Sad Day, Small City

On the morning of 11th September, I got off the bus at the Mater Hospital and walked to work. Never a morning person, I was thinking of the coffees I would get for my boss and I and how good they would be, and worrying if I would get to the café in time, as it takes me forever to get out the door and onto the bus, and I was running a bit late again. As I approached the intersection of Annerley Road and Stanley Street, however, I realised something wasn’t quite right. The traffic was held up, and there was a long, curving smear on the tarmac. There was also a pair of white sandshoes, a set of A4 papers and an apple, not crushed, but driven into the road.  A little distance away, near the kerb, was a bicycle, untouched. 

I stared, transfixed, hoping that what I was looking at was the result of produce falling from a truck. However, that didn’t account for the sandshoes or the papers. It wasn’t until the policewoman in her yellow fluoro vest asked the people now collecting at the pedestrian crossing if they absolutely had to cross the road. ‘If you don’t want to see something that you can’t unsee, then I wouldn’t recommend going down there.’ It was only then that I realised there had been an awful accident, and that the smear belonged to a human being. 

I and another fellow backtracked and went past the accident on the other side of the road, and I didn’t look. Later that day, the news said a young female cyclist had been hit by a semi-trailer and killed. Her name was Rebekka Tine Lousdal Meyer. She was a Danish student at the University of Queensland and she was 22 years old. That apple, grazed until half of it was gone, showed how hard she had been hit.

Cycling organisations and forums have said for 15 years that this was a bad spot (1999 - http://www.ericmanners.net/blackspots.pdf; 2008 -http://helenabrahams.com/media99.html; 2012 - http://www.cbdbug.org.au/…/2012/CBD-BUG-minutes-20120530.pdf). They have agitated for a Copenhagen style bike lane, but the Brisbane city council didn’t do anything about it.

A minimum passing distance of 1-1.5 metres (depending on the traffic speed) from a bicycle was legislated by the Queensland Government on 7th April 2014, but we need bike lanes, not just more laws. I speak as someone who frequently has to ride on the footpath because it’s not safe enough on Brisbane’s roads.

At the end of that day, a friend told me a friend of hers was a co-worker whose daughter was a paramedic on the scene. ‘Sad day, small city,’ she said. When something bad happens in Brisbane, many people feel it, and on 15th October, Brisbane’s cycling community came together to pay their respects. 

Perhaps that should be qualified. Many people, but not the Brisbane City Council. Someone’s daughter won’t be coming home for Christmas because the Council had 15 years to act on this black spot, and they haven’t. If even the death of a young girl doesn’t move them, what will? 

Please take care on the roads and look out for cyclists, and not just at Christmas, but always.

Review of Heat and Light

I first encountered Ellen van Neerven’s writing at a salon even at Avid Reader in 2013. I often find readings hard because they require so much energy, first to listen and then to imagine, but Ellen’s gripped me. There was (if I heard her correctly) water, a boat, and a woman.

This too, was the image that persisted after I’d closed the appealing covers of her collection of stories, Heat and Light, although on this occasion it wasn’t quite a woman rising from the water, which, incidentally, this is the title of the middle section of this work.

In ‘Water,’ Australia has become a republic and Aboriginal culture is paramount, encouraged and facilitated by the president, Tanya Sparkle. Aboriginal spirituality ‘is on its way to becoming the most popular religion,’ Jessica Mauboy’s song ‘Gotcha’ has become the national anthem, Aboriginal art has become commodified and the national flag ‘is a horrible mash-up job of the old flag and both the Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag. It looks like Tanya Sparkle’s seven-year-old son did it in Paint’ (73). The president has also created a ‘super country’ for Aboriginal people from the twenty or so islands off Moreton Bay. The application criteria is ‘to show how they have been removed or disconnected from their county — priority given to those who don’t even know where they’ve come from’ (74) – a reference to the obligation in current native title law to provide proof of unbroken descent to country. 

However, these islands are inhabited by plantpeople, who are plants with sentience, and they need to be evicted before Aboriginal people can live there. The narrator Kaden is curious about them, and ‘can’t get over how much they look like us’ (84) but is also cautious about their difference: ‘You should see the way they walk through water. Their heads like a tangling piece of reed. And you’ll look closer and see their shoulders swing back and forth like some smooth stroke and it’s frightening’ (89). Larapinta is the one with whom Kaden engages most. She consumes information through her e-reader, from encyclopaedias to Mills & Boon, and acts as a mechanism by which Kaden, and therefore the reader, can question notions of identity, belonging, alienation, the abuse of our natural environment, and how we treat others, human and non-human.

The reason for Kaden’s sardonic overtones in describing this new world for Aborigines becomes clear by the story’s end. The politics reminded me of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, in which Warren Finch’s role as international claimant for peace is undermined by Wright’s bitter humour. The tone in both books serves as a reminder of the disastrous effects of government intervention.

I loved the power at the end of this work; indeed I adored the whole story – it was different, beautifully written, and suffused with a gorgeous wonder for and appreciation of the natural world.

