Review of A Child's Book of True Crime and The Engagement

It’s apt to finish up my reviewing for the Australian Women Writers Challenge for the year (aside from one more, which will appear in my round-up of diversity issues in a week or so) with one of my favourite authors, Chloe Hooper.

I read Hooper’s The Child’s Book of True Crime many years ago, and returned to it over Christmas because I realised it had similarities with her third book, The Engagement and I wanted to look at these.  The first novel is set over the course of a week and follows a young schoolteacher, Kate Byrne, who has been having an affair with Thomas Marne, the father of one of her students.  Running parallel with this is the story written by Thomas’ wife, Veronica, about a murder that occurred in the town a generation before.  As events unfold, Kate is threatened by anonymous phone calls and believes someone has tampered with her car.  Interspersed with the heightening tension is the story of cast of Australian animals, such as a koala, Tasmanian tiger and kookaburra, which have investigated the previous murder of Ellie Siddell, and comments on Kate’s embroilment.  The reader is led to suppose that there’s a parallel between the Ellie’s predicament, and Kate’s own, and that she will be killed.  

It was because of this cast of animals, and the lushness and rhythm of the writing, that I loved this novel.  It was an inventive, clever and brilliant debut, but I remembered that it had confused me, and that the ending was murky.  On re-reading it, I realised this was because it was narrated in first person by a young woman whose imagination runs riot, rendering her unreliable.  The closing pages are described when she’s intoxicated and, by the final pages, in a state of hysteria, so it’s hard to work out what is going on. Ultimately I think the book was too brief to hold together the competing strands, a sense that was compounded by the fact that there was no firm explanation of Ellie Siddell’s murder.  While this irresolution might speak to a sense of how the past can never be contained, for me it was just far too chaotic to be successful.

Having said this, it’s easy to see that Hooper already has a command of her craft in her first novel.  Woven through the narrative are the observations of her fourth grade students on morality, which contrast with Kate’s apathy on her actions.  Through a similar form of mirroring, the theme of murder is also reflected in the destruction and disease of the native animals commenting on Ellie and Kate.  Hooper also creates a sense of the Gothic not just through the frequent contemplation of Ellie’s murder, but also through a school excursion to Port Arthur and a scene where her car breaks down, forcing her to walk along an empty road for help, which she finds in a man who shoots native animals for money.  It’s here, in a description of the man’s shed, that Hooper articulates (brilliantly, I thought) the incomprehensibility of men:

This space: it smelled of man.  It smelled of men when they were alone.  I wished suddenly that my father, or my grandfather, had better prepared me for how foreign men were.  I wondered what they even thought, with those blank faces.  It was like gauging the sea.  In high school we sat in sex education and blew up condoms, sending them flying across the room, but no one mentioned that when men made polite conversation it would always seem like an interaction that had been dubbed (113).

The opacity of the shooter, and the threatening tone of the section which comes after this, where he helps Kate with her car, is replicated in The Engagement.  This novel is also written in first person, with an unreliable narrator who has found herself out of depth, financially and then emotionally, and who is also somewhat gauche about her sexuality.  Having run out of money in England, and pursued by debts that she can’t pay in the wake of the financial crisis, architect Liese Campbell begins work for her uncle in Australia as a real-estate agent.  There she meets Alexander Colquhoun and begins a sexual liaison with him, for which she is paid, beginning in the apartments which she shows him in Melbourne, and culminating in an invitation to spend a weekend at Alexander’s house in the country for a sum that will release Liese from her financial woes.  There ensues a psychological drama in which Liese, and therefore the reader, tries to work out what Alexander’s intentions are.

After the magic of The Child’s Book, and the potency of The Tall Man, Hooper’s non-fiction account of the death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island, I confess to feeling a little deflated by this work.  The writing was more controlled, but had lost some of the sensuality of the first work, which led to a sense of dislocation.  Liese comments that ‘My own desire could make me feel obscene.  It could make me feel sluttish and out of control … the money seemed a way to manage this.  It gave my vast and clumsy longing a neater shape, a strategic purpose’ (281).  Yet, throughout the narrative, there isn’t really a sense that Liese enjoys her transactions.  It was also unfortunate that this novel was released during the brouhaha over Fifty Shades of Grey, as Hooper herself asked at a Brisbane Writers Festival event, ‘Have I written a literary Fifty Shades of Grey?’  For me, it held nothing of the erotic, nor was it really meant to, for at its heart it is a psychological drama that uses sex to explore power relations between men and women.  This is summed up in a the hesitation of a bondage scene between Alexander and Liese:

As he bent over me – leaning as he might over a sheep that needed tethering – I supposed we were both thinking how bad the other was at this game.  I was admonishing myself for not quite taking control, or not taking control in quite the right way.  It was supposed to be the person paying whose hands were tied, wasn’t it? (48).

Here, the domestic image of the sheep and its tethering is all that’s needed to deflate any suggestion of arousal (for that, turn to the opening of Krissy Kneen’s Affection).  In addition, the difficulty of knowing who, exactly, is in control, and whether Liese is really trapped or if it’s her imagination, is what propels the narrative.  By the end of the novel, Liese is questioning herself, and so is the reader, to the point where it’s hard to tell what is reality and what is fiction. 

In both novels, the question of sexuality and power is paramount.  The female characters believe that sexuality is a path to influence, but with this comes the usual fatuous typecasting by the male characters that, if a woman likes sex, she’s bound to be a whore.  Thus Kate discovers that her number is written in the men’s toilets at the pub, and Liese is cast into the role of prostitute by Alexander.  Yet neither women seem to be wholly in control of their sexuality which, cleverly, completely destabilises the Madonna/whore dichotomy with which we are plagued.  Sexuality for both men and women is never clear-cut, and Hooper does a wonderful job of both illuminating and playing with this.  I can’t wait to see what she does next. 

