The Australian Women Writers Challenge – completed!

This is my fourth year of undertaking a challenge to read and review more books by Australian women writers. The initiative was established in 2012 Elizabeth Lhuede, who wanted to redress the gender bias in reviewing.

I’m the diversity editor at AWW, and throughout the year I arranged guest posts from women writers of ethnic heritage, including Queenie Chan, Marisa Wikramanayake and Maxine Beneba Clarke, as well as lesbian/queer writers Inga Simpson, Tricia Dearborn, Lee Winter and Francesca Rendle-Short.

I was also very happy that Gayle Kennedy, an Aboriginal woman writer whom I met at an artists with disability conference last year, wrote a guest post for us during NAIDOC week, while Bec Kavanagh also write a guest post on the importance of reading diverse texts, particularly for younger readers.

I presented on the AWW challenge and writing vernacular criticism at the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature in Wollongong in July. I really enjoy taking part in the challenge because I’m interested in women’s writing and diversity, and in promoting these subjects. It also helps me to keep up to date with what’s being published, and I like interacting with the other volunteers. I get good reading suggestions from Sue T of Whispering Gums; Marisa Wikramanayake put together a series of conversations with writers throughout the year; Annabel Smith interviewed more writers, and it’s been great to watch Elizabeth’s writing career start to take off. It’s just so lovely to be part of the AWW community.

I met my challenge of reading more than 20 books (I read 38) and reviewing 10 of these. The books that I reviewed, however, were disappointingly very un-diverse. Here’s my list:

The Floating Garden, Emma Ashmere

Me, Antman & Fleabag, Gayle Kennedy

Hopscotch, Jane Messer

Georgiana Molloy: The Mind that Shines, Bernice Barry

Stanley and Sophie, Kate Jennings

Anchor Point, Alice Robinson

Remotely Fashionable, Nadia Buick and Madeleine King

The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane

The World Without Us, Mireille Juchau

The Women’s Pages, Debra Adelaide

I mostly chose to review these books because I needed to think them through for books or papers that I’m working on, which are about animals, carers, and climate change. Others, such as Remotely Fashionable or The Women’s Pages I reviewed because I loved them.

I’m sticking to my challenge level for 2016 (read at least 20, review 10), as it’s a struggle to find time to review books. However I’m going to make a concerted effort next year to review more works by Indigenous authors, and I’m hoping to arrange more guest posts by Indigenous authors throughout the year. I’m also going to arrange a focus on writers with disability, and another on writers of migrant background.

Another busy year ahead! In the meantime I’m signing off, packing my bags & heading to Thailand for two weeks of sun, water, cocktails & burning through the 25+ books on my ereader. Glorious!

Review of The Women's Pages

To pick up a piece of writing by Debra Adelaide is be instantly assured that one is in calm, capable hands. The kind that can smooth down bed sheets, whip up a meringue, tally up a line of numbers without error, guide you steadily through a narrative and deliver you to a satisfying ending (although it might, as in The Household Guide to Dying, make you cry). The narrators in Adelaide’s stories are problem solvers, and in her most recent novel The Women’s Pages, the problem is one of writing itself.

As her mother lies dying, Dove reads her Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and she begins to write a novel. She is compelled into the act of writing by reading this text, which she had picked up when she was young and which ‘was like a malaria of the brain, lying dormant then leaping up at unexpected times to attack with the fever of unresolved narrative’ (7). The same might be said of Dove’s attempts at writing: she is plagued by dreams, her characters intrude into her consciousness, and she is puzzled by how to fit it all together. As she tries to work out what’s happening so, too, does her reader.

