but no judgement from driver driving through. A later poem, “Mirrorball”, from 2010, describes travellers on a bus riding up the Hume Highway through old towns full of history, but when the driver sets off again “half his earplugged sitters wear/the look of deserted towns”. Oh dear. Not all Murray’s poems are about country towns, but rural life is one of his ongoing subjects.

I’m not sure I really like reading poems in e-format, in which I bought this book, but the upside is that you can carry some poetry with you wherever you go.

The best 100 poems of Dorothy Porter (2013)

PorterBest100BlackIncThis is a posthumous collection selected by Porter’s (1954-2008) partner, the novelist Andrea Goldsmith. It includes a small selection of poems from her verse novel The monkey’s mask which I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read. (Having now read the few poems Goldsmith included here, I’m inspired to rectify this.) It also contains poems from her verse novels El Dorado and Akhenaton, as well as from various other collections of her rather extensive oeuvre. The poems range, for me, from beautiful, heart-rending, funny, and/or wicked to rather obscure. But that’s probably the nature of poetry. Those that draw on classics and mythology sometimes lose me, I have to admit, with their erudition, but her heart, her imagery and the way she can cheekily play with rhyme and rhythm are what I love about Porter.

I’ll just share one of Porter’s poems. It’s called “Circular Quay” and expresses discomfort with perfection, because experience has taught her so: “This perfect day/makes me uneasy … I breathe easier/spying some scum/floating/on a lovely green wave./Nothing’s perfect”. In the middle of this short tight poem she is reminded of the past. It’s the sort of poem that makes me write “Oh, yes” in the margins.

I’m tempted to suggest that Murray writes more of People while Porter’s poetry is more about the Personal. This is a rather coarse generalisation I know. These poets are highly diverse, but it’s how their writing, such as I’ve read in recent years, strikes me.

The best 100 poems of Gwen Harwood (2014)

Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) is the oldest of the three, and is the one I know least, so I won’t say much. I’ve heard her described as one of Australia’s finest poets, and readers I respect speak positively of her, but I really only discovered her when I started researching Australian poets for Wikipedia a few years ago. Why is this? I certainly didn’t study her at school or university, and since then, I must admit, my poetry reading has been very erratic. This selection was made by her son, John Harwood, who is also a writer. Her recurring themes, according to Wikipedia, include motherhood and the “stifled role of women”. Music, the Tasmanian landscape and Aboriginal dispossession also recur in her work.

From the compilers of these collections – the poet himself, the partner, the son – it appears that Black Inc has aimed to make these “best 100” volumes personal rather than academic in flavour, which is lovely I think.

Given these three volumes were published in the last three Novembers, I’m presuming another will be published this November. I wonder who it will be? Meanwhile, I’ll close by saying that these are gorgeously produced books – with lovely covers. They would suit those wanting an introduction to the specific poets as well as their fans.

 

Bacchus, Ruth & Hill, Barbara, First things first: Selected letters of Kate Llewellyn 1977-2004 (Review)

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Ruth Bacchus and Barbara Hill, First things firstIt might look like I’ve suddenly hired myself as author Jessica White’s PR Consultant as this is the second post in a row that I’ve opened with her, but the coincidence was too great for me not to. You see, this week, White posted on her Facebook Author Page that she’d received funding for a novel from the Australia Council for the Arts, and exulted that “I’m so happy that I can a) afford to eat for the next 6 months …”. One of the several threads running through Kate Llewellyn’s letters in First things first is her struggle to survive financially as a writer. More on that anon …

First, how do you review a book of letters? Yes, I know I’ve done it before for Jane Austen’s letters, but that’s different. Jane Austen is long gone, and was long gone when her letters were first published. Kate Llewellyn is still, fortunately I might add, with us, so, as well as reviewing a book about a living author, which of course bloggers/reviewers do frequently, I’m reviewing something very personal, a book of her letters. She didn’t put this selection together – Charles Sturt University academics Ruth Bacchus and Barbara Hill did – but she allowed her letters to be published, “trusting us”, the editors say in their preface, “with the contents of her life”. And that, I think, is a brave thing to do. But then again, you have to be brave to be a writer, don’t you?

Some of you, particularly if you’re not Australian, may not know Kate Llewellyn, but she’s an Australian poet and prose writer. Her prose includes travel writing, autobiography, and what the editors describe as “a hybrid blend she has made her own and perhaps pioneered in Australian women’s writing – a sensuous journal, studded with poetry, laced with recipes and concerned with ‘the weather, domesticity, love, art, gardening, the names of plants, a woman’s simple daily tasks and her heart’s thoughts’*”. She also co-edited The Penguin book of Australian women poets, which I own and often refer to.

Now, back to my question of reviewing a book of letters. Late-ish in the book, Llewellyn writes in a letter to Ianesco (artist Ian North) about reading John Cheever’s journals:

I did not know at times if I should be reading them, it seemed even prurient. But I had to keep on reading … and to think he wasn’t even trying … just did it for himself … […] … sizzling honesty.

