Robbie Arnott

Canberra Writers Festival 2024: 4, Your favourites: Robbie Arnott

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

In conversation with Karen Viggers

Karen Viggers is no stranger to this blog (my posts), and I have read Robbie Arnott’s previous novel, Limberlost (my review). One of several “Your favourites” sessions with loved authors, this one was described as

Robbie Arnott’s fiction is steeped in the wild: women return from the dead as walking ecosystems; mythic birds circle the skies; the water calls to us. In writing these sumptuous, near-sentient landscapes, he grapples with our most wrenching and necessary questions: eco-grief, stolen land and human frailty. He joins local author Karen Viggers to talk about his new novel, Dusk, a tale of a feral creature loose in the Tasmanian highlands.  

Karen commenced by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people, their generosity and their stories, and spoke with passion about the importance of stories in our lives.

She then introduced herself, explaining that as an animal and landscape person, she relates to Robbie’s books and was keen to conduct this conversation for the Festival. She then introduced Robbie, his four books to date, and his many awards – Flames (2018), Rain heron (2020), Limberlost (2022), and Dusk (2024). Wildness and landscapes feature in all his work.

This was a fascinating but sometimes somewhat anarchic discussion in which Robbie didn’t always quite answer the question being asked, or, perhaps, not in the expected way. But Karen is an expert at going with the flow, so we got great insights into Robbie and his approach to writing – which is what it’s all about.

On how the accolades make him feel and their effect on his writing

It’s nice to be acknowledged, but living in Tasmania, away from the literary scene, they don’t make much difference to his daily life. Career-wise they’re good, but they don’t affect his writing. He is all about his work, to the detriment of his other responsibilities.

On the novel’s origin

Dusk is about twins Iris and Floyd joining the hunt for a feral puma, the titular Dusk, because a bounty has been offered. Karen described it as a story of wildness, freedom, connections, relationships, and asked about its origin. Robbie said it goes back to his childhood, and times in the bush when they would see feral deer which shouldn’t be there. He wanted to write this story.

On the siblings and their relationship to their parents

Iris and Floyd are 37-year-old twins whose parents had been convicts, then bushrangers, and had dragged their children through their life of crime. Now these children want to live straight. They need the bounty cash, but they have no idea about what they are doing.

He wanted two protagonists who have a close relationship, like siblings do. He didn’t make them twins for any particular twin-connection idea, but because he wanted a flatness of hierarchy between them. However, Karen felt that the sort of connection twins have comes through.

Karen wondered about the twins’ outsiderness, and whether it comes from within himself. Robbie, though – and this was reiterated throughout the interview – said he had no idea about himself. He hasn’t had therapy! They are outsiders because we live in colonial landscape. The other characters – except for some near the end (First Nations I’m guessing) – are outsiders too, but don’t realise it.

Later, Robbie talked about the deep trust Iris and Floyd have in each other. They are committed completely to each other, they rely on each other, despite frequently irritating each other.

On Dusk the puma, and wild beast myths

Dusk was not inspired by big cat stories but people are more scared of cats. They are terrifying, and play into our idea of wild landscapes. He is interested in outsiders tracking outsiders, in the strangeness of the colonial landscape. Colonists would bring things to new countries to hunt, also to rid other pests, so he had the idea that someone might bring a cat over to get rid of deer. But his pumas were more interested in easier animals than deer, like sheep. Like the cane toads brought over to eat cane beetles, but which ended up eating other things. (And, to extend this example, before the cane toads, the sugar cane itself was introduced, which then led to blackbirding.)

As for the name, Dusk, he didn’t choose it for any metaphorical meaning, but liked it as a name for a creature which appears at a liminal time of day.

Robbie doesn’t seek metaphor when he’s writing. It feels more like cleverness than openness. Karen suggested that a joy for writers is when readers see things that the writer doesn’t see. Robbie agreed, sharing Richard Flanagan’s advice that the least interesting thing in a novel is the writer’s intention. Flanagan, we learnt, is a friend and writing mentor for Robbie.

Despite this, readers did, said Karen, think about metaphorical meaning of Dusk!

On the wild and dangerous creatures in his novels, their source, relevance, meaning

Robbie has had no therapy, he reiterated, so can’t explain why! But, currently there is a focus in writing on the self and raising mundanity to art. However, he is interested in the world outside humanity. In stories, wild animals are often the impetus for change, but animals don’t work like that. They just are, going about their lives.

