When my reading group scheduled Jane Caro’s debut novel, The mother, I was, I admit, not exactly enthusiastic, because my sense was that it was not going to be the sort of, shall I say, subtle writing I prefer. My sense was right, but I am not sorry I read it – partly because of the engaged discussion we had and partly for Caro’s intention.
The mother, then, is not a literary award-winner – the writing is fine but not exciting or breath-taking in the way I like – but, and it is a big but, it is an accessible, fictional exposé of the main points Jess Hill makes in her Stella Prize-winning See what you made me do: Power, control and domestic violence (my review). Hill explores family and domestic violence from every angle, but the most shocking and enlightening part for me concerned children, particularly the Family Court’s inability or refusal to see the risks to children from its parent access orders, even when the children themselves express fear. This point is powerfully made by Caro in her novel*.
But, let me step back a bit. The mother tells the story of 60-something middle-class Miriam Duffy who, widowed early in the novel, is pleased – and indeed grateful – when her emotional daughter, with whom she has had a tricky relationship, marries a perfect-seeming man. Gradually, however, little niggles about this relationship become bigger until one day they are confirmed when Ally returns home with two little children in tow, having left her husband. From here the situation deteriorates as the husband Nick escalates his bullying, predatory behaviour, and Miriam and Ally realise that the law is unable to protect them. The novel is described as a thriller, so I’ll give you just one more piece of information. It opens with a Prologue in which Miriam buys a handgun.
This brings me to the structure. After this Prologue, the novel is divided into two parts. In Part 1, Ally marries and soon after, Miriam is widowed. There is also a second, older, daughter who is in a stable marriage and has two children. During this part, Caro slowly drips out many of the flags that constitute coercive control, but that on their own don’t initially look like it or can be explained away – things like isolation from family and friends, use of a (demeaning) pet-name, jealousy, charm that is turned on and off at will, and surveillance, moving into sexual violence and gaslighting. This part ends with Ally’s return home. Part 2 commences four years later, and we are reminded of the Prologue, because Miriam is researching where she can buy a gun. Miriam and Ally have been systematically intimidated by Nick, and have reported his transgressions against Ally’s AVO (Apprehended Violence Order) again and again, but
Eventually they had stopped going to the police. It wasn’t that the cops weren’t sympathetic; it was just that they could not do anything.
In this part, Caro ratchets up the sense of helplessness (and hopelessness) the two women feel as Nick finds new ways to harass and terrify them. As I read it, I couldn’t help but think about all the news stories of recent years about murdered women and children. Nor could Miriam and Ally, but they turned the TV off the minute these stories came on. They were too close to home!
Like many issue-driven books, The mother did, as many in my reading group commented, feel didactic at times, and it is somewhat predictable. Some of us also felt that it was a little laboured in places. However, offsetting this is the novel’s characterisation and understanding of human nature. Caro conveys the complex human emotions we all experience under stress. She explores the lines and balance between what is acceptable in relationships and what is not, the fears about when to speak up, the justifications we try to find when things feel awry, and the feelings of guilt (particularly in mothers).
The mother is unapologetically a novel with a cause. With its compelling storyline and believable characters, it has a chance of reaching those who do not understand what coercive control is, and who do not realise that it crosses all demographics. Nick, for example, is a vet and Ally a PhD candidate. Miriam, a successful businesswoman, lives in comfortable North Shore Sydney.
This novel is being promoted primarily as a thriller, but I’m more inclined to see it as belonging to that long tradition of social problem novels. It may not be as sophisticated as the best of them, but its intention is clear, to drive social change. I hope it succeeds. I don’t imagine Jane Caro, or Jess Hill for that matter, will let matters lie until we see real, sustained change happening – and nor should we.
* This month there has been news about changes in family law in Australia, including removing the presumption of equal shared care, putting a focus on prioritising children’s best interests, and revamping the role of independent children’s lawyers. Time will tell what difference this makes in practice.
Jane Caro The mother Allen & Unwin, 2022 368pp. ISBN: 9781761063893 ASIN: B09MQ3PN1W
Quite coincidentally, earlier this month, I read and posted on Willa Cather’s short story “The bookkeeper’s wife” which commences with a young man, Percy Bixby, sitting in his office deciding to do something in order to keep his flashy fiancée Stella. That was published in 1916. I have now just finished Donna M. Cameron’s novel, The rewilding, which was published in 2024. It commences with another young man, Jagger Eckerman, is sitting in his office deciding to do something that will lose him his flashy fiancée Lola. Both young men are caught up in fraud, Percy of his own making, Jagger unwittingly, though that doesn’t make him entirely blameless. From here the stories part company, so we will leave Percy, whose story I’ve already told, and look at 27-year-old Jagger.
Jagger has been living the high life. Caught up in his own privileged lifestyle, he’s been carelessly signing documents he shouldn’t, until finally the penny drops and he wakes “up to the fact that every aspect of his life is a farce”. So, he clicks Send on his whistle-blowing email and scarpers. The problem is that the only place he can think to scarper to is a cave in a national park south of Sydney, and when he gets there he finds someone else already holed up in the same spot, the 24-year-old “feral” eco-warrior, Nia Moretti. As the accompanying publicity sheet says, it is hatred at first sight, but they soon realise they need each other, whether they like it or not.
The rewilding starts with a bang and barely lets up for the length of its 300 pages. It’s a genre-bending work of eco-literature that combines thriller, road story and romance. The central thriller-driven plot is not my favourite type of story – I’m not much interested in watching or reading about chases, violence and suspense – but Cameron handles her material confidently, creating a book that I enjoyed reading despite myself. I just hurried through the bits that were less interesting to me. Why I was happy to read it is what I want to focus on here.
First, there’s the genre-bending aspect. Cameron balances the thriller components with more reflective and tender sections, with moments of interpersonal tension, with touches of humour, gorgeous natural descriptions, and serious themes. Second, the story is well-paced, and the writing fresh but accessible. It is primarily told third person through Jagger’s perspective, but this is occasionally interspersed with short chapters in Nia’s voice, in which she speaks to a mysterious “you”. These provide additional insights into Nia that Jagger can’t know, while also increasing the mystery. Who is this “you”? What has happened to Nia? Third, the two main characters are nicely developed. Jagger is on the run, scared and uncertain about what his future holds. Still grieving his mother’s death and the mistakes he’s made, he is fundamentally decent and an optimist. Nia, on the other hand, is an uncompromising idealist, and pessimistic, but reveals a softer side. Gradually, as is typical of the romance genre, the antagonism between them is relaxed, although not, of course, without setbacks.