The format of Heat and Light isn’t straightforward, with ‘Heat’ being a collection of stories with linked characters, ‘Water’ being almost a novella, and ‘Light’ having disparate stories. I found it unsettling because my expectations of genre were disrupted, but I also liked that, because it forced me to think and wonder why I’d needed a neat series of stories, or a full-blown novel, at all. Sue of Whispering Gums made a comment about Indigenous literature in the context of Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air, positing that it was stories and their themes, rather than narrative force, that pulled that particular book together, and I think that might also be happening here. After all, it shouldn’t make much difference, for stories tell us who we are, and nourish us and keep us alive, as they do in the marvellously surreal town in ‘Currency,’ where stories are used as barter.

In all of the stories, it’s detail that makes the work spring to life, such as when a newborn, held in an aunt’s arms, ‘made a sound that imprinted on her’ (50). It’s also the dynamics between characters. In ‘Anything Can Happen’, the narrator’s girlfriend Lucy wants to pick her up after having her wisdom teeth out, but her mother weighs in: ‘Lucy’s normally sweet face looked then like a run-over pie. I remembered Mum had made the same face when she commented on my new laptop bag and I said Lucy had made it for me for my birthday. They were both fighting not to be obsolete’ (146). On that note, another beautiful and often elemental part of the stories is that attraction between and desire of women. It’s sensual, quietly uncontrollable, and a bit magical: ‘I sat on the toilet seat and looked down between my legs, amazed at the glistening wet mark on my underwear, like glitter’ (138). 

There are also sudden and frequent shifts from the huge and intangible to the small and particular. Mental illness and love – concepts which are often abstract and hard to get a grip on - are suddenly pulled into reality at the ending of the last story, ‘Sound’, when they cause the narrator’s brother to act in a horrifying way. Be warned: the final page stabs you in the heart.

In his acceptance speech for the Prime Minister’s literary awards, shambolic though they, were Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, generously donated his prize money of $40,000 to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. His reasoning was thus:

‘I hope it might perhaps grow a few things. My mortgage will go on as mortgages do, but if one of those books helps a few children to advance beyond the most basic literacy to one that is liberating, then I will consider the money better spent.

And if just one of those children in turn becomes a writer, if just one brings to Australia and to the world an idea of the universe that arises out of that glorious lineage of 60,000 years of Australian civilisation, then I will think this prize has rewarded not just me, but us all.’

Heat and Light is fresh, innovative and engaging, and it made my brain tingle with all the questions it didn’t answer. I’m a bit desperate to read Ellen’s next work, and was delighted to hear that she’d received a grant Queensland Writers Fellowship for 2015. Funding for talent is badly needed in Australia, not least because we need new narratives to resists the false, leaden and sometime outright ridiculous stories that our government would like us to believe. Books like Ellen’s, that open with a strong Aboriginal woman who ‘wore a red floral dress that dropped off her narrow shoulders’ (4), shimmer with stories that show us a different way to live.

I’m leaving a copy of this book in the studio in Rome for other writers to read, but really, every woman, man and their dogs should be buying it.

Book details: Van Neerven, Ellen. Heat and Light. Brisbane: UQP, 2014.

Purchased from Avid Reader.

This is my 10th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.  

Review of The First Week

Margaret Merrilees’ debut novel, The First Week, had something of the complexity which I was looking for in Snake. It deals with the question of what Europeans have done to the land since settlement, and contemplates what we are to do with that legacy.

It opens with the widowed protagonist, Marian, wandering about the farm in Western Australia that she and her husband have worked. She stops at its border. The land on the other side has been returned to Noongars, but it’s poor quality, the soil having been eroded. Due to clearing, there also aren’t enough trees and shrubs to absorb the rising table water below the surface, which means that the water is bringing salt (which naturally occurs in the soil) with it. The salt makes it hard for vegetation to grow, and so the cycle continues. The implication is that, once Europeans have used up, the land, it’s given back to the original custodians, because the Europeans have no use for it any more. They might see it as trash, but Aboriginal people know that it never is.

Marian’s suspicion of Noongars, and her contemplation of how they could possibly use the land given that it’s so worn out, is soon thrust into sharp relief by a crime committed by her son. She goes to Perth to visit him, and becomes acquainted with his next-door-neighbour, an Aboriginal woman, Lee, whose family had to live on the reserve in the town near her farm. 

What I liked most about this work was the convincing depiction of Marian’s bewildered encounters with the city and its terrifying freeways and trains, her son’s friends and their ideas, and with Lee, with whom her engagement can only occur because she’s desperate to understand her son and his crime. Much of the beginning takes place while she’s in a state of shock and confusion, and this state splits her open and forces us to rethink her approach to things as she puts herself back together. However, it also makes her vulnerable, and the reader cares about what happens to her on account of this.

As Marian’s week progresses, she gets to know Lee better. Shut up and listen, Lee tells her (150), and eventually Marian does, and reconsiders her attitudes. By the end of the novel, she’s (metaphorically) back at the fence, trying to work out what to do with her farm and that border between her and her Noongar neighbours. I found it interesting that the choices she mulled over mirrored those taken by my protagonist in Entitlement.