The novel which Dove writes is set in the 50s, with all of its thick and casual sexism. When Ellis, her character (named for Ellis Bell, the pseudonym of Emily Bronte), refuses the advances of her friend’s husband, he calls her a ‘tight bitch’ (23). Ellis looks for a job designing typefaces and is cowed by the weight of male disapproval of a woman who should be at home, doing the laundry. Unwanted pregnancies are hidden, their attendant pain smothered beneath the daily rituals of cooking, cleaning and earning an income. Yet even some decades years later, sexism is still rife: while at university, Dove finds her breast groped by a man mid-conversation and is paralysed with indecision about whether to voice the violation, until she ‘thought she might gag with the effort of doing nothing’ (59). The scene reminded me of The First Stone, in which Helen Garner was groped during a massage, but still paid the masseuse afterwards because she was unsure of how to deal with the situation. It still seems there is no language for some acts, although I think this is (thankfully) beginning to shift with social media.

I sometimes found myself confused as to who was speaking throughout the narrative, and it took me a while to work out whose story I was in, Ellis’s or Dove’s. And yet this was apt, for this is what happens to a writer (well, to me at least) when in the thick of writing a novel – it’s hard to shake off your characters, and you carry them around with you. You know they’re not real, but they’re not phantoms either. To Dove, Emily Bronte is so real that she enters her dreams, while Ellis plagues her with questions, pushing through the narrative in search of their answers.

The two stories hinge in the final scene, which I thought was wonderful for its elegance and surprise. My own mother, however, was unimpressed: she’d seen it coming. I didn’t mind; the novel has so many intricacies in it that I know I’ll return to puzzle it out. It has also occurred to me that this might be more of a writer’s novel, rather than a reader’s, as so much of it is about the process of writing.

What I have always loved about Adelaide’s writing is her celebration of domesticity and the feminine, particularly her descriptions of cooking. For example Ellis’s carer, Mrs Wood, ‘taught Ellis how to add a few pinches of curry powder – she favoured Clive of India – to the batter for fried flathead, which took care of the fishy smell in the house’ (108). Much of Mrs Wood’s knowledge has been gleaned ‘from the women’s pages of the Sunday newspapers over the years’ (108).

Ellis, in need of an income, finds work sorting out the recipes for one such magazine, titled the Women’s Pages, although most refer to it as the Pages. This becomes its official title as a way of increasing its appeal for, as Ellis observes, ‘the Pages turned out to be read by a surprising number of men’ (187). It’s a simple reference that underscores the difficulties we’re still having with selling women’s writing and asking people (well, men, mostly) to take it seriously. Siri Hustvedt discusses these issues beautifully in her essay about the reception of Knausgaard’s emotional writing, and his dismissal of women writers as ‘No competition’.

I adored so much about The Women's Pages, including its intertextual references to other quietly domestic novels such as Camille’s Bread, and movies such as Love and Other Catastrophes (one of my favourites). It’s the perfect way to wrap up my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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

Finding Maud

Two years ago, I received a grant from Arts Queensland which gave me time to revisit my research on Rosa Praed and her deaf daughter Maud. I read the Murray-Prior papers in the National Library of Australia and combed Patricia Clarke’s biography, Rosa! Rosa! for references to Maud, who had been deaf since she was small. At age 28, Maud became destabilised by the fracturing of her family had a breakdown. She was admitted to Holloway Sanatorium in Surrey, and later transferred to St Ann’s at Canford Cliffs, near Poole. Clarke had written to the Sanatorium to ask for Maud’s medical records, but was informed that these were destroyed after 20 years. However, when I checked the National Archives database in the UK (which hadn’t yet been created when Clarke was writing her book), I found that they were still extant. I realised needed to go to England to find them.

When doing archival research from the other side of the world, you can pay a whack of money and get the archive’s employees to find documents for you, or you can pay even more money and get on a plane. It’s usually cheaper to get someone to make the copies, but then you risk not finding what you want. Control freaks with an eye for detail (and who liked collecting stamps when young) such as yours truly also prefer to do the work themselves. There is also serendipity in archival research: when you’re tootling among old papers, there’s more of a chance of making connections with pieces of information that you find on your way, and these connections throw up new ideas.

