Category Archives: Australian literature

I hadn’t realised during reading this book that I was actually reading a painting.  Here it is- McCubbin’s triptych “The Pioneers”- how could I have possibly missed the allusion?

The book opens with Mary Cameron, standing in the bush beside their wagon, desultorily feeding a smouldering campfire with sticks of eucalyptus that she breaks in her hands or across her knees.  She goes to a fallen trunk, sits down and gazes into the shadows.  The book closes with her grandson pushing the bush away from a “lichen-grown wooden cross”, dropping on one knee to read the inscription.  Ah- I thought- “The Pioneers”- of course!

The Pioneers won the Hodder and Stoughton All Empire Literature Prize for Australia in 1915.   It is not hard to imagine why: for a British publisher the book is steeped in eucalypts, pioneer spirit and optimism exemplified by the young colonial  soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force in WWI.   Although its author became (in)famous for her heavy Communist Party involvement in later decades,  there’s a nationalistic pride here that I, at least, find difficult to reconcile with the internationalism of her later politics.  Perhaps it was prompted by the circumstances in which it was written- by a young Australian journalist based in England, drawing on the notebooks she had penned recording the old-timers’ stories during her own time in Gippsland several years earlier.

It’s all there- the silence and forbidding beauty of the bush, the old convicts, the cattle-duffers and the bushfires- but there’s also a defiant pride in the generation that followed the pioneers, who threw off the shame of convictism that haunted their parents and grabbed the opportunities open to them.  There’s a White Australian debt to be acknowledged to the pioneers on the frontier, and a  romance and optimism about the “currency” lads and lasses growing up tall, proud and resourceful – who wouldn’t want to embrace that?

I often find it hard to talk about “old”  Australian books and authors.  There’s often a mawkishness and blatant nationalism that I’m not comfortable with as a reader.  I find myself wondering if the incorporation of such books  into the “Australian Classics” canon subjects them to a critical scrutiny that their targeted audience of the time might not have shared.  For example, a review of The Pioneers at the time noted that “the setting of romance is said to be very attractive to readers who are only incidentally interested in history”  and then as now, books were written and published with a contemporary audience in mind- an audience with different expectations and tastes to what we might have today.  For myself,  I find myself being dragged back to my 21st century reader mindset because the sentimentality and melodrama of these late19th/early 20th century books overwhelms me (two exceptions: Ruth Park’s Harp in the South and Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony).  I then find myself reading such texts as a historian, because I’m rather discomfited by them as a fiction-reader. I’m aware that this is probably not fair on the book, or the author, or my own experience as reader.

I’m particularly conscious of this because I’ve just finished reading Sarah Water’s The Night Watch (glowing review to come!) which I found much more satisfying than, say, Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’  Come In Spinner.  Surely the 1950s book written from experience would have an inherent fidelity, but in terms of my emotional response, I found the more recent text,  aimed no doubt at a different audience segment, and stripped of the popular melodrama and skittishness, more satisfying.  Perhaps it’s the different mindset that a reader brings to reading historical fiction as a genre, as distinct from popular contemporary fiction from an era that is now historical itself?

You might want to read Whispering Gums’ review of the book too.

1985, 1948, 1949. 684 p.

Can I just declare at the outset that I loved reading this?  I found myself looking forward to bed and being able to put aside all the ‘proper’ reading that I’m supposed to be doing and just plunging myself into the domestic lives of Mumma and Hughie, Roie and Dolour.

I had read the second book of the trilogy several decades ago (oh dear, fancy being old enough to be able to make a such a declaration!) but I came back to the book because it was a selection in my online Australian Literature bookgroup.  The scheduled read was ‘Missus’, which is chronologically first in the trilogy, but was actually written almost forty years after the second and third books.  Stylistically, ‘Missus’ is a very different book, covering a much wider time span and more in the style of ‘sweeping family saga’ with its multiple generations and incorporation of historical themes.

‘The Harp in the South’ and ‘Poor Man’s Orange’ are far more domestic and limited in scope.  They are limited in geography too, for the focus very much revolves around Coronation Street, Surry Hills and the neighbours, shopkeepers, and local personalities of a small constellation of city streets.  Had I not known that it was written in the 1940s, I would have said that it was a television tie-in, as the chapters are quite episodic in nature; perhaps its construction was influenced by radio serials as a writing genre.  For me  (partial as I am to the domestic drama), the books worked at an emotional level: these are flawed, thwarted but fundamentally good people doing the best they can.  At times there was a discordant, omniscient authorial commentary which made me uncomfortable with its patronizing tone, and I didn’t like to think of the author ‘looking down’ on these people as examples of a socio-economic ‘type’.  I much preferred it when the author allowed her love for the characters to come through.

I was impressed that in the second book, which was written first, situations were set up that allowed Park to return to them in the prequel all those decades later.  Was it planned that way?- if so, what foresight!  As it was, I am pleased that she chose to finish where she did and return to the prequel.  ‘Poor Man’s Orange’ closes with an awareness that the slum neighbourhood of Surry Hills is about to be transformed, and somehow a continuation of the book into the government housing projects of the western suburbs doesn’t have much appeal.

