Category Archives: Australian Women Writers 2012 Challenge

2011, 342 p.

I snapped this book straight off the shelf as soon as I saw it because I remembered the author’s Calibre-Prize winning essay that was published in The Australian Book Review about five years ago.  I recall where I read the essay: in a cafe in North Melbourne that I walked to from the Public Records Office to stretch my legs after a morning steeped  in the archives .  It was a powerful read that combined history, memoir and reflection as a middle-aged, Dutch-born, now Australian narrator returned to her childhood home in Walcheren, a flat island sheltered from the sea by a network of dykes off the coast of Netherlands.  Her father had been the scion of an old, aristocratic family; her  mother a Jewish beauty.  She tells of the war and its aftermath that swept away the history of her family with such  a flatness of tone that the reader is left  to fill in the betrayal and violence that such actions engendered for herself.  I found myself sitting there, quite stunned by the strength of such a quiet retelling. You can read the essay here:  it’s called An die Nachgeborenen: for those who come after, published in the Australian Book Review in February 2007.  I had remembered the essay, and its effect on me for all those years.

But on reading the book, it seemed as if I was reading the essay again, except in a longer form.  Here was the child, the old aristocratic family, the Jewish mother, the dykes, the flooding again, but now intertwined with a longer travel narrative and a migrant story as well.  It was fuller, but somehow seemed emptier.

It was only when I read an essay that Elisabeth Holdsworth wrote about the writing of the book in ABR in October 2008 that I realized that what I was missing in the book was the writer herself.  I hadn’t noticed the switch between first person voice in her original Calibre-prize essay and the third person voice of her novel, and having now read her reflection on her decision to write her memoir as fiction, I’m even less sure of the distinction between them.

I think, actually, that I preferred the first essay.  There, the flatness of tone conveyed a dignified restraint, whereas in the book it seemed like an absence and a distance.  It’s unusual to read three versions of the same story like this – essay, novel, reflection – and it raises many questions about the choice of genre, the line between memoir and fiction, and the author at work.

My rating: for the book 7/10; for the essays 9/10

Read because: I enjoyed the essay so much

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

2006, 198 p.

This is only a small book that fits right into your hand.  It is a series of short vignettes,  surrounded by quite a bit of white space, with several pages separating each chapter from the next.  The Sydney Morning Herald review of the book likened it to “short stories strung together like beads on an outlandish necklace”, and I found myself thinking of it in much the same way- as a series of small, glittering stones, carefully polished.  I soon stopped reading through the book quickly, but instead took my time, turning over her language and concentrating on the close-up, rather than striding through the broader arc of the story.

There is an overarching narrative in this book: it is essentially a quest story as a young girl leaves home after the death of her mother, who was raising her family alone and battling her own demons.

When Billy and me lost our mother, we lost ourselves.  We stopped swimming in the ocean, scared that we’d forget to breathe.  Forget to come up for mouthfuls of air.  We lost trust because we didn’t want to touch something that was going to fall away.  Like bubbles, too delicate, too fragile, too brief.

Her brother, Billy, had descended into his own half-light of drug addiction, and her aunt, who had taken over care of the siblings had her own battle with alcohol. So sixteen-year old May Gibson set off north, looking for her father, looking for her mother’s people, looking for some sense of belongingness.  Her journey takes her to the Block in Redfern, to the red sand rodeos in outback Queensland, and to the ironically-named ex-mission town of Eubelong.  She finds acceptance in the midst of poverty, addiction and anger; she comes to distrust her own memories of her father, and her dreams of the embrace of a grounded, intact aboriginal family are dealt with brusquely.  As an author, Winch does not resile from the violence and hopelessness of these different settings, but she does also overlay this with the humour and easygoingness that exists alongside it, just as Maria Munkara and Alexis Wright have done in their own books. There are good people here as well as lost ones: truck drivers who don’t take advantage of a young, rather vulnerable young girl; Joyce of the Block who accepts her at the same time as pushing her out to keep searching; Aunty who is still there, even though May has travelled far away.  She has a good ear for dialogue.

However, in reading this book, I was more struck by the language than the overall narrative.  It is very carefully written- perhaps too carefully written?- with lyrical imagery that forces you to slow down. It’s more like reading poetry than a novel.  At times the imagery clags up the meaning and becomes nonsense (can, for example, sand be said to ‘stew’?)  but overall, it challenges you to take the book on the writer’s terms, rather than your own.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: Lisa at ANZLit Lovers has held an Indigenous Reading Challenge to mark NAIDOC week (which, ahem, I am a little late to join).  Also, I’m reading this as part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

2011,  262 p.

