Showing posts with label Australian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Australian. Show all posts

Friday, 27 November 2020

Writers on Writers: Josephine Rowe on Beverley Farmer #AWW

 
Writers on Writers

In the Writers on Writers series, leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and influenced them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.


Josephine Rowe on Beverley Farmer was my first foray into the Writers on Writers series. It was a very literary affair. A non-fiction novella if you like (and I do, which means this can also be part of Novellas in November!)

I confess that I did not know very much about Farmer prior to reading this book, and I'm not sure I know a whole lot more now. But I suspect, she was that kind of person. Very private. Extremely shy. But I am curious to know more.

"This far, and no further. A familiar refrain of Farmer's throughout her writing life."


As Rowe explains, 'her characters are outsiders, foreigners, fringe dwellers. Expats and exiles, those returning home after long absences...' much like Farmer (and Rowe) themselves. It certainly seemed that part of Rowe's fascination for Farmer, was for what Farmer's life and work could tell her about herself as well. 

Most of the essay consists of Rowe discussing the nature of writing (her own and Farmer's) and what it means to be a reader (especially of Farmer's work). She notes that the 'conditions from which we enter, and to which we return when we lift our attention from the page, have bearing on wherever we are taken from the time in between.’ 

Rowe reveals Farmer's habit of notebook journaling and her ability for close, sustained observation as well as her belief in the age-old advice about keep on writing until something poetic pops out. 
every encounter with a text is influenced by the circumstances in which we read.

Like Farmer and Rowe, I am drawn to wondering about the life not lived. The shadows in our past and our 'reckonings with the past' that can produce a longing for elsewhere that we have all, no doubt, felt at times. This longing, though, seemed to drive Farmer constantly - as a source of creativity and a way to fend off loneliness.
Across Farmer's works there has always been an attraction to those beings who occupy two worlds...Once one has lived elsewhere, lived differently, it doesn't matter whether she stays to forge a new life or turns back towards the old, or moves on once again; there will always be the shadow, the after-image, of the life not lived.

Farmer was also on a mission for authenticity, with a 'fastidious concern for accuracy... for the evolutions of language in all its slipperiness.' She concerned herself with the all the opportunities we have to misunderstand each other and for being misunderstood ourselves. The power she has given to words, makes me feel a little nervous about reading her work. What if I don't understand? Or misunderstand? How would I even know?

Rowe was finishing this book as coronavirus escalated from epidemic to pandemic. 'We speak of this time as an intermission, a hiatus.' It made me wonder if that is a position that those of us in Australia are privileged to hold. We have had some lockdowns and spikes over the past nine months, but we basically have the virus under control for now. Being an island state has given us the ability to quarantine any and all incoming visitors. Since we cannot travel overseas easily or safely, the Australian tourism industry is, subsequently, booming, simply because we're all holidaying at home. It's easy to feel that any suffering we have had has been 'an intermission, a hiatus', a time in which we could be creative, recharge our batteries and declutter our homes! But I'm sure there are many here and abroad who feel very differently. Maybe what we're both trying to say here, though, is that solitude, or hiatus, and the reason for that intermission, is just another one of the circumstances that can play on a reader and a writer in different ways.

I am curious to see what kind of Covid-Lit emerges from this time. At the moment it seems to mostly be a little aside at the end of the book, where the author reveals how far through the editing process they were when the virus changed all our lives. It's like a place marker. 

I'm sure, though, that as part of the hiatus, many writers are penning their next book, that may or may not be set in a Covid-normal world. Whatever choice they make, their future readers will also bring their own understandings - to compare experiences or to wonder why the author chose to ignore it completely. Interesting times makes for interesting reading, we hope.

Rowe is the author of the novel A Faithful, Loving Animal (longlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin) and three short story collections including Here Until August (shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize & QLD Literary Award).

Favourite Quote:
Our relationship with the past and those who populate it is constantly shifting, as is our awareness of the ways in which it has shaped us....In returning to our first stories, those most deeply etched, are we seeking the comfort of...the familiar arrangements and foretokenings a means of retelling the story ourselves so that we might reconcile ourselves to an ending? 

Facts:
  • Beverley Farmer - born in Melbourne 7 February 1941 
  • Died 16 April 2018
  • Short story anthologies:
    • Snake (1982)
    • Milk (1983)
    • Home Time (1985)
    • Collected Stories (1987)
    • This Water: Five Tales (2017)
    Novellas:
    • Alone (1980)
    • The Seal Woman (1992)
    • The House in the Light (1995)
    Other:
    • A Body of Water: A Year's Notebook (1990)
    • The Bone House (2005)
  • A Body of Water has just been republished by Giramondo Publishing.
  • 1984 – NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for Milk
  • 1996 – Miles Franklin Award shortlist for The House in the Light
  • 2009 – Patrick White Award
  • 2018 – The Stella Prize longlist for This Water
  • Stan Grant on Thomas Keneally due May 2021.

#AusReadingMonth2020
#NovellasinNovember
#NonFictionNovember
#AustralianWomenWriters
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Monday, 23 November 2020

The Spare Room | Helen Garner #AWW


I find reading Helen Garner a curious affair. There's a real push me/pull me effect, that intrigues me and wow's me, then repels me all in the same sentence.

I'm intrigued and wowed by her writing, the turn of phrase that captures a moment brilliantly. There's a candour and earthiness that seems grounded in her strong sense of self. Then there's the confronting intimacy about herself and her friends and family. Such awkward, uncomfortable personal details that make me flinch with their rawness, that seem to suggest someone not so sure of their place in the world.

Over the years, I've been impressed with Garner's habit of tackling difficult topics, especially in her non-fiction, like a father killing his own children after an access visit in This House of Grief. These books seem to suggest, that like me, she is on a constant journey to understand human nature. Why do human beings do the things they do? What are our motivations? What stories do we tell ourselves to make the truth, the hard facts palatable? How do we live with ourselves when we do something bad? Questions to make us confront our own biases and preconceptions.

