Stone Sky Gold Mountain | Mirandi Riwoe #AWW

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started Stone Sky Gold Mountain by Mirandi Riwoe. A gold rush story set on the Palmer River in Queensland (an area I did not realise even had a gold rush!) through the eyes of Chinese settlers, sounded intriguing. However, I struggle with blokey books about blokey men doing blokey stuff in the wild - which gold rush/pioneer books can often be - so I tempered my intrigue.

In a number of interviews, Riwoe mentions that she writes of things that move her. 

Naturally, they end up moving her readers too. In fact, her characters get under your skin and become a part of your daily life. You feel like you have inhabited their world. You think about them between reading sessions. You fear for their safety and sanity. You feel their pain and trepidation. You feel their disconnection and isolation. 

Far North Queensland becomes a character too. You could feel the heat, the humidity, the dust and dirt, the unrelenting nature of nature.

During Riwoe's research for this novel, she discovered that Cooktown and the Palmer River area, during the goldrush era, actually had a population that was significantly more Chinese than Anglo. Yet our settler narrative only ever talks about white people exploring and moving into the area. This was the trigger for her story.

The initial inspiration for my work is probably to do with what is of personal interest to me – being Eurasian, I like to write of those who are culturally hybridized or marginalized, and I also like to write of women and feminist issues. AsiaLink: University of Melbourne

From there it was only natural to weave in a story about a brother and a sister fleeing poverty in China, to find their fortunes in the goldrush of Australia. The sister could not safely stay on the goldfields as a woman, so she disguised herself as a boy. The only other women in Maytown were prostitutes or the wives of merchants. (Incidentally, Maytown is also the setting for Thea Astley's story It's Raining in Mango).

Some of the scenes are tough to read, especially the treatment of the Indigenous population by both the whites and the Chinese characters. The women don't always fair much better. The pecking order is clearly described and belies our belief that Australia is a classless society. The British and Chinese early settlers, all brought their own prejudices to bear on their new country; prejudices we are still trying to live down.

Many of the Chinese came to Australia with the sole intention of plundering the gold, making their fortune, then returning home as soon as possible. Getting to know Australia, or fitting in, was not part of the plan. When making a fortune didn't pan out as expected, staying in Australia became caught up in a sense of failure and exile. Australia was not a welcoming place, neither did it feel like home. That sense of disconnect and alienation became a daily lived experience. The isolation could send you mad or into the seedy rooms of the local opium den. The Australian landscape and society never lived up to their memories of China. Yet, as one of the characters made their way home again at the end, they realised how much personal freedom they were giving up by doing so.

Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, was in the back of mind as I read Riwoe's goldrush story. Both stories reveal the harshness of this way of life, the sense of discrimination and displacement, the degradation of character and environment, regardless of your country of origin. The dream of striking it rich and the sense of adventure that started such a journey, inevitably ended in heartache and madness. The gold fields were an unforgiving place, full of broken dreams.

Stone Sky Gold Mountain first came to my attention when it was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Award earlier in the year. I'm glad I tracked it down. It was a fascinating peek into another point of view of early Australia colonialism complete with ghosts, hardship and lawlessness. The violence and injustice was tempered by the tenderness of friendship in unexpected places. Riwoe is an elegant storyteller and she takes you on an unforgettable journey. 

Epigraphs:

• To search for gold was like trying to catch the moon at the bottom of the sea. Taam Sze Pui
• Taam Sze Pui (or Tom See Poy) was a Chinese Australian shopkeeper in Innisfail, Queensland. He spent five (unsuccessful) years panning for gold on the Palmer River goldfields, before working in market gardens and banana plantations, eventually setting up a shop in 1883.
• I wish to inform you that they are only strangers in this land themselves. Many of them have only been here a few moons, and none for more than one of two generations. Jan Chin from a letter to his father in Shanghai, The SMH, 1858

Opening Line:

• Ying dreams of her little brother, Lai Cheng.

Facts:

• Winner 2020 Queensland Literary Award – Fiction Book Award
• Winner of the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize 2020.

#AusReadingMonth 2020

Dark Emu Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? by Bruce Pascoe

Dark Emu Black Seeds challenges the orthodoxy of how Australia was settled and what the settlers actually saw when they arrived.

To the victor goes the spoils...as well as the right to write history their way.

Reading E.H. Carr's What is History? during my first year at Uni was the first time I had cause to think about the nature of history, facts and evidence. I was amazed, at the tender age of 18, to think that facts where selected by historians to suit the story they wanted to tell. They decided which facts were important and which ones weren't. Personal bias and agenda abounded.

The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.

