Monthly Archives: February 2017

2008, 224 p.

When an writer dies, I often make a point of reading one of their books. It’s an act of tribute, I suppose, even though the reality is that all books live on beyond their authors eventually.  Although the book has to stand on its own merits, the recent death of the author probably does affect the way I read it. With an older author I read the book as the affirmation of a career, and with a younger writer it’s with a sense of lost opportunities and books not written.

This is particularly the case when the book is a beautifully crafted memoir, as Georgia Blain’s Births Deaths Marriages most surely is. As the daughter of the writer Anne Deveson, Georgia Blain died recently with a brain tumour at the age of 51, one day before her mother also died after many years living with dementia. In this series of autobiographical essays, we have met the whole family- mother, father, husband and daughter, and the overwhelming feeling that I am left with is: “I think I would have liked you”.

The book starts and finishes with a chapter titled “A Room of One’s Own”. In the opening chapter, Blain returns to her childhood home, now up for auction, and remembers her mother typewriting in the 1970s as her children waited resentfully in the doorway, for the tip-tap of the typewriter to finish. In the essay that closes the book “A Room of One’s Own II”, she is now the writer, jostling with her husband Andrew for space in the shed at the back of their ugly house to use as a workroom.   The essays between these two bookends are arranged roughly chronologically, as she writes about her years in an ‘opportunity’ class for gifted students, travelling with her mother and brothers to Adelaide after her parents separate, losing her virginity, establishing a relationship with film-maker Andrew after other unsuccessful relationships, marriage counselling, having a child, buying a dog.  Her description of her ambivalence about motherhood is one of the most honest and raw accounts that I have read. Her descriptions of place are almost cinematographic: you can feel the hot prickle of the Adelaide summer; smell the salty tang of Sydney beaches and the dust of Terowrie, a disintegrating outback town, seems to coat your skin.  As with Helen Garner’s work in sketching both people and place, I liked the sharpness of her vision, as if she is looking through a window that is cleaner than the one I’m behind.

The book itself is not new: it was published nine years ago in 2008. Even though as the title suggests, the book is about relationships, it is also very much about the act of writing itself.  In an interview with Sophie Cunningham in Meanjin in 2008, she explains that the book started as a Ph D and that several chapters had been published in a range of literary journals, each with different editors. At the time of writing it, she had already published four novels and she reflects on her decision to write from her own life:

There is a private space and a public space, and within each there are many layers. I wanted to hold the private up to the light, to look at it and put it out there on the table for public viewing, but I need to think carefully about how I wanted to do this. (p. 128)… I believed and still do, that if I wrote about my own life and lives of those I love, I had to tell the truth. But foolishly, I believed the truth lay only in the immediate. (p 130)

It’s an odd mixture of the very ordinary  set alongside the particular circumstance of being the child of two journalists who had their own public personas, and as the sister of a brother whose schizophrenia was explored publicly in her mother’s own book Tell Me I’m Here. Most particularly, the essays are a conversation on paper with her parents as professionals.  She listens, with embarrassment, to an old tape of an interview her father conducted with Germaine Greer and realizes how ineffectual he was as journalist.  She describes her ambivalence over her mother’s writing about her brother, Jonathan, thereby making his story public property, in much the way that she has herself done in this book.

Indeed, much of the book is a dialogue with her mother as writer. After years of writing non-fiction, Anne Deveson tried to write a novel but was frustrated because it kept turning into autobiography or reportage. Blain, already a published novelist, decided to switch in the other direction:

We had switched places, my mother and I. And we looked at each other. Both mothers. Both writers. Both trying on each others shoes, taking a few steps back, eyes on our feet, before we glanced across, once again, curious as to how this had happened. (p 158)

Even though the chapters are self-contained, there is a real unity to the book, best captured by the circularity of the opening and closing chapters. She writes about the narrative problem of ‘finding’ the ending in a memoir, when life that still offered more. She found that she had reached the end of the book, almost without realizing it:

