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.

In the Garden of Fugitives by Ceridwen Dovey

Don't let me mislead you into thinking that In the Gardens of the Fugitives is a book about gardening, food and recipes, even though I'm going to start with a recipe. 

Apparently one of the food items uncovered during the excavations of Pompeii, was a medallion of ham flavoured with bay leaves and fig slices. Normally a mere reference to a meal in a book wouldn't be enough to have me scrambling for recipes, except this week the Christmas ham has been on my mind.

I have a lovely recipe for a marmalade, dijon mustard & whole clove glaze that I inherited from a beloved aunt, that has been my go-to for the past decade. I'm not sure that family tradition will allow me to mess with this on Christmas Day, but I'm now dead keen to try the Pompeian version at some point. Boiling a ham and wrapping it pastry isn't my usual thing though (which seems to be how the Ancients preferred their ham), so I've found an online recipe that tweeks these old flavours by basically swapping them out with my usual ingredients. 

It looks a little something like this:

1 whole, cooked leg of ham
about 16 bay leaves
about 30 whole dried figs (I might even experiment with fresh figs in the autumn)

Glaze
1 cup smooth fig jam
1 tablespoon whole grain mustard
2 teaspoons dry English mustard
1 tablespoon finely chopped rosemary
finely grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
1⁄2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

The idea being to insert half a bay leaf into the scored sections of the ham, as one would the cloves, then cover with the glaze. Towards the end of the cooking time, add the dried or fresh figs to the juice in the bottom of the pan for about 15 mins.

To finish it off the meal, à la Romaine, float rose petals in one's glass of wine.

Sounds delish!

The flip side of feasting is death. The ancients had always understood that. A banquet is life in miniature. You arrive hungry, eat and drink your fill, make merry, then go to sleep. All feasts, all lives, must come to an end. Death, tugging your ear, says: Live, I am coming.

AD 45-79 | Still-life wall panel from the House of the Chaste Lovers |
Cockerel pecking at pomegranates, figs, and pears.

Okay, so how did we end up in Pompeii talking about figs and ham and rose petals?

I haven't read Dovey's first novel, Blood Kin, but I did read and adore her kookier second story collection, Only the Animals. This collection felt like an emerging writer still playing around with what kind of writer she wanted to be. The stories were fun and clever but they also showed that Dovey had some bigger ideas that she was prepared to play with. In the Garden of the Fugitives the writing and style felt more assured and the themes more autobiographical. It feels like she has now arrived as a fully-fledged writer.

Dovey explores, via a letter writing regime between the older mentor figure with regrets, Royce, and the younger, lost soul, Vita, themes of obsession, confession and atonement. As she says early on journeys need a point; a narrative arc. Both narrators, the letter writers, have very distinct voices and stories that intersect at times.

They are both lonely and seem to be overtaken by various forms of guilt, melancholia and nostalgia. Vita's story is more a coming-of-age one, whilst Royce is looking back on his life from his deathbed. Vita is still searching for a place or space to belong, whereas Royce spent his life trying to find someone to belong to. Neither of them ever seemed to feel at home in themselves.

Each and every one us contains a whole world of suffering.

Royce's voice sounded cultivated and charming. He was clearly educated and erudite. His letters were searching, teasing, insidious even. Vita's voice was more confronting. Harsh at times, sometimes cruel and to-the-point, she was often cool and distant. Their letter writing attempts to reinterpret, revise and reassess how they got to where they currently are. We all have a story to tell; and that story evolves with each retelling.

They both shared complex relationships with place. For Royce, place was caught up in how he felt about the people within the spaces. He said that it is impossible to experience a place like Pompeii outside the prism of your own desires. And certainly for Royce experiencing anything, including human relationships, outside the prism of his desires would be nigh on impossible. He had the emotional range typical of most narcissists.

However, his stories about his time in Pompeii, excavating the site known as the garden of fugitives, with his first obsession, Kitty, were utterly compelling. I could have had a whole story just about this time in Italy. 

Once you can inspect your own history like an artifact, you're a step closer to liberating yourself from it.

It took me a while to warm to Vita's story, even though I have shared many of her feelings of confusion about belonging. Perhaps it was the distance at which she liked to keep people, even her readers. Vita was often hamstrung by indecision, doubt and guilt. Her relationships reflected this muddle.  

One of the places that Vita was trying to fit into was Mudgee, NSW. The town I called home for 18 years. Naturally I was curious to hear what Dovey, via Vita, had to say about it.

To people just passing through, Mudgee is charming. The town's quaint sandstone buildings and wide streets, and, further out, the wineries and orchards in perfect rows, the shaded paths along the Cudgegong River. The natural beauty of the surroundings blinds most casual visitors to the town's unexpected strangeness, its schizoid social self. Itinerant labourers, gentleman farmers, amateur winemakers, corporate wine overseers, fly-in-fly-out mine workers, tree-changers, bogans, all bumping up against one another. 

There's the cheap cafe serving pies next to a hipster cafe serving artisanal brews. The old shitty pub with greasy carpets and pokies beside an organic wine bar. The farmers' market displays vegetables with authentically soiled roots and handmade cheese, but the explosions from the coal mines ringing the valley regularly destroy the peace. 

I fit in here because I, too, am caught between identities.

I suspect these comments are true of most small towns in Australia. Especially those that attract visitors and weekenders from the bigger cities around them. Mudgee is definitely one of those towns. But I lived there for a long time and never heard the sound the explosions from the coal mine at Ulan. Although it's quite possible that her character, living amongst the wineries on an olive farm, was on the Ulan side of town. Her descriptions made me think of the hills out past the cemetery and airport, on the way to the mines. Perhaps from there you could hear the blasts.