It was also the first time that I considered the role of revisionism in history and how modern thinking could colour how we viewed the 'historical facts' at different times throughout history. Carr also went on a bit about the progress of man towards some kind of better, more evolved state which was an idea that even at the tender age of 18 I struggled to swallow!

The progression of man towards some better end was definitely in the minds of many of the early white explorers and settlers to Australia. To that end, they saw everything about the Aboriginal way of life as backward and evidence of their lesser standing. This belief made it easier for them to dismiss and ignore any signs of civilisation or community. And to deny Aboriginals many basic human rights, including the most basic of all, life itself.

Pascoe writes with a barely contained anger. By the end of this slim volume it's hard not to acknowledge that this anger is justified. Through his anger, Pascoe explores the writings and texts of many of the early explorers, settlers and historians. He pulls out all the documentation showing examples of large, established Aboriginal settlements, farming and fishing industries, food storage as well as the finely tuned water and fire management that many people may already be familiar with.

It's fascinating stuff and I urge you to read this book to see all the evidence for yourself.

I've just started reading Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India which addresses many similar issues. In his Introduction, Tharoor discusses the idea of reparation, but personally feels that atonement is probably a more do-able option. He also discusses the idea of
teaching alternate histories or histories told from the other side of colonisation in schools throughout the former Empire.

Books like Tharoor's and Pascoe's are a good start.

It seems improbable that a country can continue to hide from the actuality of its history in order to validate the fact that having said sorry we refuse to say thanks.

 

Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Nauru by Madeline Gleeson

I have no idea how to adequately review Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Nauru.

Refugees, asylum seekers and offshore processing has polarised politics and opinion in Australia for several years now. A book like this, that attempts to provide an 'uncompromising' overview that 'gets behind the rumours and allegations to reveal what is known' will probably only be read by those already convinced that there has to be a better way to manage the perceived crisis in asylum seekers.

Gleeson has put together a thoughtful, cohesive and detailed document. Her anger and frustration at the living conditions on Manus and Nauru and the uncertainty around processing individual claims is palpable. Yet Offshore still offers the reader opposing ideas, contradictory evidence and controversial opinions in an attempt to provide a balanced argument.

However it was impossible for me to get to the end of this book without being appalled by the conditions that the asylum seekers are currently living in on Manus and Nauru. The only justification for this treatment appears to be the idea that it will act as a strong deterrent for anyone considering arriving in Australia by boat.

Given that so many of the world's governments seem to be in a race to head to the right, I'm not sure how or when this situation will ease. After reading about the amount of money our government has spent and continues to spend on maintaining Manus and Nauru, the problem is not the money.

The problem seems to be how we actually perceive asylum seekers and refugees. Currently our ability to perceive, know or understand all the reasons why this situation has occurred are shrouded in double speak and political obfuscation. This ignorance creates fear and distrust.

Morally and ethically we know what should be done, so why aren't we doing it? What is the political expediency that is driving our current course of action? Why are we deliberately creating more damage for people already damaged? What will the long term cost for this psychological damage be? For them and for us? How can we possibly think that it will end well for any of us to create this level of trauma in human beings?

My only problem with Gleeson's book is that none of these questions could be answered.

Future history students will one day be studying this period of time and citing these events as one of the causes for what happens next. They will shake their heads in wonder that we couldn't see and didn't do anything to change the course of history.

It would seem, that history does indeed, repeat itself.

James Kane from Goodreads has posted the review for Offshore that I wish I could have written.

Offshore was longlisted for this year's Stella Prize, shortlisted for the University of Queensland Non-fiction award 2016 and winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Writing for Non-fiction 2017.

Stories & Shout Outs #11

A whole swath of shortlists have been buzzing around the bookish world lately.

Some have got me bibliograpically excited but some have left me scratching my head.

Kim @Reading Matters alerted me to the Canadian literary award - The Giller Prize. It has been around for twenty years and recognizes 'excellence in Canadian fiction'.

For a full rundown on the longlist and the history of Kim's shadow reading of  the Giller longlist, click on her link above.

The shortlist will be announced at the end of this month and the winner will be declared in November. But for now, here's the longlist...

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad

Yiddish for Pirates by Gary Barwin

Pillow by Andrew Battershill

Stranger by David Bergen

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

The Party Wall by Catherine Leroux, translated by Lazer Lederhendler

The Two of Us by Kathy Page

Death Valley by Susan Perly

Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush by Kerry Lee Powell

By Gaslight by Steven Price

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall

The Man Booker shortlist is now out there too! The (wo)man booker shadow panel read through the longlist and prepared their own thoughts about what should have been shortlisted and why. The various posts and links to the panel are here @Dolce Bellezza. 