Last year, I attempted to read her Diaries Vol I, but I had to stop. It felt too voyeuristic, like I was trespassing where I didn't belong. I didn't understand Garner's purpose in revealing such private details. Yes, the names were disguised with initials, but if that letter happened to belong to you, it would be easy to feel betrayed and exposed.

I am friendly with someone who will be an initial in Vol II of Garner's Diaries. She said enough water had passed under the bridge since then, but she does not feel the need to revisit the pain by reading about it. I'm beginning to understand why Garner writes so often of falling out with friends. One person's open frankness is often another persons hurtful loss of trust wrapped up in a sense of disloyalty.

Which brings me to The Spare Room. 

I've been hearing about this novella for quite some time now, and it has been lingering on my TBR pile for almost as long. I assumed it was a memoir from everything I had heard - Helen writing about the three weeks she nursed a dying friend from Sydney, who had decided to try some alternative treatments that had no scientific backing whatsoever in Melbourne.

Yet, The Spare Room is clearly and determinedly classified as a novel (or a novella). The name of the dying friend has been changed and no doubt, the timeline of events has been fictionalised to fit the constraints of the size of the book, but she is still Helen, living next door to her daughter's family in Melbourne. 

I read another fictionalised memoir earlier in the year, Homeland Elegies. I got completely caught up in trying to work out what was fact and what was fiction. I quickly established that a number of the details had been significantly changed from the author's wikipedia bio, but it became too difficult for me to tease it all out. In the end, I stopped worrying about it and sat back to enjoy the story for what it was.

I found myself applying the same approach to The Spare Room.

As a novella, it ticked all of the boxes. It was under 200 pages - just. There was one central theme or conflict with just one, Helen's, point of view. There was very little backstory, and a continuous timeline. The majority of the book was set in Melbourne, with a brief trip to Sydney at the very end. It would be possible to read this is one sitting, if one had 2-3 hrs in which to do so. But thanks to the subject matter, I was happier reading it over three nights, to fully digest the story and absorb the emotional impact.

The Spare Room is one of the books discussed in The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies by Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin. Under 'cancer, caring for someone with', this book is discussed along with Alberto Barrera Tyszka's The Sickness and A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. They talk about the carer's agonising and the patient's denial. The rage that escalates to self-hatred and the 'bitter humour' that evolves. They finish by saying that this is,
a novel for those inclined to beat themselves up when they struggle to care for their patient 24/7....It's also a reminder that, however serious things are, it helps to laugh.

I came away from the story with a deep disgust for those people who work away in their shoddy rooms, milking sick and dying people of their money, with their bizarre, unverified treatments. 

Epigraph:
'It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.' Elizabeth Jolley

First Lines:
First, in my spare room, I swivelled the bed on to a north-south axis. Isn't that supposed to align the sleeper with the planet's positive energy flow, or something? She would think so.

Favourite Quote:
'What am I supposed to do?'

He put his hand on the dog's head and drew back its ears so that its eyes turned to high slits. 'Maybe that's why she's coming to stay. Maybe she wants you to be the one.'

'What one?'

'The one to tell her she's going to die.'  

Facts:
  • Winner, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction
  • Winner, Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction
  • Winner, Barbara Jefferis Award
  • Shortlisted, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
  • Shortlisted, Australian Literary Society Gold Medal
  • Shortlisted, Colin Roderick Award
  • Shortlisted, WA Premier’s Awards
  • Shortlisted, NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction

More Reviews:

#AusReadingMonth2020
#NovellasinNovember
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Friday, 20 November 2020

Classics Club Spin #25

It's time for another Classics Club Spin.
The rules are easy: compile your list of 20 books by Sunday 22nd November.

On that day a number will be randomly selected.
That's the book you read.

You have until the 30th January 2021 to finish your book and review it.

Join in the fun by visiting the other players and commenting on their lists.
It's a great way to meet like-minded bloggers and explode your TBR classics wishlist!

In honour of AusReading Month, this spin I am going to focus on the Australian classics lingering on my TBR pile and ipad. 

CC Spin #25
  1. The Timeless land | Elenor Dark
  2. An Australian Girl by Catherine Martin
  3. My Brilliant Career | Miles Franklin
  4. It's Raining in Mango | Thea Astley
  5. A Little Bush Maid | Mary Grant Bruce
  6. The Pea-Pickers | Eve Langley
  7. Maurice Guest | Henry Handel Richardson
  8. Policy and Passion | Rosa Praed
  9. The Slow Natives | Thea Astley
  10. We of the Never-Never | Jeannie Gunn
  11. Voss | Patrick White
  12. Myself When Young | Henry Handel Richardson
  13. A Woman's Experiences in the Great War | Louise Mack
  14. My Love Must Wait | Ernestine Hill
  15. The Battlers | Kylie Tennant
  16. A Mere Chance by Ada Cambridge
  17. Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill | Tasma
  18. A Sydney Sovereign and Other Tales | Tasma
  19. Coonaroo by Katharine Susannah Prichard
  20. 1788 by Watkin Tench

My Previous 24 Spin Results:








Happy Spinning!
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Friday, 6 November 2020

Australian Novellas


A few days ago, what I thought would be a very simple request to fulfil - to list a few Australian novellas to help those of you keen to combine two reading events with the one book - turned out to be anything but!

I naively believed that all I had to do was google 'Australian novellas' and there would be a lovely definitive list compiled by some intrepid Aussie list-making novella aficionado. 
But no. 
That has not turned out to be case at all. 

Wikipedia listed a mere handful of choices (included below) but I knew there had to be more.

Naturally, one of the first problems encountered was determining the exact nature of a novella. 

A word count of 17,500 to 39,999 is considered to be the norm, but I've also sited a 10,000 to 50,000 word limit range. Whichever word count you finally settle on though, makes no difference to the average reader in the end, as most books do not come with that kind of detail included.

Cathy and Rebecca have hit upon the 150 page mark with an upper limit of 200 pages. But, of course, it then depends on which edition of the book you are reading. As you can see, it was very easy to become pedantic and get caught up in the details, at the expense of making a list, that might actually be useful.

I also discovered that a novella usually (but not always) contains one central conflict, often from one point of view. Backstory is brief or non-existant, and most will have one location within a continuous time frame. A novella can usually be read in one sitting.