However a big part of Vita's story was about South Africa. She was born there, but her parents moved to Australia when she was young. She inherited not only their white guilt about Apartheid, but she suffered from her own version of guilt. Her time with a counsellor with an interesting excursion into

political will, individual culpability and responsibility. She not only reflected on the injustices and generational effects of Apartheid, but also the Australian colony experience, American slavery, Germany & the Holocaust. 

One comment struck me in particular, as I was able to relate it to the current debates around climate change politics. I hear many Gen Z's talking about climate change with a similar refrain. 

It wasn't me, I shouldn't have to feel responsible for decisions I didn't make. This way of thinking can lead to the false conviction that the injustices of the present are similarly outside your influence, that things will remain the same regardless of what you do or don't do.

I also learnt about psychohistorians. I didn't even know it was a thing, but learning about the 'why' of history and examining the differences between stated intentions and actual events sounds exactly like something I'd like to explore further.

The rallying cry of psychohistorians is that history repeats itself because of the propulsive effects of humiliation....They believe that the traumatised country, like the traumatised individual, has a psyche that is fractured. It has an unconscious. It buries painful memories, It indulges wishful fantasies through national myths....The Germans have developed an entire vocabulary and classification system for the different kinds of guilt suffered by different generations.

There's a whole lot of stuff about archaeology and Pompeii and Royce's reasons for feeling guilty and remorseful, that I haven't gone into here. Both Kate & Lisa explore these angles further, if you're interested. Like both Kate & Lisa, In the Garden of Fugitives will be added to my best books of 2019 list.

Kate @Books Are My Favourite and Best review.
Lisa @ANZLit Lovers review.

Favourite Quote:

Not one of the wise elders whose path I was privileged to cross in my years there ever said to me: No human being should have to go through life alone; do everything you can to find your person, the one who makes it bearable, the one who will love you back. Or everything else will be for naught anyway.

A Poem for a Thursday by Melissa Lucashenko

Image source

Sydney has once again woken up shrouded in bush fire smoke. Air quality is very poor and people are being asked to avoid exercising outdoors. It's hot one day, cold and blustery the next. It's hard to breath freely and it's not even summer yet.

Two weeks ago it was the smoke from the fires in northern NSW. This week, fires are blazing to the west of Sydney in the Hawkesbury area.
Sydney will be moving onto level 2 water restrictions in the next week or so (although many areas in western areas have been on level 4 or higher restrictions for months).

The rain forests in Queensland have been burning and catastrophic fire warnings are in place again today for South Australia. Victoria is on high alert as well. It's going to be a long day for the firies.

Perhaps if we thought about the trees as people, with a gender and personality, like the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, we would have found a better way to live with them and take care of them.
I'm trying not to think about the koalas and wombats and possums. The news coming in is just too distressing.

Melissa Lucashenko is an Aboriginal writer of Goorie and European heritage.

She was the winner of the 2019 Miles Franklin Award and the Queensland Premier’s award for a work of state significance for Too Much Lip.

As well as the winner of the 2013 Deloitte Queensland Literary Award for Fiction and the Victorian Premiers Prize for Indigenous Writing for Mullumbimby.

She won the 2013 Walkely Award for Long Form Journalism with her Griffith Review essay, “Sinking Below Sight: Down and Out in Brisbane and Logan”. Lucashenko also writes poems.

This poem caught my eye because my father grew up in the area of Crystal Creek, near the small town of Numinbah. Going for drives to the Natural Bridge and through the valley are part of my childhood memories. It's a beautiful area with a long history.
Small fires went through this area two months ago.

Numinbah Valley in Spring
By Melissa Lucashenko | 1 February 2016 | Cordite Poetry Review


In the Yugambeh there exist three genders: male, female, and a gender used specifically to refer to trees.


Twenty thousand moons shone here upon the People
and twenty thousand more before that
showed themselves crystal in the rushing streams
flanked with green lichened giants, beloved brothers
our other selves who have endured so much

Now the People are few here, and pale
white men came six seconds ago with their bibles and noise
the People left, bleeding
we left, torn from our mother’s arms to be made white

Our tallest selves on this mountain remain, strong and beautiful
Our tallest selves use the wind to speak, asking
Why are we lonely?
Where have our families gone?

Here, I answer, singing them a new song
jarjum yanbelillah mobo
the children of the People will return
goorie jinungilellah numinbah jagan mobo
your other selves will be standing alongside you again tomorrow
we will not cry long; we will not salt the earth of our grandmothers
be happy in your waiting Tall Ones
we are coming
we are coming
we are coming

Natural Bridge or the Nature Arch as we knew it back in the 1970's

Jennifer @Holds Upon Happiness posts a lovely Poem for a Thursday each week. I enjoy sourcing poems from my recent reads to join in with her whenever I can.

99 Interpretations of The Drover's Wives by Ryan O'Neill

This little curiosity has been sitting by my bed for over a year now. It has taken a hectic schedule and a determination to read as much Australian literature this month as possible to bring this particular book to the top of the pile.

Why?

Simply because, as the title says, it is 99 stories re-interpreting Henry Lawson's 1892 short story The Drover's Wife. With my schedule so crazy, the chance to read a stack of short stories sounded like the perfect way to get through AusReadingMonth ticking a few goals!

And it was.

99 Interpretations of the Drover's Wives was a LOT of fun. Starting with a reprint of the original Henry Lawson story to refresh our memories, O'Neill then went on to retell the story in various literary styles.

I'd love to share all 99 with you, but that would just get tedious. Which is how I also felt if I tried to read more than 4 or 5 in one sitting.

The Drover's Wives was best read in small doses so that one could enjoy each version for what it was.

My personal favourites were the Hemingwayesque, the Year 8 English Essay (which had me laughing out loud and reading parts out to a bemused Mr Books), Editorial Comments, A Gossip Column, A 1980's Computer Game, Tweets, A Question Asked by an Audience Member at a Writer's Festival and Biographical. I also enjoyed the Cryptic Crossword and Wordsearch.

