Category Archives: Australian Women’s Writing

2009, 179 p

(3.5 /5)

Before I talk about this book, a word first about humour, and aboriginal humour in particular.  Inga Clendinnen closes her analysis of the very earliest days at Port Jackson in her book Dancing with Strangers with an observation about humour as a means of connection between black and white Australians.  (Among historians, there’s often an anxiety about nomenclature for aborigines/Indigenous/specific tribal name/Aboriginal Australians- and to a lesser degree for whites/British/settlers as well.  Clendinnen settled on the term ‘Australians’ for the former, and ‘British’ for the latter, recognizing the limitations of both terms.)  But humour, she suggests, has been a bridge:

There remains a final mystery. Despite our long alienation, despite our merely adjacent histories, and through processes I do not yet understand, we are now more like each other than we are like any other people.  We even share something of the same style of humour, which is a subtle but far-reaching affinity.  Here, in this place, I think we are all Australians now. (p.288)

And so I come to Every Secret Thing by Maria Munkara, which was awarded the 2008 David Unaipon Award. It’s only a small book at 179 pages, and while it’s not, and does not claim to be,  high literature, it’s an important book nonetheless.  It is a series of tales set around an Aboriginal mission in far northern Australia with the Mission mob, the Catholic clergy, trying to convert the Bush mob who lived just outside the Mission.  The Bush mob move back and forth between the arbitrary strictures and efforts of the  clergy and their own more grounded life outside.  They are clear-eyed about the hypocrisy and smallness of these white priests and nuns, but they are also painfully aware of the degree of control that the mission has over their lives.

The stories are self-contained, but there is a broader chronological arc that runs through them, particularly in the second half of the book.  Hippies with marijuana arrive amongst the Bush mob, a mission is established for the ‘half-caste’ children who are taken from their families and sent into domestic service,  and just occasionally a child returns to the mission but cannot find her place back amongst her family again.  And finally a couple of the Bush mob men confront Father Voleur of the mission, “asking that the mission mob leave because no-one wanted them there any more” and were told to bugger off:

So began the slow downwards spiral of despair…Then the grog came and the winding path of good intentions became a straight bitumen four-laned highway that led even deeper into a world of self-destruction and hopelessness that no-one knew how to fix.  And then more and more people began to leave unexpectedly without goodbyes or explanations and a sorrow so deep that no-one could see an end to the despair descended upon them and they’d be found hanging  from trees or electrocuted by the power lines and the cemetery had to be made bigger to accommodate the unexpected influx of new residents.  But there was one thing they were certain of.  They didn’t have to die to go to hell because the mission had happily brought that with them when they’d arrived unasked on the fateful shores of the place that was their heaven all those years before. (p. 179)

This stab of pain runs throughout the book, right alongside slapstick and send-up, derision and wry irony.  Yes, there were places where I laughed out loud in this book (a 2.5 on my 4-point  laughter scale) and  Munkara’s  real skill  is to write so that, after reading a comic scenario, your smile freezes as the underlying pain and cruelty of what she is describing seeps into you.  It is a quick, deft, cutting wit.  There’s anger here too: an almost shaking rage at the inhumantity of separating the ‘half-caste’ children from their families into the ‘Garden of Eden’ mission on a nearby island.

But time has a way of covering all wounds with scar tissue, and the little abductees eventually settled down into their new life away from their homes and their families….But if the nuns at the Garden of Eden knew about the scars they certainly didn’t show it as they worked relentlessly to shape the unruly half-caste rabble into obedient and God-fearing servants of the muruntani [whites].  No rod was spared or abductee spoilt in the process as the little coloured kids were repeatedly chastised and flayed until prayers and hymns and excerpts from the Bible were slowly absorbed by rote into every fibre of their being.  And when they were eventually knocked into shape they were passed on to caring white families as domestics and the like because, let’s face it, the mission mob knew these useless individuals would never amount to anything else.  In order to control them many of the good Christian families duly followed in the incarcerators’ lead by perpetuating the violence, sometimes throwing in a few more tortures for good measure like rape and mental abuse, because this was the only thing this half-caste lot understood.  A few even had to be sent back to the mission because they just didn’t seem to respond to the kindly ministrations of their new families and kept trying to run away or told wild stories to people about their treatment.