“a capitalist suit” versus “the feral”
And finally, there are the themes. For me, a good story isn’t enough. I need some meat, some ideas that make the time I put into reading worthwhile, and this book has meat – personal and political. In the personal realm, Jagger is a young man who had lost his way but, when some truths become clear to him – when he realises his relationship had been built on a lie and his workplace was engaging in a waste removal scam – his better self, the one his recently dead mother had so carefully tried to engender in him, comes to the fore. In his suit and fancy shoes, he surprises Nia with his deep knowledge of and love for nature. Likewise, Nia is struggling with a personal loss. She is resentful of the “capitalist suit” who comes into her cave, and finds ways of using him – and his money – to her own ends but, despite her toughness, she has a heart. So, on the personal level, The rewilding is a novel about values, about the lines you draw, about the life you choose to live and what that means personally and …
politically, because this is also a novel about climate activism. Nia and her radical Earth Rebellion mates, the Lorax, are determined to save the planet. Their focus is a mining operation in northern Queensland which is about to proceed without permission. First, though, she has something to do in disaster-struck, flooded Brisbane, something that puts her and Jagger’s lives at risk. On the run, and being followed by hit men, he has no option but to go along with the only person who can help him. It is at this point, before the final dramatic confrontation at the mine, that Nia starts to unbend a little towards Jagger and his perspective.
“Why be scared of change?”
The rewilding is a wild, dramatic novel. It does push the boundaries of credibility at times, but probably no more than you expect in a thriller. Ultimately, through her characters and their fierce, lively conversations, and through her fast-paced plot which offers a few scenarios, Cameron explores the critical issues confronting us and asks the big questions we are asking, without resorting to overt didacticism.
Climate change novels can be bleak, but many authors, even those writing the bleakest of stories, talk at writers festivals about wanting to leave their readers with some hope. That this was Cameron’s intention is foreshadowed in the epigraph from Tolkien’s The lord of the rings, “Where there’s life, there’s hope”. So, at the end, certain rapprochements are achieved, but the conclusion is real rather than simplistic. It recognises that life is messy and change is hard but that it’s worth keeping on trying. The rewilding is a worthy addition to Australia’s eco-literature field.
Donna M. Cameron The rewilding Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2024 309pp. ISBN: 9781923023062
(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge, via publicist Scott Eathorne of Quikmark Media)
The forgotten writers I have been writing about vary greatly, and most will stay forgotten because, to be honest, their time has past and not all writing remains relevant. This is not to say, however, that they are not worth revisiting. They are, after all, part of our literary culture, and they paved ways, whether we are aware of it or not. Grace Ethel Martyr is an example. She is notable enough to have entries in AustLit and Wikipedia, and was interesting enough in her time to catch the attention of Zora Cross (who wrote about her for a series she did for The Australian Women’s Mirror.)
Martyr is another writer I have posted about on the Australian Women Writers (AWW) blog, but again, I am not including here the piece written by her that I published there. Titled “The blue jar”, its subject is domestic violence, though that term would not have been used then. It’s not typical of her best-known work. However, in the light of our own times, it is worth reading. It is told from the 1920s perspective that women just need to put up with brutal husbands and manage as best they can. They didn’t have much choice. But, in this story, a bit of luck comes the wife’s way … check it out at AWW.
Grace Ethel Martyr
Grace Ethel Martyr (1888-1934) was a Victorian-born poet, short story writer and journalist. She wrote under various permutations of her name – G. E. Martyr; E. Martyr; Ethel Martyr; Grace E. Martyr; and G. Ethel Martyr.
Born in Ballarat, she was the only daughter of James Kent and Grace Flora Martyr. She grew up in Maldon in central Victoria, but spent much of her working life in Bendigo. She apparently passed the University of Melbourne matriculation examination in 1906, but I haven’t found evidence that she went on to university. AustLit and Wikipedia both say she was employed by the Bank of New South Wales, for whom her father had worked, for four and a half years, but left due to ill-health. While working at the bank, she published a collection of patriotic war poems, Afterwards and other verses (1918), but she didn’t begin to write seriously until she had left the bank. Zora Cross (writing as Bernice May in The Australian Women’s Mirror) tells how this book was given to her to by Martyr’s cousin who wanted her assessment of it, and says it was she, Cross, who encouraged Martyr to leave the bank (though the ill-health part is also true, I believe).
The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 May 1918, commented on Afterwards and other verses, describing it as “unequal” (meaning “uneven”?) but also as
characterised by sincerity, depth of feeling, and a burning patriotism which redeems many shortcomings. Her technique, though not faultless, is usually correct, and at her best Miss Martyr can reach a high level of dignified expression.
War has given inspiration to Miss Martyr’s muse, and if her verse does not reach the loftiest peaks, the level of its quality is rather beyond that common to such collections.
Writing about Martyr ten years later, Cross says that
So far, Miss Martyr’s best work has been done in verse. But her true vein is the child story and child-verse. I know of no Australian writer who has so beautifully caught the spirit of the child in verse as she has. And she is that rare writer, the one who never forgets that child-verse should also be poetry.
Martyr, then, wrote children’s poetry and fiction, including several stories serialised in The Australasian, but AusLit says that her principal literary output is the poetry she published in The Bulletin and The Australian Woman’s Mirror. In addition to this writing, Martyr also worked for The Bendigo Advertiser, where she edited the women’s columns and the children’s page, and she was Bendigo’s social correspondent for several Melbourne publications.
Cross praises much about her work, saying
She shows inner melody in her verse which is often of a very high standard. Her love of music and nature comes out in her poetry. Like all Australian writers her best work has appeared in the Bulletin.
Martyr won prizes at Ballarat’s South Street Literary Awards – in 1918 for best patriotic poem and in 1919 for best original poem. In 1920 she came second to David McKee Wright, from a field of 125 entries, in the Rupert Brooke Award, which was established by the Old Collegians’ Association of Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College.
Martyr was also a pianist, and worked with musicians Margaret Sutherland and William James on various projects. In particular, she wrote stories and verses for the 3LO children’s hour, with James setting her verse to music. (William James is best known, to me anyhow, for the 15 Australian Christmas Carols he composed with lyricist John Wheeler. I wrote about them early in my blog.)