There was no need to search for it. It is right here where it had all looped back on itself, complete in this moment. Here is the place to stop, to pause before the next swoop of the arc continues following the path of all that has gone before, the same shape but a different line. (p. 163)

And a different line it certainly was to be, nine years later, even though she did not know that at the time.  Last year Georgia Blain began contributing a column to the Saturday Paper, talking about the brain tumour and the world of illness that she had been plunged into. The columns stopped late in the year.  Her friend, Charlotte Wood, wrote a beautiful tribute in the last edition for 2016. Yet in many ways and unconsciously at the time, Blain herself leaves us with her own words of comfort:

Because this is the place where I am, like my mother, writing about us. And I have so much more than I ever hoped for; I have love, work that I want to do, and a couple of rooms to move between each day.

My rating: 9/10

Source: Yarra Plenty Regional Library as an e-book.

I have linked this review to the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2017

2015, 272 p.

Each night I sit down to watch the ABC news and just accept as a matter of course the presence of Lisa Millar in London, or Anne Barker in the Middle East telling me what new tragedy has occurred or which new crisis is emerging. Yet, when I think of reporters from far-off places in the past (and particularly in war zones) my mental picture is of a male reporter: Charles Bean in WWI,  or Neil Davis in Vietnam, Greg Shackleton in East Timor or more recently, Eric Campbell.  When did it become commonplace for a woman to be a foreign correspondent, even and especially in a conflict zone?   I’m also conscious  of the recent death of Claire Hollingworth, the famed (and very old) British WWI war correspondent.  I wasn’t aware, until I read this book, of any Australian women war correspondents that I could name from the top of my head.

In this book, Jeannine Baker argues that there have been female journalists in all the conflicts in which Australia has participated since Federation.  Their numbers are, admittedly,very small but not insignificant: she estimates that between 1900 and 1975 more than thirty Australian women reporters wrote for a range of London-based and Australian-based publications. They have been largely overlooked and do not have the prominence of male Australian journalists, and their role is seen as minor compared with their American and British female counterparts.  However, this, she suggests, is not so much a reflection of their ability but because the experiences and writings of women journalists were largely shaped by their national identity as Australians first and foremost, with the Australian armed forces particularly resistant to female war reporters, right up to the Vietnam War.  Partly this was a result of the “shut it down” reaction to publicity still exhibited by the ADF to this day, but it also sprang from a belief that the war front was no place for a woman; that they would have inconvenient toileting requirements; that they would distract the men and provoke them into a misplaced chivalry at times of crisis. Other countries changed their thinking about women reporters long before Australia did.

The book is structured chronologically, bookended by an introduction and afterword.  While she does namecheck probably most of the thirty female war correspondents across the length of the text, she focuses on several women journalists in particular. As the title suggests, she starts with the Boer War, the first war to which Australian colonies sent troops. The book title concludes with the Vietnam War, but Baker’s analysis stretches beyond declared wars to encompass female journalists sent to conflict zones ostensibly under the watch of Australian troops as peacekeepers and ‘trainers’.

Several of these women journalists ended up reporting on wars -albeit from behind the frontline- under their own initiative. Agnes Macready was the first nurse to travel from Australia to South Africa, where for two years she worked as a nurse during the Boer War and, as a sideline, contributed articles to the Catholic press under the pen-name ‘Arrah Luen’. A convert to Catholicism, she found herself an outsider as an outsider in her religion, as an Australian and as a woman. She opposed Britain’s imperialist expansion and was sympathetic to the Boers from the start. A second ‘lady war correspondent’during the Boer War was Edith Dickenson, who wrote for the Adelaide Advertiser and the Chronicle, who travelled widely and alone throughout South Africa.  At first she was strongly pro-British but over time became more critical of the war and more sympathetic to the Boers. She was the only Australian journalist to give a first-hand account of the concentration camps into which the Boers were corralled, and this work was taken up by the British activist Emily Hobhouse.  During WWII Lorraine Stumm, already a journalist in London, followed her Australian-born husband when he was sent to Singapore, where under American accreditation, she reported on New Guinea.

