AWW Challenge 2018

Elizabeth Jolley, The orchard thieves (#BookReview)

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Elizabeth Jolley, The orchard thievesElizabeth Jolley’s twelfth novel, The orchard thieves, is a little different from most of the other Jolleys I’ve read. It’s a little less black, a little less about alienation, but it’s unmistakably Jolley in style and preoccupations.

By preoccupations, I mean her interest in family relationships and dynamics – and, related to that, her humane, but clear-eyed, understanding of human nature. The orchard thieves was written when Jolley was in her early seventies, and revolves around a grandmother contemplating the meaning of family and children. It feels very much like the meditations a woman of her age would be having – which is not to suggest that the story itself is autobiography. Still, I can see once again, why Helen Garner loves Jolley (and doesn’t love Thea Astley). Jolley and Garner both draw from their lives, albeit Garner more so, and both focus on life’s interior challenges. They also both do so in spare but loaded writing.

The orchard thieves, then, has a minimal plot, and no named characters. Told third person from the grandmother’s perspective, it concerns a family whose members are identified by their roles: the grandmother, the grandsons who belong to the youngest sister, the granddaughter who belongs to the middle sister, and the aunt (who also happens to be the eldest sister who lives with the grandmother). There is also the son-in-law (the youngest sister’s husband.) The novel (novella, really) is constructed in three parts, and the plot, such as it is, revolves around the return from London of the middle sister with her daughter.

So, what is it all about? It’s about the family at a point in time, from the grandmother’s point of view. It’s about parents and children, about love and worry, and about age and wisdom – not that the grandmother pontificates her wisdom or is even really sure that she has it. She worries about the aunt, her eldest unmarried daughter, fearing she’s lonely. She worries about the grandsons, their safety now and their future. And she worries about the middle sister’s health and happiness when she returns home – for how long? – clearly pregnant but saying nothing. It is this sister’s return that ripples the surface of the family’s finely balanced relationships.

Jolley prepares us for this “rippling” with an initially mysterious Preface, which commences

‘If you have the house,’ the middle sister said to the aunt, the eldest sister, ‘if you have the house you’ll have to pay us each one-third of the current market price. One-third each of the value of the place.’

We immediately think of course that someone has died, and then, as the book commences we realise that the owner of the house, the grandmother, has not died. We then wonder if she will die, but Jolley’s purpose is more subtle. This is not an inheritance-fight plot. Instead, the conversation tells something about the sisters’ characters. It also suggests underlying tensions, and introduces some ideas which, when they re-appear in their correct chronological sequence, become clear.

This is not a depressing book. The tensions are real, but the grandmother’s hard-won wisdom re-stabilises without offering pat solutions – and it’s all done in a quietly meditative, but by no means dry, tone. I found it absolutely delicious reading, with its Jolleyesque references to pear trees and birds, orchards and gardens, music and myths, sexuality and lesbianism; its sly humour; and, dare I say it, its relevance to my own musings. I haven’t reached my seventies yet, but am soon to join the world of grandmas and am certainly the mother of adult children. Jolley captures the concerns, the lessons learnt and still being learnt – about raising children, about relating to adult children, about being a grandmother, and above all about love – so economically but with sensitivity and insight.

Here’s a scene, early in the book:

Alone on the grey rug in the deeply shaded garden, the grandmother began to understand that it was not until she was a grandmother herself that she, because of her own love for her grandsons, realised how much she, as a small child, had been loved. And the pity was that it was too late to acknowledge this to anyone. It was no longer possible to offer, unsolicited, a kiss, a caress or a tender phrase backwards, as it were, over her shoulder. Recalling momentarily the pain of a telephone reprimand, well deserved she was sure, and only one of many, the grandmother came to a very real truth, which was that the great love which holds the mother to the child does not necessarily travel in the other direction, from the child to the mother. She understood also that she would not be the only person in the world to have discovered this.

Such spare writing. With the exception of the descriptions in the opening phrase – “grey” and “deeply shaded” – which set the melancholic, reflective tone, the language is direct and largely unadorned, and powerful as a result.

There are several references to myths and legends, which the grandmother believes “were attempts to explain happenings which were too painful and hard for human endurance.” Wanting to share these with the grandsons, she starts to tell them the story of Ceres/Demeter and her daughter Persephone/Proserpina, but it gets all too dark and boring for them, so they

simply slipped from the grandmother’s hands and disappeared with a slight rustling of dry leaves into the surrounding bushes.

You can just see it can’t you? Elsewhere, this gorgeous elegant language is subverted when the grandmother, walking with her grandsons, uses their language:

The grandmother hoped that the river paths unlike the roads and houses and the trolleys in the supermarket, were not crap. She hoped they were not crappy crap. She hoped that the aunt’s game and the secret paths, the rocks and the rock pools along the river beaches would remain uncrapped for as long as possible.

Oh, I could go on, sharing more and more. There’s so much more to say about, for example, the imagination and how it can lead you to worry and worry, about mothers’ regrets for things they could have done differently, about the time when children need to grow out of thieving orchards, about the reality that the

little rogues and thieves … would, during their lives, do something perfect and noble and wonderful and something absolutely appalling.

And appalling is pretty much how we could describe the middle sister’s behaviour when she arrives!

Helen Garner concludes her tribute to Jolley*, “To my dear Lift-rat” (which she wrote after Jolley had succumbed to dementia), with this:

But it was too late for me to say goodbye, or to thank her for the last sentence of The Orchard Thieves, where an old woman points out comfortingly to her daughter that the difference between a bad haircut and a good one is only a week.

Garner’s right. It’s somehow the perfect, grounding ending for a book which is about both the importance of “the unseen things, the real feelings and the deep needs” and the business of “push[ing] on with living.” It’s a timeless book.

Read for Lisa’s (ANZLitLovers) Elizabeth Jolley Week.

* You can read Garner’s essay on-line and in her collection Everywhere I look (my review).

AWW Badge 2018Elizabeth Jolley
The orchard thieves
Ringwood: Viking, 1995
134pp.
ISBN: 9780670865505

Wendy Scarfe, The day they shot Edward (#BookReview)

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Wendy Scarfe, The day they shot EdwardThere’s something about novellas, about the way they can combine the tautness of the short story with the character development of a novel, and then hone in on an idea, undistracted by side-stories. This, in any case, is what Adelaide-writer Wendy Scarfe achieves in her book, The day they shot Edward.