Martyr seems to be another example of a woman who managed to make a career for herself as a writer, by turning her hand to a wide variety of forms and audiences, but she also died relatively young. She was not completely forgotten, however, because five of her poems were included in Michael Sharkey’s 2018 anthology, Many such as she: Victorian women poets of World War One. An exhibition was held at Bendigo’s Soldiers Memorial Institute Military Museum in association with this book. Curator Kirsten McCay specifically mentioned Martyr, saying “Poet Grace Martyr lived locally and was a journalist for the Bendigo Advertiser. She also gave illustrated talks on famous composers at St Paul’s Cathedral, where a cross commemorates her life.”
Cross concluded her 1927 article with:
Grace Ethel Martyr’s work is always getting better, which is surely the best sign in any writer. Time, I think, will prove her to be one of the most sincere writers among us.
Six years later, at the age of 46, Martyr was dead. The report of her death, which was repeated in several Victorian newspapers, is brief but says that:
Miss Martyr’s literary gifts were apparent at an early age, and during the years that followed she established something of value to Australian literature.
I rest my case!
Sources
G. Ethel Martyr, “The blue jar” in The Australasian, 5 April 1924
Grace Ethel Martyr, Wikipedia [Accessed: 3 July 2024]
Grace Ethel Martyr, AustLit [Accessed: 3 July 2024]
Bernice May (aka Zora Cross), “Grace Ethel Martyr”, The Australian woman’s mirror,2 August 1927 [Accessed: 22 July 2024]
Broadly speaking, Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel, Edenglassie, does for southeast Queensland what Kim Scott’s That deadman dance does for Noongar country in southwest Western Australia. Both tell of the early days of their respective colonies from a First Nations perspective; both are written in a generous spirit but with absolute clarity about the dispossession that took place; and both suggest things could have been different.
Unlike That deadman dance, however, Edenglassie, is a dual narrative story. The main storyline, featuring two young people, Mulanyin and Nita, is set around the Magandjin or Meanjin (Brisbane) region during the mid-1850s, making it just a little later than Scott’s first contact narrative. Dispossession, massacres and other brutalities from the colonisers were met with armed resistance, but there were also attempts to work together. Paralleling this historical story is a modern one, featuring Granny Eddie, Winona, and Dr Johnny, set in the same area at the time of its 2024 bicentenary. These stories, one using historical realism and the other modern humour, riff off each other to provide a complex picture of the colonial project – then and now.
Melissa Lucashenko said much that interested me in the conversation I attended for this book, but here I’ll focus on two points she made. One is that the book’s central question is “what was going through these people’s [the colonisers’] minds?” Things could have been different then, she said, and could still be now. The other point is that she wanted to counteract the trope of the dying race. This idea has been slowly changing since Mabo, she said, but is still evident. The modern storyline, with its confident and politically involved Goorie characters, ensures that we see a vibrant, living culture in action.
Realising these two ideas is a big ask, and in my reading group there were some equivocations, but I think Lucashenko pulls it off, through creating engaging characters who come alive on the page and narratives that ring true to their times. Mulanyin, the kippa (young initiated man) from the historical period, and Winona, the fiery young woman in modern times, represent the passion of youth. They are impatient and want things to happen – or change – now. Both, however, also have elders guiding them – in the Goorie way, which is to encourage people to work it out for themselves and to remedy their mistakes.
“needing to endure the unendurable” (Mulanyin)
So, what is it that these young characters must contend with? The novel starts with two pointed events. In the modern storyline, Granny Eddie trips over a jutting tree root and is ignored by passersby until two young brown faces – Malaysian students as it turns out – help her up and get her to hospital. The modern scene is set, and all is not well.
We then flash back to 1840 where members of the Goorie Federation are looking forward to the imminent departure of the dagai, only to be told that this is now unlikely. A Goorie mother wonders what
If life never returned to normal. If the rule of law was never restored. What would her son see as a man? … Would her daughters be subject to the terrors the dagai brought?
What indeed?
Having asked the question, Lucashenko then moves her historical story to 1854-1855. Mulanyin is living with his law-brother Murree north of his own saltwater Nerang/Yugambeh home. Here, he is in close contact with the colonisers, and particularly with the Petries. At this time, the Petries, particularly the young Tom Petrie, were sympathetic to, and tried in their own way to work with, the Goories on whose land they resided. Lucashenko seems to be saying that, given colonisation was happening and wasn’t going to be undone, there were ways in which it might have been made to work (or, at least, work better). Conversations between Tom, Mulanyin, and other characters, explore their differences, particularly regarding attitudes to country. Mulanyin wants to know
what goes on in the brain of an Englishman? When he arrives in another man’s country to steal his land, and water, and game, and then with a straight face, calls those he steals from thieves? Is this how it is in Scotland? Is this why your people have fled that terrible place?’
The ensuing discussion has Tom struggling to explain the English, but admitting that “in their ignorance, they don’t understand that the land here has its own Law. They think that only their British law exists”. However, he says, they “respect some boundaries still … Those that are well defended”.
What did ‘well defended’ look like, Mulanyin wondered, if not like a thousand Goories assembled at the Woolloongabba pullen pullen? If not like Dundalli, leading the warriors who had willingly assembled under him, from Dugulumba to K’gari?
Fair point, Mulanyin.
Meanwhile, the modern-day characters are living with the fall-out from the failure of the colonisers to make it work and of the colonised to succeed in their resistance. Goories are still here, yes, but life is a struggle, and Winona wants to fight back, wants “to bite em hard onetime, while we got the chance”. She can’t understand why Granny Eddie, who grew up “with a dirt floor and empty belly” doesn’t think she deserves more. Granny, though, is two things. A pragmatist who sees that “Dagai not going away! We gotta get on with them”. And she’s an elder well-versed in her culture, so when Winona takes a hardline with Dr Johnny, who claims Aboriginal heritage, Granny says
“You’re thinking like a whitefella when ya close him out. That’s not our way. We bring people in, we bring our Mob home, and we care about them. We teach them how to behave proper way…”
Further, she argues,
“We can’t be sunk in bitterness … Or stuck in the past. We need to focus on the good dagais, like Cathy and Zainab, and them Petries, and –.”
Winona, Granny Eddie and Mulanyin all make sense, but they speak from different angles. What makes Edenglassie so interesting is the way Lucashenko gives space and respect to these angles. She certainly shows what was lost – and the utter unfairness of it. But, with the generosity of spirit we keep seeing, she also shares through her characters what living with deep connection to country means. And, she encourages everyone to think about alternative ways we can do this.
Towards the end of the novel, Gaja (Aunty) Iris shares an important story with our modern protagonists, introducing it with
we all know how important our stories are … People all over the world keep their stories close. Middle Eastern people believe … that by telling a story you can change the world, and nothing is as powerful as the right story at the right time.