So here it is, after a bit of scrounging - a list!

Australian Novellas:

The Griffith Review Novella Project is now up to its 7th edition. Some of the novellas can be read online through the links provided. You can only read a few for free per month, though, so click wisely.

If you know of any more Australian Novellas, please let me know.

#AusReadingMonth2020
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Monday, 12 October 2020

Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang | Miles Franklin #1956club


The first draft of Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang was written in 1928 by Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (1879 - 1954) upon her return to Australia to care for her ageing parents. However it wasn't published until after her death in 1956. 

You may have also noticed that the name on the book is not that of Miles Franklin. After writing her well-known first novel, My Brilliant Career, her literary and commercial success was very up and down. And from everything I've read (which is not much really), mostly down. In an attempt to move away from those poor reviews, she wrote under a number of pseudonyms, including Brent of Bin Bin: a colonial gentleman.

She wrote six books under this name including Up the country (1928); Ten Creeks Run (1930); Back to Bool Bool (1931); Prelude to waking (1950); Cockatoos (1954); and Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang (1956).

Bill @The Australian Legend has a much more comprehensive understanding of this period of Australian literature and I urge you to read his post for this book to get more of the background information.

This was my first attempt at a Brent book, having read My Brilliant Career way back when in my university days. I wasn't particularly inspired by MBC into trying any more of her books. I found Sybylla tedious. A drama queen, annoying from start to finish. 

I didn't know what to expect from Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang, so I was rather surprised to realise I was reading an Australian rural romance, set in the beautiful Snowy Mountains region of Monaro. An area that Franklin knew well, as Talbingo, her home town, is part of this region.

Bernice Gaylord, our protagonist, was an Australian woman who had a natural ability to paint. Her family sent her to Europe to learn more. While there she unlearns her old school realism technique, developed Continental tastes, took a lover and eventually comes a cropper.
As a little thing of four or five Bernice had been wont to lie on her stomach and draw men and animals of action and character. When still in her teens, and sent abroad by public subscription because of her promise, she met other budding geniuses contemptuous of her ability to catch resemblance: merely photographic, they said. She had succumbed to the fashion of portraying things seen in terms of things imagined—many of them evidently in nightmares or licentious orgies. She had for a time been infected with "modern" ideas, which had at least shaken her out of mere convention and the frustrations of an inartistic and middle-class environment.

After her lover dumps her, she returns to Australia heart sore and unable to paint any more. Her father arranges for her to visit her godfather, Sylvester Labosseer, who runs a sheep farm on the Monaro. The aim is to relax in the bush, far from journalists and city life and recover her health (the reason given to the public for her sudden return to Australia).

In the peace and quiet of the Snowy Mountain region, surrounded by natural beauty and majestic mountain peaks, Bernice slowly rediscovers her creative urge. She begins by drawing portraits of the Cook, and the working dogs, until the wider picture captures her imagination,
this scene was marvellously captured by Bernice later. The setting was the snow-gum in her bridal bloom and her powdered grey-blue trunk and Alice-blue twigs beside the grey of the men's hut, with the grindstone in one corner and kookaburras above.

The gentlemen of the title, are all the men who work at the Gyang Gyang Plains station (so named because of the cockatoos that inhabited the area). Naturally, there are two particular gentlemen who come to her romantic attention. 
The same men returned to him year after year. He had a picked squad of shearers that shore on all his places. The married men brought their sons to him as soon as they could handle axe or shears. He inspired in the berated native working men, who never thought of addressing him as "sir", a voluntary loyalty approaching that of feudal retainers shaped by generations of servitude.

This is one of the few references to Aboriginal workers in this book. White Australians of this time may have started to appreciate the country they had grown up in, no longer longing for Mother England, like their parents, but the Indigenous population was not necessarily included in this newfound love of country. But that's another story.

The gentlemanly romance is naturally complicated by an unsuccessful suitor, jealous local women and misunderstandings and secrets aplenty.

I ended up enjoying Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang far more than I thought I was going to at the start. Many of the descriptions were too over-blown for my taste, but there was no denying Franklin's love of country.

After dinner the men engaged in a game of five hundred. Bernice retired to her bed on the veranda to be guarded by the blackbutts and snow-gums, fairy-like in their perfumed blossom in the dim light of the stars, and the Southern Cross so near and kind that it seemed as if it could be plucked from the sky.

 

"Thank God for the kookaburras and magpies, for the sun and trees and whole world of blossom, and especially for the tea-tree and the creek, and all this wide and heavenly country with no awful people to drive one to distraction."

The city versus country trope, following in the tradition of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, was regularly used by Franklin. Obviously, the city folk came off worse.  
A few months of days in the surf or at the zoo, the moving pictures or the theatre, and Burberry's soul wilted like frost-bitten pumpkin-vines under the realization that he was of no importance in Sydney and had nothing to do.

 

"Good lord! I was like a cockatoo in a cage," he explained to Labosseer. "There isn't a blasted thing to do in those beastly suburbs. Nothing but that infernal idleness that rots a man, and among a crowd of bally imbeciles who don't know a gummy ewe from a two-tooth wether hogget, or a heifer from a cow, or a store beast from a fat, when they see it."

Franklin also explored women's issues. 

Bernice was an independent woman who preferred to work on her paintings than marry and raise a tribe of kids. Bernice has to work hard to convince the gentlemen to see her painting as proper work, and not just something she was filling in her time with until she got married.
Mr Ced Spires: "You can't live by work alone."

Miss Bernice Gaylord: "My work is the most important thing in the world to me."

Mr Spires: "But they all say that love is the most important thing in life to a woman."

Miss Gaylord: "Men have made up that yarn because they want it to be so."

After Franklin's death, her will stipulated the establishment of a literary prize to be awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The first prize was awarded in 1957. The Miles Franklin Award is now Australia's most well-known literary prize.

Franklin's desire to celebrate Australian life in all its phases, was articulated in her novel. Clearly her ideas on establishing art and culture, by Australians, for Australians, was something she felt passionate about for most of her life.
The need was for painters and novelists, as well as the ungifted, to break out of the established rut. A way must be found to suggest this different atmosphere both in picture and story—a fresh contribution must be made to technique.