Some of the interpretations left me scrambling around on google trying to understand the reference. For instance, I have never read any Cormac McCarthy, so the McCarthyesque version went over my head until I found a vocab list of McCarthy's books that explained everything!

Lipogram was another new-to-me term. Turns out this is a composition where the author systemically omits a certain letter of the alphabet. O'Neill chose the letter 'e'. Whilst Univocalic only uses one vowel throughout the whole story. Again the 'e'.

I wasn't sure what a pangram was, but figured out from the sentence - Zippy onyx snake just got squelched by fuming drover's wife! - that it was a sentence that used every letter of the alphabet.

I also discovered someone I know. At the bottom of the Political Cartoon was 'art by Sam Paine'. I thought, 'I know Sam Paine, he's a Mudgee boy, I wonder if it's the same one?' Turns out it was.

The N + 7 chapter made no sense until I discovered the N + 7 generator - a machine that converts your text by replacing each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary. It also explained why O'Neill dedicated the book not only to Henry Lawson but the Frenchman Raymond Queneau. Queneau was one of the 1960 founders of OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) a group of ten writers and mathematicians who created pieces by using constrained writing techniques.

One of Queneau's most famous works was Exercises in Style, which tells the story of a man's seeing the same stranger twice in one day. He tells that short story in 99 different ways. Sound familiar?

Abecedarian was a curious choice. Until I learnt about the program for disadvantaged children and finally understood the focus on the children playing and the desire for a stable home environment.

The Drover's Wives was a playful, entertaining read.
O'Neill managed to sneak in pretty much every fact known about the writing of the original story, plus loads of biographical information about Lawson throughout the 99 versions. Imaginative speculation and creative cross-overs with other stories and authors also featured in different versions.

Recommended for readers with some basic knowledge of Lawson, his short stories and the Australian literary scene. If you have to google every single version, then you may not find it quite so amusing.

the drover's wife, 1945 Russell Drysdale

Facts:

• O'Neill was the winner of the 2017 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction for Their Brilliant Careers.
• The Drover's Wife was first published in The Bulletin on the 23rd July 1892.
• Russell Drysdale's painting the drover's wife 1945 (although apparently not connected to Lawson's story).
• On 28th June 1975 Murray Bail published a story in Tabloid Story that connected Lawson and Drysdale's works.
• In 1980 Frank Moorhouse published his satire of the bush ethos in the centenary January edition of The Bulletin.
• In December of the same year, Barbara Jeffries published her feminist version.
• Anne Gambling (1986) The Drover's De Facto
• Kate Jennings (1996) Snake
• Mandy Sayers (1996) The Drovers' Wives - a critical response.
• David Ireland (1997) The Drover's Wife
• Damien Broderick (1991) The Drover's Wife's Dog tells the story from the dogs point of view.
• Leah Purcell in 2016 created a play based on the story that infuses the story with a female First Nations perspective.
• The Drover's Wife : A Celebration of a Great Australian Love Affair anthology by Frank Moorhouse 2017 which includes many of the versions above.

The Wonder Child by Ethel Turner

The Wonder Child is a gentle juvenile story about a family forced to be separated for years due to the gifted talents of one of the children. Challis plays the piano like a dream and goes off to Europe with her mother to make the family fortune.

The other four children stay at home with their hapless, but lovable father. Mr Cameron is a dreamer. He struggles to make his way in life, preferring to write verses, compose melodies and paint pictures. He doesn't seem to have the necessary skills to hold down a job and he relies on his more practical, responsible wife to manage their finances. Mrs Cameron obviously loves her creative husband, but also has to live with his flaws on a daily basis. After five children, and constantly being forced to ask family and friends for help, a job is arranged for Cameron in western NSW as a Crown Land Agent.

Wilgandra is a fictional town, but it sounds just like most of the small country towns I've known. Turner tells us it is -

three hundred and seventy-three miles back, back, away in the heart of the country - the farthest town to which the Government sent its Land Agent....

The climate was intolerable in the summer, there was little or no society, the only house they could have was not over comfortable.

It doesn't sound particularly promising or inspiring.

After their mother goes off to Europe with Challis, Hermie, Bartie, Roly & Floss are cared for by a very competent female 'lady-help' and their State girl Lizzie, carefully selected by Mrs Cameron before she left. However this arrangement only lasts six months, until the very competent young woman is snapped up by a local romeo to be his wife.

Hermie and Lizzie attempt to run the household, until even Mr Cameron is forced to acknowledge that this isn't working properly. Along comes the gentle, ineffectual Miss Browne. She's a spinster who has been unable to hold down any other job and whose ways are even more hapless than Mr Cameron.

A gradual decline sets in. Compounded by Mr Cameron losing his job as a Land Agent.

The family is forced to move out of the home the state provided, to take up possession of a lean, mean selection out of town.

Their father's selection stretched before them, eighty acres of miserable land, lying grey and dreary under the canopy of a five o'clock coppery sky, summer and drought time.

Five years drag on...five years of disguising their misfortunes from Mrs Cameron and Challis, until the day the letter arrives confirming the date they are due home from Europe. A Europe of adoration, comfort, new clothes and fine lodgings.

I don't normally provide a summary of the story in my posts, but this is one of Turner's lesser known works and I felt it deserved a fuller treatment.

Although this could be classified as a children's book, the themes are wide ranging and topical (for 1901). Turner discusses her views on religion and atheism via Mrs Cameron beliefs -

She said she did not try to explain or understand God, only to believe in him. She is quite right. It is the hard names, the popular orthodoxies, the iron creeds, that take the souls and heart and warmth out of religion. When you were little, she did nothing but show you God as your Father, and Christ as your Saviour, to be tenderly loved and obeyed, and gone to for refuge and comfort.... 