With ideas about truth-telling and decolonisation becoming part of modern Australian culture, now feels like the right time for stories like Edenglassie. It might be an uncomfortable time to be a settler Australian, but that’s nothing compared with what First Nations people have endured and continue to endure. The least we can do is try to understand. Books like Lucashenko’s not only help us along this path but give us a lively read at the same time.
Melissa Lucashenko Edenglassie St Lucia: UQP, 2023 306pp. ISBN: 9780702266126
When I was a little girl, I was allowed to watch a limited amount of television, and what I loved – yes, you can laugh at me – were the singing cowboys, like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. We are talking the 60s and I was constrained by what was on at the times I was allowed to watch, but still, I gave my heart and soul to these cool dudes. At least, they were to me. All this is a long way around to say I love that Myfyanwy Jones’ third novel, Cool water, features one of my favourite songs from that era, the titular “Cool water”, but I’ll return to that later.
Cool water is a strong, but thoughtful novel about fathers and sons, about what makes a good man, and, particularly, about family and what we inherit (whether we like it or not). I have read a few novels since blogging that explore manhood and fatherhood, including books by Christos Tsiolkas and Steve Toltz. This is another, and I found it absorbing. Set in tiny Tinaroo in Yidindji Country on the Atherton Tablelands of Queensland, Cool water is structured around two storylines, one, set in contemporary times, and the other set over 1955 and 1956 during the building of Tinaroo dam. Threading through these two time-frames are three men, Frank, his father Joe, and grandfather Victor.
“Life was an extreme sport” (Frank)
The novel opens with a Prologue, featuring Victor, the town butcher, appearing supremely confident at a town event. But immediately there is something a bit askew in the way he is described. Not only is he “imposing”, but he’s “horribly handsome”. We are introduced to many of the characters who will appear in the story to come, but the Prologue closes at “the end of the hall, where fatherly embrace has become stranglehold: Joe, white-faced now, wide-eyed and wheezing, as Victor Herbert uses the crook of his arm to apply an unrelenting pressure …”
From here, we jump to the present and Victor’s grandson Frank. His father, Joe, has died in the last year, and he, his wife Paula and daughter Lily have returned to Tinaroo for Lily’s wedding. But all is not well. Joe casts such a shadow over Frank that his relationship with Paula is suffering. They are drawing apart. The novel is told third person, but in the contemporary story, it is all from Frank’s perspective, whereas in the earlier story we switch between Victor, young Joe, and a woman named Evelyn who, unhappy in her marriage, catches the philandering Victor’s eye. Jones handles the storylines well, but it is Frank’s voice which carries the novel as he struggles to make sense of his complicated father and be the man, husband and father he wants to be:
… he feared all the men in his family were cursed. And that however hard he tried to be good, he would not be able to escape his shadow.
By contrast, Joe is the murkiest character. We see him as a young boy, caught in an adult drama between Victor and Evelyn that he doesn’t understand. A sensitive boy, he has promise as a human being, but is the youngest and least tough of Victor’s three sons and bears more than his share of Victor’s brutality. Unlike Victor and Frank whom we know as adults, we only know adult Joe through Frank’s eyes. This can feel frustrating because a strong sense of intergenerational trauma underpins the novel but the Joe Frank describes doesn’t match the child we’ve met. However, through seeing how his father treated him, and hearing Frank’s (and his sister’s) recollections, we gradually fill in the gaps to see a man who didn’t fully shake his father’s brutal volatility. As the story progresses, we realise that Joe’s dreams of a different life to that mapped out by his butcher father had not been realised. His death seems to Frank, “a measured suicide” through “deliberate self-neglect”. He is the saddest character in the story.
All this is told against the backdrop of the dam and its lake – first the building of the dam, and later as a drought-stricken recreational facility. This three-generation story could have been set anywhere, so why choose this? I had some ideas, but wanted to see if Jones had been interviewed about it, and I found she had, at Good Reading Magazine. Jones says that her novels “always seem to start with place”, and so it was a visit to Tinaroo Dam which inspired this novel. She says that, “in 2017, Tinaroo Dam was at 25 per cent capacity and full of blue-green algae; pieces of the old, submerged town of Kulara had begun to surface – an eerie manifestation of the ever-present past”.
And there you can see the inspiration. The dam is a powerful place, with a complicated history worth exploring but it also works as a useful metaphor for the “ever-present past” (and thus perfect for Jones’ exploration of intergenerational trauma). Dams and lakes, too, are intrinsically paradoxical, with dam-building representing violence and a desire to control, and lakes offering opportunities for beauty, peace and recreation. Jones uses this to full effect, including well-placed references to colonialism and First Nations dispossession, starting with subtle humour in the Prologue, where we are told that a visiting magician had “come a long way by ship (that said, so had most of the crowd, one way or another). In such ways can writers both truth-tell and decolonise our literature, without telling stories that are not their own.
As for the song, “Cool water”, lines from it appear a few times in the novel, always associated with Victor and always conveying some sense of menace, but also just a little perhaps of a lost soul, a war-damaged man who has lost his way. (In case you are interested, here is the version of “Cool water“, by Frankie Laine, that was popular in 1955 when the novel is set, but there are many versions out there which convey different senses of its meaning.)
Ultimately, Cool water is a hopeful novel, one that recognises and conveys unapologetically the very real damage that can happen in families, but that also sees, as Frank hopes early on, that “a different ending was always possible”. A sensitive novel that leaves much unanswered. I like that.
Myfanwy Jones Cool water Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2024 296pp. ISBN: 9780733650024
“Forgotten” is a subjective thing, as I suggested with my fifth post in this series on Lillian Pyke whose reputation as a children’s writer has survived in niche circles at least. My next subject, Constance Clyde, like Lillian Pyke, has entries in both AustLit and Wikipedia suggesting some notability, but I had not heard of her before.
Like my last three Forgotten Writers, Clyde was the subject of one of my posts on the Australian Women Writers (AWW) blog this year. Once again, I am not including here the piece written by Clyde that I published there, but it’s a little different from the more romantic stories I’ve published. Titled, “The paying back”, it references a failed romance but its subject is the relationship between a mother and her unmarried daughter … check it out at AWW.
Constance Clyde
Constance Clyde (1872-1951), born Constance Jane McAdam, is another writer who wrote under a few names, but Constance Clyde seems to be the name by which she was best known, as well as the name she mostly wrote under. However, for the record, AustLit says that she also wrote under Clyde Wright, Pen, C.C. and C. Clyde. Christopher Dawson, writing in the Inside Boggo Road Gaol blog, describes her as the “author of a novel, contributor to high-class English reviews, sometime social editress of a Christchurch (N.Z.) newspaper, and in 1906 one of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Suffragettes”. He sums her up, in his 2023 article, as “a formidably independent woman”.