The discussion then turned to savagery and brutality. Humans can be as savage and brutal as wild animals, but in urban societies we fear wildness and savagery, and try to keep it at bay. However, we keep bumping up against the edges of it. Robbie has had publishers and readers complain about brutality in his novels, though it’s drawn from reality. For example, Iris and Floyd slaughtering bobby calves with sledgehammers comes from a friend’s experience in 2012. In another novel, his publisher tried to talk him out of a scene involving the skinning of rabbits. Where do they think meat comes from, Robbie asked. Savagery and brutality are part of us.

We have become separated from the bush. We say we love it but is our attitude to it essentially about power and control? For Robbie, taming the wilderness is ridiculous. He shared a scene from Richard Powers’ beautiful novel, Overstory, in which people suggested removing sticks and natural debris from the forest floor.

Staying with the idea of animals, Karen spoke of Iris and Floyd living in a savage world but taking such exquisite care of their horses. She asked Robbie about his thoughts on the human-animal bond. He wanted to show the intensity of the relationship, that it was an unquestioned one, and a necessity.

On what landscape means to him, and how he writes it

Robbie always starts with the landscape, not plot or character, and then thinks about who would be there. Landscape moves him. It offers the greatest way to feel small, the most beautiful form of insignificance. To write about landscape with feeling, the first thing he does is to free it of baggage, like the idea that the forest is green. He describes it as it is, which is not green, and then focuses on emotional reactions to it. For him, the aim of fiction is not to render the world as it is but how it feels.

To write freshly about landscape he gets out into it, and draws on his memory (memory is critical). He searches for the “atmosphere”. He most enjoys a book when he has slid into its atmosphere.

Staying with the idea of feelings, Karen asked him about the feelings he wanted for Dusk, who is omnipresent from the beginning. Robbie said that it wasn’t quite menace but a “hauntedness”. She’s not vengeful. He wanted her to feel alive.

On his novel as Western (and more!)

Robbie has described the novel as being something like a western, in that it is framed like a western, like a quest. It is also a journey novel, which makes it fun to write and enjoyable for the reader.

The discussion got into other aspects of his writing, such as his blurring of the line between realism and the magical in most of his books. It’s about, he said, conveying how the world feels. The magical wasn’t needed in Limberlost which was inspired by his grandfather. He edits a lot out, because it must feel real.

Karen loves the opening of Rain heron, and suggested that cutting out is an art. Robbie doesn’t want to waste anyone’s time. He wants to keep his books vivid, vibrant, alive. He doesn’t write drafts, but writes sentence by sentence, crafting each one carefully as he goes, so that by the end he has his book.

On Iris

Is Iris looking for belonging? Robbie said Iris feels connection to the landscape, and realises she doesn’t want to leave but she also recognises that she has no cultural connection to the place. Does she have a right to stay? This is the unanswered question – for Iris and for us. She does her best but the question is never resolved.

This point, this, above all else, makes me keen to read Dusk.

Q & A

On his becoming a writer, and his influences: He was a bookworm from the start (as soon as he learnt his sister got to stay up later because she could read!) He started writing when he was 11 or 12. There was never a decision, he just started writing. His literary influences are many, but he loves Annie Proulx for her amazing descriptions of the world; he loves Denis Johnston “at the sentence level”. He thinks Kevin Barry’s new novel is excellent, and later he mentioned David Mitchell and Claire Keegan.

On his thoughts about relationships between humans and wild animals (like the seal and fisherman in Flames): He agrees with ecologists who advocate staying away, but narratively he is pulled to these relationships.

On how he manages to keep his unique, glorious style: He can tell when he Is writing like himself, and when he “is wearing his influences too heavily”. When this happens, he writes a description of something he knows – not necessarily related to his current project – to get back to his own style.

On other art forms that influence or inspire his writing: Photography; poetry for its imagery; oh, and when he is writing he often puts on moving image of salmon leaping and grizzly bears trying (and usually failing) to catch them. This live and unscripted action inspires him.

Karen concluded by simply saying that Robbie’s writing is magical. This conversation would surely have convinced anyone not already in agreement.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2024
Your favourites: Robbie Arnott
The Arc Theatre, NFSA
Saturday 26 October 2024, 2-3pm

Canberra Writers Festival 2023: 4, Into the Wild

/ Whispering Gums / 15 Comments

How good was it that my two sessions today involved books my reading group has done this year, Debra Dank’s We come with this place, and, in this session, Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost. The session, subtitled “Robbie Arnott in conversation with Astrid Edwards”, sounded broader in ambit:

Robbie Arnott’s fiction is steeped in the wild: women return from the dead as walking ecosystems; mythic birds circle the skies; the water calls to us. In writing these sumptuous, near-sentient landscapes, he grapples with our most wrenching and necessary questions: eco-grief, stolen land and human frailty. 