She wanted the love of God to be a living thing to you all - a glad, warm, spontaneous thing, like the love you bore us, only deeper. She would have no lines and rules and analyses of it while you were small. It was not a thing she actually spoke about very often....Not to understand, only to believe.

She includes some lovely descriptions of the bush -

Wattle in bloom made a glory of the uncleared spaces, the young gums were very green, the older ones wore masses of soft white upon their soberness.

Farther away there browsed brown sheep, but this was the season for lambs, a dozen little soft snowballs of things had come close to the cottage and gambolled with the children.  

They drove up the road that wound out of civilised Wilgandra away to parts where the bush took on its wild character again, and rolled either side of them in unbroken severity and loneliness for miles.

The air was fragrant with the bush scents that rise after rain. A cool, quiet breeze swayed the boughs pf the ocean-waste of tress, here and there it lifted the long string of warm-coloured bark - autumn's royal rags - that hung from the silvered trunks.

And the Boer War experience is covered off via the neighbouring squatter, Morty. Mortimer Stevenson is the youngest son of a strict father who runs off to war to avoid a romantic disappointment. Turner doesn't glorify the war (too much). She describes the Macquarie St parade as -

And now the crowd took the reins off itself, and gave head to its madness. It hurrahed itself hoarse; it waved its arms, and its handkerchiefs, and its hat,and its head; it flung flowers, and flags and coloured paper; it hung recklessly from roofs, and walls, doors, chimneys, fences, lamp-posts, balconies, verandah-posts.

We also see young Roly embrace the war talk. He renames the selection Transvall Vale, sets up camp in the yard and spends his days fighting imaginary enemies. But it is Morty's time in South Africa that hints at a more realistic and perhaps personal, view of war -

his first battle, with its horrid nightmare of flashing lights and thundering gins, its pools of blood, its contorted human faces, its agonised horses writhing in the dust.

She also shows us the other side with a quick glimpse into the life of a South African family who provide Morty with a place to sleep after he helps them bury their son/brother. -

it is the same everywhere; our lovers, our husbands, our sons - all gone from us! Some will come back, of course, but crushed and mutilated.... 

you must know why we are fighting....but our men don't know. They have been told they will lose their liberty and homes if they don't fight....your men, of course they come because they are sent, and they fight their best because they are brave and obey orders.... 

We are no different from you. We pay a few great men to do the thinking for us, and if they say it's got to be fighting, then, whatever it seems to us individually, collectively we just shoot.

As I said, for a juvenile story, Turner has managed to include lots of meaty topics. Including a very brief view on Indigenous life in a colonial outpost -

Two or three aboriginal women were coming back from a journey to the house, cloths full of stores and broken food slung over their shoulder. Stevenson forty years ago had had to break up a big camp of them on the land he had just taken up, and drive them farther west. Ever since he had not felt justified in refusing food to any of their colour.

Let's not forget young Hermie either, as the book is ultimately her coming of age story -

I can't tell you how silly  and small I have been - thinking men ought to be just like men in books, and never looking at what they really are.

Just like, Turner's more famous story, Seven Little Australians, The Wonder Child embraces it's sense of time and place. Her characters are unapologetically Australian in sound and attitude. Their lives always teetering on the brink of hardship and poverty, with large family life being shown as chaotic. We see young children shoulder responsibility and adult cares at a far earlier age than we expect now and where most people lived their daily lives far removed from government interference or regard. Individuals and families fell through the cracks all the time. Life was hard work, money and resources were scarce and getting by was the best most people could expect from life.

According the Brenda Niall's biography of Turner on the Australian Dictionary of Biography:

Her writing showed a continuing tension between her enjoyment of popular and commercial success and her wish to break free from the restrictions of juvenile fiction. Ethel's publishers always insisted that her work should remain within the range of the sheltered young reader.

I sensed this tension throughout the book. The meatier, adult subjects were dressed up in neat moral bows suitable for the edification of younger readers. Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed this glimpse into a world gone by and I'm grateful that Turner has another 40 or so such stories for me to enjoy at my leisure.

Facts:

• Published in 1901 but set in the time just prior to the Boer War (1899-1902).
• My CC spin #21 book.
• My flashback review of Seven Little Australians.
• My review of The Story of a Baby.
• My review of In the Mist of the Mountains.

The Yield by Tara June Winch

I've been trying to write a review for The Yield by Tara June Winch for the past week that would do it justice and adequately describe my reading experience. But I'm so tired and under the weather with a foggy brain and raspy throat that nothing is coming out right.

So, let me just simply say how much I enjoyed this story. From the beautiful cover to the endearing protagonist, August and her amazing Poppy Albert, the dictionary maker. It's not often that I tell you to read a book, but this is the one. The Yield is not just a highly recommended, but a must read.

The main themes centre around grief, loss, missing and belonging. We have a missing child, a missing book and all of our characters miss the recently deceased Poppy.

We have lost language, lost country and that sense of loss for those no longer with us as well as times gone by.

Three different perspectives are explored by Winch in this multi-generational story. We have August's contemporary story. A young Indigenous woman, living abroad, running away from her losses, trying to work out who she is and how she fits into this modern world. Poppy's death is the catalyst for bringing her home to Prosperous House.

Poppy Albert is the heart and soul of the story. His first person story is told via a dictionary of Wiradjuri words. Like the Oxford English Dictionary, we get a definition of the word with an example of the word in use. But it's not just any old example. Albert uses the dictionary to relate family stories, pass on culture, myths and legends to be 'proud of our culture again'. These sections of the book are inspired and revealing.