Other Australian women journalists were able to gain access to conflict zones because they were already employed with overseas newspapers, a reflection of the greater mobility for a particular class of young, unmarried and independent Australian women. Just before World War I Louise Mack (who, as it happens, Sue at Whispering Gums has been reading in a different context) was working in London and persuaded her London newspaper editor to send her to Belgium, where she travelled as a free agent. Likewise, Katharine Susannah Pritchard, who had based herself in London prior to the war, was unable to convince her editor to send her to Serbia, so instead travelled to France to cover the Australian Voluntary Hospital there. During World War II Elizabeth Riddell from Sydney, worked at the Daily Mirror and was asked to open a New York branch. In that capacity, she travelled to Britain, where she wrote about the ‘war weariness’ of the Brits, an observation at odds with the ‘brave Londoners’ stance being promulgated by other local newspapers.

Other women happened to be in London when war broke out and offered to send their reports back to Australian newspapers. Margaret Gilruth, who wrote for a range of papers including the Courier Mail and the Mercury Herald, travelled to Europe before the Nazis invaded the Low Countries.  She held a pilot’s licence, and had good contacts with Charles Kingsford Smith and  Australian aviator Nancy Bird.  She attended and reported on Nazi rallies.   Sydney-born Ann Matheson from ACP travelled to Prague in 1938 and was in London during the Blitz, which she reported for the Australian Women’s Weekly.

But in general, the Australian armed forces were very reluctant to allow women anywhere near the frontline: more resistant even than the British and certainly more resistant than the Americans.  The Australian army did not permit women journalists to be accredited, issuing them only temporary passes on application.  Male journalists were not welcome on the front either, for that matter, but there was a strong view that the only role for a woman in war was that of a supporter or aide, through nursing or the female auxiliary service.  It was the relatively relaxed American attitude that eventually nudged Australia into allowing female journalists in war zones during the Vietnam War.

Women journalists in the Australian newspaper industry had had a very circumscribed role prior to WWII. Although women were granted equal pay in 1917, they were usually restricted to the lower grade payscales, with few opportunities for progress, and newspaper proprietors were keen to dismantle that equality.  I had not realized the significance of the advent of women’s magazines, most particularly the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1933. Although I don’t particularly think of the writers for the Womens Weekly today as journalists, during WWII its editors looked for ‘a woman’s view’ on the war.  Through this, and the enlistment of many male journalists with the outbreak of WWII, opportunities opened up for women to move beyond the ‘women’s pages’ to write about crime, courts, sports and stock exchange.  Male journalists did not take this quietly: there were criticisms of the quality of their writing and accusations of flippancy and it was made quite clear that men expected to resume their positions at the end of the war.

During WWII Tilly Shelton Smith from the Australian Women’s Weekly was the first woman journalist to travel from Australia to report from an overseas military theatre with the sanction of the Australian government and armed forces. However, it was a posting that almost destroy Shelton Smith’s career when the Women’s Weekly misjudged its audience and the military botched the organization of her tour. She wore civilian clothes, thus marking out femininity and difference from the troops, and she was charged with reporting “with a woman’s eyes” on the men at the garrison and training base at Malaya,who were awaiting deployment elsewhere. Shelton Smith was central character of her own reports with titles like “How I Met the Sultan of Jahore” or “I go to Curry Tiffin”. She revelled in the exotica of Malaysia and highlighted the physicality of the Australian soldiers. She was not allowed to accompany the troops, so she was restricted to reporting on the domestic conditions in the training camp, and her social contacts were largely amongst the officers. When she portrayed the living conditions of the troops like a holiday camp, she incurred the wrath of the troops; when she publicized the ‘taxi dancers’ (Malay women who were paid a small fee to dance with the men) she roused the enmity of the wives and mothers at home.  Many troops remained bitter about Shelton Smith’s reporting for decades after the war, although there was some acknowledgement later that some of the trenchant criticism was unfair.