It was sad really. (p81)

Sad, sad indeed. There’s anger at the hypocrisy by which the Mission mob decided that  a white woman, Odile, who had a ‘half-caste’ child called Treasure should be allowed to keep her own child:

And didn’t the anger of the bush mob bubble away in their guts as they grumbled at the injustice of it all.  The more erudite had reasoned that if they had to hand over their coloured kids then why shouldn’t Odile.  No matter that the mother wasn’t black, the kid was still coloured, wasn’t he, and everybody knew what happened to them. (p. 137)

But Father Macredie found a way to rationalize himself around this:

…there’d be no way he’d be taking young Treasure away from his rightful parents and the bush mob would just have to accept and understand that.  Despite Treasure’s coloured skin, he would always be white on the inside not like their kids who would always be black on the inside- and that’s where the difference therein lay. (p. 138)

This sounds bleak, and it is bleak.  But just as importantly, there is humour here too, and the author’s photo on the front page shows that.  The pettiness of the Mission mob is skewered, but with almost a sense of pity. There is a generosity of spirit among the Bush mob that is often completely lacking amongst the nuns and priests who have such power over them. It’s the ridicule of pomposity and the refusal to take things too seriously that reflects the humour that Inga Clendinnen noted.   We see it in the recent musical Bran Nue Day, and it’s there in the term ‘Moomba’ (meaning ‘up your bum’) offered up as an aboriginal translation for ‘let’s get together and have fun’ for the founders of  Melbourne’s festival some fifty years ago: a scenario repeated in this book where an earnest ethnographer is tricked into recording a string of expletives and obscenities as ‘authentic’ language.  But make no mistake amongst the derision and send-up, the mission mob do hold the power here, but it’s a hollow and ultimately unstable victory.  And I’m glad that it is.

Some other links:

Blog review from Musing of a Literary Dilettante

Interview with the author by Bob Gosford on Crikey

Biographical information about the author

1993,  228 p.

(4/5)

The further I get from the right side of fifty years of age, the more I am drawn to writers who don’t get published until they themselves are over fifty. What in my younger days I may have perceived as to be rather pathetic (the idea of someone scribbling away secretly for years, the mounting rejection slips, or life just slipping away with ambitions unfulfilled) I now see as an affirmation of the strength of maturity, a victory for persistence and dedication, the triumph of character and a validation of life experience!  Methinks I do protest too much.

Madeleine St John’s first book The Women in Black was written in 1993 when she was fifty-two years old.  She’d been working odd jobs in bookshops in London for years and, convinced that she could do as well as the authors of the books she was selling, she wrote this book and three succeeding books, one of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  From the preface ‘Madeleine and Me’ written by Bruce Beresford and the obituary at the end by Christopher Potter, she seems to be a rather reclusive expatriate who lived her life in London, seeking various kinds of spirituality and with rather brittle friendships and little contact with her family back in Sydney.  She was an undergraduate at Sydney University in the early 1960s, alongside Clive James, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, John Bell and Bruce Beresford: were university students more brilliant then in the rarified air of fees and Commonwealth Scholarships, or arriving early on the cultural scene,  have they just promoted themselves better?

The Women in Black relates a sliver in the life of the main character, Lesley who has adopted the name Lisa instead, who is I suspect rather biographical. Lisa has taken a job in the Ladies Cocktail Dress department of F.G. Goode in Sydney- a thinly disguised David Jones.  I say ‘a sliver’ because Lisa is  in that hiatus between completing her Leaving Certificate results and finding out whether she has been accepted for University.  She is the young casual, working alongside older permanent women as one of the “women in black”, changing from their street clothes into the black uniform of F. G. Goode before starting work. She just works the one Christmas/New Year period, then she moves on.

The narrative shifts in successive small chapters (often only 2 pages in length) between the lives of the women who work in the department store.  I’m starting to make “being able to build a sustained narrative over 20 pages” as one of my criteria for good writing: I am tiring of these short, jumpy snatches that seem to be common in recent writing.  It seems ridiculous that a novel  of only 228 pages should have 55 chapters.

The front cover of the book suggests chick-lit, and it IS an easy read.  But I think that St John has captured the early 1960s  well here: the wariness and yet curiosity about ‘New Australians’ who seem cultured and exotic with their strange food, coffee and wine;  the stifling embarrassment about sexuality even among married couples, and the world of promise opening up with universities that is stretching the expectations of women for their lives. It is an intellectual coming-of-age book too, in a way, as Lisa finds herself feeling embarrassed about her home-made clothes and dipping her toes into adult social life.  Her father is gruff but grudging: her mother is out of her depth both socially and educationally but she is encouraging her daughter to move into this world that she knows nothing of.

It is certainly a well-blurbed book  with Clive James, Bruce Beresford and Barry Humphries (Helen Garner???)  as contemporaries, and with younger women writers Toni Jordan, Joan London, Kaz Cooke and Deborah Robertson as well.   They refer to the warmth, wit, wistfulness and sharp observation of the book, and they’re right.  It’s a small nugget of a book, affectionate, nostalgic and optimistic.  And yes, I did laugh during this book- at force 2 level (breaking into a smile with a little chuckle). It’s only short- you could almost knock it over at a reading- but it was a satisfying, happy read.

Sue at Whispering Gums and Lisa at ANZLitLovers have both reviewed this book.  It’s not a coincidence that Sue and I have read this together: it was the January selection for the online Australian Literature group we’re both in.

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.