 

"It's high time that scenes that foreigners and English know nothing about were recorded for a change."

I suspect this was one of the reasons why her work was not widely appreciated at the time. Europeans (and many Australians) considered Australia a cultural back-water, cringe-worthy and incapable of any kind of unique creativity. Some still do.
 
Finally, I was struck by the same-old, age-old debate about money, fiscal responsibility and financial bubbles. 
As far as I can estimate, Australian life—and I suppose it's the same all over the world—rests on inflated values, and can't last....Fellows I've had here for the summer have stayed in the winter and made ten or fifteen pounds, even twenty pounds a week. And do they save that money to better themselves? Not a bit of it!

 

Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang was rather fun in the end. Like Franklin, I love our country's unique beauty and I appreciated her efforts to bring this to light in a literary way. I will certainly have a go at her other Brent of Bin Bin books.

A gang-gang cockatoo

Read for Simon & Kaggsy's 1956 Club.
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Wednesday, 8 July 2020

Indigenous Picture Books

Lisa @ANZLitLover is hosting her annual Indigenous Literature Week. Normally this week is also NAIDOC week, but due to Covid it has been postponed until 8th -15th November. The 2020 theme is 
Always Was, Always Will Be. 
Always Was, Always Will Be. recognises that First Nations people have occupied and cared for this continent for over 65,000 years. 

The picture books below honour this theme with their focus on country, family, success past and present, dreaming, songlines and sharing language & culture. They share a pride in Aboriginal heritage, acknowledging the wrongs and the suffering but looking forward to a more hopeful, inclusive future.

Respect | Aunty Fay Muir & Sue Lawson | Magabala Books | 1st May 2020


You have to respect this book.

It's heart is in the right place. Every page reflects love of country and family.

Respect combines a deep concern for taking care of each other, with acknowledging cultural heritage and traditions. It generously shares a part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture with the wider community.

Magabala Books are planning a series of such books:
Respect is the first title in the ‘Our Place’ series of four children’s picture books which welcome and introduce children to important elements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture.
Lisa Kennedy's illustrations are stunning. Full of warmth and colour and a pleasing simple design that engages and draws the reader in.


I can't wait to see the other three books in this series.

Aunty Fay Muir is a Boonwurrung Elder.
Lawson's first book with Aunty Fay was Nganga: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Words and Phrases.
Lisa Kennedy is a descendant of the coastal Trawlwoolway people of north-east Tasmania.


Family | Aunty Fay Muir & Sue Lawson | Magabala Books | 1st July 2020


Family is book two in the Our Place series of picture books from Magabala Books. It's an Indigenous picture book about heart and home.

These books are designed for a preschool aged audience. Simple, clear language is used to show how caring and sharing for country and mob is an integral philosophy of Aboriginal life. This book focuses on how daily rituals and traditions create belonging and connection.

The earthy tones and palate used by Seymour throughout the book, feature family groups interacting together with country.

Respect and Family are both gentle, positive introductions for younger readers to Indigenous family and culture.


Aunty Fay Muir is a Boonwurrung Elder.
This is the third book that Sue Lawson has written with Aunty Fay.
Jasmine Seymour a Darug writer and artist.


Cooee Mittigar | Jasmine Seymour | Magabala Books | 1st November 2019


The full title for this book is Cooee Mittigar: A Story of Darug Songlines.
Cooee mittigar means come here friend. Seymour & Watson, two Darug women, invite us inside to share their story and to pay respect to country.

Darug country encompasses the greater Sydney Basin and Hawkesbury River.

Seymour & Watson have created a story that celebrates the Darug language by embedding it naturally within the text.

A glossary at the back provides simple meanings for each new word, but each word is also explained on the page where it is used, separate to the main text.

Mulgo, Black Swan takes us on a history lesson through Dreamtime and songlines, before moving onto a seasonal journey through Darug country.
Cooee mittigar. Tread softly on our lands.

Know that this dreaming was here. Is still here.

Will be forever.

Beautifully illustrated with native animals and local plants.
This is my pick of the crop (so far) for Indigenous picture books published in the past year.

Shortlisted – 2020 CBCA Award for New Illustrator
Notable – 2020 CBCA Book of the Year Awards: Eve Pownall Award


Coming Home to Country | Bronwyn Bancroft | Little Hare Books | 1st February 2020


Bancroft's illustrations feel very personal. They feature the rivers of her childhood in northern NSW that flow from page to page. Love of country and nature jump off each page in bold colours as Bronwyn takes us on a journey through her home, past and present.

A sense of where her home is grounds her. Knowing where she belongs allows her to go out into the world to make her own way. 

Over the years, her way, has included time as a textile and fashion designer, artist, activist and children's picture book writer and illustrator.


In 2016 Bancroft was the Australian Finalist for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (Illustrator).

She is now a finalist for the 2020 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

Born in Tenterfield, in northern NSW, Bronwyn Bancroft is a descendant of the Djanbun clan of the Bundjalung nation.


Our Home, Our Heartbeat | Adam Briggs | Little Hare Books | 1st May 2020


Yorta Yorta rapper Adam Briggs' energetic, enthusiastic personality oozes from every page and lyric in this book.

In 2014 Briggs released a song during Naidoc week called The Children Came Back. The song celebrates successful, well-known Indigenous athletes and artists, past and present. It was written on the 25th anniversary of Archie Roach's song Took the Children Away to continue the conversation originally started by Roach. His aim is to normalise Indigenous success.

Briggs claims his song is a "history lesson, a monologue, a celebration and an education." 

I've included the lyrics from the song below but urge you to search out the various youtube videos of the song, including the live versions done with Paul Kelly and Dan Sultan.