On Beauty

When I was a girl, I was a little on the plump side.  Comments such as ‘You’re like the side of a house’ or ‘You look like the back of a bus’ were occasionally levelled at me, although looking at photos of myself, I hardly seemed fat, just a little round.  Once, playing cricket with our cousins, I swung and missed the ball and complained that I couldn’t see it coming.  ‘That’s cos you can’t see past your stomach,’ said a cousin, when in reality it was poor coordination caused by meningitis.  Little wonder, then, at 13, I developed the obligatory eating disorder and lost so much weight that green and purple bruises dotted my body, like Cate in Entitlement.  When we moved off the farm and into town, I stopped running because the tarmac was a poor substitute for paddocks.  My weight swung in the other direction and I slumped into self-disgust.  Then, on going to uni, I was so stressed I was nauseous every time I ate something, so I largely stopped eating, and lost 6 kilos in 6 weeks.  That’s when I discovered that I was in possession of an hourglass figure and that, after all those years of torment for being too bulky, I was actually beautiful.  

I confess I felt a bit like Cinderella, and to a girl who was used to being unseen and unnoticed, except for being unattractive and disabled, this was magical.  And then I learned about silk frocks and stilettos, and the charm of having a nice figure was magnified.  However, over the years I’ve become increasingly ambivalent about my looks.  It’s what men seem to appreciate about me most, and I feel as though I constantly need to remind them that the real me is the woman who learnt to successfully negotiate severe deafness, who got herself to America and England to study, and who has published two novels.  At the same time, as someone who, because of an adolescence of ostracism, has never shaken off the habit of hiding her disability, it’s hard not to be relieved that beauty deflects attention from my deafness.  Often I chide myself for complaining about it at all, for there are many girls who would want to be noticed while walking down a busy street.  And at other times, again, there is still that unadulterated pleasure in wearing a beautiful dress that accentuates these looks that, by sheer chance, I have been given.

When P left, I was assailed with self-doubt, and ordered Susan Johnson’s On Beauty in the hope that it might shed some light on how an intelligent woman also blessed with looks (for Johnson has both) might negotiate her interactions with men.  ‘Beauty is not neutral’ Johnson opens her essay, which shines with her usual lovely turns of phrase, such as ‘the enfeebled pearly light of the winter’s sky at dusk’ (7) in London, describing that unrelenting grey sky much more delicately than I ever could, while her observation that ‘a female version of beauty might involve a circle perhaps, a ceaseless graceful line that endlessly turns back on itself’ (30) might be applied to her latest novel, My Hundred Lovers.

Johnson cites her research on beauty in the British Library, that place where I struggled to stay focussed on my thesis, where I hated the bleak cold outside and where, at Starbucks across the road while I was drinking a coffee, the fourth youngest cousin phoned from Australia to tell me his father-in-law had died unexpectedly, and asked if I could suggest a poem for the funeral.  Johnson refers to Proust, Ruskin, Hogarth, Aristotle, Plato (where are the women writers on beauty, I wanted to know – were there really none?), and describes the horror of war, with its absence of beauty, quoting an account of a lieutenant colonel visiting the concentration camps after the Second World War was over.  It made my stomach turn as I stood in the crowded bus to work, waiting for the traffic to move outside the Gabba.  

The essay became interesting when it got personal, and when Johnson described her own beauty, or how she felt the lack of it.  Beauty is subjective, she concludes, and there are ‘vast discrepancies in our accounts of human beauty and in particular our own ambiguous understanding of our own worth’ (61).  Here I found an echo of my own thoughts: how can one be assured of what one is worth, if one is liked predominantly for one’s looks?  Ought I to be blamed for wearing a tight dress that shows a small waist, instead of a hessian sack that covers everything, particularly as a feminist who is wary of the relentless male gaze?  And should I be more confident about my deafness instead of trying to hide it with a feminine frock and a smile?  After all, it’s amazing how many people thing you’re listening to them if you watch attentively and smile prettily.  Sometimes I feel caught up in a myriad of cultural currents that I just don’t have the skill to negotiate.  Johnson’s neat and lovely volume, while it didn’t give me the answers I needed, did at least reassure me that responses to beauty are never cut-and-dried, and that I am right to be confused.

It is because of this history of ambivalence about beauty that I was absolutely fascinated by Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts.  I picked the book up because I vaguely knew that some had thought it a good read and, more pressingly, because it was about sea creatures.  My next novel involves a mermaid so I’m reading books on this theme to see how other authors have presented their material.  I was completely unprepared for how good the book would be, and avidly followed its unfurling themes.

It is the story of Misskaella, shunned from her island town of Rollrock for being ugly.  Her female sisters and peers grow up and marry, but she has no chance of that, for ‘no Rollrock man could look on me without scornful laughter or fear’ (65-66).  When she discovers she can summon selkies, gorgeous women from the hides of seals, she takes her revenge.  Men become intoxicated with the selkies and leave their wives, and the wives in turn leave the island.  

As I read, I wondered if the novel would be an indictment of our lust for women’s beauty and preference for female passivity, but it veered away from this, becoming a meditation on homesickness, for the selkies missed the sea, and the men moped because their wives were unhappy.  I liked that it wasn’t so black and white, and that it became a story about the sadness caused by longing, rather than a story entirely about punishment.  And, although I was uncomfortable that the men were so consumed by these pretty, languid women, I was impressed that Lanagan still rendered the women with such humanity.  They were beautiful, but they weren’t banal.  Rather, they were otherworldly creatures, and her blending of their seal and human characteristics was superb, as in the following scene where they catch up for tea and conversation, and become more themselves:

Then one of them would sigh and cross from table to armchair or settee or fireside stool, or even settle to the floor.  All the mam’s movements would suddenly change, slowing and swaying, and their voices would lower from so bright and brittle … Their talk would grow less proper, and have more sighs in it, and more seal: the high crooning, whistles and coughs of their attempts were always followed by laughter, or a shaking of the head (247).