Salt bubbles up frequently in the work, a reminder that the bad history never stays underground, but wells up, poisonous, and needs to be treated. One of the most striking references to it comes when Marian recalls a holiday by the river at her mother’s with her sons. She jumps into the water ‘and laughed with the sheer pleasure of it and duck-dived. But something was wrong. The taste of the water on her lips was wrong. The water was brackish, where no salt should be … This was a river. [Her boys] saw nothing wrong, would never know that a river should smell of reeds and mud and fresh sweet water. They were the salt generation’ (135). The metaphor is poignant because the salt water didn’t cause problems until deforestation by Europeans, and younger generations are the ones that must deal with this legacy. Although on an ecological level, this problem is a global one, not just confined to Australia. 

I found out about this book through a post by Sue of Whispering Gums about an essay Merrilees had penned on white people writing Aboriginal characters. Merrillees rightly points out, as I indicated in my review of Snake, that one cannot refer to Australia without including an Indigenous consciousness. How to do this, however, is contested. She notes that there’s ‘never going to be a unified Aboriginal view, any more that there is a unified white view. There is no such entity as “the Aboriginal people” to provide answers.

The best thing we can do, she suggests, is to take her character Lee’s advice and ‘Shut up and listen.’ On that note, you can also listen to Melissa Lucashenko’s talk on representations of Indigenous people in her 2013 Colin Simpson Memorial Lecture, while Anita Heiss answered some interview questions for the Wheeler Centre on a workshop she gave on this topic, now available on her website.

The politics of writing Indigenous characters and voices is something I think about repeatedly, even having written a book which does so. I suspect my approach was flawed – the more I read Indigenous literature and about Indigenous people the more I question some of the decisions I made – but I think Sue is on the money when she says writes, ‘Genuine, thoughtful trial-and-error seems to be the way to go. Listen, give it a go, and listen again.’ 

Book details: Merrilees, Margaret. The First Week. Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2013.

Borrowed as an eBook from Brisbane City Council Library.

This is my 9th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Snake

Kate Jennings’ novella has periodically appeared on my radar for the last few years, particularly as I came across the anthology of poems she edited Mother, I’m Rooted (what an great and unforgettable title!) in my feminist readings at uni. Snake is also a poetic work, with chapters (collected under four parts) so brief they veer towards prose-poems. 

It opens with the character of Rex, a man who cannot inherit his family’s farm because it is needed for his brother. His lonely life is narrated through the second person, which served to keep the reader at a distance from Rex, just as his family does.

Part Two opens with Rex’s marriage after WWII to a woman named Irene, and a section which captures Irene’s personality in a few brief lines: ‘Billie was noticing how Irene, in her excitement, kept forgetting herself. She’d break into a stride, causing the silk of her wedding dress to pull tight across her thighs. Thus checked, she reverted to smaller, more ladylike steps. The next minute, though, her gait widened, and she was off again’ (21). Who knew a piece of fabric could do so much? It acts as a template for much of Irene’s behaviour in the rest of the work.

In Part Two, the reader is still held at length through different perspectives on Irene, from her bridesmaid Billie, sister Daphne, her parents and parents-in-law, from Rex and then finally herself, but mediated through third person.  Part Three is also in third person, narrating Rex and Irene’s relationship to the plot of land they have settled upon: Rex loves it because it has irrigation and is full of water, while Irene established a flourishing garden. However, her lack of stimulation festers into discontent with, and finally hatred at, Rex. She could ‘go for days without speaking … Then, in the bedroom, the children asleep, she unknitted her lips and words poured from her, black as pitch’ (42). Despite this bitterness and her infelicities, Rex decides to stay with her.

They have two children, Boy, whom Irene adores, and Girlie, who irritates her. Irene finds a job in town and some off-beat friends, some of whom Rex doesn’t take to. However, just as Rex cannot understand Irene, neither does she understand her husband. After various natural calamities on the farm, Irene blithely comments ‘The insurance will pay’ and Rex ‘looked at his wife, baffled anew by her insensitivity. Of course the insurance will pay. That wasn’t the point; his work was shredded’ (96). Farming is never just farming, but artistry as well, albeit in a country not designed for it.

In the final, brief section, the voice reverts to second person from Irene’s point of view, closing with her question to Boy, ‘Where did the years go?’ in a tone that ‘isn’t plaintive, as might be expected, but querulous and accusing, as if you had no part in it, as if someone stole the years from under your nose’ (137). It’s a bitter ending to a bleak book whose characters are constrained by a conservative society and an environment, both physical and emotional, to which they are unsuited.

Snakes writhe throughout the book. Boy attacks one with an axe, Girlie is terrified of them, Irene watches out for them while hunting for wild asparagus, and Rex decapitates them in the irrigation channels with a shovel and ease. Essentially they act to reinforce the characters: Irene’s biting of her husband, Boy’s adventurousness and Girl’s timorousness, and Rex’s adroitness as a farmer.

