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Well, it’s the end of the year and time for toting up my reads for The Australian Women Writers Challenge again.  I had intended to read more histories written by women, and I’m rather disappointed to see that I hadn’t really read as much as I thought I had.  I do, however, have an excuse as this thesis really does need to be written.  In fact, the high number of fiction books gives a hint as to why it hasn’t been finished this year as planned.

Here they are, then:

FICTION

The Golden Age by Joan London

When It Rains by Maggie Mackellar

The Kayles of Bushy Lodge by Vera G. Dwyer

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

After the Fire, A Small Still Voice by Evie Wyld

Letter to George Clooney by Debra Adelaide

NON-FICTION  (Memoirs, biographies, non-fiction)

Velocity by Mandy Sayer

The Tainted Trial of Farah Jama Julie Szego

Boy, Lost by Kristina Olsson

Night Games Anna Krein

Housewife Superstar Danielle Wood

The Ghost at the Wedding Shirley Walker

Mrs Cook: the Real and Imagined Life of the Captain’s Wife Marele Day

Madness by Kate Richards

HISTORY

Shattered Anzacs Marina Larsson

What’s Wrong with ANZAC?  Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds

The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka Clare Wright

Broken Nation Joan Beaumont

And my favourites?  The Golden Age for fiction; a dead heat between Boy, Lost and Madness for non-fiction and Shattered Anzacs for history.

Posted to Australian Women Writers Challenge 2014

I don’t normally get my history from the New Scientist, but there was an interesting article in the 6 September 2014 issue called “Imagine there’s no countries…” written by Debora MacKenzie.  Her article incorporated some historical approaches (Benedict Anderson etc) but also highlighted findings from the social sciences related to nationhood.  For example, here’s some rather disjointed observations from the article that attracted my attention:

Robert Dunbar of Oxford University has found that one individual can keep track of social interactions linking no more than about 150 people. He came up with this figure through studies of villages and army units throughout history and the average tally of Facebook friends (!!).  Society transcended that number by the invention of hierarchy, which meant that leaders could coordinate large groups without anyone having to keep personal track of more than 150 people.

Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut notes that Eurasion empires grew largest where fighting was fiercest, suggesting that war was a major factor in political enlargement.  Picking up on the idea that hierarchy facilitated larger groups than the 150 figure, Turchin suggests that in addition to their immediate circle, an individual interacted with one person from a higher level in the hierarchy, and typically eight people from lower levels.

These hierarchies, of course, are not nation states.  A number of historians have concluded that states define nations, not the other way round.  For example, in France in 1789, half its residents did not speak French; while in Italy in 1860 at reunification, only 2.5% only spoke standard Italian.

When nation-states fail, they break down into civil war.  Civil wars are often blamed on ethnic or sectarian tensions, but there are other nation-states that combine multiple ethnicities and religions.  What makes the difference, the article suggests, is bureaucracy.  An interesting thought, especially given the rage that conservatives, in particular, direct towards ‘red tape’.  While we might complain about lengthy processes, queues etc. a return to  the alternative of patronage, bribery and ‘who you know’  being the basis of service provision  is pretty unappealing.

Four years ago today.

Mum was an airhostess with TAA before she married.

Tuesday 22nd July, 1-2 p.m.  Royal Historical Society, 239 A Beckett Street, cnr. A Beckett and William Street, Melbourne

357 p. 2002

Marele Day has subtitled her book “The Real and Imagined Life of the Captain’s Wife”, signposting that this is not a straight biography, but nor is it pure fiction either.  The book is organized around a fairly large collection of existing Cook artefacts which, from the the notes at the back of the book, are located in various museums, libraries, churches and parks across the world.  Some of them are documentary, but several of them are domestic objects like drinking glasses, teapots, fans.   She uses these real-life objects as the tethering posts to which she attaches her fictional narrative, complete with conversation and internal speech. The narrative unfolds chronologically, with each chapter named for the object which appears somewhere in that chapter.

However, given that many of the objects are rather domestic in nature, it means that the narrative is even more quotidian than it would already have been, given that it is examining the life of the woman left behind by one of the world’s great navigators.  At times, too, the narrative becomes quite contorted and unnatural in trying to bring the object into the story- for example, in devoting a whole chapter to the act of buying a teapot.

The ‘imagined’ life in the title mainly revolves around Elizabeth’s emotional and sexual life.  A explorer’s wife spent years not knowing whether her husband was dead or alive, and somehow life had to be lived at two speeds: the long years of waiting, reunion and waiting again,  and at the same time the day-to-day accumulation of  rather banal, land-based, domestic detail. Elizabeth Cook  endured the tragedy of outliving her husband and all six children, and the book makes much of her sorrow.