Clyde was born, the 11th child in her family, on 25 Jul 1872 in Glasgow, Scotland, and died in Brisbane, Queensland, on 30 Aug 1951. The “Clyde”, both Dawson and I suspect, comes from Glasgow’s Clyde River. She moved to Dunedin, New Zealand, with her family when she was 7, and was schooled there. According to Australian writer and journalist Zora Cross (writing as Bernice May), Constance Clyde’s first poem, called “Blighted Hopes,” was published in the Otago Witness when she was twelve, and she won second prize in a story competition for adults when she was still at school.
She arrived in Sydney in 1898, where she continued her career in literature and journalism, contributing to Australian and English newspapers, including the Sydney Bulletin. Cross says that Clyde was one of the first women to contribute to the Bulletin regularly, and that it was the Bulletin that gave her “the idea that one can and should write from the soul”. She also says that “Possessed of a rippling sense of humor, a pen as strong and vigorous as a man’s at times, it is because she does write with her soul that this writer has so many admirers.” Cross, adds later that Clyde
thoroughly mastered the tense, compressed drama the pink-covered weekly [The Bulletin] favored, and her work earned the admiration of the reader and the envy of the aspiring writer of the day.
Meanwhile, Dawson says New Zealand academic Kirstine Moffatt describes Clyde’s subject matter as encompassing “social, feminist and literary questions”. Wikipedia says that, in an essay entitled “The Literary Woman”, Clyde urged women to continue “to make brilliant discoveries in the realm of the emotions”.
In 1903, Clyde went to London to pursue a literary career, and her only novel, A pagan’s love, was published there in 1905. Anti-Puritan, it apparently explored ideas about women’s dependence, which included the heroine considering an extra-marital relationship with a man. Cross writes that while in London, Clyde met leading writers like HG Wells and Bernard Shaw.
In 1907, she was imprisoned in Holloway Prison as one of the suffragettes who ’caused a disturbance’ in the House of Commons. She wrote about this experience – which I found in Hobart’s The Mercury (June 24 1907) – from how she went about ensuring that she was arrested through to her release after thirteen days incarceration. It’s worth reading, not only for its firsthand experience but for its insight into who she was, but I’ll just share this little reference to Australia and Australian literature. She says one visitor was not allowed to give her a rose, but another was
permitted to leave a book. It is Tom Collins’s “Such is Life,” and she had previously reviewed it as a volume “suitable for reading in a desert, island, or gaol.” I find its acid philosophy, flavoured by eucalyptus, thoroughly refreshing!
Some time later, she returned to New Zealand, and in 1925 co-authored a travel book with journalist Alan Mulgan. In 1928, while living in Auckland, she was described by Sydney’s Smith’s Weekly as “one of the most brilliant and versatile of Australasian women journalists”. The article explains that:
In order to understand officialdom, Miss Clyde in recent years accepted appointments in New Zealand institutions, being on the staff of a backward school, sub-matron of a women’s gaol, and attendant at a mental asylum of 1500 inmates. She is strongly opposed to the new N.Z. Child Welfare Act, which she contends gives the official too much power over family life. Her great desire is to have proper Montessori teachers in New Zealand for such backward children as do come into the hands of the State.
In 1931, she was ejected from the New Zealand Parliament for protesting against the 1925 Child Welfare Act. She was a true activist, in other words.
Sometime after this, in the early 1930s, she returned to Australia, to Brisbane, where she was again imprisoned in 1935, this time for refusing to pay a fine for fortune-telling using tea-leaves. Dawson reports that, when in court for this offence, she said, “I thought that I could do some good in this depression by sympathy, kindness and advice, and especially by telling people that there is nothing wrong with this world except the monetary system.” As Dawson added, “even reading tea leaves could become a political platform” for Constance Clyde. Somehow, in between all this she wrote prolifically, with AustLit listing over 130 works by her, most of them short stories, the latest dated 1938.
Sadly, as Dawson chronicles, her life ended quietly, petering out “in the mundane concerns of suburbia after such an ambitious foray into the bohemian literary circles of turn-of-the-century Sydney and London”. There was no obituary. Forgotten already it seems!
Sources
Bernice May (aka Zora Cross), “Constance Clyde“, “Constance Clyde”, The Australian woman’s mirror, 3 July 1928 (Accessed: 22 July 2024[
This week’s Meet-the-Author conversation with Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham about their book Hazzard and Harrower: The letters was high priority for me – not only because Hazzard and Harrower are wonderful writers, but because Olubas and Wyndham are themselves significant players in Australia’s literary community.
For those who don’t know them, Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) and Elizabeth Harrower (1928-2020) were both Australian-born writers, but Hazzard spent most of her life overseas, primarily in New York and Capri. She wrote four novels, of which I’ve read her last two (before blogging), The transit of Venus and The great fire (which won the Miles Franklin Award in 2004). Elizabeth Harrower’s trajectory was more complicated. Aside from living in London from 1951 to 1959, she lived most of her life in Sydney. She published four novels between 1957 and 1966 (of which I’ve read two), withdrew her fifth from publication in 1971, and then pretty much disappeared from view until Text Publishing reprinted her works in the 2010s. Text also convinced her to let them publish that withdrawn novel (In certain circles), and they published a collection of her short stories. I’ve read both of these. (My Elizabeth Harrower posts.)
Brigitta Olubas, an academic and Hazzard’s official biographer, instigated the project to edit the letters, and asked journalist and literary editor Susan Wyndham to collaborate with her. Wyndham had, during her career, interviewed both Hazzard and Harrower. For the project, Olubas focused on Hazzard’s letters and Wyndham Harrower’s. It was a big task that included negotiating how to reduce 400,000 words of letters to the final 120,000. During the conversation, Olubas joked that, at one stage, Harrower had five letters in a row, providing some insight into the challenge it had been to choose letters that would make a coherent whole. Julieanne Lamond, who conducted the conversation, is a literary critic and academic in Australian literature at the Australian National University.
The letters begin in 1966 and continue for four decades, though the two writers didn’t meet physically until 1972, and after that only a few more times.
The conversation
From left: Brigitta Olubas, Susan Wyndham, Julieanne Lamond
MC Colin Steele did the usual acknowledgement of country and introductions, before passing the session over to Julieanne, who started by asking Susan and Brigitta to describe the relationship between the two writers. I am going to use first names from hereon. Last names sound just too formal for warm-hearted events like these.