Having grown up in the country, the characters, settings and snakes were familiar to me. I know of those such as Rex’s parents who thought that ‘people who spoke in consecutive sentences were indulging themselves; they were of the same order as tipplers and gluttons. Remarks beyond  those necessary to get things done passed their lips are rarely as cacti have flowers, and were as startling’ (16). Likewise I know people like Rex, who was simple and wanted stillness and nature, and Irene, who was a fast women who wanted dalliance and dash, and was cramped by the country. And maybe this is why, despite its beautiful language and a carefully crafted sentences, the book didn’t do much for me. Perhaps if it was longer and the characters had more complexity, I would have enjoyed it more. 

Also, I can’t read a book about the country now without thinking about Indigenous people. There were none on these pages, except in their absence. At a conference in Prato earlier this year, an academic from Germany told me about her PhD student who was researching Australian novels in the wake of Mabo, and found that they were describing the landscape in a completely different way, obviously with more consideration for Indigenous issues. And of course, there are more and more Indigenous authors being published which also influences the way we look at land and its history. Perhaps my problem with the novella was simply that it was dated.

Book details: Jennings, Kate. Snake. Collingwood: Black, Inc., 2011.

Borrowed as an eBook from Brisbane City Council Library.

This is my 8th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge

Review of The Art of Being Deaf

Earlier this year in April, on a balmy autumnal Brisbane evening (is there any other kind?), I put on one of my Leona Edmiston frocks and caught the bus to my beloved Avid Reader bookshop in West End.  This time the occasion was the launch of Donna McDonald’s memoir The Art of Being Deaf. 

When I moved to Brisbane from London and found a job, my boss urged me to get in touch with Donna, with whom she’d once worked. Donna had been deaf from birth, but her lipreading skills, my boss said, were incredible. In 2010 I met Donna over coffee at the University of Queensland, where she was writing her PhD. Although I had been reading about the history of deafness and the education of deaf people for my PhD, that coffee with Donna was responsible for the intensification of my interest in how writers represented deafness, and my own identity as a deaf writer. I read a version of her exegesis and creative piece, which later found publication through Gallaudet University Press and thus was being launched at Avid.

This launch was quite different to others I’d attended, although perhaps it shouldn’t have been. There were two interpreters – one who translated the signing of Bretty Casey (Deaf Services Queensland CEO), into speech (and the translator didn’t just speak, but captured the cadences and nuances of his expression), and one who translated speech into sign language. Krissy, the events coordinater, joked that she wanted a sign language interpreter for the launch of her next erotic novel (let’s hope that comes to pass!) The work was then introduced by the ever-lovely Kris Olsson, and it was beautiful to see Donna’s friends, whom she mentions in her work, sitting in the front row.

The prologue of The Art of Being Deaf opens with the three-year old Donna removing her new hearing aid with a particularly BrisVegas flourish on the William Jolley Bridge, leaving ‘white clouds of softness falling into my ears’ (x). This gesture acts as a motif for the rest of the book, in which Donna explores and resists the efforts of others to have her conform to their vision of what a deaf person should be like. Which, in essence, is like a hearing person.

The prologue also introduces the reader to Donna’s mother, a strong-willed woman who was determined that her daughter would succeed at all costs. Rather than having Donna learn sign language (which is easier and more natural for deaf people than speech), she sent her daughter, age 3, to a school which taught her lipreading and how to speak. Five years later, Donna was transferred to a private girls’ school. She went on to a successful career in the public sector in England and Australia, worked as a freelance policy analyst, and now teaches at a university. Donna’s and her mother’s perseverance certainly paid off, but it wasn’t without cost. 

Donna’s exploration of the impact of deafness upon her identity was prompted by a visit to a psychologist who stated, with a question, ‘Your hearing loss must have had a big impact on you?’ She didn’t respond to the question at the time, but as she began to think about her past, she wondered about the impact of her removal from the deaf school. Her mother, she writes, ‘had been vigilant and successful in her determination to raise me as a full-fledged hearing person’, a vigilance in ‘keeping me apart from the deaf world [that] had bordered on inflexible’ (62). Yet Donna was deaf, and a part of her history was missing. She began to get in touch with her friends from the deaf school and, her antennae now up, she also realised ‘how rarely I had met deaf characters in novels’ (63). She set about finding some more literary people by trawling the stacks at the university library.

Her reading was a depressing exercise, as she explains: ‘The publishers’ blurbs and abstracts revealed a tendency by most “expert” writers to portray deafness as a melancholy condition, or as a subject of caricature, or as a problem to be understood, overcome, or resolved … The language used in so many titles of books, essays, videos, and other documents on deafness emphasised an “otherness” experienced by deaf people that is apparently bleak, hopeless, and lonely’ (64). She switched genres, hoping for a better response from memoirists, but this was no better. Their rendition of deafness as something traumatic was completely alien to her own experiences. Eventually, she began reading novels about deaf characters, and was heartened, although the pickings were slim and the authors themselves were not always deaf. Neither Vikram Seth, (An Equal Music), Frances Itani (Deafening) and T. Coraghessan Boyle (Talk Talk) were deaf, but ‘they were able to imagine their way, with reasonable credibility, into deaf experiences’ (68).