The third perspective turns up later in the story when we get a few letters written by the Rev Ferdinand Greenleaf, the minister who established and ran Prosperous Mission in the early part of the twentieth century. His letters cover the period around 1915. As a German national, he is now under suspicion thanks to the war. He is trying to get funding and government guarantees to protect everyone staying at Prosperous. He documents some of the violence and mistreatment of the local Aboriginal tribes.

Winch's moving story reminds me once again that Indigenous culture is not a unified whole. And that's okay. Like every other culture, different groups within that culture want different things. Poppy Albert's family, faced with the sadness of his death and the tragedy of dispossession as a tin mine tries to take over their property, all react differently - some want the money, some want to stay on the land, some want to remember the past, some want to forget, some want to fight, some want to give in.

I will leave you to discover for yourself the beauty of the brolga's, but for now I will leave you with a few key passages that spoke to me.

August:

Her mouth ached for something more, wanted some unknown balm, not a kiss, or a meal, or a drink, but something long denied....The feeling that nothing was properly said, that she'd existed in a foreign land of herself. How she saw home through the eyes of everyone else but her.

How she was scared to leave, even more scared to stay. 

But in every mobile-library book, she could never find herself or her sister. Never a girl like August and Jedda Gondiwindi, not ever.

Poppy Albert:

'Just tell the truth and someone will hear it eventually'.

searching, looking around - ngaa-bun-gaa-nha When I turned fifteen and was too old for the Boys' Home I was a ward of the state still, working the local properties. At nineteen I was issued my dog tag. With it I could travel in a certain distance to work for meat and salt on the field or out mustering. I moved around far and wide looking for work, but I was looking mostly ngaa-bun-gaa-nha for home.

So much to unpack in just this one definition. Why was Albert a ward of the state in a Boys' Home?  Dog tags! Lack of freedom, working for food not wages, loss of family and home and belonging. Every one of Poppy's definitions has this same sense of the universal wrapped up in the personal.

ashamed, have shame - giyal-dhuray I'm done with this word. I'd leave it out completely but I can't. It's become part of the dictionary we think we carry. We mustn't anymore. See, pain travels through our family tree like a songline. We've been singing our pain into a solid thing. the old ones, the young ones, are ready to heal. We don't have to be giyal-dhuray anymore, we don't have to pass that down anymore.

I was also taken with this very simple, but clearly prescribed view of Indigenous religion:

Biyaami is the creator, but we don't worship him or his son. We worship the things He made, the earth.

Favourite Quote:

After I met my beautiful wife, although beauty was the least of her, strong and fearless was the most of her - well she taught me lots of things.

Favourite or Forget: Not only a firm favourite but possibly a reread as well. I will certainly be reading more by Winch in the future.

Book 12 of 20 Books of Summer Winter
Sydney 17℃
Dublin  23℃

How It Feels To Float by Helena Fox

In recent times I have been mostly writing quick reviews for the kids books I read on Goodreads, but every now and again I read one that I feel is worthy of a bigger post here. A book that I want to spend more time with, thinking about it - it's impact on me, the writing, the story, the characters.

This is one of those books.

How It Feels to Float came to me highly recommended - not only by my rep, but also by the mother of the author, Helena Fox.

The Pan Macmillan blurb says,

Biz knows how to float. She has her people, posse, her mum and the twins. She has Grace. And she has her dad, who tells her about the little kid she was, and who shouldn't be here but is. So Biz doesn't tell anyone anything. Not about her dark, runaway thoughts, not about kissing Grace or noticing Jasper, the new boy. And she doesn't tell anyone about her dad. Because her dad died when she was seven. And Biz knows how to float, right there on the surface - normal okay regular fine.

Dark, runaway thoughts and floating are all clues that this seemingly regular teen story about not fitting in, feeling awkward about one's body, one's sexuality, social gaffs, drinking, kissing the wrong people and kissing the right people at the wrong time is going to move into heavier territory at some point.

Fairly soon we realise that Biz, our extraordinary protagonist, is clearly experiencing life a little differently to everyone around her. She floats, or dissociates out of her body when things get too stressful, too awkward or too weird to cope with. She has visits from her dead dad, a man who was obviously struggling with his own major mental health issues in the lead up to his death.

Mental health, illness, sexual confusion, grief and loss are all big topics in young people's fiction right now, and a part of me nearly groaned out loud when I realised where this book was heading. But within a few chapters, I was hooked by Fox's poetic language and Biz's moving, authentic story.

I also loved the locations - all around the Illawarra region plus the train trip out west to Cootamundra, Temora and Wagga that were woven naturally into the story. I feel it is so important for us to have stories that reflect our own lives, in places we know intimately, so that we can own the messages they have to tell us and not just push them away as things that happen to other people, over there somewhere far away from us.

Without reading the author's acknowledgements at the end, you could still fairly safely assume that the author has had first hand experience with mental health issues. Her descriptions of Biz's thinking and reactions are so heartfelt, instinctive and genuine that they can only come from personal knowledge.

Biz's descent and torment are sympathetically drawn as is her search for a safe emotional harbour. Eventually this becomes a story about how to be anchored, or grounded and how be present, instead of floating away, perhaps permanently.

How it Feels to Float was an intense read, that drew me in, gradually, compulsively, urgently until I was left feeling like I had just read one of the best YA's I've read in a very long time.

The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones

Sometimes a reading experience is not as straight forward as you might first think. There are some books that demand more of the reader. The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones was one of those books for me.

I feel a little guilty about confessing that this was my first Gail Jones. One of my former colleagues (who is very arty and whose book tastes often, but not always, match my own) loves Jones' ouevre. It has taken this year's Stella longlist nominations to finally get me there though.

The Death of Noah Glass could simply be read as a tender, moving story about the sudden death of an elderly, but still physically active and able father in mysterious circumstances. Martin and Evie struggle with their grief and memories, although, ultimately, it is these memories that provide them with solace and connection.