If I can write as well as this in my third novel, I’ll be very happy indeed, for this is truly a splendid book – one of my favourites for this year, along with Anna Funder’s All That I Am and Gillian Mears’ Foal’s Bread.  If you’re stuck for Xmas presents, buy it.  Even if you’re not stuck, still buy it.

I turn 35 in January, and sometimes in the mirror I contemplate the gradual furrowing and folding of my body, wondering if I will actually mind ageing all that much: the weight of the male gaze will be gone, and I will grow into the person I always was.  However, beauty, like one’s children, is something that’s on loan, and I think I ought to make the most of it while it lasts.

Review of The Rest is Weight and Gone

It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon when I began this, with light filling my flat.  I haven’t been able to sit at my desk, with the light, for months.  I am tired and unwell again, but then, after a year in which I travelled overseas twice, edited and published a novel, and negotiated two failed relationships, I think some tiredness is justified.  Soon I will head to Parental Unit’s for Xmas, and thence to the beach with P&T, whereupon I will sleep and swim and sleep some more.  And drink Pimms with strawberries and mangoes, and lie by the pool and read.

Before I leave, I need to head to the library to return my overdue books, one of which is Jennifer Mills’ ‘Gone’.  I first heard of Mills on Twitter, when her book of short stories, ‘The Rest is Weight’, came out.  The cover was so good that I picked the book up from Avid Reader and began reading.

I don’t generally gravitate towards volumes of short stories, preferring to read them in literary journals or embedded among other works.  I discovered this on reading Alice Munro in my first English Christmas at the house of friends in Dorset, where I couldn’t get warm unless I was sitting by the fire with a doona and two blankets piled over me.  Munro is such a sophisticated and skilful writer that I found each time she drew me into a story, I became so attached to the characters that there was a little heartbreak every time the story ended.

My experience with Mills’ stories was similar, although I didn’t have quite the same rapport with her that I had with Munro.  It may have been the cadence of the stories’ endings, for they often concluded the same way, with an abstraction that became frustrating after a while.  Or it may have been that the tone, although her characters varied widely and the writing that described them was highly polished, didn’t alter than much.  This set me to wondering, and worrying, about my own style.  It seems that at some point a writer becomes fixed in the way they write, and I wonder if this can be averted.  While I’m changing genres for my next novel, and moving into a kind of magic realism, I’m conscious that the very descriptive way in which I write might be more difficult to change.  It’s compelled me to try and start writing short stories that are different to those I’ve been doing, to see if I can shake myself up a bit.

All this aside, there were some absolute gems in Mills’ volume, including ‘The Air You Need’, about a mother taking care of her son who immerses himself in water every night, ‘saving for a pool of their own, but after the psychiatrists’ bills, the medication, the plastic, the seals, the oxygen, twenty years of it, there is very little left to live on’ (180).  It was peculiar and wonderful, particularly when my discovery of the narrator caused me to go back and read the story again. 

Halfway through the collection, I borrowed ‘Gone’, Mills’ second novel, for which she was shortlisted for a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist Award this year.  It follows Frank, a young man just out of prison, across the continent to his old home near Halls Creek, haunted by the memory of his feral brother Jake and the crime that landed Frank in prison.  The plot is propelled by Frank’s movements and the people that he meets who, like those in Mills’ short stories, are often disenfranchised, hovering on the fringes of society. However, although there were some troubling sorts, they never transformed into anything really menacing, the result of which was a subdued plot, almost as flat as the landscape that Frank crossed.  Yet the tone was gritty and bleak, and I enjoyed that, as I did lines such as ‘In this light, anything delicate is quickly broken up’ (214).  The last few chapters, in which the mystery of Frank’s relationship with Jake unfolded, were the most chilling and absorbing, and I found myself wishing for this intensity throughout the rest of the work.

On the whole though, I liked Mills’ writing.  It seemed that there was a leap in quality from the second novel to her short stories, but many of these were written either before or at the same time, so perhaps it was that she works better in a shorter form.  Either way, I’m looking forward to seeing what she comes up with next.

These two reviews are part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge, a wonderful initiative set up by Elizabeth Lheude to counter the gender imbalance in reviewing books.  In early January I’ll be posting a round-up of reviews covered in 2012, looking specifically at diversity.  In the meantime, if you have a moment, it would also be wonderful if you could fill in this survey on reading (you don’t have to be part of the challenge to fill it in): http://australianwomenwriters.com/2012/12/03/what-impact-has-aww-had-in-2012/

On Journeys

I’ve made it back from India, where I was battered about with culture shock, but otherwise had an excellent time.  My red sony eReader was fantastic, and saved me carrying around the brick-size book five of Game of Thrones, and Edith Wharton’s The Reef which, even for a Wharton fan, was supremely disappointing.  I also read Willa Cather’s My Antonia, a recommendation from H., and loved the distilled descriptions of the American countryside.  I’ll write up my travels in another post, probably when I get to Parental Unit’s in a few weeks, as I remain waylaid by exhaustion.  In the meantime, I have a stack of books on my desk accruing library fines as they await reviewing for the Australian Women Writer’s Challenge, and it seems apt to pick out two which are about journeys.

I picked up Mardi McConnochie’s The Voyagers as she’d been mentioned in James Bradley’s blog, and I loved the cover.  It’s the story of Stead and Marina, who meet briefly while Stead, a sailor, has shore leave.  After three days, Stead leaves, and not long after Marina sails to London for her musical career, with Stead’s promise that he’ll meet her there at New Year’s Eve.  However, Marina’s career is thwarted, the second world war comes, and the lovers spend years trying to find one another.

It took me a while to get into the novel because the writing didn’t grab me, but once I reached the end, I found images lingering afterwards: Marina playing piano at a club in Shanghai, waiting for Stead while Singapore fell, trying to survive in Changi prison camp with an adopted baby.  There must have been a wealth of research behind those scenes but it was held lightly; perhaps almost too lightly, I thought, as I craved more detail and depth.