Like her previous novel, Hunger town (my review), The day they shot Edward is a work of historical fiction. It’s set in Adelaide in 1916, in other words, half-way through World War One. Emotions run high, and 9-year old Matthew, through whose third-person perspective we see most of the events, is often uncertain, if not fearful. The plot is simple enough. We know from the title that Edward has died, and we know from the Prologue that Matthew is implicated in his death in some way, but was a child at the time. From the Prologue we move straight into a chronological narrative telling the story of Matthew, an only child who lives with his restless mother Margaret, his wise Gran (Sarah), and his father, the ironically named Victor, who is dying of tuberculosis on the sleep-out. There are three other main characters, the aforesaid Edward, who is an anarchist and whom Matthew idolises, an intimidating man in a cigar-brown suit, and Mr Werther, the German-born headmaster of Matthew’s school.

Matthew’s life is difficult. A sensitive lad, he is caught between his grounded, politically-aware, loving Gran and his self-centred, unhappy Mother. Gran, who approves of Edward’s activism on behalf of disadvantaged people, is constantly disappointed by her daughter’s readiness to put Matthew’s and anyone else’s interests behind her own desire for acceptance by the “better class”. Matthew himself is conscious of his mother’s self-centredness. Out with Gran and Mr Werther, for example, he feels included, part of “the special laughter and talk of Gran and Mr Werther”, but out with his Mother he feels “alone, beside her but separate” because although she sat with him

in reality she skipped out of her chair nodding, laughing, flirting and frolicking around the room. People always looked at her. She insisted that they did.

Complicating all this is that Edward is attracted to Margaret, and she’s happy to flirt with him but, “lost in her dream of social acceptance”, is unlikely to accept him when she does become free. However, lest you are now seeing Margaret as the villain of the piece, she deserves some sympathy. She had chosen poorly in marriage, and her lot is now doubly difficult in having to care for an ill man who hadn’t been a good husband in the first place. Her life is not easy, and her future not assured.

Anyhow, as if this wasn’t enough in Matthew’s life, there are the political tensions – Mr Werther is insulted by his students and is no longer welcomed amongst people who once socialised with him, and, worse, there are people wanting to trap Edward in the act of subversion. The net is closing in on Edward – as we knew it would from the Prologue.

We see these adult tensions and interactions through Matthew’s eyes – but we know the dangers lying behind the things that simply mystify (or, unsettle) him. I would call Matthew a naive narrator but I’m trying to recollect whether I’ve ever read a third-person naive narrator. Regardless, though, this is essentially what he is.

All this is to say that The day they shot Edward makes for great reading. Although we essentially know the end at the beginning, we do not know who the characters are, nor how or even why it happened. We don’t know, for example, who this Mr Wether is who is accompanying the now violin-playing grown-up Matthew in the Prologue. It is all told through a beautifully controlled narrative. There are recurring plot points – from the opening scene when Matthew decides to save the yabbies he’d caught to his ongoing concern about people liking to kill things, from Edward’s little box-gift for Margaret to the boxes of papers he asks them to store. There’s the quiet build-up of imagery, particularly the increasing references to red/blood/crimson colours. There’s the development of the characters through tight little scenes in the kitchen and living room, on the street and in the schoolyard, in cafes and at the beach. And there’s the language which is poetic, but never obscure.

Ultimately, this is a coming-of-age story. Sure, it’s about politics – about how difficult times turn people to suspicion, intolerance and cruelty – and in this, it’s universal. We see it happening now. But it is also about a young boy surrounded by adults whom he doesn’t understand. He’s only 9 when it all comes to a head – young for a coming-of-age – but as he considers in the Prologue:

Had surprise ceased that tragic night? Or did his understanding as a man mark that moment as his step into awareness?

In this, it’s also universal. Matthew learns some difficult truths the night Edward died – but those truths include some positive ones, such as that love can continue after a person dies, that good choices can be made, and that not all people kill things. A lovely, warm, read.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed this book.

AWW Badge 2018Wendy Scarfe
The day they shot Edward
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2018
124pp.
ISBN: 9781743055199

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)

Eleanor Limprecht, The passengers (#BookReview)

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The passengers is Eleanor Limprecht’s third novel, but the second I’ve read, that being Long Bay (my review) based on the life of early twentieth century abortionist Rebecca Sinclair. The passengers is also a work of historical fiction, though not specifically based on one person’s experience. Instead, it’s about the Australian war brides who married American soldiers during World War 2 and followed their husbands to the USA after the war.

It is also somewhat more complex in conception and structure than Long Bay’s simple chronological third person narrative. It is framed around a journey, that of war bride Sarah who, through the course of the novel, travels back to Australia, on a cruise-ship, after a 68-year absence. She is accompanied by her circa twenty-year-old American grand-daughter Hannah, who has anorexia nervosa. The narrative comprises alternating chapters in Sarah and Hannah’s first person voices: Sarah’s is primarily her telling her story to Hannah, while Hannah’s is more her internal reflections on her life and her grandmother’s story.

Now, I’m going to get this voice decision out of the way first, because I found it a bit problematic. In her Acknowledgements, Limprecht thanks some people for helping her to hone her focus, and for showing her “how not to be scared of trying a different structure”. Good for her, I say. There’s nothing wrong with trying a different structure. This alternating-voice one, which is not particularly new or out-there, can be used effectively to throw light on two different perspectives and experiences, which is essentially what it does here, though war bride Sarah’s is the main story being told. Hannah never comes quite as alive as Sarah. She provides neat segues between episodes in Sarah’s story, and creates some parallels in their respective experiences, but she, and her condition, don’t really add significantly to the novel. Given this proviso, however, Limprecht does capture her illness authentically, and doesn’t trivialise it by presenting a simple resolution.

Still, the structure works. My issue is more the first-person voices, particularly Sarah’s storytelling one, because it constrains the narrative to the sorts of things Sarah would tell a grand-daughter. She is surprisingly open about deeply personal things like sex with her husband/s, but this narrative approach reduces the opportunity for deeper, more internal, reflections about the emotional, social, and mental challenges faced by war brides.

But now, that discussed, I’ll get on to all the positive things, because this is an enjoyable read. For a start, Limprecht’s evocation of Sarah’s life in Australia, first on a dairy farm south of Sydney and then in Sydney during the war, beautifully conveys life at that time, and captures the strangeness of those days:

How was anyone to make sense of it? The world was upside down, flipped and spinning backwards–women working men’s jobs, street and railway station signs taken down or covered in case the Japs landed, coupons needed just to buy butter, tea, sugar or meat. … The army and navy requisitioning anything they wanted, anything they needed for war. Japanese subs in Sydney harbour.

When death is close, you have to live.

It’s no wonder, as naval officer Jim says to war bride Sarah now en-route to Virginia, that the war “made us do strange things.” For many young women like Sarah, those strange things included marrying young American men whom they barely knew, and not fully comprehending the post-war implications of these weddings, which was that they would be expected to live in America!