This is good, solid story-telling, with none of the rather precious self-consciousness of 21^st century writing.  It rings true in its dialogue and in the development of character, and as a reader I was able to just relax into the hands of a confident author, sure of her craft.

Kate Jennings Snake,  Melbourne, Minerva, 1996, 145 p.

Snake is a short book: only 145 pages and easily readable in one sitting.  It is a sharp, gritty book and you know from the opening pages that this is not going to be an easy reading experience.

The layout of the book is interesting.  It is in four unevenly sized parts, each divided with an engraved version of the snake of the front cover.  Part 1, only nine pages in length, is written in the second person and addressed to Rex, the father of the family. Immediately you are plunged into Australian Gothic:

Everybody likes you.  A good man.  Decent. But disappointed. Who wouldn’t be? That wife.  Those Children.

Your wife.  You love and cherish her.  You like to watch her unobserved, through a window, across a road or a paddock, as if you were a stranger and knew nothing about her.  You admire her springy hair, slow smile, muscled legs, confident bearing.  If this woman were your wife, your chest would swell with pride.

She is your wife, she despises you.  The coldness, the forbearing looks, the sarcastic asides, they are constant.  She emasculates you with the sure blade of her contempt.  The whirring of the whetstone wheel, the strident whine of steel being held to it, that is the background noise to the nightmare of your days  (p. 3)

Part 2 moves into third person, and is only a little longer- 11 pages and it takes us to their wedding, and already the ashes are in our mouth as we move through the unvoiced thoughts of the unlovely people who make up their extended family.

The longest section of the book is in Part 3, where there are short vignettes of the pettiness and the cruelties of everyday life in this blighted family:  Irene’s love letter to ‘the other man’ intentionally left where her husband Rex would find it; her moodiness and favouritism, the dog tragically left to die in a car. You know- as you’ve known from the opening pages, that this isn’t going to end well.

The final Part IV returns to the second-person voice, but this time it is addressed to Irene.  It is short- the shortest part of the book- and bitter.

All of the chapters in this book are short – in some cases the title is almost as long as the chapter itself!  The relationship of the title to the chapter is often oblique, as is the image of the snake that slides through the book both graphically and structurally.

Sue at Whispering Gums wrote a fantastic post about ‘taker-outers’ in books, and this book is just about as spare as you could get.  It is as dry and dessicated as the family it is describing, and all the more powerful for that.

2009, 170 p

I hadn’t heard of this book until I read Lisa’s review at ANZLitLovers, but I see that it has attracted quite a bit of attention with shortlistings at both the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize First Book of Fiction and the Age Book of the Year.  It’s only short- just the right length really, because she teases her reader and as we know, it’s a narrow line between teasing and tears.

It’s an unusual and risky book.  A young girl is rescued by a young man after being swept ashore as the only survivor after a shipwreck in 1887.  She is  unable to remember her earlier life, and her story becomes part of the local folklore, heavily mined by the press at the time,  a series of oral histories in the 1940s and then centenary publications a hundred years later.   There’s shades of the Loch Ard here, but not quite; the small seaside town of Colego seems as if must exist somewhere in Western Australia, but it doesn’t seem to, either.  The slippage between fact and fiction starts on the flyleaves, where the author thanks “Ken and Claire Stewart” for the extracts from an unpublished manuscript by Caroline Stewart held at Colego Public Library.  It is this manuscript that forms one strand of  the narrative: the other strand is the drugged delirium of a woman on what appears to be a ship.  Woven around these two main strands is an assortment of tangentially-related ‘evidence’- press clippings and letters from 1887,  extracts of books, interviews with Colego inhabitants in 1946, a collection of letters by Isobel Smith, a book by the same Isobel Smith, then an edited anniversary edition of the same work.

There’s much here about memory and history, as layer upon layer is built up over the story.  Caroline Stewart, the author of the manuscript, works in the small Colego museum where she works cataloguing the objects,  and although her instructions are to label the materials empirically, the edifice of objectivity is just as tottery for the ‘fact-based’ local museum as it is for the other retellings. The curator of the museum is fiercely protective of the artefacts and the version of local history that the museum promulgates but there’s a flatness and deadness about the history it embalms, especially compared with the other stories we are given based on people rather than things.

A risky book? Sure is.  She has assembled it all carefully, but it is the reader who puts it together.  I’m not sure if I understood it, and that’s an uncomfortable reading experience.  At 170 pages it is short and as the number of pages diminished,  I found myself wondering how she was going to draw it to a close, and even why it ended at that particular point.  It is beautifully written, and she deftly catches the tone and cadence of many different genres in the material that she lays out for us.   And yes, I know the adage about judging books and covers, but that is a truly lovely photograph on the front.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago a book called Pistols! Treason! Murder! which, labelled “History” on the back cover, uses a similar methodology.  I’ve borrowed it and I’m interested to see the technique used in non-fiction. I wonder if I’ll experience the same sense of floating anxiety (yes- that front cover is well chosen)  about whether I’m putting it together “properly”.