It was five and a half years since I had left England and returned to Australia after finishing my PhD. Until a few years before, I’d had nightmares about having to return to finish my thesis, and would wake with that familiar, sickening feeling of leaving my family behind yet again. So I was somewhat apprehensive about returning, but that feeling began to dissipate when I was met by my good friend C, who lived in Kent, and as I met up with other old friends in London. It was autumn, almost ten years to the day (20th September 2014) that I had boarded a plane to England for the first time to start my PhD, and the weather is rarely cruel in an English autumn.

We visited Knole, the book which inspired Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. I’d always wanted to go there with C while I was there, as she lived not far away, but we never got around to it. It was a grand but hollow building, and I wondered how they had ever kept warm.

A day later, I began my research at University College London’s Ear Institute and Action on Hearing Loss Library, located at the Royal National Ear Nose and Throat Hospital, which I’d often visited for checkups when I lived in London. I also knew the head librarian from having worked at UCL library, and that was nice too. I was specifically looking at the reports of Society for Training Teachers of the Deaf and for the Diffusion of the German System. They didn’t yield much that was interesting, although the librarian gave me a fascinating account of Benjamin St Ackers’ daughter, who had been taught to speak though she had been deaf since birth, and ended up very isolated and alone.

From London I caught a train to Leamington Spa, where some more old friends lived. One of these had been in our (predominantly Australian) bookclub, the Book Rangers. She now had two sprogs: a lively little boy who liked investigating things, and a newborn girl. The next day I caught a train to Birmingham, where the archives for the Society for Training Teachers for the Deaf (which was an amalgamation of the all teacher training colleges) were held at the Cadbury Research Library. Sadly, there was nothing in this lot, aside from some minor references to Benjamin St John Ackers.

I returned to London, and from there I went on to Woking.

‘You’re going to Woking!?’ a friend had exclaimed when I told him of my research plans over coffee at the Brisbane Writers Festival.

‘Yeah. What’s wrong with Woking?’

‘Woking’s awesome! It’s has a racing car track at a museum. Actually, it’s a Weybridge, but that’s not far away.’

‘Maybe I’ll just send you a postcard from Woking.’

He clocked the look on my face. ‘Yeah, do that. If cars aren’t your thing.’

Woking seemed a nice place, although overrun with chain stores, as are all the small towns in England, something that never failed to make me sad. I grabbed a coffee and some lunch from Pret, then caught a cab to the Surrey History Centre, which was housed in a municipal building. It was a plain, almost sterile building, at odds with the leather bound case notes which were handed to me.

I set up my camera and latptop, pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves to protect the case notes from the sweat on my skin, and opened the case notes. There was Maud, staring back at me, as well as a letter she had written to her doctor. The case notes, although not detailed, described her deterioration over about a decade.

I was beside myself, and this article I wrote for Meanjin describes why. I wandered back to the pub at which I was staying via a path beside a canal, dazed and triumphant.

A few days later, C very generously drove me to Canford Cliffs, where Maud's sanatorium was located. The building had been restored and it was beautiful, set among green lawns that slide down to the sea, but I wondered how it would have been in Maud's time. Gulls cried overhead. Maud wouldn't have been able to hear them, but she would have felt the sea breezes on her face.

I caught the train back to London and stayed with some good friends who live near Kensington Gardens, and who were also not far from one of the apartments Rosa Praed had lived in. I took myself for a walk through Holland Park to find it, stopping to marvel at the peacocks.

Then, after a gloriously sunny day in Bath with C, where we bought some dark blue suede boots from Duo Boots, it was time to leave. The Queensland election started while I was stepping onto the plane. When I flew into Brisbane, I wasn’t able to get my phone to work, so once I reached Customs I bailed up the first officer I could find.

‘Who won the election?’ I asked him.

‘They’re still counting, but it looks like it might be Labor.’