On their relationship: Susan explained that the two writers were introduced to each other by Shirley’s Sydney-based mother Kit, and that their friendship was formed on the page. Although Elizabeth’s friendship with Kit was kind and caring, family problems and Kit’s mental fragility meant that Elizabeth was thrust into an intimacy she wasn’t necessarily expecting. However, although Kit and her needs occupied part of their correspondence, the two women also wrote about their own lives, what they read, the political landscape, and challenges they confronted in writing (including writer’s block). Their correspondence, suggested Brigitta, may have been more important to Shirley, who said that Elizabeth reflected “something eternal in my consciousness”. She also mentioned the brief falling out they had after Elizabeth visited Shirley and her husband in Italy.
For her part, Elizabeth would tell her friends that she didn’t have much time for Shirley Hazzard, and yet her final letters to Shirley express a keen desire (or concern) to hear from her. Susan suggested that Elizabeth’s attitude could be related to the fact that as Shirley became famous, she became grand in her manner, which Elizabeth didn’t like.
Later, Julieanne asked why would someone, like Elizabeth, take on responsibility for someone else’s mother. Susan explained that Elizabeth liked Kit; they had fun together. Also, her own mother had died (aged only 61) soon after Elizabeth had become friendly with Kit. Elizabeth felt some guilt about her own mother, so was perhaps making up for that. Caring for Kit also enabled her to procrastinate her writing! Julieanne suggested the situation created a complicated sibling-like relationship between Shirley and Elizabeth. Brigitta agreed, adding that Shirley had a sister living in Sydney with whom she had a poor relationship, and would call on Elizabeth to do things that one would normally ask of a sister.
On their careers: Elizabeth had a more difficult career. She wrote a lot in London but it became more difficult after she returned to Australia (due to her own mother’s health). Elizabeth moved in Sydney’s literary circles, including Patrick White, Kylie Tennant and Christina Stead. She had good reviews, but didn’t make a lot of money from her novels. The watchtower – described as a “great act of compression and atmosphere” – was particularly well reviewed.
Shirley also had a late career with big gaps, but is now being rediscovered by younger writers. Both, Brigitta said, were writing “outside their time”, making them difficult to market. They wrote what they wanted to write, what they were good at.
Patrick White, who admired Elizabeth’s writing and kept urging her to write, apparently said that “she’s living a novel rather than writing one”! She was a diligent writer early on but needed a day job to pay her way. She was working at Macmillan publishing while writing her fourth novel, The watchtower (1966). She obtained a grant for her next novel, but that was the one she withdrew. Did she write better when she was pressured for time, as she had been with The watchtower?
By contrast, Shirley was lucky, as she was published by The New Yorker, which provided an income you could live on. She also had a much older, well-off husband, Francis Steegmuller. They worked as jobbing writers, honing their craft. Life wasn’t easy though. She was receiving “monstrous letters” from mother, and her husband started developing dementia.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth had her own challenges. Her mother died in 1970 but, besides Shirley’s mother Kit, she took on helping others, like Kylie Tenant. She got “sucked” into Kylie’s complicated life. She was sympathetic to others. She had a “laser vision into other people’s psyches” which was good for her writing, but it impacted her life.
Both writers, too, were sociable, and claimed they had no time to work. All this affected their careers.
On their correspondence: Both writers put a lot of effort into crafting their letters, which shows in the way their letters reveal their insight into character, dark humour, sense of place, and moral compass.
Brigitta answered in the affirmative Julieanne’s question about whether the two were thinking about posterity as they wrote their letters. Infuriatingly, Shirley didn’t keep her manuscripts – she seemed invested in herself as a “perfect first-time writer” – but she kept her letters and diaries. Elizabeth, on the other hand, threw out many letters, including those she wrote to her mother, but she did keep an “organised set of letters”. Susan believes she wanted posterity to find her. This may be why she was discreet in her letters, often not naming people she wrote about. Susan did some sleuthing to unearth some of this information.
Brigitta added that they had no false modesty. They were aware of their value as writers.
On their political views. Both Shirley and Elizabeth had strong political commitments. Shirley worked for the UN for 10 years. She was bound up in the moral seriousness of the project, and likened her own views to those of Milton – his liberal attitudes, and his commitment to becoming involved in political ideas. Later, Shirley became obsessed with Watergate. In 1977, her article “Letter from Australia” (paywalled) was published in The New Yorker. I think it’s here that Shirley writes about Nixon and Republicans, saying something like “each one in his awfulness makes the next one possible”. Hmmm…
As for Elizabeth, she grew up in Newcastle, through wartime. She saw poverty, and she witnessed the Aldermaston anti-nuclear protests in England. She was galvanised by Whitlam and his reform project. She was staying with Christina Stead at University House in Canberra when the Dismissal occurred, and was at Parliament House when Whitlam appeared on the steps. Susan read from Elizabeth’s letter to Shirley on 17 November 1975, but I’ll excerpt her excerpt. Elizabeth describes Stead answering the phone and being told that Malcolm Fraser was now Prime Minister, then writes:
… Horror. Horror and stupefaction. People very nearly fell down in the street with amazement and dismay. Manning Clark (our most splendid historian) said he was literally sick … Everyone was outraged. Our votes meant nothing. Moderate reform is not allowed to take place here. The new leaders came out on the balcony and laughed like Nazis …
We weren’t surprised when Susan said that later, Paul Keating became her new hero.
Despite this, Elizabeth wrote that she wished she hadn’t become so involved in politics.
Q & A
There was a brief Q&A. By this time I was struggling to keep up with my notes, but here are some of the points discussed:
Brigitta and Susan talked about their own, relatively new, literary friendship which has been forged through this project.
Regarding gaps in the letters – and things not discussed – they don’t know why. Were they discussed when they met, or over the phone, or?
Regarding the brief falling out between Shirley and Elizabeth, this happened in 1984 during a visit Elizabeth made to Capri. She hadn’t wanted to go but had relented after much urging from Shirley. Elizabeth didn’t behave well. Brigitta and Susan speculated on why. Perhaps she didn’t want to let Shirley feel grand (as she was inclined to do), or perhaps, being worried about spending money, Elizabeth didn’t want to feel obliged. An audience member wondered whether the awkwardness came from theirs being primarily an epistolary friendship. Perhaps, was the answer. Speech seemed to be a second language for Shirley. She could be more truthful in writing. She was also, they commented wryly, better at monologues than conversation. Writing gave them both time to consider their thoughts. (I relate to that!)