The story didn’t leave me with much to think about, aside from these rather beautiful scenes and one other aspect: Marina’s sister, Bea.  An artist living in Paris, she meets Marina in London and takes care of her for a while.  When Marina loses her place at the music school after Bea has done all she can for her, Bea’s patience snaps.  

‘I have to work,’ Bea insisted.  ‘My work is my life.  And that means making sacrifices.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Marina said.  ‘What have you ever had to sacrifice?’

Bea’s face crumpled a little. ‘I’ve made sacrifices,’ she said.

‘Like what?’ Marina demanded.  But Bea just shook her head angrily, refusing to be drawn on the subject.  (128)

In the context, the suggestion is that Marina has given up her own child in order to paint.

The internal conflict between an artistic life and motherhood is one that fascinates and concerns me, and I was disappointed that Bea’s story wasn’t returned to, or her dilemma elaborated on.  Instead, all we have of her dedication and sacrifice is Stead’s observation of her features:  ‘She was older than Marina, with a sterner cast of feature and a very determined jaw.  Her eyes were brown, sharp and serious’ (82).  However, this was Marina’s journey, rather than her sister’s, so perhaps I was expecting too much in this sense.

The story is also saved from becoming a predictable war-torn romance through its shifting narrative, moving between Stead and Marina’s voices, and backwards and forwards in time, with Stead’s search for Marina becoming a board from which to dive back into the past of Marina’s story.  Ultimately, Marina comes across as the more interesting character, her estrangement from music mirroring her loss of self which, in Changi, became a means of expressing a newer, tougher, woman: ‘something inside her began to unravel, and then to knit itself into something new’ (240).  Meawhile Stead appears well-meaning, but hopeless, and whose hopelessness, in causing so much heartache, becomes malign.

In all, although it was light, I really quite enjoyed this novel, and am tempted to look up some of McConnachie’s earlier works.

Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air (2006) won the David Unaipon award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing and was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year.  It’s a series of short stories narrated by May, a young Indigenous girl, as she grows into adulthood.  Her father has disappeared, her mother dies, her aunt is an alcoholic, her brother leaves home, and May sets out on her own.  Despite abuse, poverty and sadness, the world around her is rendered beautifully through Winch’s poetic writing.  Sometimes this is discomforting, such as in ‘My Bleeding Palm’, where a scene of violence is hinted at through the press studs down the side of a man’s tracksuit pants.  The popping sound they make reminds May of ‘Bubble wrap.  Lemonade burps as Billy and me push each plastic blister between finger and thumb, choking on each other’s laughter.  Popping giggles silence violence grunts’ (36).  The juxtaposition of lovely memories with the violence of the scene serves to heighten its horror, and far more effectively than if it had been described in detail.

At times the lusciousness of the language becomes a little irritating because the metaphors jump around a bit, as with the first chapter, ‘Swallow the Air’, where a dead stingray is likened to ‘a plastic raincoat sleeping on the stone’, ‘a fat man in a tight suit after a greedy meal’ and ‘an angel fallen’, while its tail is a ‘garden hose’ and its blood oozes ‘paint like liquid, the colour of temple chimes’.  There’s just too much going on.  At other times, however, the imagery is controlled and works efficiently, such as in the lines ‘We find sherbet-coloured coral clumps, sponge tentacles and sea mats, and bluebottles – we bust them with a stick’ (22).  This operates almost at the level of poetry, with the run-on lines and alliteration stopped abruptly by segmenting the sentence with a dash, mirroring the whacking of bluebottles.  Winch’s characters are also wonderfully delineated through moving stories, such as her mother scrimping to buy a set of saucepans from a travelling salesman.

This is May’s story about finding herself, her mother’s people, and her home.  By the end of her journey she understands that ‘The land is belonging, all of it for all of us.  The river is that ocean, these clouds are that lake, these tears are not only my own.  They belong to the whales, to Joyce … to Billy, to Aunty, to my nannas, to their nannas, to their great nannas’ neighbours.  They belong to the spirits’ (183).  It’s a testament to the will of Indigenous people that they struggle to rebuild their families fractured by white settlement, and they try to recover that wholeness described by May, and that they continue do so after centuries of ill-treatment, as an old Indigenous man says to May when describing the abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests on ‘the little fellas … Who’s gunna speak up for em little fellas?  Other people don’t understand, when that bad spirit happens to family, it stays in the family, when we born we got all out past people’s pain too.  It doesn’t just go away like they think it does’ (170).

Both May and Marina show their readers that, by journeying through difficult terrains, and by persisting despite heartache, one can reach a stronger sense of self.  Incidentally, both books are a great read if you’re ever on the road, or in the air.

In which the Whites go to Magnetic Island

I grew up on a property of 5,500 acres with my family and 6 cousins, 2 sets of aunts and uncles and 1 set of grandparents.  There were 17 of us altogether and, with 9 kids, there was always someone to play with, plus 9 birthdays a year, and 9 cakes from the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cook Book.

We left the farm when I was 15, and occasions for catching up with the cousins have become rarer, usually only happening at weddings or at Christmas, where there is much drinking, singing and carrying on (for they are a bunch of showoffs, myself no doubt included).  It is also very loud.  I am the quietest, and that’s only because I have a disability and can’t hear enough to join in (which is really saying something).  So there was much joy when CousinG announced that she would be having her nuptials on Magnetic Island and we could meet up again.

Sister booked us a flight, on the proviso that I would pay her back as I haven’t a brass razoo to rub together these days.  We caught a taxi to the airport, whereupon she downloaded her latest drama to me (and later gave the short version to H.  ‘Why didn’t I get the short version?’ I complained.  ‘Because you were a captive audience,’ she replied).  I was wearing a rather short silk tunic which, when I walked from the tarmac up the steps to the airplane (tottering a little due to high heels and too-heavy hand luggage), blew up to reveal my undies, and was brushed down by the girl behind me, while her boyfriend tried to look askance.  