‘That’s brilliant!’ I exclaimed. Campbell Newman, an arrogant and selfish politician who, in his first act of parliament, had binned the Premier’s Literary Awards, had also squandered his majority by treating Queenslanders like trash.

He turned over my card and read my occupation. ‘So, you’re a writer. That’d be right.’

I laughed, loudly. It was good to be home.

Review of The World Without Us

The opening line of this novel, ‘He’d been climbing for three hours when he saw the odd colour through the tawny trees’, and the evocation of a tryst – the character comes across a naked woman roped with scars, about to take a dip in the chilly river - echoes the opening of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour so strongly that I expected a flourish of Monarch butterflies in the next few lines. Instead, there were bees, referenced through the figure of Evangeline, the woman whom Jim stumbles across. She sells the family’s honey at the market in the town of Bidgalong and her husband, Stefan, is a beekeeper. The community in which they live, with its broken commune and hippies, is reminiscent of Byron Bay.

Any book about bees, these days, is usually a reference to environmental destruction, with good reason: in the last five years in the US, 30% of the national bee population has disappeared due to colony collapse. There are a number of reasons, including pesticides and climactic extremes such as drought and harsh winters. Australian scientists have suggested that these stressors mean that the next generation matures too quickly, and then they die when they go out to forage for food because it’s such an energy-intensive activity.

In Mireille Juchau's The World Without Us, the characters’ trauma is also intergenerational. Tess and Meg have lost their sister to leukaemia. Tess becomes mute with grief, her mother Evangeline stops painting and wanders the countryside with an umbrella, and her father Stefan takes to drink. Evangeline’s grief is layered onto an older sadness occasioned by the breakdown of the Hive, a commune in which she was raised, and which is stirred up by Stefan’s discovery of bones on their property. Meanwhile, Jim, Tess’s schoolteacher who has relocated from the city, struggles to establish himself after a failed relationship involving children. He is visited by the loss of his mother when he was a boy, while another secondary character, Tommy, looks after his mother, afflicted by dementia, and searches for his absent father.

In less capable hands, this book would have been a disaster. There are so many strands, so many parentless children, that it could easily have spiralled out of control or tipped into melodrama. Instead, Juchau keeps the threads tightly bound and contained. Sometimes this makes the writing affectless, but this is a necessary characteristic when so many internal storms populate the pages, and it is still undeniably beautiful, such as when Tess sees a native hive:

'That sound getting steadily louder, the livid air pocked with busy insects. Closer, inside the dim cavern of that ruined hall, the noise is unmistakeable.

As her eyes adjust Tess sees what’s hanging from the ceiling and jutting like lichen in thick, creamy layers. They protrude from the wall and fan from the corners. They garland the roof beams. Great waxy chandeliers lit with yellow bees’ (161).'

Garland. Creamy. Chandeliers. All adjectives that denote wealthy and luxury.

Throughout the novel, the bees symbolise humans’ attempts to keep functioning when there are internal stressors such as loss and grief, and external stressors such as fracking, which divides the community. By transferring the non-human to the realm of the human, it shows us how difficult it is for anything to survive when too much strain is placed upon it. Perhaps if readers can see how a human ecosystem can fall apart, they might also see how a non-human ecosystem can be similarly impacted, particularly by their own actions.

Within this, the native hive, so luxuriously rendered, could be seen as a symbol of hope. We have one last chance – Paris made that clear to everyone across the world – and if we squander it, we’ll die. This will be no great loss to nature – it will flourish without us – but if we lose each other, as this novel signals, we’ll be decimated by the loss of our environment and of our selves.

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

To Florence and Prato

It’s a measure of how busy and tired I’ve been this past year that I’m only just now writing up the trips that I took last year, to Prato, England and Rome. Fortunately, Christmas has given me a breathing space and I’m catching up on my belated posts.