Limprecht clearly did her war-bride research well – and I love that she details it at the end of the novel. It shows in the vivid way she relates the experience of these brides as, accompanied by Red Cross workers, they travelled by boat to America and then by train to their husbands all over the country. This part of the narrative not only felt authentic, but it was also highly engaging. At one point Sara describes herself as “barrelling blindly forwards” with “no idea of what world I would enter.” Brave stuff, really. Sarah’s journey continues after her arrival in Virginia, taking us from her early 20s to the present when she is a widow, and retired vet, in her late 80s.

As you’ll have realised by now, the novel’s unifying theme is the journey – a theme I discussed only recently in my post on Glenda Guest’s A week in the life of Cassandra Aberline. Cassie’s journey was about deciding whether she’d made the right decision to leave Perth when she was around 20. Sarah’s is somewhat more complex. It’s about reconnecting with her past, and about putting right, or resolving, the lies she had told both before and after leaving Australia. There’s a journey for Hannah too. She thinks she is there to help her elderly grandmother, but in fact her grandmother had invited her because she hoped it would help Hannah get well. The relationship between Sarah and Hannah is a lovely part of the novel.

There are also several references in the novel to John Steinbeck’s The grapes of wrath, which Sarah reads on her train journey across America. Although the Joads’ travels are rather different from Sarah’s, she sees some similarities to her family’s farm struggles in Australia, and she sees value in Tom Joad’s practical philosophy that “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”

Overall, then, The passengers is an engaging book about a by-product of war – and the long tail of its aftermath – that has tended to be forgotten in the ongoing focus on men and their experiences. For this, as well as for its lively descriptions of war-time Sydney and of the war brides’ journey by boat to America, I’d recommend it.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) also enjoyed the war-bride story.

AWW Badge 2018Eleanor Limprecht
The passengers
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2018
336pp.
ISBN: 9781760631338

(Review copy courtesy Allen & Unwin)

Sarah Krasnostein, The trauma cleaner (#BookReview)

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Sarah Krasnostein, The trauma cleanerI’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t planned to read Sarah Krasnostein’s biography The trauma cleaner. I feared it might be one of those sensationalised, voyeuristic stories, but how wrong I was. I thank Brother Gums and partner for this great birthday gift.

I was wrong because … no, let me start with why I thought what I thought. The subject of this biography, Sandra Pankhurst, is a transgender woman, now in her early-sixties. She’s been a drag queen and a sex worker, and now has a trauma cleaning business, which means she cleans houses after murders and other difficult, messy deaths. It also means that she cleans the houses of hoarders, particularly those whose hoarding has resulted in squalid living conditions. And there’s more. Pankhurst was also an abused, neglected and rejected adopted child, and she experienced the violent death of her pregnant girlfriend. You can see why I feared what I did.

But, I couldn’t have been more wrong, for two main reasons – Sarah Pankhurst is a compelling human being, and Sarah Krasnostein a wonderful writer who knows her subject well. I’m not surprised that the book is doing well on the award circuit this year, including winning the 2018 Victorian Prize for Literature.

First Pankhurst

Born apparently a boy, and adopted when 6-weeks-old by a couple to replace their son who’d died during childbirth, Pankhurst’s life was fraught from the start. He was adopted because his parents had been told they couldn’t have more biological children, but his life was upended five years later when the inevitable happened. A son was born, followed by another two years later. His parents told him they’d made a mistake, because now they had two sons, and proceeded to increasingly exclude him from the family circle. He was physically and emotionally abused and neglected. Unbelievable – except that we all know, don’t we, that human beings are capable of unbelievable cruelty.

Eventually, Pankhurst left home, married, and had children, but his gender dysphoria began to affect his ability to live the life he’d forged. He left his family, and over the next couple of decades was a drag queen and sex worker, and underwent sex reassignment surgery in its early days in Australia, to become the person now known as Sandra. She lost a pregnant partner through a vicious assault by a club bouncer, and worked in the brothels of Kalgoorlie. All this at a time when gay and transgender people were ostracised and brutalised, particularly by those in authority. Then she married an older man, George. She ran a small hardware business with him, and became a respected leader in her community. It was after this business failed that Pankhurst moved into cleaning and thence to her current speciality of trauma cleaning.

Now, popular wisdom would say that a person so neglected and abused would end up abusing others, or, at the very least, be bitter, but not so Pankhurst, which makes her an amazing being, or, as Krasnostein says, “utterly peerless”. Here is just one example of her tender but firm care of a hoarder – Janice, whom she and her team struggle to keep from going through the bags of “rubbish” being thrown out.

And then, speaking to herself [Janice this is], sharp and low, ‘Why do you do this? You know what rubbish is.’

‘Because you see yourself as rubbish,’ Sandra says. ‘Time to start seeing the good in life. You deserve it.’ The angel statue suddenly slips off the couch and bounces on the carpet; a wing snaps off.

‘Is that a bad omen?’ Janice asks, looking up at Sandra frantically.

‘You know what it’s saying?’ Sandra answers with a smile. ‘I’m broken but I’m not dead.’

And this is what she does, time and time again, building up her damaged clients, gently guiding them to make better decisions, and, above all, treating them with absolute dignity, all the while surrounded by a squalor most of us would run a mile from.

And now Krasnostein

But what makes this book so captivating is Krasnostein’s skills in telling it to reveal Pankhurst’s extraordinariness. I’ll start with the mundane, the book’s structure. It begins with an untitled preface in which Krasnostein introduces Pankhurst, and then moves into the first and unnumbered chapter titled Kim, who turns out to be one of Krasnostein’s clients. From here we move to the numbered chapter 2 which begins the chronicle of Pankhurst’s biography with her childhood. The book then progresses in alternating named and numbered chapters – switching that is, between clients and biography – until the last two chapters which are both numbered. This structure does a number of things, one of which is to show, as we go, how Pankhurst’s own experiences have made her the empathetic, but no-nonsense, trauma cleaner (no, person) she is.

This brings me to the book’s genre – a biography of a living person. To write it, Krasnostein had to traverse several mine-fields, the first being the presence of the subject. It’s clear that Krasnostein is close to her subject, which could make us question her objectivity. Fortunately, I’m not a huge believer in objectivity, but I do believe in being thoughtfully analytical, and this is what Krasnostein achieves. She doesn’t hide her admiration of Pankhurst. Indeed she addresses Pankhurst in her “preface” calling the book “my love letter to you”.

Related to this minefield is the fact-gathering one. There are gaps in Pankhurst’s memory. She is not, Krasnostein says, “a flawlessly reliable narrator”:

She is in her early sixties and simply not old enough for that to be the reason why she is so bad with the basic sequence of her life, particularly her early life. Many facts of Sandra’s past are either entirely forgotten, endlessly interchangeable, neurotically ordered, conflicting or loosely tethered to reality.