It’s significant that Donna’s journey was conducted through literature. In a paper given at a conference, she said, ‘Stories of deafness have to travel out beyond disability and medicine into the world of novels and films. We learn about who we are as much by what we read and see about ourselves, as by what we are told and by what we experience’ (102). Until deaf people can view or read positive representations of themselves, deafness will often be considered to be a curse rather than a unique experience. The same holds for many other minorities, including Indigenous people. 

Donna mentioned this finding to me during our coffee at the university, and it compelled me to begin actively writing about the positive aspects of deafness. Although at the time I told her (and she recounts this conversation in her book) that I felt as though I would be cheating if I wrote about deafness (largely because I couldn’t see how it would challenge me as a writer), I’ve since realised how important it is to tell good stories about deaf people. I’ve since published an essay on the creativity inherent in my experience of deafness, and used the ambiguity of hearing in a short story published in the Review of Australian Fiction.

The act of writing, and particularly the act of writing memoir, is a way of creating a map of one’s life, but Donna was specific about what kind of map she created. This was no narrative about ‘triumph over adversity’, for her deafness had not caused her any great adversity. Nor was it an account in which she wanted to dwell in misery (or ‘inspiration porn’, as the late Stella Young termed it). Rather, she drew her own, original map of the contours of her experiences of deafness, creating a land into which other people could travel and learn of its customs. 

At the book launch, Kris handed over to another wonderful Queensland writer, Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko. In many ways, I’ve found through my reading, the experiences of deaf people who have been forced to speak are akin to those of Indigenous or any people who are colonised, for they have been removed from their own culture and assimilated into the dominant culture, and forced to speak its language. Melissa talked about the importance of elders in Aboriginal culture for educating children and showing them a way forward. Donna, she said, had not had any such elders in her deaf community, and had needed to work things out on her own. Unfortunately by this stage I was starting to mist up, for I recognised the loneliness she was talking about, and I missed the rest of her talk because I couldn’t lipread it. 

One of the important aspects of first hand accounts is that they demonstrate the diversity of the experiences of being deaf. The amount of hearing someone has, when they became deaf, and whether they were raised to speak or to sign all have an impact on how they interact with and respond to the world. This is why Donna’s memoir is so significant – it is another contribution to literature on deafness and, most importantly, it indicates that deafness is not, as David Lodge, author of Deaf Sentence, might have some believe, a death sentence. Unsurprisingly, every copy of her book sold at the launch at Avid that night.

It might seem incredible, but after some thirty years on this earth, Donna was the first deaf person with whom I had ever interacted at length. Until that coffee, I had felt myself to be an aberration, but when I met her then, and every other time we catch up, I am completely at ease in my own skin.  This is one of the best books I read in 2014. I hope you pick it up over the holidays and enjoy it as much as I have. Copies can be purchased here.

Book details: McDonald, Donna. The Art of Being Deaf: a Memoir. Gallaudet University Press, 2014.

Purchased from Avid Reader.

This is my 7th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.  

A Novel Update

So, having returned from a research and conference trip in Europe a month ago, I’m now packing my bags again. The Australia Council has offered me a two-month residency to write at the B.R. Whiting studio. What can I say, except that this is the perfect end to an amazing year.

One of the loveliest things about getting two grants earlier this year was that I was able to pay myself a wage for what I love: writing. This in turn meant that I could afford to have my teeth fixed – something I’ve been putting off for five and a half years because I couldn’t afford it, and going back to England to visit my friends (the first trip I’ve made since leaving London). In England, I also did some archival research for my Rosa Praed book, with absolutely amazing results. More of that in a later post.

I’ve written another 30,000 words of my draft of The Sea Creatures, my third novel, so I’m up to roughly 80,000 words. Much of this is crap and can’t be used, but it hasn’t been entirely wasted, because it’s given me an understanding of the characters and their histories.

I did think I’d be up to the point of doing and inserting the research for it by now, but I just haven’t been able to get a handle on the voices or timeline. The action takes place over millennia, for it among other things it charts the life of a mermaid that lives forever. Her voice is the product of millions of years of adaptation and it took a while to capture this. Meanwhile, I found myself doubling up on some of the perspectives of the characters, so I have to find more innovative ways of conveying information.

At first I panicked at these stumbling blocks, and thought I’d have to toss out everything I’d written and start again, but then I realised it was just a part of growing as an artist, and that I needed to just keep on hacking my way through the brambles. As I go, I have been taking great comfort from writer Charlotte Wood’s interviews with other authors. Joan London, for example, said that, ‘I hate it when I’m beginning something and it’s slow and tentative and clumsy, and I’m not sure at all that it will work ... But when it is coming together, then I love it, really.’  I’m still stumbling along, but I have complete faith that this book will work, and work well.