Day has decided to remain true to the main facts of Elizabeth’s life – thus the ‘real’ Elizabeth stays firmly rooted on solid ground, waiting for James to return, with no imagined affairs, imagined illegitimate children, or imagined crimes of passion.  The ‘imagined’ part of the book is most clearly seen in the sexual passages, of which there are several.  I found them all rather uncomfortable, I must admit. Somehow, looking at that picture of James Cook sitting  in his skin-tight white breeches looking at a scrolled map on the table before him will never be the same again:

He would start at the nape of her neck, gently blowing aside the wisps of her hair, and making a place for his lips.  He began the journey south, each vertebra rising to the moist warmth of his mouth.  The long channel under which lay the reef of her backbone descended to her buttocks, two plump hillocks with a dimple either side.  Elizabeth lay with her arms by her sides, and when she shifted, bent her elbows to make a pillow of her hands, James saw the shoulder blades rise up like the beginnings of angel wings….When she was ready, she turned to face him and their desires would meet… Gradually, James’s gentle perseverance awakened Elizabeth’s pleasure.  How wonderful that her body opened to him, moistening the pathway he would take.  Then he lifted her into rapture and Elizabeth became a wave.  (p. 102)

I was never convinced of the emotional and sexual authenticity of this eighteenth century woman, who seemed to me to have a very twentieth century head on her shoulders (and other parts of her body).   I was put off by the awkward, didactic tone of the text when the author explained the context and use of particular artefacts, and its juxtaposition with  the heavy-breathing, purring tone of passages describing their intimate life.

Nonetheless, the decision to integrate real-life artefacts into the story is an interesting one, and I find myself wondering if there are other ways that it could have been done more successfully.  Could the author have inserted herself into the text more  in describing the artefact and its provenance in a strictly non-fictional way at the start of the chapter, then moving to the imagined story? Could the artefact and associated information  have been marked out typographically from the fictional text?

This book was a bookgroup selection, and I must confess that I would have abandoned reading it had I not felt an obligation to read to the end.  It was probably one of the most divisive books we’ve read in recent years: some absolutely loved it; others were distinctly underwhelmed.  I’m afraid that I was one of the latter.

I have posted a link to this book on the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

There was an interesting article in the New Scientist from 2 November last year.  It describes a Halloween party trick that involves quite simply looking at your face in the mirror.

As I prepare the room, it feels as if I’m getting ready for a seance.  I close the curtains to block out most of the light and place two chairs about a metre apart.  I prop up a large mirror on one and sit in the other so that I can just see my reflection in the near darkness.  Then I set a timer for 10 minutes and wait patiently for the faces to appear.

When they do, it is startling.  At first the distortions in the mirror are small: a lifted eyebrow, a twitch of the mouth.  But after seven minutes my reflection suddenly looks fake, like a waxwork.  And then it is no longer my face.  For a few seconds an old man with a thickly wrinkled brow and down-turned mouth stares back at me.

Apparently these visual illusions are quite common. Giovanni Caputo, a psychologist from the University of Urbano in Italy came across the phenomenon by accident when conducting an experiment looking at self-identity in a room entirely enclosed with mirrors.  The experiment was usually conducted in normal lighting, but one day he decided to dim the lighting, and found that many people experienced a distortion in what they saw after about 10 minutes.

Since his chance discovery, Caputo has found that most people perceive some degree of eerie distortion to their face if they stare into a mirror in low light for at least 10 minutes. “Usually, after about 1 minute of mirror-gazing, the eys start to move or shine, the mouth opens, or the nose becomes very large,” he says. “If you continue to gaze there are very big changes, until completely new faces appear.”  And it’s not just human faces that are seen-” some report seeing animals and others fantastical or monstrous beings….You are suddenly conscious that there is another person behind the mirror.”

The article offers a number of explanations for the phenomenon. One is that the incomplete view of the image disrupts the way that the brain binds together features to make a recognizable face, and so it patches together a ‘photo fit’ of features.  Another suggestion is that it is a form of dissociation, which is apparently heightened by looking in mirrors.

I must confess to being a little frightened to try it myself.  But it did bring to mind many of the those Victorian horror-stories and reports of seances conducted in dimly lit rooms.  Of course, darkness hides a plethora of tricks and manipulations by unscrupulous shysters, but it’s an interesting thought that perhaps some of the effects are generated within the brain of the perceiver as well.

Source: “Mirror, mirror” by Douglas Heaven. New Scientist, 2 November 2013

It’s the Queens Birthday holiday in Australia today.  I know that only naughty bloggers recycle old posts, but I did write this years and years ago…..

And I suppose that I should mark the day in some fashion.