Krasnostein suggests various reasons for this lack of reliability, including drugs, trauma, and the fact that she has not spent her life surrounded by people who have always known her and with whom she’s shared life’s stories again and again, building up a personal history. Makes sense – and suggests another fallout from the ostracism and neglect experienced by people like Pankhurst.

One of these Pankhurst-memory-gaps relates to her first marriage. Whenever Krasnostein questions her about this time in her life, about the way she left her wife and children, pretty much high-and-dry and with no ongoing interest or involvement, Pankhurst, who exhibits such empathy in so much of her life, seems unable to answer. Krasnostein writes – and this is also a good example of her gorgeous style and of her attempt to get at “the truth”:

When I ask these questions, Sandra genuinely seems to be considering them for the first time and uninterested in pursing them further. We have floated across the line and here we stay, becalmed, past her outer limits. The mediaeval horizon where you simply sailed off the edge of the earth or were swallowed by the monstrous beasts that swam there.

With a biography of a non-famous living person, there are few documentary sources against which the biographer can validate what the subject says, but there are other people. And Krasnostein speaks to them, including this first wife, Linda, who was treated so poorly but who seems to bear no animosity. She’s amazing too. That’s the thing about this book: there’s such a display of basic human compassion amongst people, many of whom have so little.

And finally, if you haven’t already noticed, there’s the language. It frequently took my breath away with its clarity and freshness. Here’s a description of Sandra after she’d experienced a brutal rape while working in a Kalgoorlie brothel:

It’s not the first time she’s had crippling pain that she pushes into a tight little marble and drops down through the grates of her mind, somewhere deep below.

It may be that I loved this book so much because I had no real expectations, but I think it’s more than that. The trauma cleaner is an elegantly conceived and warmly written book about a woman who could teach us all something, I’m sure, about tolerance, acceptance, and respect. With a red-face, I recommend it.

AWW Badge 2018Sarah Krasnostein
The trauma cleaner: One woman’s extraordinary life in death, decay & disaster
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2017
261pp.
ISBN: 9781925498523

Helen Garner, The last days of chez nous, and Two friends (#BookReview)

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Helen Garner, Last days of chez house & Two friendsHelen Garner must have loved prize-winning book designer WH Chong’s cheeky cypress-dominated cover for the Text Classics edition of her two screenplays, The last days of chez nous and Two friends. You’d only realise this, though, after reading her Preface, in which she explains that she had incorporated cypresses into her screenplay for their “freight of meaning”, but that, because an appropriate location could not be found, they were replaced by a spire! For the published screenplay, however, Garner says she’d taken “the liberty of removing the spire and putting the cypress trees back in.” Love it.

I enjoyed reading this book much more than I expected. I’ve seen and enjoyed both films – a long time ago, as they were made in 1992 and 1986, respectively – but reading screenplays didn’t seem very appealing. How wrong I was. I’m glad, therefore, that Text decided to republish this volume in its Text Classics series. As always, they’ve value-added by commissioning an expert to write a commentary, which, in this case, given there was already an author’s Preface from the original 1992 edition, they appended an Afterword. It’s by well-regarded Australian scriptwriter, Laura Jones (who, coincidentally, is the daughter of the late Australian writer, Jessica Anderson.)

Both the Preface and the Afterword are informative and engaging, but I’ll start by discussing the plays. They are presented in the book in reverse chronological order of their writing, which means The last days of chez nous comes first. Both stories chronicle relationship breakdowns. This is common fare for Garner, but here as in all her work I’ve read, it’s not boring. Her skill lies in the intelligent, clear-sighted way she explores these situations, and in her ability to inject both humour and warmth. She’s never maudlin, and she never judges.

So, in The last days of chez nous, the breakdown is the marriage of Beth and her French husband JP, while in Two friends it’s the friendship between two 14-year-old girls, Louise and Kelly. Both, as is Garner’s wont, draw from her life. She was married to a Frenchman, the marriage did break up, and her husband did fall in love with and eventually marry her sister, most of which happens in the play. In Two friends, Bernadette Brennan reports, she drew on a friendship her daughter had had, but, when she saw the film, she realised that it was “really, in a funny sort of way, about me.” And the “me” character was not the sensible daughter, based on her own daughter, but the friend from the troubled background.

In her Preface, Garner tells how the impetus to write her first play, Two friends, was money. She needed it at the time, so when the idea was put to her:

I rushed home and rummaged in my folder of unexamined ideas. Out of it stepped Kelly and Louise, the young girls who became Two friends.

She continues that, although money had been the initial driver, she found, as she got down to it, the writing was “powered by the same drives as fiction” – curiosity, technical fascination, and “the same old need to shape life’s mess into a seizable story.”

This latter point is important, not only because it confirms her lifelong subject matter, “life’s mess” aka relationships, but because it answers those criticisms that she “just” presents her journals. She doesn’t, she “shapes” what she’s experienced (and seen) into “a seizable story”. She also shares in the Preface some of the things she learnt from film writing, including the challenge of working collaboratively which is something writers don’t usually have to do, the “priceless art of the apparently dumb question”, and that she was “forced to learn and relearn the stern law of structure.” She explains, using Last days of chez nous, how her “perfectly smooth narrative curve” was turned into “a little Himalaya of mini-climaxes”.

This is a good place, though, to talk about the structure of Two friends which chronicles the girls’ relationship breakdown in reverse. That is, we start at the point where it appears to have broken down and move back through the months to the peak of their togetherness. Experienced scriptwriter Laura Jones discusses this in her Afterword:

The story … is daringly told in the present tense, backwards, although each of the five parts is told in the present tense, forwards. We hold these two storytelling modes in our minds at once, the forwards momentum and the backwards knowledge […] Such deft playing with time–elegant, formal and musical–offers great storytelling pleasure, as we move from dark to light, from the painful separation of two adolescent girls to the rapturous closeness of ten months earlier.

She’s right, it’s clever because the end is bittersweet – we love the close friendship but we know what’s coming.

Now I want to share some of the experience of reading these plays. Here is an example from early in Two friends when Matthew, Louise’s wannabe boyfriend, tells her he’s seen Kelly:

LOUISE: What did she look like?
MATTHEW: All right.

He shrugs; like many boys he is not good at the kind of detail Louise is after.

These instructions to the actor about his character also enliven the reading. It’s the sort of sentiment you’d find in a Garner novel, though perhaps expressed a little more creatively.

And here’s some scene-setting in the next part, where Louise, Matthew and Kelly are together:

Kelly plays up to Matthew–almost as if she can’t help it. (Kelly will become one of those women who, when there’s a man in the room, unconsciously channel all their attention towards him.)