There was also discussion of the history being lost because people aren’t writing letters like this any more. Julieanne commented on the value of letters like these in which time and care have been taken to express thoughts. There is a sort of romance, too, it was suggested, in the time and distance correspondence like this involves.
Brigitta shared some words from a short letter Elizabeth wrote to Shirley on 13 June 2005 concerning a visit Shirley was making to Australia:
You say you hope to be recognizable, and I look much more worn than I feel, but we’ll know each other.
“But we’ll know each other”. Lovely – and what fascinating women.
Vote of thanks
Beejay Silcox, literary critic and Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival, gave the vote of thanks. As eloquent as ever, she was enthusiastic in her acknowledgement of what Brigitta and Susan have achieved and of the conversation we had just experienced. I think I got the gist of her remarks. Describing herself as “a pathological shredder of the past”, she admired these “life-ravenous”, ferocious, flawed and gorgeous women whom we discover through their letters. She described the book as protecting the comradeship of writing, and as a “great and mighty gift” to readers. Our culture tends to praise newness, she said, and bright, shiny things are lovely, but they are not the whole story. Yes! (This is why my reading group aims to include at least one classic/significantly older book in our reading schedule each year. Not only do “good” older works make great reading but they add perspective and depth to all our reading.)
Another very enjoyable, and well-organised, meet-the-author event.
It’s some time since I wrote a Delicious Descriptions post, but I want to explore Charlotte Wood’s novel Stone Yard devotional (my review) just a little more. Although I finished it over a week ago, I keep thinking about its evocation of quiet lives in retreat – and what Wood might be saying.
I am, admittedly, a woman of “a certain age”, but, nonetheless, I am surprised to find that where once I loved filling my life with noise and action, I am now enjoying quiet. By noise and action, I don’t mean energetic activity – I’ve never minded being sedentary – but I mean I have never actively chosen quietness. Recently, however, this has changed. Now when Mr Gums and I drive long distances, for example, we often drive in silence – no music, no audiobooks, podcasts or radio programs, just silence. And, I like it.
It is this silence that Wood’s unnamed narrator in Stone Yard devotional seeks, and Wood writes about it in a way that not only makes it meaningful in terms of why we might seek it, but that is calming to read.
It starts the afternoon our narrator arrives at the abbey. “The silence is so thick,” she writes, “it makes me feel wealthy”. What an idea that is, “the silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy”. A couple of paragraphs later, she explains that the abbey’s welcome booklet says they “accept that guests might want total solitude”. “Noise is discouraged”, and guests “are free to decline joining others for eating or worship”. She “cannot think of a greater act of kindness than to offer such privacy to a stranger”.
A couple of pages after this, and despite not being required to join in, our narrator decides to go to Lauds in the little church, and finds herself wondering how they get anything done with all this toddling into church every couple of hours. But then she realises that this “is the work. This is the doing”. She finds herself “drenched in a weird tranquility” and she wonders whether this has come from
being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical, illicit.
Such silence, however, while appealing in theory, is not as simple as it sounds. She talks about the Lectio Divina, which Wikipedia describes as a traditional monastic practice comprising “four separate steps: read; meditate; pray; contemplate”. This is a step too far for our narrator at this point in her journey, and she finds herself arguing internally with what she is seeing, but
Despite this, the process is strangely beautiful. Sister Bonaventure says getting caught on a word is the point, and if you remain troubled or confused by it, you just ‘hand it over to God’. This is so antithetical to everything I have believed (knowledge is power, question everything, take responsibility) that it feels almost wicked. The astonishing – suspect – simplicity of just . . . handing it over.
The narrator is an atheist and the novel is not about religion per se, so she comprehends this concept more broadly in the sense of letting the things that bother you just sit, instead of endlessly turning them over.
This brings me to the idea I shared in my post on the novel, that of
waiting. An incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered.
Thoughts about stillness, silence, solitude, and contemplation, freedom and peace, form the backbone of this novel, but they are tested by the visitations or “visitants”. They are also specifically tested by the idea of an active life. Sister Helen Parry distances herself from the abbey’s inhabitants, getting on with her activist work via “internet video calls … calling for action on this or that”. She brings, says the narrator, “everything we so painstakingly left behind”. Local farmer Richard Gittens’ wife, Annette, views life at the abbey as “sick … unnatural”.
And yet … (indeed, Elie Wiesel’s “and yet” is the narrator’s favourite phrase) … the end, when it comes, seems to suggest that there is a place for all. And that, maybe, there is no either-or, but what is right for us at different points in time. A gift of a book for anyone interested in thinking about how to live in our noisy, troubled and troubling world.
Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard devotional, Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2024
Next week will be NAIDOC Week – with this year’s theme being “Keep the Fire Burning! Blak, Loud and Proud” – but I am jumping the gun a little with a post on a relevant publishing initiative that was announced earlier this year.
This initiative comes from publisher Simon & Schuster, and is that they have created a new First Nations imprint called Bundyi, which will be curated by Dr Anita Heiss, “a proud Wiradyuri woman and one of Australia’s most prolific and well-known authors”. Simon & Schuster published Heiss’s most recent novel, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (my review).
Bundyi is, the website says, a Wiradyuri word meaning “to share with me’” The aim is to “focus on cultivating First Nations talent in the industry by publishing First Nations authors, edited and designed by First Nations people”. Heiss, described as Publisher at Large, will be commissioning both fiction and non-fiction writing. She says that “the only way we will see First Nations people truly sovereign in this space, is to have us as publishers of our own stories”, and makes the point that Simon & Schuster understands “that the responsibility for change in the sector lies with the current mainstream publishers acting as mentors, and eventually moving over to allow us to learn, and to do what Australian publishing has needed for a long time: for us to have control over the way we are represented on the page, and in the national narrative”.
And they have started the way they mean to continue with the Bundyi logo being designed by a 100% Aboriginal-owned company, Iscariot media. The logo, which you can see at the link I’ve provided above, “represents the flow of the three rivers of Wiradyuri country – the Kilari, the Marrambidya and the Wambool – as well as the flow of creativity”.
What can we expect?
S&S’s page, linked above, says that the first titles in the imprint will be published this year, but doesn’t name them. However, in late May, through Canberra’s wonderful Meet The Author convenor, Colin Steele, who is also one of my major sources of literary news, I received a news item from Books+Publishing. It said that Bundyi had “acquired world rights to a new commercial novel by Larissa Behrendt”, and that the book was the result of a brainstorm between Behrendt and her good friend Anita Heiss. It is to be a First Nations take on Pride and prejudice!