Shelton Smith’s experience served as a salutary warning for other female war journalists. When Dorothy Jenner, who wrote as ‘Andrea’ in the Sun visited Malaysia in Shelton Smith’s wake, she was careful to avoid repeating such errors and wrote a much more positive approach, still from ‘a woman’s eyes’ but she was treated as ‘one of the boys’. She was captured and interned, and kept a diary during her interment, at great personal risk. Likewise when Ida Drain from the Australian Women’s Weekly visited Hiroshima after the deployment of the British Commonwealth Occupation force in Japan between 1946-52, she had learned from Tilly Shelton Smith’s experience. She devised her own official-looking uniform (even though it had no standing whatsoever) and only gently reproached the government over living arrangements for Australian men. She carefully avoided photos of Australian soldiers with Japanese women. Nonetheless, she too, was criticized.

However, as the authorities found, women journalists writing ‘with a woman’s eye’ had their uses when they wanted to stimulate enlistment in the women’s auxiliary forces.  On the homefront during WWII ‘lines of communication’ correspondents wore official uniforms and were taken as a group on a four-week tour of factories and auxiliary bases to report on women’s wartime contributions throughout Australia, at a time when interstate travel was restricted.

By Vietnam, women reporters were no longer kept on the periphery. Australian journalist Jan Graham from AP and Kate Webb from United Press International spoke Vietnamese and French respectively,although neither had Australian military accreditation, and these skills gave them entry to reporting the Vietnam conflict.  The ABC – with whom I started this review- was slow to embrace female foreign correspondents let alone conflict reporters, but they have gradually become more common. Australian soldiers were no longer warriors but peacekeepers or trainers, working in hot conflict zones across the globe.  At this point Baker moves to interviews with current practising reporters- Monica Attard in Moscow, Iris Makler in Afghanistan, Ruth Pollard, Ginny Stein etc.  Female correspondents are no longer allocated different types of stories: their editors now want stories not through ‘women’s eyes’ but through the eyes of the people who are experiencing the conflict. It’s almost the opposite of ‘drone’type reporting from above.

Baker’s book is based on her PhD and the several academic articles which arose from that work, and it is eminently readable. She has been allowed space to identify historians whose work she has drawn on by name, and her extensive bibliography reveals the breadth of sources she has used.  She has drawn on the newspaper and magazine articles that the women wrote, and interviews recorded with the journalists themselves over several decades, as well as interviews with descendants and current-day practising journalists. For the Shelton Smith chapter, she uses soldiers’ letters from the time and interviews with old soldiers who were in Malaysia when and after Shelton Smith visited.  Several of the journalists wrote their own books about their experiences, but Baker is prudently wary of journalistic ‘war stories’ in a professional sense: it is not only men who are prone to exaggeration or underplaying their professional ambition. In the case of Louise Mack in World War I,  Baker’s caution over the veracity of Mack’s claims is prompted by her analysis of Mack’s writings alongside established facts, and her critique of the highly coloured mythology that Mack wove around herself when she returned to Australia and embarked on lecture tours full of patriotic fervour and boosterist claims.

As Baker points out, the war  reporter often frames him or her self as ‘I’ in telling their story, but only male reporters were able to write ‘we’ by identifying themselves with the troops they were describing, even though this was often fanciful and based on exaggerated proximity.  The journalistic one-upmanship of claiming to be the ‘first’- a professional competition indulged by both male and female reporters- meant that individual women reporters did not have a sense that they were acting in a longer tradition of female reporters.  However, the change in the nature of war reporting by focussing on the human response (both for soldier and victim) meant that the type of  behind-the-lines, participant-based reporting that women had previously been restricted to creating by editors and army personnel who refused to allow their presence at the front, now became the genre of choice and an integral part of how we understand war.