“Prurience” isn’t the word you’d use for reading Llewellyn’s letters, and these are letters so written for someone besides herself, but they were, initially anyhow, private and they contain a rawness and honesty, together with a poetic beauty, that struck me much the way it seems that Cheever struck her. This rawness and honesty is most apparent when she writes about her relationships with others (romantic and otherwise) and her struggle to survive as a writer. It’s this latter of course that Jessica White’s Facebook post struck a chord with.

“I wouldn’t want not to be vulnerable”

As a reader, I’m interested in how writers do it. How do they manage to write and live? Some, of course, produce bestsellers but they are few. Some have significant others who support them. But most, it seems, scrabble around putting together projects, applying for grants, undertaking speaking and teaching engagements to keep going. It is this, among other things, that Llewellyn conveys with fearless clarity through her letters. She details the challenges of co-editing the poetry anthology with Susan Hampton, and of the difficulty of finding a publisher when the first one fell through. She describes unsatisfying, if not downright unpleasant, experiences of some (though not all) writers’ retreats. She tells of sending pieces off to numerous magazines and editors and of writing applications for grants or positions as writer-in-residence, and shares the emotional and financial pain of rejection, alongside the occasional joy of success. She describes cobbling together projects, such as one which didn’t come to fruition with friend Marion Halligan. She loses confidence in writing poetry, and wants to change her prose style. She writes of “the spite and derangement of the literary world” and of the mismanagement of distribution. She wonders why certain poets don’t like her, questions why some reviewers feel the need to be cruel, and is aware that there are people on boards who “do not wish me well”. It’s an uncertain life, and yet, with her get-up-and-go spirit she writes:

I think there’s a lot to be said for perplexity and bewilderment. Certainty is not all it’s cracked up to be. (to Ianesco, 13 January, 1995)

So, I learnt quite a lot about the life of a working writer. I realise that, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, every writer’s life is different, and that each is likely to respond differently to the challenges, but experience tells me there’s a significant core in Llewellyn’s experience that’s true for many writers. What, though, did I learn about Llewellyn, herself?

Well, here is the challenge of course, because not only is a volume of letters, like this, one-sided, but these letters are a selection (and a selection, at that, of a period of her life). What letters weren’t included and how might they have affected our view of Llewellyn? Not much I think, because Llewellyn is so honest with her friends – and these letters are all to friends, many of whom are artists, writers and musicians – that you get a clear picture of her. She’s funny, vulnerable, emotional, warm-hearted, generous of spirit, depressed and lonely at times, subversive and yet a little conservative too. She can also, she’s aware, be rather full-on (high-maintenance, perhaps): “when I meet people I’m attracted to and with whom I feel great sympathy … I leap in”. She’s intelligent and, of course, creative.

One of the delights of the book, besides its various insights, is her writing. Funny that! It’s almost impossible to find one good example, but I’ll try. How about this description of a couple met at a dinner:

The former was a thin 50 year-old woman with husband to match … it was like talking to an oyster … a khaki woollen frock, grey hair, no colour anywhere, no lipstick … cold, grey, elegant, been everywhere, smoking, khaki skin, eyes like cold stones … I felt so defeated in my scarlet outfit I decided to try to get some reaction … (to Jerry Rogers, 19 June 1992)

Llewellyn, you have probably gathered, likes colour and life, and she likes “ardour … perhaps more than anything else in life”. Anyhow, I can’t leave it at one example, so will share a few more:

In fact, I think this town [Sofala] where not one building stands erect, but leans like a person into the wind, has only goats and tourists for income. (to Marion Halligan, 11 April 1994).

And

I swam in and out of it [Adelaide Writers’ Week] like a fish and took what came my way, be it seaweed or krill, but no bait, I hope. (to Marion Halligan, 11 April 1994).

And

… she [friend Jerry Rogers’ teen granddaughter] has been a real joy here … laughing like a gutter full of fresh rain after a drought, it is the loveliest laugh I ever heard. (to Ianesco and Mirna, 8 July 1996).

I will write another post or maybe two on this book – to share some of her thoughts on Australian writers, and a little of her humour. But, I don’t want to give the whole book away … which brings me to the question of whether I’d recommend it. Well, yes I would, but with, I suppose, a little qualification. This is a book of letters, and letters aren’t for everyone. With the best editing in the world, they can’t help but be disjointed. However, for me, Llewellyn’s voice is so compelling, her persona so open, and her writing so frequently funny, that I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent in her head.

awwchallenge2015Bacchus, Ruth & Hill, Barbara
First things first: Selected letters of Kate Llewellyn, 1977-2004
Mile End SA, Wakefield Press, 2015
299pp.
ISBN: 9781743053645

(Review copy supplied by Wakefield Press)

* Llewellyn’s own description of her best-selling book in this genre, The Waterlily, in a letter to Bob Boynes and Mandy Martin, 20 July 1987.