Last year, after doing more research on Rosa and Maud Praed, I realised I needed to go back to England to look for Maud’s medical records. The European Association for the Study of Australia was holding a conference in Prato, Italy, in September. I had wanted to go to the association’s conference in France two years before but I was too broke. This time I had a bit of cash in reserve and decided to stop off on the way to England.

I caught a straightforward flight to Rome and checked into a hotel. When I woke the next morning I walked down to the Colosseum and attendant ruins. If someone had told me I’d be there again two months later, I would have laughed.

In the afternoon I wandered into Termini to catch a train to Florence. As I stood watching people using the ticket machines, trying to work out what to do, I was approached by a neatly-dressed, slightly cross-eyed young woman with blonde hair, who asked if I wanted help. ‘I need to go to Florence,’ I told her. She took me to a ticket machine and showed me how to use it. I wasn’t quite sure that what she was doing was orthodox, but she turned away when I slid my card in and put in the pin. When the machine spat out the tickets and she showed me the platform number on the screen, she said, ‘Ten euros, please.’ I felt like an idiot, I later emailed my boyfriend, who reassured me that it was par for the course to be fleeced at least once when travelling.

The last time I was at Florence train station was in 1999, when I was backpacking with friends around Europe. We’d just missed the train to Pizzo in Calabria, and it was too late to find a hotel, so we spent the night on the station’s cold floor. When we finally boarded our train the next morning, we went south through a gorgeous Tuscan sunrise of pink, layered with mist and shot through with gold. I tried to keep my eyes open to watch it, but I’d only had a few hours sleep. This time I was alert, and the view was of gorgeous, green rolling hills. I was ecstatic to be overseas again and realised how much I’d missed travelling.

In Florence, the station was crowded. I’d forgotten how many people there were in Europe. I queued in the taxi rank, and a middle-aged, balding man before asked me, ‘You are a local?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m from Australia.’

When the cab pulled up, he gestured for me to get in, and I shook my head and made for the cab coming after me. What was it with these arrogant, European men, I thought crossly, did they try it on with anyone?

My irritation subsided when I reached Ape Rosa, an 18th century villa that was located away from the centre. It was absolutely gorgeous, with high-ceilinged, airy rooms, ornate furniture and a lovely green garden.

As I signed in and was given my key, one of the owners dropped by.

‘I’m from Australia,’ I introduced myself.

‘You are the famous person?’

‘Noooo! I’m not famous. No.’

‘You have the website?’

‘Yes, I’m a writer, but I'm not famous!’

Still, she made me feel like a star. Later, she told me that Napoleon’s brother had stayed at villa, and what with the excellent coffee that was served with breakfast, I was pretty much in heaven.

There was a bus that I caught into town, which was very straightforward. My friend from England had intended to join me, but she was unwell and had to cancel. It was easy to get around the city, although in my jetlag I’d booked the wrong time slot to the Academia, where Michaelangelo’sDavid was housed. They let me in anyway, and as I stood in the queue, I watched a couple of Asian girls giggling at a nearby stall over the aprons and boxer shorts that featured David’s manhood. It was hard not to smile. I also chatted to some ladies waiting ahead of me, who were speech therapists from America.

David was quite good, but art doesn’t do a whole lot for me, despite growing up with an artist for a father. The next day I visited the Uffizi, which was also good, although these days, looking at Boticelli’s Venus doesn’t seem to be much different to looking at it on the internet. I was more impressed with frescoes stretching across the high ceilings. After that I took myself off along the river to the gardens surrounding Piazzale Michaelangelo, which had exceptional views of the city.

No overseas trip is complete without a spot of shopping if one has an addiction to frocks and the like, and the next day I caught a bus through the green hills to The Mall, a shopping outlet of designer labels which Mum had read about in the travel section of the Sydney Morning Herald. I was a bit disappointed – it was a sanitised, soulless and boxy place, but that didn’t stop me from buying some cashmere from Prada. When in Italy, after all, one must do as the Italians do.