I'm Fitzroy where the stars be
I'm Wanganeen in '93
I'm Mundine, I'm Cathy Free-
Man, that fire inside a me
I'm Adam Goodes, and Adam should
Be applauded when he stand up
You can look to us when that time stop
I'm Patty Mills with the last shot

I'm Gurrumul, I'm Archie
I'm everything that you ask me
I'm everything that you can't be
I'm the dead hearts, heart beat

The children came back
The children came back
Back where their hearts grow strong
Back where they all belong
The children came back

I'm Doug Nicholls, I'm jimmy little
With a royal telephone
I'm the world champ in '68
Boy I'm Lionel Rose
I'm William Cooper, I take a stand
When no one even knows
I'm the walk off, I'm the sound of
The children coming home

I'm Gurrumul, I'm Archie
I'm everything you ask me
I'm everything you can't be
I'm the dead hearts, heart beat

The children came back
The children came back
Back where their hearts grow strong
Back where they all belong
The children came back

Let me take it home, I'm Rumba
I'm the sand hills on Cummera
I'm Les Briggs, I'm Paul Briggs
I'm Uncle Ringo with all them kids
I'm Uncle Buddy - everybody love me
Ain't none below, ain't none above me
I'm the carvings outta every scar tree
I'm those flats that birthed Archie

Now Mr abbott, think about it - me and you we feel the same
That might sound strange, I'm just saying,
We both unsettled when the boats came

I'm Gurrumul, I'm Archie
I'm everything you ask me
I'm everything you can’t be
I'm the dead hearts, heart beat

The children came back
The children came back
Back where their hearts grow strong
Back where they all belong
The children came back.


Our Home, Our Heartbeat is a younger readers version of this song. Briggs then made a very deliberate decision to have non-traditional illustrations, choosing a contemporary, almost cartoon style with bold, bright colours and lots of action.

From Lunch Lady interview |  21st May 2020
the Dreamtime stories, which are all fantastic, and all the artwork is amazing and fantastic. But cool, we have that. Let’s not do that, because people who are really good at that are already doing it. Here’s my contribution. It’s not here to take away. It’s here to add....I wanted it to be really super vibrant. I wanted everything to be bright and colourful and not like earthy ochre tones. I wanted it to really pop.

Kate Moon is a Melbourne based designer and 3D artist.
Rachael Sarra is a contemporary Aboriginal artist from Goreng Goreng country.
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Friday, 26 June 2020

Moving Among Strangers by Gabrielle Carey

Writing regularly blog posts seems to be something quite beyond right now. But thanks to Karen @Booker Talk I've be revisiting some of my older posts to find fresh inspiration. This post about the rather silent author, Randolph Stow, was originally published on the 29th August 2015.

I've been thinking about Gabrielle Carey a lot, over the past 24 hrs, after learning that she has a new book coming out in October with University of Queensland Press about Elizabeth von Armin called Only Happiness Here. 


Her website explains that von Armin has been one of her literary passions for quite some time, and like me, Carey is amazed that this Australian born writer (along with her cousin, Katherine Mansfield) is so little known and appreciated here. 

New Zealander's have done a much better job of being loud and proud about Mansfield. Admittedly, von Armin only lived in Australia for the first three years of her life (whereas Mansfield grew up in NZ before moving permanently to Europe). But given our tendency to claim famous folk with far less tenuous links than that, it's curious that we have been so silent on our relationship with von Armin.

I want to know more about the friendship and authorial support that existed between von Armin and Mansfield and how they influenced each other. And I'm keen to find out why Carey is so fascinated by von Armin. Weaving together the biography of an author with her own personal reflections was one of the things I really enjoyed about her Randolph Stow book. 

It has stayed with me for five years now. 

Given how many books pass through my hands each year, for one to stick in my memory so clearly, says something about the strength of the story within, as well as it's ability to get under my skin.

So I give you a slightly revised and updated look at my 2015 post for Moving Among Strangers.


Today I had the pleasure of attending the Honouring Randolph Stow event at the NSW Library.

The Honouring series is the brainchild of my friend Julia Tsalis, the Program Manager at the NSW Writers Centre. 

On their website she says:
Sometimes we forget about the great when revelling in the new. In its annual Honouring Australian Writers series, the NSW Writers’ Centre pays tribute to writers who have made an important contribution to our literary culture.  
In 2015 we turn to the West Australian writer Randolph Stow. Perhaps best known for The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and To The Islands, which won the Miles Franklin Award, Australian Literary Society Gold Medal and the Melbourne Book Fair Award in 1958. He was also awarded the ALS Gold Medal for his poetry in 1957 and won the Patrick White Award in 1979.  
A writer fond of silence, known for the metaphysical and existential qualities of his writing but also a master at evoking the Australian landscape, Randolph Stow embodied contradictions. Geordie Williamson, says of him in The Burning Library, ‘In him, as in no other non-indigenous writer in our literature, landscape and mindscape are one.’  
Honouring: Randolph Stow brings together Gabrielle Carey, author of Moving Among Strangers a memoir about her family’s connection to Stow, Suzanne Falkiner whose biography will be released in 2016, Richard Tipping a poet and producer of a documentary on Stow, and West Australian author Alice Nelson (The Last Sky) whose career has been inspired by him.


In preparation for the event, I read Gabrielle Carey's Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family.

Carey's award winning book is a curious, but very pleasing mix of family memoir and grief journal as well as a homage to little known Australian author and poet, Randolph 'Mick' Stow.

I say little known, because when I told family, friends and colleagues (yes, even colleagues!) where I was going today. Only a couple of them had heard of Stow.

My relationship with Stow is not much better. I've only read one of his books and that was his children's story about Midnite, the not-so-bright bushranger and his talking cat. The talking cat put me off too much to ever really enjoy it properly though!

But, like Carey, I do seem to have this fascination for Australia's long lost, forgotten authors.

I'm curious about why we, as a nation, do not seem to celebrate, embrace or cherish our award winning, highly acclaimed authors.

Their childhood homes do not become museums.

No "so and so was born here" plaques pop up on suburban streets and rarely do they have university or school wings named after them. They're lucky to have a street named in their honour!

Carey echoes my concerns in her book when she reminds us that:
Other countries seem to be able to preserve significant writers' houses - why are there so few in Australia?

However, after the Honouring Randolph Stow event today, I wonder if part of this lack of recognition starts with the authors themselves.