Join Robbie Arnott for this intimate discussion about his abiding love for the natural world and how he brings it to life on the page.

But, Limberlost was the focus. For those of you who don’t know the participants, Robbie Arnott is the Tasmanian-based author of three acclaimed novels (Flames, Rain heron and Limberlost), while Astrid Edwards is a bibliophile, writing teacher, literary awards judge and host of the Garrett Podcast.

The conversation

I will start by saying this felt like the perfect session on which to end my 2023 Canberra Writers Festival experience. I’ll explain at the end, in case you haven’t worked it out by then. Edwards began by saying that behind the scenes she’d gleaned that the question Arnott doesn’t get asked enough concerned “craft” so she asked him to tell us all about it. Arnott simply replied that he likes talking about craft. So Edwards pressed on – but craft was in fact a major thread of the conversation.

Meanwhile, Edwards moved to the critical success he’d had, and whether public recognition has affected how he feels when he sits down to write. He was grateful for the accolades, he said, but he lives in Tasmania away from the literary scene. The main pressure is the one he puts on himself.

Edwards took the obvious segue, and asked him what this pressure means. Arnott referred to a Garrett Podcast interview with Michelle de Kretser who said that “literature lives in the sentences”. He can’t sleep he said until he’s “messed” with a paragraph. This “messing” includes things like reading aloud; going for a walk; changing it because it’s too active and then because it’s too passive; adding commas and removing them. He has spent long conversations with his editor about a comma! Here’s a writer I can love! Seriously though, this made sense because Limberlost wowed me with the tightness of the writing, by which I mean the way Arnott conveys so much in so few words.

After a brief discussion about his first novel Flames, we got to Limberlost, with Edwards asking him to provide a “high level intro”. Arnott described it as being about a young man and a pivotal summer in his life. It is set during World War 1, and he is conflicted about his dream to buy a boat. We flash forward at times to see how that summer affected the rest of his life.

Edwards then returned to the craft issue, saying she was interested in how he handled animals, time, and place, and how he positions himself as a settler writer writing about these things.

After reading from the opening of his novel, which introduces the whale motif, Arnott turned to how he writes about animals. He is fascinated by wild animals. They “yank us out of the civilised world we know when we confront them”. Edwards pushed a bit more about this, mentioning the quoll and Ned’s relationship with it, and how he treats the natural world with respect and honour. Arnott said that all the world is important, and Ned feels respect and connection with it, even if he doesn’t always have the language to express this.

Edwards then raised the logging scene, and how he goes about creating scenes like these. Arnott’s answer was another craft one. What he does is to think about the emotion of the scene, and the atmosphere he wants to create, before he writes the description. Then, here it comes – are you ready – emotion, or feeling, is what he aims for in his writing because it’s what he reads for. This issue underpinned much of the rest of the discussion.

Moving on to the next topic she’d heralded, Edwards asked him about structure and his use of time, about how we tend not to see critical events (like the boat’s destruction) but get Ned’s feeling. Arnott replied that he can’t write action, and quoted Amanda Lorry who said “I can’t read crime because I don’t care who did it”, which is pretty much how I feel. When I read or watch crime, I rarely try to work out who did it. I’m far more interested in the relationships and the ideas being explored. Arnott basically sai the same. He’s not interested in the action but in how people feel. He doesn’t formally plot his books. He knows where he wants to go, and from there he works it all out as he “walks and types”.

What, asked Edwards next, is he trying to share? He has a strong compulsion to write, he says. He sees novels as a two-way communication between author and reader; he likes this connection. He wants to know whether what he feels resonates with the reader. What does “this strange mess” he’s offered up mean to the reader?

Edwards then turned to the craft, and asked how he managed to make Ned’s father feel whole, even though he doesn’t do much. Arnott believes its by having him seen through Ned’s eyes. The novel is 3rd person so a bit objective, but it is through Ned. He surprises Ned. Arnott is interested in masculine tenderness. Edwards turned then to the war context. Arnott said that it wasn’t a war novel, but he needed to provide a context for the story so the reader wouldn’t hit “snags” in terms of understanding what was happening.

At this point Edwards reflected on Arnott’s various references to readers, and asked him how he conceives readers. With gratitude and happiness, he responded, as most people don’t read fiction. The usual response in his social circles, from men in particular, is “Yeah, mate, I don’t read fiction. It’s made up!” But Arnott likes having his mind messed up with made-up things!

The obvious question here, of course, is why. Does he think, asked Edwards, that fiction can do something? And here again was what made this session so special … Arnott said that fiction can expand our consciousness, can make us feel things. We come away a different person after reading it. In this way fiction shapes who we become.