Heiss said that “It didn’t take long for us to come up with the idea of Larissa, an Austen aficionado, writing a version of Pride and Prejudice through her lens, as a Euahlayai/Gamilaroi woman”. Behrendt added that “As a long-time friend and admirer of her work, I am beyond excited to be working with Anita on this project. I love Jane Austen, and the idea of translating the characters and story arcs through a First Nations lens is an idea that is close to my heart. Anita has been a trailblazer with new writing, and I am proud to be following in her footsteps.”
That Behrendt is a fan of Austen won’t be news to those who read her novel After story (my review) in which a woman takes her mother on a literary tour of England, so this will be interesting – even to someone like me who is not normally a fan of prequels, sequels and retellings. Behrendt has a seriously impressive cv. Not only is she an award-winning author, but she is a filmmaker and host of the program Speaking Out on ABC Radio, the Distinguished Professor at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology Sydney, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law – and more. We have to wait a bit for her book, though, as it’s not due to be published until 2026.
Meanwhile, Books+Publishing named two books which will be published by Bundyi before Behrendt’s – Stan Grant’s memoir Murriyang and Tasma Walton’s historical fiction novel, I am Nan’nert’garrook. These align with the imprint’s focus as listed on its homepage:
This new imprint is exciting news for all of us interested in First Nations Australian writing. It may not, it seems, be focusing on the edgier end of town, but there is room for all, particularly if we want more Australians to read First Nations writing. If you are interested, I suggest you keep an eye on Bundyi’s homepage for further news. I plan to.
Charlotte Wood’s most recent novel, Stone Yard devotional, is set in the Monaro, a region just south of where I live. It’s a landscape that is much loved by many of us, including Nigel Featherstone, whose My heart is a little wild thing (my review) is also set there. The Monaro is expansive country, a dry, golden-brown plateau, characterised by rocky outcrops here and there, much as the cover shows. There are also hills in the distance, and big skies. Perfect country for contemplation, I’d say, which is exactly what Wood’s unnamed protagonist is doing there. (In fact, it’s also what Featherstone’s protagonist went there to do, for a very different reason – although, coincidentally, both books have something to do with mothers).
Stone Yard devotional is a quiet and warm-hearted read, one that asks its readers to not rush ahead looking for a plot, but to think about the deeper things that confront us all at one time or another. These things are hinted at by the two epigraphs, one being Australian musician Nick Cave’s “I felt chastened by the world”, and the other American writer Elizabeth Hardwick‘s “This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today”. Add these to the title – with its hardscrabble sounding “Stone Yard” set against the gentle, inwardness of “devotional” – and you have a sense of the intensity to be found within.
“a place of industry, not recreation”
While this is not a plot-driven novel, there is a definite narrative arc. Taking the form of undated journal entries, the novel covers a period in the life of a middle-aged woman who has left her city life – her husband, her job in threatened species conservation, and her friends – to live in an abbey on the Monaro. It starts with a five-day stay, which is followed by more stays until the time comes when she arrives and doesn’t leave. Why she does this is not explicitly explained but through her contemplations we come to see that there’s unresolved grief in her life over the death of her parents some three decades earlier and, alongside this, a level of existential despair which has built up over time.
This is the set up. The narrative arc comes from three “visitations” to the abbey – a mouse plague which ramps up as the novel progresses, and the celebrity “environmental activist nun” Helen Parry, who accompanies the bones of the murdered Sister Jenny who had left the abbey decades ago to work among poor women in Thailand. These three events, both real and metaphoric in import, present practical and moral challenges, “a rupture” but also “a frisson of change”, for our narrator, and for all at the abbey.
So, we follow Wood’s narrator as she settles into life at the abbey, taking on the role of cooking for the group, and, as their non-religious member, the shopping and other errands that need to be done. Much industry is required to keep the place running when there is no financial help from the church, but the main industry is emotional and spiritual (in its wider meaning). Early on, our narrator recognises that prayer and contemplation “is the work … is the doing”. For her, as an atheist, this is not religious in origin or intent, but nonetheless contemplation is the real work she does while living at the abbey.
Much of this contemplation is invoked by flashbacks to and memories of events from the past, some experienced by her and others that happened around her (like the suicide of a farmer). Many involve her beloved and humane mother, who, like nuns Helen and Jenny, was an “unconventional”, determined to continue along her path despite what others thought. Such contemplation is hard, and our narrator is tested by the “visitations”, particularly Helen Parry with whom she has history involving bullying at school. Our narrator wishes to apologise but, as she comes to see, the hard work is in coming to that point of apology, not in having the apology accepted. But, forgiveness and atonement are only part of the bigger questions posed in this novel. Grief, despair and, ultimately, how to live are also part of its ambit – and are set against the shadow of climate change and its implications for our lives and choices.
This sort of exploration, however, can only work if we like the telling, and I found it thoroughly compelling. Stone Yard devotional is delicious for its details about life in an abbey on the “high, dry, Monaro plains, far from anywhere”, and for its insights into the women living there. No character is fully developed, but each, from the “business-like but soft-looking” leader Sister Simone to the distressed Sister Bonaventure, feels real in the role she’s been given in the narrative. While there’s not a lot of dialogue, our narrator reports on interactions between the women, and these contribute to her contemplations about life. She is not perfect and admits to moments of pettiness and poor judgement in her dealings with her co-habitants. Contrasting this little community is local farmer Richard Gittens, who supports the abbey in many practical ways and who represents, as our narrator recognises, “decency”.
All this is told in spare but expressive writing that maintains a tone which is serious and reflective, but which never becomes bleak.
There is no single, final enlightenment, but rather, as the narrator says earlier in the novel, “an incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, [a] sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered”. This is the sort of writing I love to read. In some fundamental way, it reminded me of my favourite Wallace Stegner quote. In Angle of repose, he wrote that “civilisations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations”. Through living this life in retreat, Wood’s narrator comes to know herself better. In so doing, she is able to lay some of her demons to rest, not through any major crisis but through quiet contemplation. The abbey does, indeed, turn out to be a “place of refuge, of steadiness. Not agitation”.
Interestingly, and perhaps pointedly, the novel ends on an anecdote about the narrator’s mother and her “reverence for the earth itself”. Ultimately, Wood invites us, without exhortation, to not be “chastened by the world” but to do the hard work of thinking about what is really important. A compassionate, and gently provocative, book.
Whispering Gums 