The official list, I confess, has me scratching my head. I really thought The North Water was a contender for taking out the big prize this year. I do at least have Do No Say We Have Nothing on my TBR pile, so I can read one of the books on both of these lists so far.

Paul Beatty (US) - The Sellout

Deborah Levy (UK) - Hot Milk

Graeme Macrae Burnet (UK) - His Bloody Project

Ottessa Moshfegh (US) – Eileen

David Szalay (Canada-UK) - All That Man Is

Madeleine Thien (Canada) - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Meanwhile the Royal Society Science Prize has a shortlist that I can get very excited about. Especially as I've read one of the contenders (Cure), I'm a third of the way through another (The Invention of Nature) and have my eyes on a third (The Gene).

Cure Jo Marchant

The Gene Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Hunt for Vulcan Thomas Levenson

WINNER - The Invention of Nature Andrea Wulf

The Most Perfect Thing Tim Birkhead

The Planet Remade Oliver Morton

Finally, closer to home, we have the shortlist for this year's Queensland Literary Awards. They have an incredible number of categories to work through, so grab a cuppa and settle back to check out the wonderful diversity that makes up Australian writing in 2016.

Queensland Premier's Award for a work of State Significance

Nadia Buick & Madeleine King Remotely Fashionable: A Story of Subtropical Style 

Matthew Condon All Fall Down 

Elspeth Muir Wasted

P. J. Parker The Long Goodbye

WINNER - Lesley and Tammy Williams Not Just Black and White

The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award

Tony Birch Ghost River

WINNER - Georgia Blain Between a Wolf and a Dog

David Dyer The Midnight Watch

Patrick Holland One

Charlotte Wood The Natural Way of Things

The University of Queensland Non-fiction Book Award

Madeline Gleeson Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Nauru

Stan Grant Talking to My Country

Drusilla Modjeska Second Half First

Tim Winton Island Home

WINNER - Fiona Wright Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger

Griffith University Young Adult Book Award

Will Kostakis The Sidekicks

WINNER - David Metzenthen Dreaming the Enemy

Glenda Millard The Stars at Oktober Bend

James Roy and Noël Zihabamwe One Thousand Hills

Claire Zorn One Would Think the Deep

Griffith University Children's Book Award

Lucy Estrela, illustrator: Matt Ottley Suri's Wall

Bob Graham How the Sun Got to Coco's House  (R)

Libby Hathorn; illustrator: Gaye Chapman Incredibilia

WINNER - Julie Hunt; illustrator:Dale Newman KidGlovz

Chris McKimmie Me, Teddy

University of Southern Queensland History Book Award

Vicken Babkenian and Peter Stanley Armenia, Australia and the Great War

Stuart Macintyre Australia's Boldest Experiment: War and reconstruction in the 1940s

WINNER - Julia Martinez and Adrian Vickers The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia's Northern Trading Network

Jeff Maynard The Unseen Anzac

John Newton The Oldest Foods on Earth: A history of Australian native foods with recipes

Garry Wotherspoon Gay Sydney: A History

University of Southern Queensland Australian Short Story Collection - Steele Rudd Award

Tegan Bennett Daylight Six Bedrooms

Sonja Dechian An Astronaut's Life

WINNER - Elizabeth Harrower A Few Days in the Country and Other Stories

Julie Koh Portable Curiosities

WINNER - Fiona McFarlane The High Places

State Library of Queensland Poetry Collection – Judith Wright Calanthe Award

Joel Deane Year of the Wasp

Liam Ferney Content

Sarah Holland-Batt The Hazards

WINNER - David Musgrave Anatomy of Voice

Chloe Wilson Not Fox Nor Axe

Queensland Premier's Young Publishers and Writers Awards

WINNER - Emily Craven

Sam George-Allen

Anna Jacobson

WINNER - Michelle Law

Andrew McMillen

Unpublished Indigenous Writer - David Unaipon Award

WINNER - Paul Collis Dancing Home

B.A. Quakawoot The Song of Jessica Perkins

Yvonne Weldon 67 Days

Emerging Queensland Writer – Manuscript Award

H.E. Crampton for The Boatman

Laura Elvery for The Elements

Which book, from all of the above, should I read next?

Gap by Rebecca Jessen

Another day; another verse novel.

This time set in Queenland with more of a YA feel to it.

Gap won the 2013 Queensland Literary Award for Jessen as Best Emerging Author.

A few years ago I would never have thought that verse novels were my thing. But thanks to some fabulous Aussie children's writers like Steven Herrick and Emma Cameron I have been converted.

Jessen also cites Dorothy Porter as one her inspirations; another award winning Aussie poet well-known for verse novels, who I have recently 'discovered'.