‘I think I’m wearing nice knickers,’ I mused, and continued up the stairs.  When making a fashion faux pas (another example might be getting one’s stiletto heel caught in pavement cracks), the best thing to do is to look as if it happens every day of one’s life, and proceed as if all is quite normal.

At Townsville airport we met H, who had flown up from Sydney, and caught a taxi to the ferry.  While I stared out the window, H & Sister chatted vigorously to the driver, who had a senior moment and forgot mid-conversation what he was talking about.  

Townsville was quite pretty, with the sea on one side, orange, rocky hills on the other, and old, renovated buildings in between, but it appeared I was the only person there in possession of high heels.  P had once told me a story of a ship at the docks that was unloading cattle, when a cow slipped off the ramp into the water.  It managed to scramble out, whereupon it ran down the main street of town, startling coffee sippers in the cafes.  

‘Just at the time Townsville was trying to take itself seriously,’ he added, making me laugh.  I was disappointed, this time, that I didn’t see any cows.

We rollicked on the ferry to Magnetic Island, which was named (or rather, re-named from Yunbenun, that given to it by the first Aboriginal inhabitants) because it supposedly messed up Captain Cook’s compass as he passed by in 1770.  We were picked up by CousinA, the eldest.  She, Sister and CousinG, who was getting married, had left misspelled notes to faeries in our grandmother’s garden.  She drove us past the roadworks to Geoffrey Bay, where we were staying with her and her three kids, while all the rellies were next door.

It’s at times like these that I’m really glad I’m deaf.  While the kids ran around and chirped, and woke everyone up at the crack of dawn (not my favourite time), I immersed myself in A Fringe of Leaves and slept in.  H & I also swam, whereupon I became dotted with sea lice bites, and walked to the forts that had been used during WW2, on which my boss’ father had worked as an engineer.  We saw a koala – I think the first I have ever seen in the wild – and chatted about boys and dates, my next novel and H’s new job, and mused over some blossoms that smelled thickly like honey, and smiled at the German tourists passing us by.

CousinG was not fussed about her wedding.  She picked a spot and had coffee with us in the morning while her mother fretted over the sand, smoothing it with a palm leaf.  The ceremony was in late afternoon, and I put on a floaty, pink silk Sacha Drake frock that I bought last year and have hardly worn.  We were surprised and proud to actually see CousinG, ever the tomboy, in a dress, & when she started crying halfway through, she set off Sister as well.  It was a lovely ceremony, and afterwards I collected my pink stilettos (having worn thongs on the sand) and was driven to the reception in Horseshoe Bay, which was also very pretty.  

We left on Monday morning to have a look at the aquarium in Townsville, as I needed to do some research for my next novel (which is about mermaids and the aquatic ape).  We caught the Turtle Hospital tour, had lunch, and then wandered around the exhibits.   One of the volunteers, a blue-eyed, blonde-haired young man who had talked to us about the turtles, had some time on his hands and walked along with us to explain things about the fish.  He had finished his degree in Marine Biology, but worked on fish, not turtles.  

I kept an eye on my watch, as we needed to get to the airport and I can’t abide being late, and eventually hustled Sister & H to the exit.

‘Oh,’ H swooned as we walked out, ‘who wasn’t half in love with that boy by the end of it?’  

I was inclined to agree, but was concentrating on finding a taxi, and sent H into the pub to ask where we could find a taxi rank.  He came running out just as one pulled over to the kerb.

‘Why is he running?’ the driver asked Sister and I.

Apparently, no one runs in Townsville.  

This was another chatty driver, who had a small gold Buddha perched on his dashboard.  Once we reached the airport, I asked my siblings, ‘What was he talking about?’

‘Well, what wasn’t he talking about?’ Sister replied.  I gathered it was about the cyclone, and living in Sydney. 

Sister made snide comments about having got there too early, which I ignored.  When we finally boarded, Sister looked down at my thongs and asked, ‘Where are your high heels, Jess?’

‘Gone troppo,’ I said shortly.

From the plane window, I looked down at smoke from bushfires tangled in the clouds, then fell asleep, and the sun burnt my chest.

Unearthed

I have been published in the Review of Australian Fiction!  Excitement!

The RAF is an online journal launched this year by two Bris Vegans, Matt Lamb (now in Tassie) and Phil Crowley.  They pair one established author with one emerging author in a mentoring arrangement, and publish a story by both authors in each issue.

My story, 'Unearthed', is about a somewhat belligerent young deaf woman who works as an itinerant farmer.  I've been paired with witty and quirky Elizabeth Stead, niece of the wonderful Australian author Christina Stead.

A copy of the issue will only set you back $2.99 (for both stories), and you get to enjoy a bit of bush gothic with your morning cuppa.  Better still, you can subscribe for $12.99 and sample a wide range of Australian literature - there's something new every fortnight.  I also get royalties for this story, and as I'm staring down the barrel of destitution while I write my 3rd novel next year, any spare income will keep me off the streets.

Click here to start reading.

Review of Am I Black Enough for You?

I’ve been aware of Anita Heiss’ new book for a while, after its promotion at Avid Reader and the fact that our agents work at Curtis Brown, but it was only recently that I found time to get to the library to borrow it.  I’m always glad to learn more about Aboriginal culture, and this book gave me a number of things to think about.

A memoir, the work details Heiss’ life to date, outlining her connection to her country (Wiradjuri ie central NSW), the history of her Austrian father and Aboriginal mother and their meeting, her career as an academic and writer, and her relationship with and nurturing of Aboriginal kids and young adults.  It also debunks a number of myths about and expectations of contemporary Aboriginal women.  Pulling the work together is an account of Andrew Bolt’s defamatory claim that Heiss identified as Aboriginal to advance her career, and her successful refutation of this, along with eight others, through a class action.  