However, although I’ve grabbed some time for writing this year, for the most part it’s been running around madly, going to conferences and writing papers to improve my profile so I can get a job, or a postdoc, or more funding. So much of being a writer is just getting money to survive, or finance the next project, or doing endless social media to keep one’s name in the public’s consciousness. As Queensland author Kim Wilkins wrote in September’s issue of WQ: ‘This is not being yourself, this is playing yourself, and that means that a good deal of your time is spent kind of outside yourself looking in, looking at yourself and thinking, “Hey, am I being engaging enough in this? Am I being approachable enough? Have I blogged enough? Do I need to tell people more about myself? Oh my god, did I overshare? What’s going on here? I don’t know.”  While you’re doing that, do you know what you’re not doing? You’re not being inside yourself nurturing your creativity from the inside, which is your core business; this is what you need to be doing as a creative artist.’

So, time in Rome means time to be creative and get through all the projects I haven’t had time to finish this year, as well as starting new ones involving poetry & research. I am a little apprehensive about going – I’ll miss my beau, my family, and my hairdresser — but by god am I looking forward to uninterrupted time to write.

Review of Thornwood House

I can’t quite recall how I heard about Anna Romer’s Thornwood House; it may have been through a review for the Australian Women Writer’s challenge last year, which described it as ‘Australian rural Gothic’, a style I’m interested in writing.  At any rate, I left it on my desk when I went away for Christmas and, facing overdue library fines when I came back, figured I had better read it in a hurry. Then work and life got in the way, and only now am I getting to the review after a general clean up of my desktops – both wooden & computer.  My timing, however delayed, is apt, as it’s the National Week of Deaf People.

The story revolves around Audrey Kepler, who is bequeathed the homestead of Thornwood in Queensland when her estranged partner Tony dies, and moves there with her 11 year old daughter.  The house was owned by Tony’s grandfather, Samuel, who was accused of murdering his wife in 1946.  Audrey becomes obsessed with finding out the house’s history, and whether or not Samuel was innocent.  In doing so, she also uncovers the motivations behind Tony’s peculiar personality.

The novel turned out to be general fiction, which isn’t my cup of tea because the language doesn’t usually captivate me.  It didn’t here, either, not least because there were too many clichés.  About a third of the way in I was contemplating whether to give up (which I rarely do, because I know how involved it is to write these damn things, although Lionel Shriver begs to differ), when one of the male characters, Danny, turned out to be deaf.  I perked up immediately, because not only was he deaf, he was also hot, ‘in his mid-thirties; dark-haired, nicely muscled.  He wore only jeans: ragged at the cuffs, torn at the knees, low-slung beneath a tanned stomach’ (89).  

Danny signs, lipreads and uses a notebook for people who don’t know sign language.  Romer captures the discomfort hearing people sometimes feel when deaf people watch them intently to listen, and uses this to add to the sexual charge between Audrey and Danny: ‘It was disconcerting to have a man pay such close attention to my mouth, especially when I was talking’ (171). She also captures the beauty of sign language when she writes, ‘Danny made a lazy sign, knowing full well I couldn’t read it. His hands were large and lightly freckled, graceful’ (108). Danny refuses to speak because his voice sounds strange, but by the end of the novel there’s the suggestion that he’s about to counter this and start trying, which I liked. Although there is a long and troubled history of forcing the deaf to speak, in this instance it was used to show that Danny is accepting this part of himself, even though he is otherwise appealingly confident about his disability.

Donna McDonald, author of The Art of Being Deaf, has written about on literary representations of deaf people.  Often, such representations have been overwhelmingly negative, focussed not so much on how it’s possible to live in the world as a deaf person, but on how awful it is to lose one’s hearing.  Well, sure it’s difficult to be deaf, but you don’t need to have a pity party over it – life’s too short for that.  I have found it rewarding to be deaf – it has made me more attuned to other people, particularly minorities; it has made me more observant and I have become a far more interesting person than I might otherwise have been.  As I’ve noted in a guest post for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, I also almost certainly wouldn’t have been a writer if I wasn’t deaf.  

Which is why I was so pleased to see a positive portrayal of a deaf character in a book - it reflects the experiences of those who find deafness adds to their lives, rather than detracting.

Book details: Romer, Anna. Thornwood House. Simon & Schuster, 2013.

Borrowed from Brisbane City Council Library.

This is my 6th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge

Review of The Singing Gold

Over at the Australian Women Writers Challenge, where I’m a contributing editor in the area of diversity, I’ve been coordinating a focus on Australian Women Writers with Disability.

I was introduced to Dorothy Cottrell through fellow writer Michelle Dicinoski when I put out a call on Facebook for Australian women writers with disability to add to our list. Strangely enough, I’d just read an essay about Cottrell not two days before when I was looking for literature about far north Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef.

Cottrell was a remarkable woman. She suffered from polio when she was small and was confined to a wheelchair. Her mother largely disowned her, so she was brought up by her aunt. She was also exceptionally talented and confident, taking lessons in sculpture and attending classes at the Royal Art Society. At 16 she returned to Ularunda in the outback to stay with her mother, where she learned how to handle a gun, and then eloped with the station’s bookkeeper, Walter Cottrell. They ended up on Dunk Island (north of Hichinbrook Island off the coast of Queensland), neighbours to the nature writer E.J. Banfield and his wife.