Jessen's novel is a story about the young people who fall through the cracks in our society (which does seem to be a common theme for the verse novels that I've read so far.)

Ana's life has been spent on the run, on the wrong side of the tracks. But in an effort to help her kid sister from falling into the same trap, Ana cleans herself up and takes over caring for her sister when their dysfunctional mother kicks her out too. But things don't always go to plan.

An old school romance is rekindled when the female cop who knocks on Ana's door one night turns out to be an old love. But can she save Ana from her past, her mother and years of bad associations?

I pile in
more stuff
necessary
for a quick exit

Indie grabs me
demands a reason
for this
onset
of madness

'Ana' she says
holding both my arms

'Are you in trouble
is that it?'
I can't leave
what about my exams?

'Shit' I sigh
sinking into the couch
head in hands

Indie sits
wraps an arm
around me

is this what I call
looking out
for my kid sister?

Not as powerful or as raw with gritty emotion as Porter's work (although to my mind, Porter has set the bar very high!), but Gap is a very worthy attempt by an emerging young writer. I'll be curious to see what Jessen does next.

This post is part of my Australian Women Writers challenge.

Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey

Ahhhhh!

The sigh of satisfaction after finishing an extraordinary, quirky, thought-provoking book is a blissful sound indeed!

At the start I had no expections for Ceridwen Dovey's Only the Animals.

My aversion to talking animal stories is well documented!
The cover also intrigued & repelled in equal measure.

And for the first 2-3 stories I struggled a little with the talking animals. Not because the animals were talking....but because I kept forgetting that I was reading about animals who could 'talk'. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't reading a story about humans.

Perhaps that's the only real flaw I can bring up with Only the Animals. All the animals are personified to such a degree that you forget that they are animal.
That's where the beauty & the uncomfortable part comes in though - what is human nature & what is animal nature & is the difference between the two really that great?

Although the book is set up as separate short stories, and I found that I could only read one at a time, the whole thing flowed together through time and space to present a united front.

Each animal was connected to a human writer at a time of conflict. I had enough literary knowledge to recognise & enjoy most of the references, allusions & homages. But I'm convinced you could enjoy these stories at any level.

My personal favourites? The Jack Kerouac style mussel story was hilarious, Colette's cat was seductive, Tolstoy's tortoise & the inspiring twin sister elephants will be revisited for the pure pleasure of it all.

I will leave you with the dolphin who wrote a letter to Sylvia Plath. She is discussing Ted Hughes, as dolphins do,

"Back then, I had admiringly thought he was trying to understand the human by way of the animal, 

but now I can see that in fact he wanted to justify the animal in the human."

Later:

Nancy, in the comments below, asked me about Dovey winning the New Australian Writing Award, and I had to confess to not knowing anything about it.

Since then I have done some research.

Readings is an Indy bookshop based in Melbourne with several shop fronts. They have been in business since 1969. Last year they created two new book awards to encourage new authors and children's writing. The prize money for each was $4000.

The New Australian Writing Award (RNAWA) is designed to encourage new and emerging writers. As such writers will only be eligible for the award with their first or second published work. The inaugural award was won last year by Ceridwen Dovey for Only the Animals (her second published work).

The Readings Children Book Prize (RCBP) is also for new and emerging authors of children's books (but not picture books). Last year's inaugural winner was Julie Hunt for Song For a Scarlet Runner.

For the record, Dovey has also recently won the Steele Rudd Award (Short Story collection) for the 2014 Queensland Literary Awards (QLA) and has been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (2015).

This post is part of my Australian Women Writers challenge.

Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir by Kristina Olsson

I've been going through a phase of reading sad, bittersweet books these past few weeks...and I feel like I've been through the wringer!

Boy, Lost is no different.

Based on the true story of what happened to Olsson's family in the 1950's in Queensland, Australia, this memoir is retold with grace, understanding and a deep, overarching love and care for everyone concerned. She gently walks through the complexities of memory, loss and grief.

But this is so much more than a beautiful told family memoir. It is also so much more than one family's attempt to confront their past & lay their ghosts to rest.

Olsson takes the time to consider all the other 'lost' children in Australia during the 1950's. She discusses how it was that our society allowed these children to be taken, and so often mistreated, as well.

I'm feeling so awash with emotion from this book (and Tyler's and Hay's) that I know I have not done it justice with this review.

All I can do is give it a highly recommended, a big thumbs up and five stars!

Boy, Lost won the Queensland Literary Awards last year. It was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards this year.

Breaking news: Boy, Lost shared the first prize for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction 2014 with Michael Fullilove's Rendezvous with Destiny.