All four panelists spoke of Stow's famous silence.

Suzanne called it his "authorial invisibility". 

Richard told us how Stow had said, "writers are writers because they're not talkers." 

And Alice quoted poet Louise Gluck's "eloquent deliberate silence" to describe Stow's personality.

Meanwhile Carey's tender memoir is an endless parade of Stow's reticence and quietness which she sums up towards the end by saying,
Stow's silence doesn't appear to have been an unfriendly one. His temperament and philosophical bent both point towards a faith in silence and deep doubt about language.
 
This is not someone searching for the limelight or to have his name forever blazoned across the skies. His story writing and poetry were personal, they were part of his search for home. Home, for Stow, was not one house or place either.

Maybe we don't need to make a fuss about his childhood home or where he went to school, except of course, there is no denying, that it is these things, these places of our childhoods that shape us is so many ways, consciously and unconsciously.

Stow himself also said (in reference to Joseph Conrad) that "I think one does need to know a great deal - well, a certain amount, anyway, about an author's life...and not only what he chooses to have known."
(my highlight).

So, what have I learnt about Stow in the past week?

He could speak and read about five languages, he was fascinated by the Batavia wreck (so much so that he taught himself to read Old Dutch so he could research the source materials), he loved to read Conrad and Joyce and he 'wrote' his books in his head whilst walking and only physically wrote them down once he had it complete in his head. Sadly, he had two such books in his head when he died. 


Stow also had an incredibly mellifluous voice (not unlike Princes Charles but with an Australian undertone) that we heard thanks to the resurrecting of Richard Tipping's interview with Stow from the 1988 film A Country of Islands. More than preserving old homes and the placing of plaques, we need to ensure that archival films and interviews like this are conserved for future reference. The 8 minute excerpt we heard today was one of the highlights of a stimulating afternoon.

I look forward to reading one of Stow's adult novels (now republished by Text Publishing) or seeing one on the big screen soon. I also highly recommend Carey's memoir for those who love their family memoirs and author biographies entwined in a happy embrace.

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Saturday, 30 May 2020

Truganini | Cassandra Pybus #AWW


Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse is an extraordinary read. 

Cassandra Pybus has compiled a thorough and very personal history of Truganini's life and times. I say personal, because what gives this book that little extra something special is Pybus' relationship to Truganini. As she says in her Preface, the 'rapid dispossession (of the original people of Tasmania), and its terrible aftermath, is the foundation narrative of my family.' 

This book has been a 30 year labour of love for Pybus, as she has searched for the right way to tell this story. Feeling very conscious about not speaking for someone who left behind no letters, diaries or direct speech of her own, Pybus chose to only use documents that contained first hand accounts from people who had actually met Truganini, 'people who saw and heard her with their own eyes and ears, then - ideally - made a contemporaneous record of it.'

Pybus was also conscious that most of these first hand accounts about Truganini, were written by men, 'pompous, blinkered, acquisitive, self-aggrandising men who controlled and directed the context of what they described.' She was determined to find the 'woman behind the myth.'

One of those pompous, blinkered, acquisitive, self-aggrandising men was George Augustus Robinson (1791-1866). His Australian Dictionary of Biography claims that he was a protector of Aborigines, however his diaries reveal a man far more self-interested and self-serving than this generous sounding title would imply. 

Richard Pybus and his wife (Cassandra's ancestors) arrived in Australia in 1829 and were given a 'massive swathe of North Bruny Island, an unencumbered free land grant, even while Truganini and her family were still living there.' Their other (white) neighbour on this island, Nuenonne land, was George Robinson.

This is where we first meet a young Truganini - in the journals, letters and notes made by the Harrison - at home on Bruny Island with her family.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like for people of Truganini's generation. To have been born into one world - a safe, familiar, world where you knew you belonged - but then to grow up in another - with alien rules and expectations, even while still living on your own country. To have the certainty of your birth right taken from you, subjected to judgement and harsh treatment and to be denied the solace of your own way of life A way of life now seen as inferior, if not completely denigrated and despised.

Robinson's diaries document this rapidly changing world for Truganini and her family. Whalers stealing the young girls and women, having to barter for goods (often with their bodies), the life-long effects of syphilis and other venereal diseases, dressing up in European clothes to impress governors, Christian leaders and journalists only to run off naked back to their home land, what was left of it...that is, until the influenza virus of 1829.

After the flu virus had ravaged the island, Robinson in his diary said,
only fourteen Nuenonne remained to receive the benefit of his proselytising. These traumatisied survivors were slashing their faces and bodies in grief, in no state to heed his Christian platitudes.

Naturally, Truganini's story is bound up with Robinson's story. He seemed to have taken on a fatherly role in her life. She also seemed to realise that by sticking by him, she was guaranteed a safer passage through this fast-changing world. So when Robinson left Bruny Island to take on a missionary role tracking remote clans on the west coast of Tasmania so he could bring them 'under his protection'. Truganini joined him, little realising that she would never live on Bruny Island, her home country, again.

Robinson was a curious fellow,
He reasoned to himself that his object in plunging into the wild was to shine the light of God into the darkness, while his wholehearted embrace of untamed nature revealed a passion for elemental experience much at odds with his evangelical posturing....it seemed as if he was in the process of becoming one of them....he shared the food they caught and was at pains to make himself part of their rituals and daily activity.

Although it's not easy to like him or even respect him very much by today's standards, Pybus reminds us of how he was seen by his contemporaries. His desire to protect, or broker a reconciliation with the original people of Van Dieman's Land was actually at odds with most of the other white settlers of the colony, who just wanted a clear field and a clear conscious to do what they wanted in this new land.

The bulk of the book is about the long, arduous treks that Robinson took around Tasmania, with his native guides, searching for the last surviving tribes. By the end, he had even travelled to the newly founded settlement of Melbourne on the mainland. Robinson's changing perspective and position in regards to whether he was proselytising or capturing, preserving or protecting, acting compassionately or purely for self-promotion, ultimately made him a man that Truganini and her friends could not trust completely, yet they had so few other options available to them for survival.
Having watched the people sing the land, he knew it was the wellspring of their spiritual life and their material culture. For them, land and life were indivisible. Until this bond was completely severed, he believed their souls would never be saved for God.