Similarly, in Last days of chez nous. Here is a scene where Beth has eaten some French cheese that JP has been storing carefully until it reaches maturation. He’s very upset, and eventually Beth senses the importance to him:

Beth is silent. They stand looking at each other. She has not quite succumbed, but for once he has her full attention–and this is so rare that he does not know what to do with it …

All this is probably what always happens in scripts, but Garner’s way of describing the situations and characters certainly made the screenplays more than just readable. They were engrossing.

Of course, I read Shakespeare’s (and other) plays at school – but that was school and, although I enjoyed them, I haven’t really gravitated to reading plays/scripts since. I won’t be quite so cautious in future.

Do you read them?

AWW Badge 2018Helen Garner
The last days of chez nous and Two friends
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2016
243pp.
ISBN: 9781925355635

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Glenda Guest, A week in the life of Cassandra Aberline (#BookReview)

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Glenda Guest, A week in the life of Cassandra AberlineWest Australian author Glenda Guest made quite a splash with her first novel, Siddon Rock, though unfortunately I didn’t read it. It won, for example, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2010. I was very keen, therefore, to read her second novel, A week in the life of Cassandra Aberline, when the opportunity came my way.

There is a mystery and a question at the heart of this novel, and protagonist Cassie’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis in the opening chapter provides the impetus for their resolution. The mystery is implied in the opening page when Cassie accepts a “brown-paper-wrapped-package” and promises someone something. We soon learn that the package contains a good deal of money, but what the promise is, and why, unfolds through the course of the novel. The question appears on page 8, and is, “What if I was wrong?” About what?

Before I discuss that, though, I want to mention the novel’s organising motif, which is a train trip, assigning this book to the “journey” genre (though perhaps “genre” isn’t quite the right word.) In this genre (or form?), the plot is framed by a journey, by the end of which the protagonist resolves something and/or achieves some sort of personal growth. These stories are as old as literature. The Odyssey and The pilgrim’s progress are obvious examples, but Cormac McCarthy’s The road is a more recent one. Sometimes, the journey is full of adventures, of a series of trials that must be overcome, but some are quieter, more internal. A week in the life of Cassandra Aberline is one of these. There is a physical journey, but most of the action is in Cassie’s mind.

So, why does she take this journey? Well, I’ve implied it already, but will expand a bit more. Cassie left Perth, somewhat suddenly, 45 years before the novel opens. It’s clear that whatever it was that prompted this departure has remained unresolved, but now, with her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, she wants to be sure she was right – and if she wasn’t, because she does admit this possibility, she wants to do whatever is “needed to make amends”. And why does she want to do this? Part way through the trip she reveals the underlying reason:

I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late.

In other words, this is a true journey story, so much so that while we might think she is going home to confront the people she left, this is not so, as she clarifies near the end:

She had imagined her search for the truth would have been done by the time the Indian Pacific reached its destination, and that she’d be on a plane back to Sydney today. That was her expectation, but inconstant memory has not cooperated – it has twisted and turned, throwing up irrelevant and forgotten things, and so she has to stay.

She had chosen the train then, not just because it was the way she’d left all those years ago, but because it would give her the time think through the situation.

On the surface, the novel has a simple chronological arc following the train journey, but as Cassie travels we flash back to her childhood and young adulthood in WA’s Wheatbelt, and gradually piece together her story. We learn that she’d lived with her parents and an older sister, that her mother had died just before she started high school, and that she was very close to a neighbouring farm family, the Blanchards, who comprise Mary, her husband Hec, and their identical twin sons, Dion and Coe. Indeed, she spent more time with them than with her own family, particularly after her mother died, as she felt superfluous at home and was warmly welcomed by Mary who didn’t have a daughter.

However, things go awry, as they are wont to do in situations like this – and it’s precipitated by the Vietnam War, further complicated by romance and the fact that identical twins are involved. And here is where I should say that the novel plays with another literary motif – the twins one. However, this and the journey motif never overwhelm the focus on Cassie, who captures our attention from the start, and retains it throughout. She’s an engaging, well-formed character, who’s both resilient and vulnerable, warm and reserved. She has suffered, but she is never self-pitying.

The novel’s success, in fact, rests on Cassie’s ability to engage us, because we meet few other characters directly, albeit we meet several indirectly through her flashbacks. The story is told third person, but is limited to Cassie’s point of view. The over-riding theme is memory – memory which is of course threatened by her Alzheimer’s but which she needs if she is to work through the problem she has set herself. As she struggles to remember what happened in the past – to see if she can make sense of it – she is confronted by memory’s slipperiness (which may not always be related to her diagnosis). Here she responds to Jack, whom she meets on the train and to whom she admits that “a single moment changed everything”:

But memory slips and slides around, she says, so you never really know if what you remember about that young person is true. You can never be sure of what happened at any given moment. I don’t want to end with a question mark still in my mind, but maybe I’ll never really know what was right or what was wrong.

There’s one more significant thing that I haven’t mentioned, and that’s Cassie’s career, as an actor and then university drama teacher. Her real specialty, her love, is Shakespeare, and this too frames the novel – alongside the journey and the twins. Late in the novel, she reflects on how she teaches her students:

Look at Shakespeare, she will say, at how he leaves room for interpretation, for each actor to take a character and make it their own. That’s what good actors do – work from the details to create a believable persona, to make the watcher believe the character on the stage is true.

She is trying to understand herself, the life she has created …

And so, in a very real way, this novel is all about the journey. There is a plot – and it’s a powerful almost-melodramatic-in-that-Shakespearean-way one – but the main interest is Cassie, herself, and her predicament, past, present and future. In the end, the question is not whether she was right or wrong, but something else entirely. An absorbing read.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) enjoyed this novel too.

AWW Badge 2018 Glenda Guest
A week in the life of Cassandra Aberline
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018
206pp.
ISBN: 9781925603262

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Charlie Archbold, Mallee boys (#BookReview)

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Charlie Archbold, Mallee boysReading synchronicities strike again. Both my last read, John Clanchy’s Sisters, and this one, Charlie Archbold’s Mallee boys, are family stories with a guilt about the death of a family member at their centre. Both, too, are set in non-urban areas, Clanchy’s in coastal New South Wales and Archbold’s in the dry Mallee region of western Victoria. Here, though, the similarities end. Clanchy’s book chronicles a month in the lives of three late-middle-aged sisters, and the person who died was their four-year-old baby brother – a long time ago. Also, Clanchy is a male writer, writing about women, in third person voice. Archbold, on the other hand, is a female writer writing about men. Her subjects are farmer, Tom, and his two sons, Sandy and Red, 15 and 18 at the beginning. The death they are dealing with is their wife and mother, who died just a year before the book opens. This novel, which spans a year, is told in the alternating first person voices of the two brothers.