Edwards then raised the settler writer issue, through the scene in which Ned’s university daughters confront him about living and working on stolen land. Ned, said Arnott, is a decent person, but there’s a gaping moral hole concerning living on land not his. It was important for him to be confronted with the idea. To ignore this issue would not be real. There is no moral closure about this in the book. It just sits there, but that’s life too.

Arnott said he had received lot of feedback about that scene in particular, and it’s been split on age: older readers have told him that the daughters were horrible, while younger readers like that part of the book. (Hmm… I guess the older readers who like it haven’t thought to tell him!) This led to a question about how he thinks about himself as a writer. He said he feels a strong responsibility to tell stories about land in a way that improves our country. There is a moral aspect to everything we do, particularly those of us who benefit from colonialism.

Edwards mentioned the eco-fiction genre, and wondered how he sees it. Arnott responded that he’s fine with the idea but doesn’t think about it when he is writing. His focus is emotion. Novels work well when “they rattle around inside you, when they shake you up”. Nonetheless, he is very anxious about this coming summer, and the potential for climate disaster. He wants to write more about climate change. He wants to write the emotion of it, not the facts, which his readers know anyhow.

Q & A

  • On whether there’s a trajectory in how his three books deal the environment but with different senses of place: each book’s place is explicit and deliberate, and it depends on what best suits the story. There is no supernatural element in Limberlost for example because it was not needed.
  • On writing male vulnerability, without being sentimental: he is interested male vulnerability, though everyone is vulnerable. He fears being sentimental, so tries to avoid it by using his sharpest, clearest eye to convey feeling. He focuses on what characters do, not on writing descriptive, interior monologue.
  • On his literary influences, senses elements of Winton and Flanagan: is a fan of both those authors. Loves Flanagan, particularly Gould’s book of fish which exploded fiction at the time. He also likes Annie Proulx, and Tobias Wolff, particularly his “beautiful book” Old school. (This just crossed my path recently as a book I’d love to read.)
  • On next book: yes he’s working on one.
  • On AI’s impact on the future of writing: he is reasonably concerned, but not about the sort of books he writes. It will affect people who write “content”, and it’s terrible for them. He remains hopeful for what novels can do for the world

My wrap-up

I hope you’ve worked out by now why I thought this was the perfect final session for me? It’s Arnott’s absolute commitment to fiction – to its ability to change us, and to its moral (but not didactic) heft. Encouraging and inspiring.

Canberra Writers Festival, 2023
Into the Wild
Sunday, 20 August 2023, 2-3 pm

Robbie Arnott, Limberlost (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 27 Comments

Where should I start my discussion of Robbie Arnott’s third novel, Limberlost? Perhaps with the epigraph. It’s by Gene Stratton Porter, and says, “In the economy of Nature, nothing is ever lost”. I have posted on Porter – on her essay, “The last Passenger Pigeon”. She was, says Wikipedia, an author, nature photographer, naturalist and silent-film producer.

Some of you will know her for her now classic novel, Girl of the Limberlost (1909). My mother adored it, and passed it on to me. I adored it too, and passed it on to my daughter, who adored it in her turn. It is a beautiful book about love of place (Indiana’s Limberlost Swamp) and a young woman, Elnora, living with a wounded, neglectful, widowed mother. It is about how Elnora obtains sustenance (physical and emotional) from nature. Yes, it’s a bit sentimental, in the style of the time, but Porter won me over with her description of the Limberlost Swamp and with her young protagonist Elnora’s strength. (Oh, and with Elnora’s beautiful lunchbox, which, apparently, also impressed author Joan Aiken! I wanted one.)

So, Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost … it draws more than a little – but also not a lot – from Porter and her novel. It is about a teenage boy Ned who, though not neglected like Elnora, is living with a loving but stressed and often remote father. It is set in a stunning and beautifully-rendered-by-Arnott environment, in this case northeast Tasmania, in the Tamar River valley. There are enough similarities to suggest that Arnott also loved Porter’s novel. However, Arnott has taken this kernel – troubled teenager left frequently alone in a beautiful environment – and woven a more subtle story about, well, let’s talk about that now …

Fundamentally, Limberlost is a coming-of-age novel but one that also happens to tell a whole life from childhood to 90s – in just over 200 pages. That’s impressive writing. If you like family sagas, this is not for you, but if you are interested in what makes a life a life then Arnott has written just the book. In this case, we are talking specifically the life of a man. I have reviewed a few books over the years that explore manhood – Christos Tsiolkas’ Barracuda (my review) and Sandy Gordon’s Leaving Owl Creek (my review), being two. Arnott’s book has its own take on this question.