Pybus talked about the effects of Stockholm syndrome on the Indigenous population, especially how it could explain why the young women kept returning to abusive white whalers and sealers, even though they were treated so appallingly.

I learnt more than I ever want to know about the ghastly Black Line - the pincer movement decreed by Governor George Arthur that 'every able-bodied male - settler and convict - was required to muster into a militia' to capture and remove every single remaining Aboriginal from the new colony.

I learnt what a loathsome character John Batman was, not only in Robinson's eye, but in the eye's of many others and how a blind eye was turned towards his activities by those in charge, simply because he got stuff done. His particular habit of capturing young Aboriginal boys to 'rear them' was considered a very dubious practice by Robinson.

I learnt that Flinders Island was used to house the remaining Tasmanian Aborigines, so that on the 3rd February, 1835, Robinson was able to claim that 'he had cleared all the original people from the colony.'

I learnt that the painter, John Glover spent time with Robinson and some his native guides on the Nile River in January 1834. Glover spent several days sketching the group. He later used these in his paintings including The River Nile, Van Diemen's Land, from Mr Glover's farm | 1837 | below.

 
Robinson had truly believed that his removal of the original people of Van Dieman's Land was for their own good. He had wanted to protect them from murderous settlers, to bring them into God's grace and to bestow the great benefits of civilisation, as he understood it. Never did he think that his beneficent God would permit them all to die. Now the inescapable reality was that his intended sanctuary would become one great graveyard.

In 1839, Robinson took Truganini and some of the other guides, to the Port Phillip District, where he basically let them loose to fend for themselves. Things did not go well for them. 

We know that Truganini spent some time back on Flinders Island before being removed to an abandoned penal station at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. It sounded like a ghastly place to live, yet somehow Truganini basically lived out her life there. From here, she was able to regularly visit Bruny Island, so perhaps that was enough reason. In 1872 she was the sole remaining person living there.

At the end, Pybus provides an extensive biography on Truganini's contemporaries, as well as a timeline and her various sources.

For those of us in the AWW blogging world, you may be as delighted as I was, to note that Pybus cited as one her online sources The Resident Judge of Port Philip. How wonderful that all the hard work and love we pour into our blogs can be appreciated and acknowledged in the wider world.

Truganini's story is compelling and heart-breaking. Pybus has honoured her story and returned the myth back into a flesh and blood woman.
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Tuesday, 26 May 2020

The Cardboard Crown | Martin Boyd #CCspin

This remarkable novel, first published to a chorus of acclaim in 1952, is one of the lost classics of Australian literature. Martin Boyd is a deeply humane novelist, a writer of family sagas without peer.

Set in Australia and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, The Cardboard Crown presents an unforgettable portrait of an upper middle-class family who love both countries but are not quite at home in either.

At the centre of this scintillating and immensely readable novel is Alice Verso, whose unexpected marriage to Austin Langton not only brings financial stability to the Langtons but founds an Anglo-Australian dynasty. But when her grandson finds her diaries and begins to uncover her story he chances on an intricate web of deception and reveals the complex fate of his family over three generations.

I don't often start with a blurb about the book I've just read, but I figured that many of my readers may never have heard of The Cardboard Crown or Martin Boyd. 

The Langton Quartet (there are three more books in the series) have been compared to the Forsyte Saga, and Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time as an Australian example of a family epic across time and place.

Boyd (10th June 1893 – 3rd June 1972 - how frustrating to get so close to one's 80th birthday and just miss out!) was part of the well-known à Beckett-Boyd family of Melbourne. Various members of the family made their names in the judiciary, art, literary and publishing worlds. To name a few of this creative extended family we have Merric Boyd, Helen à Beckett Read, Arthur Boyd, Guy Boyd, David Boyd, Mary Nolan, Robin Boyd and Joan Lindsay.

Martin actually spent most of his adult life in Europe, but The Cardboard Crown and it's follow up books A Difficult Young Man (1955), Outbreak of Love (1957) and When Blackbirds Sing (1962) were written thanks to a brief period of his life when he returned to Australia with a dream to restore the old family home. 

During this time (1948-1951), he rediscovered his grandmother's diaries where he read about her previously unknown convict heritage. Her father, John Mills, the founder of Melbourne Brewery, was an ex-convict. It was his money that had funded the extended family for several generations. In 1950's Australia though, a convict past was decidedly frowned upon. So Boyd changed the family scandal in his books to that of an adulterous affair, or as Brenda Niall says in her Introduction, he 'reinterpreted a century of family history'.

Boyd had a brief stint in a seminary (followed by a lifelong search for the place of religion in his life) before enlisting in the Royal East Kent Regiment during WWI. After the war, he returned to Melbourne, but no longer felt like he fitted in there. He returned to Europe, wandering around from place to place. After his final stay in Australia, he moved to Rome to write. He converted to Catholicism in his dying days and is buried in the Rome Protestant English Cemetery near Keats and Shelley.

Like the characters in his semi-biographical quartet, Boyd never felt at home in Australia or England. Throughout The Cardboard Crown the tension between being English and being Australian is a constant pull. As is the sad and slow decline of a once well-off, well-connected family moving down the social ladder. 
It did not occur to anyone until after the 1914 war that there was any obligation to work unless it was necessary.

I can see why this book may have fallen out of favour for a while. Aristocrats, inherited money and gentlemen of leisure don't really hold much truck with the average Australian. Ignoring our convict heritage may have been de rigueur in the early part of the nineteenth century, but by the 1970's, with its sudden surge in family history research, having a convict or two in your past, became not only acceptable but something to be proud of, especially if you could claim a First Fleeter on your tree. It's a shame that Boyd didn't feel that he could tell that story.
They had brought out with them their English style of living, but it was tempered by a pleasant colonial informality. They had to satisfy no one but themselves. They did not follow the social pattern, they set it.