There must be something about the challenge of writing a book set completely within one day, because many writers seem to have done it: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf (and in homage, Michael Cunningham), Gail Bell and, although I haven’t read it yet, my latest craze, Mollie Panter-Downes.  Limiting one’s focus onto a single day gives scope for close scrutiny of the quotidian and the elapse of hour after hour runs underneath the narrative like a bass-line.  But there’s a risk too – we all have our own mundane lives that are ticking over hour by hour too, and somehow or other the author needs to make you care enough about an ‘ordinary’ person to devote some hours of your life to watch someone else’s day unfolding as well as your own.

Characterization is fundamental to this contract between writer and reader.  You don’t need to like the character as such, but you have to at least care.  In this case, Stephen is a bit of a drifter, with a dead-end job as a kitchen-hand at the zoo, living a rather spare and bitten-down existence, aware of his family’s disappointment in him, likeable enough but wary of being tied down by commitment.  As he wakes on this hot Sydney morning, he knows that he is going to break off his relationship with Fiona, a good, passionate, separated woman, that day.  In this, he is quite steely, even though he knows that she is beautiful, that she loves him and her young daughters tolerate him, and that his mother has already absorbed them as ‘family’.  He combines inflexibility with irresoluteness; he is hard as steel and yet soft, he is selfish without asking for anything.  We probably all know someone like him.

Charlotte Wood is a good observer and it’s as if she has inserted herself behind our own eyes.  Her descriptions of the various people who orbit around Stephen have a verisimilitude similar to those in Tsiolkas’ The Slap– in fact, in many ways this book reminded me of The Slap in reverse.  The mounting heat of the day, and the brittle mania of a child’s birthday party add to the sense of unreality and the rising shriek of the day, as Stephen drifts closer and closer to making his break with Fiona.

There’s a second theme in the book- that of animals and the human relationship with them- that I felt was rather heavy-handed.  The parallels were rather too obvious, and it just seemed rather laboured.

I have read several very positive reviews of the book- in fact, people seem to be struck emotionally speechless by the book (for example, John Purcell on Booktopia and Michelle on Book To the Future).  I wouldn’t go that far.  Certainly, it was very easy to read, and I was quickly drawn in enough to want to keep reading, and it captured urban, middle class Sydney very well.  It had just a touch of the ‘book club’ about it, something that Lisa at ANZ LitLovers noted as well.  I don’t think that I mean this as a put-down (after all, I belong to online and face-to-face bookgroups myself) but there’s something about the straining for theme and topicality that made me wonder if it was written with this demographic in mind.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I enjoyed The Submerged Cathedral and because I wanted to review it as part of the 2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

2012, 208 p.

This is a quirky, sly book that had me closing it with regret, with a smile on my lips.  It is set in Cohuna in the 1950s and is redolent of long grass, cow-pats, and dusty roads, set to a soundtrack of magpies and kookaburras, country dances and a slow, masculine drawl.

Harry is a shy, lonely dairy farmer who lives next door to Betty, a single mother, who works in the local aged-care home and lives with her adolescent son, Michael and young  daughter Little Hazel.  They are neighbours: they turn to each other in need; they keep an eye out for each other, and as Michael grows older, Harry decides, in the absence of a father,  to teach him about the opposite sex.

But the boundaries between sex, breeding, fertility, physicality and nature are fluid in this strangely sensual context.  The book, too, is a scrapbook of conversations and episodes, birdwatching observations about a kookaburra family, reflections on the physicality of milking cows and washing withered old men, and a chronicle of illness and injuries.  It is a book of the rhythms of country life, and it is both hard and pragmatic and yet watchful and sensitive.

The author is not, as you might suspect, a dinky-die, true-blue Aussie country girl. Instead, she migrated from Yorkshire with her family as a child, grew up in Perth, and works as an agricultural journalist.  The amount of research that must have gone into this book- set in the decade before she was born in another hemisphere- is prodigious, and yet so lightly worn.  As with her debut book Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, it is a deceptively simple work with good people and big themes.  I hope that it gets the recognition it deserves.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: it’s my fourth book in the Australian Women Writers Challenge