In between my peregrinations in and around Florence, I sat before the window of my room at Ape Rosa, finishing an essay on Rosa Praed that I wasn’t able to get done before I left. I didn’t mind too much; there are worse places in which to write. That essay was published a few months ago in the Journal for the Association of Australian Studies. I also sat in the lovely, tousled gardens and read Annabel Smith’s new book, The Ark.

Then it was time for the conference, which was organised by Monash University, as it has a centre in Prato. I caught a train to the town, which was only half an hour away and checked into a hotel beside the river, just outside the city walls. The theme of the conference was ‘Encountering Australia: Transcultural Conversations’ and I spoke about the interactions between Georgiana Molloy and Noongars in south west Western Australia, as Molloy went about collecting plants. My paper has just been published in the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (you may have to create a login to read it).

The conference dinner was at the Conservatorio San Niccolò Private Catholic School, which used to be an orphanage. I sat next to a lovely Australian woman who was doing her postdoc at Cambridge on Judith Wright and a few other poets. The next evening we did a spot of shopping and drank cocktails in the piazza, which was bliss! I think this photo sums up pretty well what I thought of Florence and Prato:

Review of The Night Guest

I hadn’t intended to review The Night Guest. While I enjoyed reading it, I didn’t like the ending and the book left me with a clammy feeling that I didn’t want to revisit. However, as I’ve been musing about animals and carers for my book When the World Shivered, I thought might be worth thinking about further, as The Night Guest features both.

This is the story of Ruth, an elderly widow who lives on an isolated stretch of coast, and believes herself to be visited by a tiger. After its first foray into the house, in which she hears the noises it makes, ‘loud and wet, with a low, guttural breathing hum punctuated by little cautionary yelps’ (2), she is reminded ‘of something vital – not of youth, exactly, but of the urgency of youth’ (6). Her childhood was spent on Fiji, where her parents were missionaries, and where she fashioned an unrequited romance for a doctor.

Shortly after the tiger’s first manifestation, a woman named Frida arrives to take care of Ruth. Rather than being preyed up on by the tiger, Ruth is gradually, subtly, threatened by this carer, a muscular woman who is also from Fiji. She tends to Ruth so efficiently that Ruth cannot see how she would survive without her, and at the same time she infiltrates Ruth's few relationships and persuades her to sell her car.

McFarlane’s hand is surest when she bleeds reality and fiction into one another through Ruth’s wavering point of view. The reader is uncertain as to whether Frida is friend or foe, or whether Ruth is losing her mind and cannot read the situation clearly. The ending provides answers, but until this point, the reader is held in suspense.

Herein lies the horror of the story. Ruth is physically, intellectually and emotionally isolated, and vulnerable to the depredations of others. A woman who is mean to care for her becomes a predator, like the tiger. And yet the bond between them is close, as it would be when people’s daily rhythms are knotted together. An acquaintance, Ellen, muses ‘She remembered the way Ruth and Frida had run together like lovers, and how embarrassed she’d been by that intimacy, and, later, how unsettled’ (273). The tiger also has multivalent meanings, being at times threatening, and at other times a delight. At the end of the novel, Ruth ‘leaned her head into his soft chest, where his great heart ticked’ (268).

Frida is yoked with the tiger through this thematic similarity and their simultaneous appearance, and through a scene towards the end in which Frida fights the animal. ‘There had been no beginning to Frida and the tiger, and now there would be no end,’ McFarlane writes. ‘They both snarled and bared their teeth, Frida called out the strange syllables of a warlike alphabet’ (224). These similarities can be read as a metaphor for colonialism, for the imposition of power upon vulnerable subjects, and how they fight back. The tiger invokes Ruth’s childhood and her missionary parents, who colonised Fijians through Christianity, and at the same time it reminds us that we are really not so different from animals: we are both prey and predator as we try to survive.

The vivid evocation of Ruth’s childhood also suggests the circularity of our lives – when we are old, we become like children. Our minds, sometimes sharp and sometimes wandering, can be just as fantastical as theirs, but while this is tolerated in young people, it isn’t so much in the elderly.