I quickly felt, though, that there was more going on here. There was a lot of Italian art history and art theory being thrown around (as you might expect when one of the characters was an art historian and one an artist) and the discussions on time, space and memory felt layered and purposeful.

So after about 50-60 pages, I googled.

Piero della Francesca was the obvious place to start, as he was the Florentine artist that Noah Glass studied. I quickly discovered that Weng-Ho Chong, the cover designer, had used part of one of the frames from Piero's The Legend of the True Cross for his stunning book cover design. This frame is titled, Dream of Constantine and features a sleeping figure (Constantine) and a relaxed servant in the foreground. The servant, dreamily sits in the left hand corner of the cover, whilst the angel, prophesying victory, has been moved to the other side of the cover.

The Legend of the True Cross 1454-1458, Bacci Chapel, Church of San Francesco, Arezzo

I've also thought many times in the past year, that the blue cover was a nod to Brett Whitely's, The Balcony 2. Given the very Sydney setting of the story, the choice of this particular blue on the cover feels deliberate and significant.

And then I discovered Robert Dixon's article in the Sydney Review of Books, September 2018.

My brain almost exploded with art references and philosophical debates way beyond my ken! However I did take on a few new-to-me terms, and thanks to wikipedia, managed to grasp their meaning:

In Western art history, Mise en abyme is a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. In film theory and literary theory, it refers to the technique of inserting a story within a story.

A type of frame story. Sometimes a story within the main narrative can be used to sum up or encapsulate some aspect of the framing story, in which case it is referred to in literary criticism by the French term mise en abyme.

Ekphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its essence and form, and in doing so, relate more directly to the audience, through its illuminative liveliness.

In this way, a painting may represent a sculpture, and vice versa; a poem portray a picture; a sculpture depict a heroine of a novel; in fact, given the right circumstances, any art may describe any other art, especially if a rhetorical element, standing for the sentiments of the artist when they created their work, is present.

Knowing this, gave my reading of The Death of Noah Glass a little extra depth. I could see, and enjoy the various layers that Jones was exploring, even if I didn't completely understand why she wanted to, or needed to do this.

After finishing the book, I found Caroline Baum's review in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6th April 2018, which helped me to understand Jones' intentions a little more,

Acknowledgments are handy for literary snoops: they provide invaluable clues to a book's emotional undertow, especially when the writer is as private and reticent as Gail Jones....

"I'm a novelist of ideas," she continues, as if slightly insulted by the notion that she might entertain even for a moment switching allegiances from the literary side of the fence to populist genre fiction. 

"Novels are machines for thinking as well as feeling. Plot points are really engines for dispersed, unstable ideas about art, family and time. Especially time, and the way it folds and crumples, its patterns and repetitions, how it stops in front of a painting."

 ...Perhaps in spite of herself, Jones' novel reveals her own feelings about what it means to lose those we love. "There is no closure and that is a good thing," she says with certainty. "Other people live on in us, as a kind of secular afterlife. Art consoles us. That is its power."

As someone who has experienced that profound stopping and folding of time in front of certain paintings and in certain historical sites, I honour and admire other people's revelations. I certainly found some consolation in The Death of Noah Glass and hope that Jones did to in the writing of it.

Shell by Kristina Olsson

I wanted to love Shell so much. I thought it would be easy.

I adored the beautiful pearlescent cover on the hardback edition. It's dreamy quality felt nostalgic and apocalyptic at the same time (rather like Sydney last week during the dust storm)!
I love historical fiction. The building of the Opera House combined with Vietnam War issues should have been fascinating for me.
But most importantly, I was utterly mesmerised by Olsson's earlier memoir, Boy, Lost. I still think about how graciously and generously she explored her own family story within the context of 1950's Australia politics and culture. It was moving and powerful stuff.

I had heard from other bloggers, who raved about Shell, that the story was a slow burn, so after picking it up, then putting it down after about a dozen pages last year, I decided to try again recently, now that I have a bit more slow time up my sleeve.

But the same problem confronted me.

The start is not only a slow burn, but I also found it clunky with truncated sentences and phrases. This choppy sentence structure doesn't stop. I never felt a sense of rhythm or flow. It felt like Olsson was trying to hard to be poetic and clever. The effect didn't grab my attention or suit my mood. As she herself said about the Australian language (through the voice of Axel, the Swedish glass maker),

Its sentences were without rhythm, flat, featureless....He wondered if it was a matter of sophistication or history or even weather, this difference. This leaning into or away from another's sentences, or into or away from landscape, or surroundings. The things you were willing to reveal, what you were willing to hear.

Sometimes he would stand on the quay and let the streams of people part around him like water, and he would listen. Words, phrases, perhaps a whole sentence....what was in the words that made these people. Did their language make them feel a different way? 

But my biggest disappointment was my lack of affection or connection to the two main characters - Pearl and Axel. I never really felt like I was inside their heads or their hearts. I struggled to care for their issues or dilemmas.

I persisted past my usual stopping point of the 50 page mark, thanks to the number of comments about the slow burn, but by page 122 I realised that Shell simply wasn't working for me. I had given enough time to a book that wasn't getting under my skin, into my head or heart.

It's disappointing to anticipate a book so much only to find that you've fail to find a way in. Normally not finishing a book doesn't worry me too much - life is too short and there are too many other books I could be reading, but this one has left me with a sense of failure. What have I missed that so many others got? Why was I not able to appreciate the writing style or connect to the characters when so many other bloggers have?

Because I loved Boy, Lost so much, I feel the need to be fair to Shell and Olsson and share some of the reviews that rave about it so that you can make up your own mind.

Sam @Sam Still Reading

Lisa @ANZ Lit Lovers

Theresa @Theresa Smith Writes

Becky @My Becky Blog

Cass @Cass Moriarty Author

• Longlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.