Mallee boys, however, also reminds me of another book about a farming father and two sons whose wife and mother had died, Stephen Orr’s The hands (my review), but while Orr’s book sits squarely in the literary adult fiction fold, Mallee boys is Young Adult fiction. Its concerns are, therefore, a little different, but it is worth looking at. It won the 2016 Adelaide Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award, and has now been shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers Award.

Now, that was a long intro – even for me – but I have managed, I think, to include in it a fair introduction to book and its main storyline. I’ll add that while the story is told in the alternating voices of Sandy and Red, the main protagonist is Sandy. He starts and ends the story, and he is presented as the more thoughtful, more reflective, of the two boys. Also, he is not the one carrying the guilt. This is his brother, who was with his mother when she, a pedestrian, was hit by a car.

Like Clanchy with his women characters, Archbold captures the voices of the boys and their father well, their tensions, their squabbles, and most of all the challenges they face in running their home without a mother’s touch! “Chops” for dinner again tonight says it all. Late in the novel, the father Tom admits to being lonely, but his pain is not the focus, this being a YA novel. Sandy is in Year 10, and as a rural boy, is at schooling cross-roads. Their farm can’t afford to send him to boarding school in the city, but can he get a scholarship? Red, on the other hand, is not the scholastic type. He has left school and works the farm with his father, with the usual father-son tensions. Added to this are the boys’ relationships with their friends – not all of whom are “suitable” but Red, in particular, can’t be told and needs to learn the hard way. And, of course, there are girls.

This is all told naturally, neither sensationalised nor sentimentalised, but with enough drama, and humour, to keep readers, particularly the intended audience, interested. I wouldn’t call this a crossover novel exactly, but I did enjoy the read despite its YA intent.

Underpinning the narrative, the plot, is the setting, and this also the London-born Archbold, who has lived and worked as a teacher in the area, evokes beautifully. The setting is the Mallee, which borders the riverland area in which Laguna’s The choke (my review) is set. It’s a dry area, known for sheep and dryland crops like wheat. Farming is tough here, but communities are close. This comes through too, with locals helping each other out, in the natural way people do, something which is surely good for young readers to see and relate to. I do love to see good – but realistic – role modelling in media!

In addition to this, there’s the language. I enjoyed the descriptions of the Mallee, such as Sandy’s of Lake Bonney:

When the river runs low, the water in the lake huddles to the middle, leaving it fringed with smelly sticky mud. It’s a strange place. Because of the drought a lot of the trees around the edge have died. Bony old river red gums stick in the ground like a perching cafe for pelicans and kookaburras.

Tom, the father, tells Red what’s kept him going, despite his loneliness:

“I know it’s the rhythms of nature that have kept me going. This isn’t a glamorous landscape, but it’s in my veins.”

And I enjoyed how the boys describe feelings. Here’s Sandy describing his brother Red:

He acts hard because it gives him control but I know he’s all mushed up inside. Like a beetle with soft guts crammed in under the shell.

And here’s Red, just after his girl has suddenly broken up with him without explaining why:

And so she’s left me hanging, like a daggy bit of wool caught on a fence. Knotted in with no way to break free.

As you’d expect in a coming-of-age story, lessons are learnt, wisdom gained. Sandy says near the end, and this is surely one of the novel’s themes:

… because time doesn’t heal all wounds, like Dad once told me, but it does scab over them.

It sure does. And every now and then those scabs break off and have to re-form, n’est-ce pas? An effective metaphor I think.

Mallee boys, then, is an engaging book about growing up, about facing some of the hardest challenges, and most of all about being male. It’s a book that has something to offer both rural and urban young Australians, and I hope it gets widely read.

AWW Badge 2018Charlie Archbold
Mallee boys 
Mile End: Wakefield Press, 2017
285pp.
ISBN: 9781743055007

(Review copy courtesy Wakefield Press)

Claire G. Coleman, Terra nullius (#BookReview)

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Claire G Coleman, Terra nulliusClaire G. Coleman’s debut novel, Terra nullius, was my reading group’s third book for this year. The first two – An unnecessary woman (my review) and The sympathizer (my review) were well liked – but not so Coleman’s book. In fact that I was the only one who liked it. So, instead of my usual review, I’ve decided to tease out some of the issues my group had with the book, and see where I end up. I didn’t take notes at the meeting, so I’m relying on my memory. I may not have got all the issues down, or down correctly, but I’ll give it my best shot. In doing so, I’ll also draw on GoodReads because its users tend to be general readers, like you finding reading groups.

First though, a brief introduction for those who don’t know the book. Terra nullius starts off reading like an historical fiction novel about the colonial settlement of Australia and the concurrent dispossession of our indigenous people. Coleman’s world of Settlers and Natives, of Troopers and Trackers, of Missions to which stolen children are taken for education, of a Department for the Protection of Natives, and so on, mimics colonial Western Australia in particular, but it’s not long before hints start to appear that all is not as we’ve assumed. Before halfway, all is revealed, and we realise we are not reading historical fiction, but speculative fiction set in some near future. It is, as a result, not about indigenous Australians versus white colonists, but about colonised people of all races versus settler-colonists (“grey fellas”) from somewhere else. This realisation is unsettling, and clever, because it forces non-indigenous readers to switch identification from the colonisers to the colonised.

Now to my reading group’s response. The over-riding criticism was that it was repetitive and tedious. This is the criticism I could most understand, because partway through the novel’s second half I felt the momentum flag a little, which I put down to the structure. It’s multi-stranded, with the stories of different people or groups running parallel for a significant portion of the book. The strands include Native Jacky who is on the run; Settler Sister Bagra who runs a Mission; Settler Sergeant Rohan who leads the posse which is hunting Jacky; Esperance and her camp of free, renegade Natives; and deserter-Settler Johnny Star who is taken in by some rebel Natives. Fortunately, just as I wondered whether the separate groups – the separate strands – were ever going to come together, two things happened. A new character, Father Grark, appeared, and the strands did start to coalesce. These, along with other factors including the writing itself, were enough to prevent the book’s becoming tedious for me.

However, my reading group friends weren’t alone in their criticism. One GoodReads reviewer described it as “gratingly repetitive” and another overall positive reviewer had “some minor quibbles”, of which the main one was that “some elements of the story were repetitive”.

Another criticism made by some of my group was that they weren’t interested in any of the characters. Some GoodReads reviewers concurred. One didn’t “connect with any of the characters” and another said that “the characters, the individuals, are basic, with no complex motivations, no desires”. This surprised me, because I was interested in several of the characters, and I looked forward to their next appearance. One was Esperance, the young woman living with that renegade camp of Natives. Another was Jacky, who is the first character we meet and who, for over half the novel, struggles on alone, trying to survive and keep one step ahead of his pursuers. There are, though, a lot of characters, and I can see the argument that many of them have “no complex motivations”. However, I’m not sure that deep characterisation is always essential for speculative, dystopian fiction, such as this book is. Anyhow, regardless of this point, I can’t accept the argument that none have desires. Esperance and Jacky, for example, certainly have desires. Survival is one, and for Jacky, returning to his home, his country, is a major driving force.