As Baker argues, Australian women war reporters were at a particular disadvantage in their work because of the tight control that the defence forces exerted over their movements – far more than was the case with British and especially American female journalists.  Australia may not have a Claire Hollingworth or a Martha Gellhorn, but through this book Australian women reporters are brought out from the ‘women’s pages’ and the women’s magazines Australian Women’s Weekly and Women’s Day assume a significance not readily apparent at the checkout in the supermarket.  The women who wrote ‘with a woman’s eye’  provided a view of war probably far more congruent with our current conception of war than the military bluster of manoeuvres and patriotism that constituted much war reporting at the time.

Source: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

I have posted a link to this review on the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2017 site.

2016, 280 p.

My library has taken to identifying fiction books by a label on the spine denoting categories like ‘Australian fiction’ or ‘Romance’ or ‘Science Fiction’.  (They’ve also taken to grouping non-fiction by broad themes that leads to the ludicrous situation where a book about the Holocaust ends up in the ‘Travel and Culture’ section- but that’s a complaint for another day.) Misled, perhaps, by the title and the curious egg-shaped image on the front cover, a librarian has labelled  Josephine Wilson’s book Extinctions  as ‘Science Fiction’. Once you’ve read it, you’ll know how inappropriate that classification is.

Professor Fred Lothian is a sixty-nine years old former engineer, and has recently moved into a retirement village following the death of his wife Martha.  Despite his relatively young age (a statement, I suspect, that says more about me than him!), he is thoroughly encased in old-man-curmudgeonliness, hemmed in by the modernist furniture from his large former home that he was unable to relinquish, disdainful of his neighbours and generally not looking after himself.  He is estranged, for varying reasons, from his adult children Caroline, a museum display curator and Callum, once a promising sportsman and architect.  Looking out his window, he sees another resident collapse in the courtyard, and this sparks a conversation with his next-door neighbour Jan.  All he knows of Jan is that she keeps many budgerigars, much to his disgust.  He comes to find that she is much more than this, and she brings him to the point where he is forced to face many of the silences and blockages in his life.

It’s not common to have a book set in a retirement village, with such fully realized older characters.  (I wonder if we’ll see more as the baby boomer generation ages?) The story is set over a one-week period in January 2006 in Perth.  The author, herself resident in Perth, captures the starkly sun-bleached and open nature of the Perth suburbs well, and her ear for dialogue is finely-tuned.  It is suggestive of Fred’s own mental scattiness that the book jumps abruptly in time and perspective, and Wilson succeeds well in withholding and revealing information, making the reader work hard in establishing events.  You don’t have to work too hard, though, and I realized at the end of the book just how cleverly Wilson had constructed the narrative.

There’s multiple themes and metaphors woven throughout the book- teetering almost on too many.  There’s the Stolen Generations, genocide and extinction, adoption, domestic violence and its intergenerational effects, regret and the fissures in family relationships.  This sounds a rather grim menu, but it’s leavened by little touches of humour over our shared human foibles.

The narrative time-frame of the book was tight and specific (15 January – 23 January 2006) but tendrils extended back into Fred’s childhood, his marriage, and his relationship with his children.  This 8 day frame seemed implausibly tight for the ending, although Wilson had drawn Fred’s impulsivity and mental flailing vividly enough that, as a reader, I could suspend my disbelief enough to be satisfied enough by the ending.

Reminiscent of a W. E. Sebald book, Extinctions contains many photographs which relate at a tangent to the narrative, and they’re a powerful and effective addition to the text. I haven’t heard much about this book beyond Lisa’s review of it at ANZLitlovers, which surprises me. It’s a very accomplished book, and its apparent ease belies careful plotting and a nuanced reading of regret and experience.  I hope that it’s there on the Miles Franklin shortlist next year.

My rating: 9/10

Source: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.

I have linked to this review on the Australian Women Writers Challenge website.