The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright

The World Was Whole by Fiona Wright is a difficult book to review. It's a personal collection of Wright's essays, anecdotes and snippets. They are revealing and specific, almost like reading someone's private journal. Yet, all these sketches are written with such emotional intelligence and compassion that they become universal, finding their own connection with each reader.

I underlined so many sections and googled so many poems so that I could read the whole after being tempted by the snippet (one example being Aubade by Louise Gluck) which is always a sign that a book has affected me or moved me deeply. Wright has a lot to say, from her perspective as someone who has anorexia nervosa, about our bodies, how we perceive ourselves, space, environments, nature, food, habits and rituals.

We only half notice the truly extraordinary landscapes, places and situations that we move through. 

I learnt a lot about the complex nature of anorexia. As someone who derives as much pleasure from food and eating out as I do, it was challenging to hear of how complicated all this gets when you have an eating disorder.

Our days are consumed by making choices about food, by worrying over the things that we might eat or have just eaten.

Yet, most of the women I know have had body issues at varying points in their life. It is hard to escape societal expectation, (false) media images that become the norm and all the conflicting guidelines about how much, how little, what, when and where.

Behaviour, despite what fiction would have us believe, cannot tell us everything, or even very much, about a person.

I enjoyed her observations about the changing face of Sydney suburbs and found a lot to compare about her time in China, where it's 'hard to feel significant' amongst the overwhelming crowds, with my own time there 20 years ago.

But there were also times when I felt incredibly old and maternal towards Wright. I wanted to bundle her into my now, much older arms, (along with my younger self), and plead with them not to be so hard on themselves, to let go the angst and conflict and insecurities that absorb(ed) their days. This time feels like it crawls by at a painfully slow pace, yet it's gone in the blink of an eye. And suddenly you find yourself in your 50's, calmer, at peace, comfortable and secure, in a way that your (my) younger self would have scorned and envied at the same time.

It is complicated, but most of the time we make it more complicated than we need to. It's a journey we all have to go on, at our pace in our own way. I believe it's possible for everyone to eventually feel a sense of belonging and acceptance. You just have to give it time. And be kind to yourself along the way.

The Story of a Baby by Ethel Turner

The Story of a Baby by Ethel Turner was a rather sad, and unexpected excursion into young love, an early marriage and societal expectations about gender roles. In this short story, Turner also took a rather nostalgic look into the changing face of Sydney and it's outer suburbs in the late 1890's.

In cool weather the Red Road was very pleasant walking. It wound up hill and down dale for many a mile till it reached Hornsby, and branched away into different country.

All the way there were gum trees - gum trees and fences; here and there were closer palings and garden shrubs indicating human residence, but they were far apart and the road was lonely. Parallel to it and showing in places between the trees was the single line of the railway. It did not spoil the scenery at all, it rather gave a friendly look to it and reminded the pedestrian that in spite of the bush silences, the towering trees, the vista of the blue hills and mountain-like freshness of the air, he could be in all the buslte and happy fellowship of town in half-an-hour....

In a few years the beautiful countryside will be commonplace suburbs;there will be stucco villas and terrace houses, shops and paved roads; the railway has broken its fastness and the change is inevitable.

The smooth grass slopes, the wooded stretches will live only in memory. The great read and black and silver-limbed gums will be hewn down to make way for spreading civilisation. The blue gracious hills will be thick with chimneys and advertisement boards. There will be a double line of railway, no longer picturesque, and big spreading stations instead of primitive sidings where one held up a 'flag by day and a light at night' to be picked up of the passing train. 

I do love these glimpses into a time gone by. What looks old-fashioned and parochial to our modern eyes was once modern and new to those who lived it. It's a good reminder that our modern times will one day be considered old-fashioned to future generations. It's an idea I wish I could impart to B21 and B18, who seem utterly oblivious to history and their place in it.

Struggling to find one's place is a major theme of The Story of a Baby. Sadly this struggle becomes a battle of wills that ends disastrously for the young family. Dot believes that 'no one literally interpreted that word 'obey' in the marriage service, now that the equality of the sexes was recognised'. Whereas Larrie believes that 'I am your master, and I intend you to know it from this day.' Things rapidly go downhill from here.

Neither parties were particularly sympathetic characters and I ended the story feeling rather sorry for the young baby who was caught in the middle.

I wasn't expecting a battle of the sexes to be at the heart of a story written in 1896. But according to Turner, this kind of thinking was commonplace in the younger generation,

She was going to make this strike for her rights, and in future have the independence due to the nineteenth century married woman.

Perhaps the reason I've been woefully unaware of the nineteenth century feminist perspective before this, is that most of the authors I've read from this era are male?

I read this book as part of Bill @The Australian Legend's Australian Women Writer's Gen II reading week.

Previous Ethel Turner posts:

Seven Little Australians

In the Mist of the Mountains

In the Mist of the Mountains by Ethel Turner

Thanks to Bill @The Australian Legend's Australian Women Writer's Gen II Week I have read my very first ebook from start to finish.

As with almost everything in my life at the last moment, I left it to the minute to prepare for Bill's Gen II week, even though I've known about it for months. I really enjoyed reading my first Ada Cambridge story, Sisters, for last year's Gen I event, so I didn't want to miss out. But with only days to spare, I realised that I had no unread AWW Gen II books on my shelf. Anything I did select would have to be easily sourced and a short story if I was going to have any chance of reading & reviewing it in time.

Normally I hate reading novels on a screen. My one attempt with an eReader a number of years ago, was nothing but an exercise in frustration. However, last week, it dawned on me that the ipad I inherited from my father-in-law, might actually be an okay device to read on in a pinch. As this was now an emergency reading situation, I searched Project Gutenberg for the authors on Bill's Gen II list. I downloaded a few, but the one that jumped straight out at me was an Ethel Turner story.