One of the positive GoodReads writers said, and it reflects my response, that “importantly, Coleman’s more ‘extreme’ characters – such as Sister Bagra, in charge of a Native ‘orphanage’ – are frighteningly familiar, and it [is] these elements of the story that will linger.” She is not, in other words, a particularly complex character, but given what I know of colonial history, she is believable. I’d argue that that’s sufficient.

Then there were arguments that the book was too heavy-handed, too obvious, not nuanced enough. Again, there were GoodReads reviewers who agreed, one saying the “messaging was much too overt” and another that it could have been more subtle. However, I’m not sure that I’ve read much dystopian fiction that is subtle. On GoodReads I found a perfect example of how differently we “read” books. One criticised the chapter epigraphs, which come from various fictional “sources”, saying that “the book could have been done much more subtly without the chapter-starters explicitly comparing the colonisation to the colonisation of Australia”, while another said that Coleman’s “use of ‘archival documents’ at the beginning of each chapter gave the book rich perspective.” Again, I concur with the latter, and some in my group agreed that this feature of Coleman’s book was effective and worth exploring further.

It seems that those who are well-versed in speculative fiction’s colonisation stories – in my reading group and on GoodReads – felt that Coleman’s book didn’t offer anything new. A member in my group felt that it was so clearly Western Australia’s story that Coleman may as well have made it Western Australia. I agree that the “facts” aligned closely with the Western Australian experience, but I didn’t see that spoiling its speculative layer. In a way, it increased its effectiveness because, using the GoodReads quote above, it felt “frighteningly familiar”. There is an argument to be had, I suppose, about how “familiar” speculative fiction can be before it’s no longer speculative, but for me it worked.

Other concerns were raised in my group, but there were positives too, particularly regarding the quality of Coleman’s descriptive writing. She knows the landscape well and captures the heat and light, not to mention the weirdness of Australian desert vegetation beautifully:

He [Sergeant Rohan] did not relish another night under the alien trees, the twisted limbs, the hanging bark, the wrong colour: their waxy grey-green leaves too hard, almost glassy.

There’s more to like about the writing than this, however. From the first page when we meet Jacky on the run, I loved Coleman’s voice. It’s direct but evocative, it’s serious but peppered with a light, cheeky touch that uses throwaway lines and afterthoughts to great effect:

Dinner was a disappointment: sure the meat was fresh but it was tough and tasted like all the other Native meats – quite unappetising, only to be relished by the desperate. Good thing they were desperate then.

So, I was impressed by this book. My heart engaged with the characters who were struggling to survive their nightmarish world, while my mind was intrigued by what Coleman was doing, by her layering of historical experience within an imaginative framework, by her grounding us in a familiar story, and then overturning it to force us to see it from a different perspective. I’m not sure I followed all her intellectual twists and turns but I certainly got the point about invasion – and about the cruelty people inflict on each other in its name.

He [Johnny Star] had learned, through his friends, that the bent, broken drugged and drunk state of those surviving near the Settlements was not the habitual state of Natives. The truth was, it was a sort of depression brought on by what they had lost, brought on by being dominated and controlled by another people. Who could not be depressed, being treated like animals in a land that had once been theirs alone.

Without giving away the details, the ending is generally what you’d expect from a dystopian scenario, but it’s not without hope, without defiance too. A great read … at least, I thought so!

Lisa (Anzlitlovers) loved the book, as did Bill (The Australian Legend).

Note: I haven’t cited the individual GoodReads reviewers, but they can be found at the site’s page for the book.

AWW Badge 2018Claire G. Coleman
Terra nullius
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2017
294pp.
ISBN: 9780733638312

Mirandi Riwoe, The fish girl (#BookReview)

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Mirandi Riwoe, The fish girlMirandi Riwoe was joint-winner of the 2017 Seizure Viva La Novella prize with her book, The fish girl – and it has now been shortlisted for this year’s Stella Prize. As you may already know, it was inspired by Somerset Maugham’s short story “The four Dutchmen”, which I reviewed a few days ago. Indeed, Maugham’s story provides the epigraphs to each of the novella’s three parts. Do you then need to have read Maugham’s story to appreciate Riwoe’s take? I’d say not – and would hate that assumption to put people off reading her book. Nonetheless, I’m glad I read Maugham’s work. How’s that for a foot in both camps?

To recap briefly, “The four Dutchmen” tells of four fat, jolly Dutchmen who work together on a boat plying the southeast Asian seas. Immensely loyal to each other, they plan to all retire when the first of them dies. The only blot on their togetherness is the captain’s penchant for Malay girls. However, the chief officer usually cleans up after him – paying off the girls, in other words, when the captain tires of them – until the day the captain decides to bring one of these girls along on a boat trip. Tragedy ensues.

Now, Maugham’s story is told first person by an observer-narrator, a traveller in the region, rather than one who’s involved in the events. The story has a matter-of-fact tone. Not so Riwoe’s story, which, although told first person, gets into the girl’s heart. Unlike Maugham, Riwoe gives her a name, Mina, and from the start, we realise that Mina’s fate is tied to men. Hers is a world controlled by men – regardless of whether that world is her village or the Dutch Resident’s house.

I should, perhaps, clarify some terminology at this point. Maugham uses the terms “Javanese” and “Malay girl” in his story. These days, we differentiate Javanese, who come from Java which is part of Indonesia, from Malaysians, who come from Malaysia, which neighbours Indonesia. However, in Maugham’s time, Malay was used for Austronesian people, which include today’s Malaysians and Indonesians, amongst others. Mina, Riwoe’s version of Maugham’s Malay girl, is from a Sunda village in this region.

Riwoe tells her story in three acts, each preceded by epigraphs from Maugham’s story. In the first part, Mina is offered by her father to a man who comes searching for “cheap labour for the Dutch Resident’s kitchen.” The barely pubescent Mina doesn’t want to go, has never left home before, but for her parents, her father in particular, there is hope that she will be able to send them things they “need, like more spice and tobacco.” Mina is scared, but we also get an intimation of resilience when we’re told of the “tremor of excitement finally mingling with the dread in her stomach.” Maybe it will work out alright we hope.

By the end of part 1, she has arrived at the Dutch Resident’s place where she works in the kitchen to the unsympathetic, unkind head cook Ibu Tana. She seems to be a favourite of the Dutch Resident who treats her kindly, and requests her to serve table in his house. Is he grooming her? Or is he decent? We fear the answer.