He’d never felt so brotherless

The central narrative takes place over summer, near the end of World War 2, when Ned is 15. With his mother having died within months of his birth, and his two older brothers, Bill and Toby, being away at war, it is just Ned and his father on the family orchard, until big sister Maggie arrives to make it three. The core chronology follows Ned through summer, but the narrative shifts back and forth in time as events segue to other experiences in Ned’s life.

Ned is a sensitive, reflective young man. The novel starts with a scene from when he was 5. The community was awash with rumours and fears about a mad whale causing death and destruction at the mouth of the river, so Ned’s father had taken his three boys out in a boat to the eye of the storm, as it were. This little incident is key to the novel, because it is about facing fears, about checking the truth of stories, about memory – and about fathers and brothers. Throughout the novel, Ned struggles to remember what really happened in the various events of his life, starting with this one. Which brother had given him a coat that night when he’d shivered with cold? This bothers him, but what is more important is that “he remembered the warmth of the wool”.

It is perhaps the challenge of being the baby brother, but for Ned the struggle to feel competent – like his father, like his brothers – is ongoing. At 15, he dreams of having a boat, and he works hard to realise it, by trapping rabbits and selling the pelts. Achieving this dream would bring him two victories: “He’d have the boat, and he’d have people’s shock at the casual totality of his competence”. There is a guilty niggle, though, because his trapping for pelts looks “nobler” – providing pelts for slouch hats, while his brothers are at war – than he knows in his heart it is.

Limberlost, however, is not only about manhood and brotherhood. It is also a work of eco-literature (about which I’ve written before). The novel’s epigraph, along with the opening “mad whale” scene, clues us into this. Nature – the natural world – thrums through the novel – from the whale, the rabbits, and the quoll he mistakenly traps, to the beautiful giant manna gums (or “White Knights”) that Ned logs in a short stint on a logging crew. Many of the descriptions of the animals, plants and landscape are visceral in the way they act upon Ned’s emotions and consciousness. Ned’s relationship with this world is complex – at times it terrifies, at times it nurtures, at times he takes from it (such as logging and rabbit-trapping) and at times he gives back (such as returning the quoll), but it is always there. Arnott’s natural world is beautiful but fierce. It is also threatened – by man’s actions upon it – which Arnott shows graphically but not didactically.

There are many strong, dramatic descriptions of nature in the novel, but I’m gong to share a rare joyful one. It comes during Ned’s honeymoon, after he had experienced the true joys of lovemaking (in one of the best sex-scenes I’ve read for a while):

Afterwards he’d driven them across the plateau through white-fingered fog, through ghostly stands of cider gums, through thick-needled pencil pines, through plains of button grass and tarns, through old rock and fresh lichen, until the road twisted and dived into a golden valley. Here at winter’s end, thousands of wattles had unfurled their gaudy colours. As they descended from the heights their vision was swarmed by the yellow fuzz. Every slope, every scree, every patch of forest, every glimpse through every window was a scene of flowering gold.

The rolling, breathlessly joyful rhythm of this description is very different to that in the next paragraph where Ned’s old fears return, and the sentences become clipped, and staccato-like.

Arnott also refers to the presence of local First Nations peoples, to Ned’s awareness of their knowledge of the land. “At no point, Ned had heard, were they hungry” – not the way he and Callie were as they struggled to make their little orchard work. Some members of my reading group, with whom I read this book, felt this was anachronistic, but the Tasmanians amongst us argued that northern Tasmanians have long been aware of First Nations presence.

The final point I want to make concerns dreams and imagination. Ned, as I wrote above, feels guilty about his boat-dream when others think his rabbit-trapping is war-effort related, but it’s the dream that sustains him. When crisis comes and dreams are shattered – not in the way you are expecting so this is not a spoiler – Ned is devastated:

He wanted something to do, something to love. He had … nowhere to push his imagination, nothing to dream of … nowhere to turn his thoughts from reality … He felt cut loose from the anchors he’d been dropping all summer. He’d never felt so brotherless.

Limberlost is a great read. It is imbued with warmth for its world and characters, but it is not sentimental, nor simplistic, and no answers are given – except for one, the ties that bind, family. The novel starts and ends with father and brothers – but in between are real lives lived authentically in a vividly-rendered landscape that has its own life. Beautiful.

Several bloggers got to this before me, including Lisa, Kimbofo and Brona.

Robbie Arnott
Limberlost
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2022
226pp.
ISBN: 9781922458766