I confess that I thought that she had only written Seven Little Australians plus a sequel or two. Imagine my delight to discover, whilst holidaying in the Blue Mountains last week, a book by Turner called In the Mist of the Mountains. Serendipity at work I say!

For a full discussion about the Bush Realism that defines this period of Australian writing (roughly 1890 - 1923) please read Bill's post via the link above.

It seems to me that the mythology that evolved about life in the bush at this time in history, came from white men living in an urban environment (Paterson, Lawson, Kendall etc), conscious of their role in creating a unique Australian identity. White settlement was just a hundred years old and many of these men (and women) were the first generation to be born and raised in Australia. Nostalgia for Mother England was something they grew up with, but it didn't necessarily fit in with life as they knew it. Australia was their home and they were looking for something they could be proud of, that they could call their own. The wilderness, the untamed bush landscape, so alien to their parents, was something familiar, unique and heroic to this new generation. A sense of journey or exploration featured in this type of writing and those that took the journey into the bush were admired for their courage, fortitude, practicality and resourcefulness.

To say that I have now became intensely curious about how women writer's fit into this myth making process and how they tackled this topic, is an understatement!

Penleigh Boyd (1890 - 1923, Australia) Blue Haze. 1919

In the Mist of the Mountains may not be the perfect example of Bush Realism, but it was very definite in it's choice of setting and very proud of this unique bush environment.

By 1908, the Blue Mountains was becoming (as it is now) a halfway place between the city and the bush proper. In this short, romantic story, Turner shows us the meeting of city and bush types. We see the locals - the baker, the butcher, the shoe repairman who inhabit the small villages dotted along the train track through the mountains and we see the urban folk who clamber up the misty November slopes to escape summer in the city. We also get to know one young larrikin, Larkin, a lad of fifteen or so who works for the local grocer.

He grew up on the other side of the mountain, on a 'wretched selection where his father...his mother and six or seven children younger than Larkin, fought the losing fight of the Man on the Land.' He dreams of being able to save up his commissions to 'put "a bit of stuff" on the Melbourne Cup...."then mother and the old man shall chuck up that dirty selection..., and the kids can go to school, an' I'll get Polly an' Blarnche a pianner."'

The Lomaxes are a large family belonging to a Sydney judge. The children are holidaying in the mountains to recover from a bout of whooping cough with a governess, while their parents vacation in New Zealand. 'Unlike many Australians, (they) respected the hand of Nature even when it had traced Australian rather than English design on their land.'

Down, down they went into the exquisite gorge; greener and still green grew the way as the path wound farther and farther away from the sunburnt lands overhead. Giant tree ferns grouped themselves together in one place and in another guarded the path in sentinel-like rows. You looked up and sheer walls of rock towered thousands of feet above your head - brown, naked, rugged walls here- and there, where the waterfall dripped, clothed in a marvellous mantle of young ferns. Here a huge, jagged promontory stretched across your way, and the diplomatic path, unable to force a way through, simply ceased its downward bent, and with handrails and steps led you up again.

I really enjoyed reading such obvious love for the Australian environment and particularly admired the judge's desire to create a native garden rather than an English garden in their mountains home.

As a newbie to Project Gutenberg I found myself reading all the details provided including the licensing agreement and the cover page details (below).

Ethel Turner (Mrs H. R. Curlewis)
1908 published by Ward Lock & Co London
Illustrations by J. MacFarlane
Project Gutenberg Ebook 4th Feb 2008

To H.R.C
"They that have heard the overword
Know life's a dream worth dreaming."
Henley.

I realised from this that I knew next to nothing about Ethel Turner's life.

A quick check of the Australian Dictionary of Biography revealed that Ethel Mary Burwell was born in Yorkshire on the 24th January 1870. Her big sister was Lillian Wattnall Burwell (1867 - 1956). Sadly their father died not long after Ethel's birth. Their mother, Sarah Jane Shaw, remarried in 1872, a widower with six children of his own, Henry Turner (sounds rather like the family in Seven Little Australians!) Sadly he also died not long afterwards, in 1878, leaving the family in financial difficulties.

Mrs Turner decided to emigrate to Australia with her two daughters in 1879. In Sydney, she married Charles Cope at the end of 1880 and had a son with him, Charles Rex.

The girls went to Sydney Girls' High School and started a school magazine called Iris, to compete with their friend Louise Mack's Gazette. When the sisters left school they 'co-edited a sixpenny monthly, the Parthenon', while Ethel also contributed to children's pages in various papers until 1919.

In 1894 she published Seven Little Australian, and in 1896 she married Herbert Raine Curlewis, a young Sydney barrister. They had a daughter (Ethel Jean Sophia) and son (Adrian Herbert), living most of their married life at Avenal overlooking Middle Harbour.

The biography claims that,

Her writing showed a continuing tension between her enjoyment of popular and commercial success and her wish to break free from the restrictions of juvenile fiction....A recurring theme in the Turner novels is that of the conflicting demands of the creative and the domestic life.

Both these tensions were on display In the Mist of the Mountain. Part children's summer holiday romp, part rom-com and part literary diversion. I was pleased that this simple summer holiday story morphed into a gentle romance between two ageing characters - the governess and the writer, escaping to the mountains to rediscover his muse. Turner's publishers rebuked her for using Australian slang in her stories, but I'm so glad she ignored them and continued to give her characters a local vernacular. Young Larkin's enthusiastic speech was a delight to read.

Turner wrote thirty-four volumes of fiction, three of verse, a travel book, plays, and miscellaneous verse and prose before her death on the 8th April 1958. She also left behind journals and letters that have been published in 1979 and 1982. According to wikipedia, In the Mist of the Mountains was originally published in 1906.

Ethel Turner posing in the window of her study at her Mosman home, ‘Avenel’ 1928 (Cazneaux)