Cottrell’s perceptivity of the landscape is apparent in the beautiful descriptions in The Singing Gold (1928) her most famous work, which was published in book form in the UK and US, serialised in the Sydney Mail and drew praise from Mary Gilmore. The novel opens with the protagonist Joan rejecting a frilly doll, a gift from her grandmother. Joan is a tomboy who loves climbing trees and despises her brother for being much less clever than she is. She loves nature, however, and in a beautiful description of a flowering almond tree, Cottrell demonstrates Joan’s surprising jolt into adolescence and femininity:

After a while I rose from the grass, and climbed carefully into the heart of the tree . . . There was nothing now save sunfiltered, pale blossom, fresh and cool and marvellous, pressing against my bare brown legs and arms and neck, brushing my eyelids, crinkling against my lips.  I could not even see the sky, there was only the paleness, and the beauty, and the blossom, and a great buzzing of bees. It was like being in a fairy bath of flowers. (p. 51).

At the novel’s opening, Joan describes herself as ‘not the sort of little girl that harmonises with highly polished old furniture, ornament piled whatnots, and canaries in silk shaded cages’ (8). In climbing into the tree, however, the gentleness of the blossoms, the distinctive sensation of them ‘crinkling’ against her lips and the ‘fairy bath’ all combine to create in Joan a much softer appreciation of nature than formerly. I thought it a beautiful way of describing a girl’s growing sensuality.

One of the most striking passages in the book comes from a description of the novel’s title, from Joan’s father, who drove a flock of sheep across the plains as the sun went down:

And all day long a million larks fluttered singing into the sunshine, and the little cruel hawks of the plains followed the travelling sheep and preyed upon the living sparks of music. Singing they rose, although they knew that the hawks were waiting for them, singing even as they fled from the talons of death. For on the pitiless sun-bleached splendour of the downs there was no shelter for them, and so they rose singing by the hundred, and by the hundred were butchered … the sheep drifted slowly across the gold immensity of down, under the gold immensity of evening, and even the woolly backs were gold, and the rising larks and the hovering hawks so many sparks of fire (26-27).

In this passage there is a contrast, as in much Australian settler literature, between the beauty and harshness of the landscape and its inhabitants, but the overall impression is one of beauty. The rhythm of the phrases gradually builds, mirroring the sense that the sky is swelling with gold, which in turn contributes to the wonder of the passage. 

The novel is fairly autobiographical, following Joan’s marriage to a fellow named Clippings. As with Cottrell’s marriage to Walter, Clippings bought six wedding rings because he didn’t know what size his betrothed’s finger would be. In the church he dropped them on the floor and then ‘assisted by the tennis-playing young giants [who were witnesses] he crawled blushingly about the church and gathered up the rings.’

Clippings buys a island, to which the couple then repair, but one day while out in a boat, Joan’s food lands on an unidentified creature in the sea and she is struck with pain, perhaps mirroring Dorothy’s pain of polio. Clippings sells the island, the couple become destitute, and are saved when Joan sells some poems to a newspaper. Although the plot isn’t much to write home about, this novel still has gorgeous nature writing, a strong female protagonist, an that unavoidably heartening theme of gaining financial independence through writing. 

In real life, Cottrell became so successful as a writer that she jumped ship to America to avoid paying a huge tax bill in Australia. She’s a great example of a woman who wasn’t hampered by her disability. She spent most of her life in a wheelchair, was a crack shot with a rifle, lived on a Queensland island and makes buckets of money through writing: what’s not to love about that?

Book details: Cottrell, Dorothy. The Singing Gold. Hodder and Stoughton, 1928.

Read in the John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland

This is my 5th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

On Happiness

If someone had said to me a year ago, when I was in the clammy grip of depression, that within twelve months I would have won two grants (one from Arts Queensland for my book on Rosa Praed, and another from the Australia Council’s new Artists with Disability fund) and been shortlisted for a third (for the Peter Blazey life writing award); that I had chanced upon a kind and sincere man of dazzling intelligence; and that I was shortly to board a flight to Italy, I would have laughed them from the room. 

Life can be flipped in an instant, from good to bad, but also from bad to good. Over the past year, I’ve also tried to take on board some of the things my psychologist recommended: I no longer beat myself up for not being perfect, I’ve stopped worrying so much about the bourgeois ideal of a mortgage and kids (which isn’t always compatible with the life of a writer), and I’ve learnt to sleep when I feel myself getting sick instead of battling on through it and making it worse. I’ve tried to stop working so hard, but failed abysmally. But then, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Regarding things Italian, I’m heading to Prato to present at the European Association of Australian Studies conference, where I will see my lovely ex-supervisor Ian Henderson after many long moons, plus lots of other friendly academics whose company I enjoy. After that I’ll head to England to catch up with friends who I haven’t seen for five years, and will look up some archives to try and find traces of Maud Praed, Rosa Praed’s deaf daughter.