Part 2 introduces the four Dutchmen who dine with the Dutch Resident, and, in particular to the captain – the man described in the epigraph from Maugham as “losing his head over one brazen hussy or another”. That should warn us, though in this part he seems gentle. He wants her to teach him her language. In return he teaches her his, and gives her gifts. Hmm … our antennae are up. Meanwhile, Mina has fallen for Ajat, her village chief’s son who does some work for the Dutch Resident. Her sexuality is awakening, but Ajat treats her cruelly. Part 3 commences with her arrival on the boat with the captain, after which the story plays out pretty much as Maugham tells in his short story.

What Riwoe does in this story – her post-colonial response to Maugham’s – is to look at it from the angle of the colonised, and particularly colonised young women. What she shows is that young women are not only pawns in the hands of colonial powers but also in the hands of their own men (in this case her father who trades her for potential material gain, and the chief’s son who tricks her and uses her ill).

This may all sound same-same, as in “I’ve heard all this before”, and at a simple level that’s so. However, what makes The fish girl such a good read is the character Riwoe gives Mina. She’s young and naive, but she’s not a type. She has dreams and at least an attempt at having agency. Here she is, as she’s about to be taken to the boat by the Captain:

Kanjeng Ratu Kidal (Ocean Queen): By Gunawan Kartapranata (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0]


Mina leans against a tree, rolls her head gently against the prickly bark. She takes a deep breath. She will need to be very strong. She will need to be like one of the dhalang’s wayang puppets, as hard as lacquer, enduring.

Also, Riwoe adds a mythical element through Mina’s love of the sea, and her belief in the Ocean Queen. The sea is presented as a curative force – both physically (for her rash, presumably eczema) and spiritually.

She calls for the Ocean Queen. Only when she feels Nayai Loro’s strong, smooth pull, feels the soft arms suckle at her damaged thighs, does Mina scatter the flowers upon the sparkling water.

Finally, although this is short, Riwoe unfolds the story slowly, developing Mina’s character and allowing us to hope that Mina will endure. But that, of course, would be a fairy tale and, despite its heartening mystical conclusion for Mina, this is definitely not that. An engaging but powerful read.

AWW Badge 2018Mirandi Riwoe
The fish girl
Sydney: Xoum, 2017
97pp.
ISBN: 9781925589061

M.L. (Mollie) Skinner, The hand (#Review)

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ML Skinner, The fifth sparrow

ML Skinner, The fifth sparrow: An autobiography

Pam of Travellin’ Penguin blog read ML Skinner’s short story “The hand” for a challenge she was doing, and, when I expressed interest in it, very kindly sent me a copy. “The hand” is a mysterious little story – and by little, I mean, little in that it takes up less than 7 pages of the anthology, Australian short stories, that she found it in.

Now, the story is a bit tricky, and I think is best understood within the context of Skinner’s biography. She was born in Perth in 1876, but the family moved to England and Ireland in 1878. Mollie was a keen student and reader but had to abandon formal education in 1887 because of an ulcerated cornea, which resulted in her spending much of the next five years in a darkened room with bandaged eyes. After cauterisation partially restored her sight, she started to write poems and stories. Presumably this was around 1892 (ie 5 years after 1887?) when she was about 16 years old. Later she trained as a nurse, which gave her her main living. And then, the ADB biography (linked to above) says something interesting in terms of our reading of this story:  “she recognized within herself an intuitive power, or sixth sense.” A little later in the biography, we are also told that “Mollie believed that God’s hand on her shoulder guided her life. She dabbled in the occult”. She returned to Australia in 1900, though returned to England later to study. She also travelled to India, and served there and Burma during World War 1.

So to the story, which was first published in 1924. It is set in a “mining hospital back there in the west.” As there was “little doing” and the light too dim to read by, the Matron is encouraged to tell a story which she is “good at” doing. They – presumably the off-duty staff – ask her about her life in “those posts way back in the interior”. Was she ever frightened, they ask?

‘Of what?’
‘Well–the loneliness. And bad white men, and bad blacks. Of patients in delirium. Or some awful maternity case you couldn’t handle.’
‘I didn’t think about it. I did what I could. I was frightened once, though: and that, really, by a nurse screaming. A nurse shouldn’t scream.’

Interesting, the “bad white men, and bad blacks”, but I’ll just take that as another of those ways in which contemporary stories provide us insight into the times, and move on with the story. She then tells the story of the scream. She describes the small outback post, the sense of community they had, and the little L-shaped hospital which was open to the bush on one side, and the road and railroad on the other. There were two other nurses besides herself, one being Nurse Hammer “a regular town girl, very attractive, but unstable, untried.” On the night of the scream, our Matron story-teller was doing accounts while the two nurses were chatting with the patients. Our Matron’s mind kept wandering she says. She’s

very practical, really, and then liable to feel things in the air, things that other people don’t seem aware of. My father called it “unwarranted interference”; and told me to taboo it. But it gets hold of me sometimes: and this evening I was uneasy, aware of “something”. There seemed to be a sound.

But, she can’t identify anything, so continues to try to work. She hears Nurse Hammer go to bed, and then – the scream. The rest of the story concerns locating the scream – it was Nurse Hammer – and working out the cause of it – a hand has grabbed Hammer’s leg.

In the end, there’s a practical explanation for “the hand” but along the way there’s a sense of an awakening or at least, a growing up, for Nurse Hammer. Initially, the Matron is

conscious, not only of Hammer’s terrible fear, but of a deeper source, dark and secret within herself. I remembered how lovely she was. How men in the wards watched with furtive eyes as she walked past. I remembered the way she walked–how she avoided those eyes. I knew then that the girl had herself been tempted, that she was powerless, now, in this dark room, because in her own life she was passing through crisis.

The Matron finds herself praying that “whatever we found in this room would not be evil.”

Skinner builds up the suspense well, the darkness, the lantern going out, until eventually the cause of the scream is determined. Before it is fully explained though, Nurse Hammer has a little more to endure, but, says Matron,

I glanced at Hammer. The Nightingale light was flooding her face …

And the Matron goes on to use words that imply a biblical aspect to Hammer’s enlightenment – but if I say more, I’ll give away the story which I’m not sure I want to do (though unfortunately the story does not seem to be available online).

Interestingly, Skinner attracted the attention of DH Lawrence … but I think I might make this the subject of tomorrow’s Monday Musings! Meanwhile, I think the story is to be understood in the sense of a divine intervention intended to test and try Nurse Hammer, from which she emerges, in a sense, reborn and now a real nurse, like Florence Nightingale. (But, I could be wrong.)

AWW Badge 2018ML (Mollie) Skinner
“The hand” (1924)
in Australian short stories (1951)
ed. by Walter Murdoch and Henrietta-Drake Brockman
(pp. 148-154)