One of the elements that stood out for me was the language used to define Aboriginal people.  For example:

‘When western societies evolve they call it “modernization”.

When [Aboriginal people] evolve we’re told we have “cultural loss”.

Western societies have “development” but when we develop we’re told we’re experiencing “cultural disgintegration”.

Western societies are allowed to “progress” but when we do, we’re told we’re “trapped between two worlds” ...

Western societies, as mentioned above, are allowed to have one identity with diverse heritages but we are told we are “half-caste”, “part” and so on’ (124-125).

Reading this, I could understand why the case mounted against Bolt was for the right for self-determination for Aboriginal people – that is, ‘the right and ability to identify as Aboriginal’ (168).  People, I think, tend not to realise how important the words are until they are affected by them – witness the Prime Minister’s impassioned speech against Abbott’s tiresome misogyny this week.  And unfortunately, people who are in positions of power don’t see – or choose not to see – the ramifications of their words (and this is why I wage a war - at the risk of being seen as too sensitive by my friends - against the use of the word ‘gay’ in the context, ‘oh, that’s so gay’ because it belittles the gay community).

While words can be used to drag down or degrade people, they can also be used to bolster them.  I can see why Heiss chose to move away from academia into writing fiction that could be accessed by a wide range of people.  As she writes of her ‘choc-lit’ novels:

‘I have heard whispers that I am ‘dumbing down’ my writing and betraying readers of my serious work, but those who criticise the genre miss the point of the efforts I’ve made as a Black writer in Australia to broker new publishing ground … I’d hazard a guess that there are more Aboriginal women reading my novels than reading any Indigenous-authored academic books, unless the women are working in academia themselves’ (215).

As someone who moves in and out of academia, I can relate to this.  When I’m teaching students or at conferences, I love learning new ideas and making connections in texts – but I also resent the opaque language of philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari which can only be understood by a select few.  I believe in writing works that are enjoyable and accessible, and if people get some ideas out of them along the way, then that’s great too.

By the time I finished the memoir, it was clear how integral her Aboriginal culture is to Heiss’ identity, and how ludicrous Bolt’s accusations were.  In his article, Bolt had written that Heiss’ ‘self identification as Aboriginal strikes me as self-obsessed, and driven more by politics than by any racial reality’ (79).  To call someone ‘self-obsessed’ for being themselves was absurd.  It would be like, I thought, describing my writing about deafness as self-advancement, when it’s an unavoidable part of my everyday existence, and even that isn’t such a strong simile because I don’t identify with Deaf culture.

I was also full of admiration for Heiss – for her energy and workaholism, her unabated endeavours to help Aboriginal people, and her concerted efforts to remain positive. 

For things have been a bit rough lately.  After getting over the shock of the unexpected and abrupt termination of my relationship with P, an implacable sadness has descended.  I also belatedly discovered that I hadn’t been successful in my application for an Australia Council grant for the fifth time running and promptly dissolved into tears at work in front of my poor boss.  I don’t often cry, usually it’s only when I’m absolutely overwrought, so I think I have generally been run ragged in the last few weeks.  And, although it’s an unfair comparison, I can’t help but think of emigrant Georgiana Molloy on the shores of Augusta in 1829, having lost her first baby in a completely alien land, and later writing to her friend Helen Storey back in Scotland, ‘I thought I might have had one little bright object left me to solace all the hardships and privations I endured and have still to go through.’

However as I was walking to catch the bus to work earlier this week, and thinking about writing this review, I contemplated Anita’s repetition of the things for which she was grateful.  Sometimes, especially for someone with a saturnine disposition who is too hard on themselves, it’s easy to slip into self-absorbed despair, and a little perspective never goes astray.  So I thought it would be helpful to also compile a list of things for which I am grateful:

1. 1.The jacarandas and golden raintrees are in full bloom, as is the jasmine along my neighbour’s fence.  It’s also becoming very friendly with my washing line, and entwining itself therein.

2. 2.I have fabulous friends who buy me eReaders and bottles of Moet and Chandon, who invite me to exhibition openings, who drink wine with me at French cafés and regale me with entertaining stories, and who help me sweat myself into my summer figure at yoga.

3. 3.Julia Gillard took Tony to the cleaners this week.  While the Canberra journalists didn’t even recognise the importance of what she was doing for women, social media went totally haywire.  It was wonderful and amazing.

4. 4.I have a short story coming out in the Review of Australian Fiction tomorrow, and I’ve been paired with Elizabeth Stead, niece of Christina Stead.  The lovely people at the RAF have also organised a deal to sell the story through Avid Reader with Entitlement ie buy the novel, and get the story free!  

5. 5.I have parents who support me as a writer by helping put a roof over my head, so that even if I didn’t get the grant, I can probably just survive on two days of work a week, for the next 6 months, after which time I’ll hopefully be able to get a postdoc, otherwise I’ll start tutoring again.  This means I can get the first draft of my third novel done in the next 6 months.  I won’t be able to eat much, or go out, or buy any frocks or shoes, but hell, we only have one life, and I can survive 6 months of deprivation just so I can write.

6. 6.Being single again also means more time for writing, dancing, swimming, and generally recovering from this rollercoaster of a year.

Anita will be speaking at the 5th Anniversay of BlackWords at Avid Reader on Friday 19th October.  BlackWords is a website, searchable database and forum for communication.  It has grown from a subset of the AustLit database recording the published work of some 700 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, to become a rich collection of records covering the lives, writing and storytelling activities of more than 4,800 people.

On Saturday 20 October there will also be a public symposium on BlackWords held at the University of Queensland Art Museum.  Unfortunately I can’t go as I have a cousin’s wedding, but both sound like fantastic events.