2003, 367 p.

Three puzzling books in a row.  My dear daughter, bless her, says that I’m just getting stupider.  That may be the case (I blame Judge Willis), but in my own defence in my last three fiction reads I think that I’ve read

1. a wilfully abstruse  book (House of Splendid Isolation)
2. a genre high-wire act (Truth)
3. and now a carefully constructed, unsettling book that I feel satisfied to puzzle over.

This was my face-to-face book group read for the month.  It was my selection (“Who chose THIS book?”) and I was rather disappointed to find when I was flipping through my reading journal that I’d actually read it before, in 2004.  I now realize that what I meant to nominate was her next book The Lost Dog which she wrote in 2007.  It didn’t matter though- I really could not remember much about The Hamilton Case at all.  I was interested to see that the comments I made six years ago are pretty much the same comments I’m going to make now.

This is a clever, clever book.  It commences with an autobiographical fragment, written by the elderly Ceylonese lawyer Sam Obeysekere, reminiscing about The Hamilton Case which he prosecuted many years previously.  The case was emblematic of Sri Lanka’s colonial past: it occurred on a tea-plantation where the white manager was murdered and two labouring coolies were accused of the murder.  Our narrator is a pompous, deluded, rather pathetic character, reminiscent of the narrator of  Ishiguru’s The Remains of the Day.  This section ends abruptly and the narrative broadens to an omniscient third-person perspective.  This is perhaps a little unfair as we have been repelled by Sam’s character in the first section, just as other characters in the book had been repulsed by him for other reasons.  What follows is a narrative of Sam’s family- his mother, sister and son- and what a steaming, foetid family this is.  De Kretser  evokes vividly the rampant Sri Lankan jungle- it reminded me a little of One Hundred Years of Solitude– and the book is drenched with colonial decay.   Much though I was enjoying this section, I did find myself wondering about the title, given that the Hamilton Case itself had taken up only a small part of the book.  But I was in confident hands, and sure enough the last section of the book, written as a letter from an author who had fictionalized (or had he??) the Hamilton Case, disrupted completely Sam’s telling of the case in the book’s opening.

Confusing?  It might read that way in my summary of it, but it didn’t feel confusing while reading.  Certainly, as a reader, you felt distrustful of all the characters and alert to the nuances and tricks of memory but at no stage did I feel that the author was losing control of her own narrative.  On the contrary, it was very assured, clever writing, very careful and well worth a second (or in my case- third!) reading.

2009, 139 p.

I wasn’t going to write this post. I was going to write about my own experience of poetry as a reader, the frustrations of reading a collection of poetry in an online environment etc. etc. But I’ve just been crying as I turn the page on the last poem in The Bee Hut, the collection of Dorothy Porter’s poetry that was completed just before she died in December 2008.  I feel so very sad at the thought that this is, literally, the last poem. I’ve been thinking, too, of my friend Dot Mac (everyone knew her that way)- another Dot, my Dot-  who also died of breast cancer a few years ago, at much the same age.  I still can’t quite believe that my life goes on, day after day, and yet she is not here.

While I was reading this book, I found myself wondering about the interweaving of the poet’s life and her poetry. It seemed to me that the whole book was pervaded by a clearness of vision- a close, intense, way of looking- that had been sharpened by her cancer and confrontation with death. In the final poems there is a closing around and a drawing inwards that I think even someone unaware of Dorothy Porter’s own biography would detect.

The book itself is divided into sections, almost like the acts of a play. In this way, it has its own narrative thread, as a collection.  There are travel poems- dust-laden poems about Egypt, cold green poems about London; there are theatrical poems written as lyrics for stage performance.  There’s a section of poems about illness, reflecting the first bout of cancer years earlier, then there are the final, quiet poems at the end. There’s a sense of movement through the poems as a whole, rather than just one self-contained poem after another.

I read this book as part of an online book group that I’m in that focuses on Australian literature-http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AustralianLiterature if you’re interested in joining us. We read and discuss (rather desultorily I must admit) one book a month. This was the first poetry book we have read, and I found it hard to actually comment on it during the process of reading, beyond saying “I liked this bit….” and quoting particular phrases and stanzas.  But there’s an artificiality about reading a book over a month like this, and I don’t think it serves poetry well.   I think that poetry has to be purchased, rather than borrowed; I think that you need to have it at hand for dipping into, rather than reading straight from cover to cover.  I think it needs to be read out loud, rather than read through. It stands on its own two feet: anything that I could add is superfluous.

I really didn’t think that I’d be in tears at the end of it.  The opening poem has been well chosen: the first words you encounter are:

The most powerful presence/is absence.

And what a powerful presence this is.