The story of Alice Langton, is told by her grandson Guy de Teba Langton. We see her as he remembers her, but we also get a more first hand, personal account of her life through her own diaries. Boyd/Langton enjoys the disparity between the two and spends many musing moments comparing these two women, these two images of the same woman. 
It did not seem only to contain the ghosts of the dead from whom we spring, but also the ghosts of the living, of the child I was.

She was quite an extraordinary woman - self-made, strong and capable. She spent her life searching for home and for love, constantly juggling and handing over money to prevent the entire family from going under. 
Alice only wanted to fill properly the position in which circumstances had placed her, and to see that her children had and used all the opportunities available to people of their kind.

But Guy/Martin also explored class consciousness and the workings of democracy. He compares the two countries, he compares East St Kilda and Toorak, he compares town and country and he compares Europe and England. There's a snobbish attitude towards the middle class, but a curious link is made between the landed gentry and the rural working classes,
The aristocracy lives from the land, the peasant lives from the land - they are akin. Their blood is nourished red from nature, and the flesh and the spirit are one.

The colonial emigrant experience is a big part of this story. The disconnect and confusion about belonging and home reflected the reality of many nineteenth century Australians who still called England 'home'. It was an odd situation to be in. In England, where their hearts lay, they were small fish in a very old pond. In Australia they had the opportunity to be big fish with a lot of political and social clout, but it was only in Australia, on the other side of the world from where all the important stuff was actually happening. It almost felt like play-acting at being important. Living in the now, and being happy where you are, was not something that these Australians found easy to do. Their eyes were always on the horizon and they were constantly trying to superimpose an English way of life onto this alien Australian environment.

Needless to say, the story was filled with a curious mix of nostalgia, pride and divided loyalties.

My one difficulty with this book was the large paragraphs written in French. I spent one Sunday afternoon typing them all into my google translate app, to only discover that most of the sentiment within these paragraphs was conveyed, by Boyd, in the sections around them. But I needed to know for sure. Once upon a time, Boyd's readers would have been schooled in basic French, but no longer. All I could do was pick out random words I knew.

I was thoroughly engaged with this multi-generational story, seeing an older Melbourne through nostalgic eyes and a Europe still innocent of two world wars. When I finished I wasn't sure if I would continue the journey with the other three books. But as time has gone by, between reading and reviewing, I now also feel a sense of nostalgia for this time and this place and this family and I'm very curious to see what happens next.

I guess I'll be adding A Difficult Young Man to my next CC Spin!
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Tuesday, 5 May 2020

488 Rules For Life | Kitty Flanagan #AWW

Rule 12: The bathroom is not a library, there are far more pleasant, not to mention less smelly, places to read your book. Don't linger in there, get in get out.
Sorry Kitty. I was with you right up to rule number 12!

I've read in the bathroom ever since I was little. In a large family, there were not many places to go where you were guaranteed privacy. The bathroom was almost the one and only retreat available to an avid reader seeking peace and quiet. Taking a long bath with a good book was my favourite escape. It still is.

I hate to admit it Kitty, 488 Rules for Life: The Thankless Art of Being Correct is actually the perfect book for reading in the bathroom. 

Brief chapters filled with pithy and witty sections best imbibed a few at a time to fully savour their aptness. It also meant that Mr Books and I could read the same book at the same time. Well, obviously, not at exactly the same time. But over a period of a few weeks, with two distinct bookmarks, we chuckled and chortled our way through Kitty's rules together.

Rule 26: Cushions are not spiritual advisors.  
Rule 260: Decide on your tattoo. Then wait a year.

The other 480-odd rules were fair and reasonable rules though. As you mentioned a few times, they're barely worth mentioning, except, that obviously you do need to mention them as some people clearly don't understand the importance of standing back from the baggage carousel at the airport or about not leaving only one square of toilet paper on the roll or posting pictures of themselves doing yoga. 
Rule 386: Don't call it a wedding invite. It's an invitation. You invite people to your wedding with an invitation.

I have had the pleasure of seeing Kitty perform live a couple of times. I also enjoy her various appearances on TV shows and televised comedy festivals. She's my kind of funny. I feel like I know her. I certainly know her voice, her inflections and tone. As a read her 488 rules, I could hear her in my head. That's a good thing, by the way. It added to the funny.

488 Rules id highly recommended during these strange times when a good laugh can make all the difference.

Facts:
  • Published by Allen & Unwin 2019
  • Cover design and illustrations | Tohby Riddle
  • Her dad is John Flanagan, the children's writer of The Ranger's Apprentice series.
  • The book started as a joke inspired by Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life. Obviously 12 were never going to be enough in Kitty's world!
  • Kitty has one of the most comprehensive wikipedia bio's I've ever read!
Favourite or Forget:
  • Obviously a favourite.
  • If you haven't seen her performances in Utopia yet, then make it your mission for the rest of this lockdown period, to binge watch this funny/not funny/too close to real life Working Dog series.
Image Source
Rule 404: Don't get a photo taken with Santa unless you're a child.
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Saturday, 4 April 2020

Ten Doors Down | Robert Tickner #Memoir


I recently attended an author talk featuring Robert Tickner talking about the story of his adoption. Ten Doors Down is the book of this story.

You may recall Tickner's name. He was an ALP politician during the Hawke and Keating era and the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs throughout the first half of the 90's. During this time, he was also going through the emotionally fraught experience of searching for his birth parents.

Early on, Tickner makes clear that he is one of the fortunate ones. He was adopted by two loving, generous parents. He had an idyllic childhood growing up in Forster, NSW. And his subsequent experiences in searching for and finding his birth family were mostly successful and positive.

His birth mother had a less happy time though. She grieved her whole life for the child she gave up. Even though she found love and happiness in marriage, she decided not to have any more children as she couldn't bear the thought of losing another child.

After the initial joy of rediscovering her son, she suffered terribly from knowing that she had spent most of her adult life living ten doors down from Tickner's adopted grandmother. A grandmother that Tickner visited nearly every school holidays. Knowing retrospectively that her son had been so close all this time was hard to absorb.

Ten Doors Down is a touching memoir and if you get a chance to listen to Tickner talk with Richard Fidler in Conversations, I would highly recommend it.

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