On The Oldest Song in the World

When I checked in at the Brisbane airport before going to the conference for the Oz Lit conference in Wellington earlier this year, I discovered the plane was delayed for three hours.  I didn’t properly hear why, but I think it was something to do with the bad weather in Christchurch, which had a knock-on effect with other flights.  I knew this would mean I’d run out of reading material, so I went to the newsagents, and Sue Woolfe’s new novel The Oldest Song in the World leapt out at me.  The cover was gorgeous, with gold writing that mirrored the orange sand beneath a vast Australian sky, with a girl in a pale blue dress carrying her suitcase.  

The story inside it was about Kate, a struggling linguistics student who is asked by her professor to travel to the desert to record the oldest song in the world, which can only be recorded by a woman.  In a bid to save her appalling grades at university, and prompted by the chance to reconnect with a boy she loved in her youth, Kate agrees to her professor’s request.  In the desert, she is forced to change her pace to align with that of the Indigenous people she lives among, and to learn their customs, manners and personalities.  Eventually, she is trusted enough to gain the information she needs, and finds a resolution to the abrupt events of her childhood.

I have no doubt that Woolfe’s research for this novel was exhaustive, not least because she has done dedicated research for her earlier works, Leaning Towards Infinity, The Secret Cure and The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady.  Much of the description of Indigenous life in the novel appears to be first hand, for Woolfe accompanied her daughter on a trip for work experience in a remote Aboriginal settlement in the Northern Territory.  She intended to stay for two weeks, but remained for more than 18 months.  Her observations build a vivid picture, from erratic electricity, to overbearing personalities at the hospital, to the shallowness of visiting politicians.  The scene of a school teacher forcing Indigenous kids to repeat their language after her, is superb (302-306).  The teacher mispronounces their words and the kids remain silent with bewilderment until, in fury, she roars their butchered language back at them.

And yet jostling among these descriptions are clichéd phrases that, I would have thought, an established novelist would have edited away.  For example, when she describes books of Indigenous stories Kate had almost thrown out, Woolfe writes: ‘I’d planned to extinguish unique stories from a culture not my own.  I’d been like a barbarian sacking the libraries of the ancient world’ (272).  While I understand that Woolfe is attempting to represent the gaucheness of white newcomers in Indigenous communities, the clunkiness of Kate’s first person narration often makes her seem unbelievable.

I also found there was something deeply unsettling about the concept of a white woman travelling from an academic institution – although she was ambivalently placed in that institution – into the desert to gain some kind of enlightenment from Indigenous people.  My frustration reached its height when, after watching a ceremony, Kate wakes at dawn and hears a disembodied singing which she describes as: 

a song that wasn’t quite music but was more than sound, a rising and falling like the sea, like a cloud, like the slow march of humanity, like the inevitable, majestic movement of a river.

These people and their ancestors had taught the old earth to sing, I reasoned.  Or perhaps, this most ancient earth had taught them (313).

To me, this essentialises Indigenous people as gateholders to spirituality and ancient history, when their lives are far more multifaceted than this, not least because a large proportion of Indigenous people live in urban areas.  The romantic image of the earth singing also seems dated, as is Kate’s appropriation of it.  While Woolfe gently satirizes the posturing academics for whom Kate works, who want to use the song to bolster their careers, she runs the risk of framing Kate in the same way.  For it seems that Kate takes something from this community – that is, her own self-awareness – without giving anything in return. 

In her novel, Woolfe offers a captivating account of the life of an Indigenous community in remote Australia.  However, the loose backstory of Kate’s history, combined with the two-dimensional nature of her character, means that the novel fails to coalesce, reading more like an anthropological account than a convincing story of a young woman’s journey towards emotional and intellectual maturity.

On Creative Writing Courses

Recently, in Southerly’s blog (which I always enjoy reading), I came across a post by Belinda Castles on the value of creative writing courses.  Belinda is author of Falling Woman, The River Baptists (which won the Vogel, and was awarded Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist in 2008), and Hannah & Emil, recently released by Allen & Unwin.  I’ve put this novel on my reading list but, given the amount of writing/paid work/travel I have to do between now and the end of the year, I probably won’t get to it until Christmas.  

In her post, Castles, who is a teacher of creative writing, gently refutes some of the comments made by Lisa Pryor in an article titled ‘A novel idea turns creative writing into an academic racket’.  Pryor refers to an article in The Guardian containing advice from writers, in which none of them suggest doing a creative writing course to get ahead.  I was surprised to find I had this self-same article rattling around in a box beside my desk, for H had sent it to me while he was still in England.  I have asterisked little bits, viz. ‘Have regrets.  They are fuel.  On the page they flare into desire’ – Geoff Dyer; ‘If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane’ – Colm Toibin; and ‘It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction’ – Jonathon Franzen (Franzie, you must know this downright wrong).

Pryor speculates that these writers’ failure to endorse creative writing courses is ‘because they know that if you can't work out what good writing is by reading widely, if you need it spelled out slowly with the benefit of a circle of plastic chairs and a whiteboard, you lack the mettle to be a great novelist.’   Her complaint is largely regarding ‘the baggage that goes with luring writers into universities’.  Although she has no problem with writers striving to get money any way they can, she concludes that ‘[s]tudents may not realise when they enrol that that the greatest contribution they will be making to writing is providing charitable financial support to the writers who teach them.’

Castles acknowledges these criticisms, but notes that her own experiences weren’t in accordance with them.  While undertaking her PhD in creative writing, she was stimulated and challenged by her peers and the variety in the work they produced, while her contact with academics the ‘careful supervision of long projects is an echo from the old days of close and continuing involvement with publishers’.

Pryor writes that there is a risk of creating homogenised writing if writers are formed in universities, but Castles suggested not, writing that ‘There is an incredible spark that comes from being in a room with people from many different backgrounds writing about fascinating and urgent subjects.’  