I used to have bad dreams repeatedly about having to go back to London, because every time I left Australia in real life, while I was doing my PhD, I ended up in tears.  My conscious self has also barely given a thought to London over the past five years, but the more I’ve contemplated it recently as I’ve organised my itinerary, the more excited I am about seeing it, and my friends, again. 

Of course, one of the best things about leaving is coming home. I shall return to my beau and to my novel, the first draft of which needs to be rewritten because the voice is wrong; to warmer days and that unworn frock I bought last season; to the lilac jacarandas, flaring against Brisbane’s blue skies; and, if I can make it happen, to a slower pace of life.

Jean Hamilton 1922-2014

Not many children can say that their parents trekked around India for three months and left their kids in the care of their New Zealand grandparents. And not many can say that their grandmother took them to school for their very first day, but I remember staring up at Jean as I stood by her side and she talked to my teacher, Mrs Woodley. I was determined not to cry, and stifled my panic at the thought that she was going to leave me there. In later years, Jean fondly recalled me stumbling from the bus after those early days at school, my plaits unravelling, my school bag slipping off my shoulder, my laces undone, ‘But in your hand, you always had a book.’

Her fondness dissipated, however, when I threw my school bag against the wall of the verandah instead of hanging it up on the hook.  

‘And if you were asked to do something you didn’t want to, you gave them the dirtiest look,’ she added. Not much has changed.

John, her husband, once told me that he a lot of respect for Dad because he had never worked as hard as he did when on the farm for those three months.  One might spare a thought for Jean however, for when making H’s lunch for school one day, H spontaneously burst into tears.

‘Whatever is the matter, dear?’ she asked.

‘You cut my sandwiches the wrong way,’ he wailed.

My sister remembers the excitement of Mum and Dad coming home, and of painting a sheet with the letters ‘Welcome back.’ No doubt Jean and John were just as excited.

On other occasions, whenever they came to the farm to stay, all activity promptly ceased at 5pm, whereupon everyone would settle under the liquid ambers for G&Ts. After watching this a few times, my very young sister suddenly realised, ‘Oh, so that’s what adults do. They drink to relax.’ Unsurprisingly, she now has a great affinity with gin.

If Jean wasn’t smoking or drinking booze, she was gambling. When visiting her in Christchurch, H took her to the pokies, because this was what she and John used to do. They agreed to spend only $20 each. Jean spent hers in an eyeblink, but H had never played the pokies before and needed to work out what to do.

‘Come on dear, hurry up,’ Jean said, so H gambled large amounts to catch up. Suddenly, his machine lit up like a Christmas tree. They both looked on in amazement as he clocked up $70. 

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We're ahead, so we're quitting.’ However, Jean leaned over and said, ‘Lend your grandmother a twenty would you?’

Hadley gave her the $20 and went off to cash his winnings. When he returned, Jean’s machine was flashing, beeping and racking up bonus rounds in an endless cycle of wins. When it stopped, Jean was up to $230. 

‘Let's cash your winnings and get out of here,’ he said. ‘And I want my $20 back.’

H mentioned that Jean promptly spent all her winnings on cashmere. 

He also recounts settling Jean into her new apartment in the nursing home, after which time they headed out to do some errands. When they went downstairs, they passed a common room of old people staring blankly into space or at the TV, or sitting in their wheelchair dozing. Jean stuck her head in and gave everyone a good look. H was concerned that she must be thinking this was how she’d end up, half comatose in a chair.

Jean turned to him with a frown. ‘They’re all wearing skirts. I don’t have any skirts to wear. Come on, we’ll have to go shopping.’ And off she went.

It’s nice to know that my own penchant for shopping and luxury is purely genetic.

Jean was a mild-natured woman – she had to be, to withstand her husband’s overbearing nature — who enjoyed other people and their business. At the nursing home she was forever wandering into people’s rooms to start a conversation. Once, on the farm, when I was leaning against the flagpole (for we had one of those), staring dreamily across the paddocks to the hills that were softening with dusk, she interrupted me to say, ‘What are you contemplating, dear?’ I hadn’t heard her approach and drew myself up with an inarticulate noise of irritation, then waited for her to go away. 

Despite my occasional bouts of shittiness, she still adored me. While I was visiting Christchurch with mum as a 10 year old, she would look on with some amusement as I tried to get up in the mornings, dragging myself from the bed to the couch, the sound of the real world hurting my ears. That was the year that Christchurch was in drought, and the butter tasted peculiar because the cows weren’t getting any fresh grass.

Historically, letter writing gave rise to the form of the novel, and it’s possible that my obsessive letter writing to my grandmother jump started my career as a novelist. Our mail only came on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on the farm, and on those days I would burst through the door after getting off the bus and ask if I had any letters, so that I would have a reason for writing another. I wrote about what we were doing on the farm, skited about my school marks, and sent her my stories, typed up on a Commodore 64 and printed out with a dox matrix printer. Jean was no intellectual, though, and it was hard to talk to her as she got older and her conversation became like thin broth. 

Unerringly cheerful however, Jean showed her sometimes saturnine granddaughter how to live happily and well in an increasingly difficult world. Her brightness will illuminate our lives for many more years to come.