You cannot teach someone to write.  In my opinion, the only way to become a good writer is to read incessantly, write obsessively, and observe.  However I do believe that creative writing courses are good starting points, most certainly for me.  I was a young, sheltered country girl with a disability – there was no way I could have taken a year out and starved myself to write a novel.  In fact, the disability was largely the reason why I decided on creative writing, as a careers advisor suggested I needed some way of processing my frustrations.  I enrolled in Creative Writing at Wollongong and, because I wasn’t getting enough stimulation, took on a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English as well.

What I learned in that undergraduate degree was discipline and exercise.  John Scott was my prose teacher in second year and Tony Macris in third year, while Alan Wearne my poetry teacher in my second, third and Honours years.  John was often lugubrious, but sometimes dropped gems into his musings.  ‘I suppose if I wrote the way a professional footballer trained,’ he trundled, ‘I’d be way ahead of my game by now.’  

I took that on board, and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.  After the summer between second and third years, he asked, ‘Have you been drinking or something?’

‘No, just writing,’ I replied, a little embarrassed.

Tony Macris and Alan Wearne also exposed me to different genres every week, so that my writing became elastic as I tried out new forms.  I wish I still had the luxury of time and money to practice like this.  As Belinda writes, ‘For three years, my real job was being a writer. If you have the chance to do the same, and know that you will do something valuable with that rare time, space and encouragement, take that privilege, and make something with it.’

This was largely why I did the Masters at the University of Technology, Sydney.  I finished at Wollongong with first class in double Honours and a university medal, so I could have gone on to a PhD, but I knew that if this happened I wouldn’t be able to write my novel.  So I agree with Pryor that academia is one way for writers to stay alive and write, for I had an Australian Postgraduate Award to write that book.  Castles also observed that writers move in and out of academia.  In my case, my movements are prompted finances (ie I have to teach when I run out of money, which I’ll need to do next year as I’m flat broke, which also means I won’t be producing much work) and boredom (I thrive on the stimulation of new ideas, and universities are where I find them). 

Yet one thing neither Castles nor Pryor comment upon is the possibility of creating professional networks through universities.  Through my Masters course I made a good friend who put me in touch with an editor, who put me in touch with my now-agent.  I’m still in contact with another two friends from that course, and they have both provided invaluable feedback on my novels.  In turn, I also workshop their work, and let them know about any publishing opportunities that I come across.  

Castles also notes that she learned to frame her criticism in writing workshops, a trait which helps her as an editor.  I would argue this is definitely a benefit of such courses, but for me, the real means by which I learned to analyse and review texts was through my BA in English Lit.  I also love the mental acrobatics of literary criticism, and to date my tutoring has been in this field, rather than creative writing.

Thus I was delighted to be asked by Elizabeth Lhuede to participate in next year’s Australian Women Writers challenge by keeping an eye on texts and reviews about diversity.  I’ve almost finished a review of several books by Indigenous and white women writers about Indigenous subjects, and will write another on diversity in the 2012 Challenge by the end of November.

Finally, I was left thinking of a comment author Louise Doughty made in her non-fiction book, A Novel in One Year. (Interestingly, Doughty canvasses the same arguments in the above two articles in their UK context here). I’ve lost the reference to this (or rather, it’s in one of the many folders in my bookshelf), but essentially she was saying that people take up tennis or piano playing because they enjoy it, so why should those who want to write be any different?  Those who want to go on to succeed as writers or winners of the Australian Open will, because that’s what they were born to do, regardless of their circumstances.  

Thoughts on eReaders

I took this past week off work to whack my writing on Rosa Praed into some sort of shape and figure out how to make it readable but, sadly, on Monday the b/f ended our relationship.  This happened a few hours after I’d had my inoculations for India, so for several days I was thrown out of action by despair and by a very tired and useless body.  Which was immensely irritating, on top of everything else, as I was physically unable to find solace in writing, as I usually do.  At least the man had the grace to do it in person rather than by text message, although it is a bit sad that, having been dumped in this manner by a spineless wonder once before, it has become a benchmark for how well men break things off, although these things are never easily done.

Technology may have robbed people of courtesy, but it can still be a source of great pleasure, as an old friend bought me an eReader by way of congratulating me for the publication of Entitlement, and for cheering me up.  I mentioned I wanted the Sony reader, because it comes in red, and I don’t like the design of the Kindle (nor Amazon’s monopolisation of the market), and the Kobo’s padding is a little weird.  And heavens, have I been so excited!  Not only because it’s pretty and red and it fits neatly into my handbag (I mean, how could I ever have taken A Dance With Dragons to read on the bus to work when it’s the same size as my lunchbox?) but because I have access to so many books that are affordable.  For a povo writer, this is pretty darn overwhelming.  Despite my palpitations, however, I still don’t think books will disappear, largely because of their tangibility: their smell, the feel of paper beneath your fingertips, their weight in your hands, and the pleasure of browsing in a bookstore and being among people who also love books.  

What concerns me are libraries.  If books are so cheap that they save one the effort of going to the library, we will lose these wonderful hubs of communality.  Matt Lamb, one half of the Review of Australian Fiction, mentioned once in a conversation that we might return to the days of the salon.  Certainly the salon events at Avid Reader, consisting of discussions with a number of authors, are the ones I enjoy the most, particularly as I’m not teaching at the moment and don’t have access to many like-minded people.  Libraries already do work in this way through author talks and book clubs (as do bookstores, of course), but I wonder if they might need to do more.  However, given that our esteemed premier is proposing cuts in the library sector (despite his being an ambassador for the Year of National Reading – clearly he doesn’t understand what constitutes irony or, as Nick Earls has pointed out, downright hypocrisy), this is probably not even possible.   

I’m taking my reader to India with me (where I’m presenting at a conference on Patrick White), but rest assured I’ll still be pedalling to Stones Corner library to fill up my bicycle basket with books.  Libraries are too valuable to lose my support.