There is much to plumb in this novel, which won the NSW Premier’s award and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. I heard McFarlane speak at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference last year (ASAL always have at least one session to showcase Australian writers, which I think is great) and thought her intellectually astute. She has a book of short stories coming out soon, The High Places, which will be published by Penguin and, based on this book, well worth a read.

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

Review of Remotely Fashionable

Readers who follow my blog or my feeds might have gathered that I have an addiction to frocks, shoes and handbags. I know it’s an irresponsible addiction for a writer to have, and I’ve lost track of the times I’ve told friends that I’m going to stop buying frocks because I’m so broke. Somehow, I always find the money for it, even if it means I have nothing to eat by the end of the fortnight. On the other hand, I don’t really have any other vices: I don’t eat much, I don’t drink much, I don’t smoke, I don’t have a car, and I don’t have a mortgage (though I should be saving for one). Obviously I can’t be a writer without any vices, so it’s imperative that I buy a frock now and then.

Last year I stumbled upon The Fashion Archives when I was stuck at procrastination station. This is an online publication created by Madeleine King and Nadia Buick that looks at the history of Queensland fashion. In 2013-14 they released a 12-issue online publication, The Fashion Archives, which was followed in 2014-15 by High Street Histories, for which they received a fellowship to do research at the John Oxley Library.

Then I discovered they were putting together a book with crowd funding and that, if one threw in some money, one could get a copy of said book and go to a party at its launch. I could get frocked up! I drew out my overused plastic from my wallet.

Last week, Remotely Fashionable: A Story of Subtropical Style arrived, and what a beauty it is. The book, nestled in a box stamped with blue, is crammed with wonderful photographs and readable essays. I went to the party (at the charming Avid Reader, no less) wearing a Review frock patterned with pink hibiscus and pale green palms. I took my fashionable neighbour along too, and looked at all the other people wearing their interesting clothes. It was yet another gorgeous Brisbane evening of books, balmy weather and lovely people.

Why a book on Queensland fashion? Well, no one’s written one before. Queensland, as the authors write, ‘is typically dismissed by its savvier southern counterparts as betraying a gauche, derivative, superficial, or provincial approach to culture and taste. While its natural beauty, tropical climate, and relaxed attitude are seen as major assets for tourism and lifestyle, these same qualities are often considered anathema to the high-minded pursuits of culture and aesthetics, including style’ (13). And then there’s fashion itself which, being associated with women, has traditionally been devalued, ‘the close relationship between women and their clothing … [has] often been perceived in terms of frivolity and indulgence’ (14).

This book fills this gap in Queensland’s history in an interesting and accessible way, beginning with apt foreword by Easton & Pearson. When they started their label, these designers didn’t mention that they were from Brisbane until they started showing in Paris.

There follows an essay by Associate Professor Margaret Maynard, a dress historian, who discusses how Queensland’s climate and class impacted on the state’s fashion. Although the fashionable upper classes looked to Paris for style, they modified the fabrics to suit the climate, using muslin and light silk in summer, while men wore light-coloured jackets or trousers.

I was impressed with Amanda Hayman’s ‘A Brief Redress of Indigenous Fashion in Australia’. Amanda, who is an Indigenous artist and Digital Exhibitions Program Officer at kuril dhagan at the State Library, describes how ‘clothing and body adornment have a close relationship to Indigenous identity and can be viewed as a reflection of country’ (41) and are made from natural materials such as wood, bark, fur, feathers, grass, twine and seeds. Following colonisation however, Aboriginal cultural identity and expression was suppressed, and it wasn’t until after the 1967 referendum that Indigenous people’s wardrobes began to reflect their increasing opportunities. I thought her closing line neat and apt: ‘Just as fashion often resembles trends from the past, with certain cuts and styles from eras gone by reinvigorated by the designer’s personal touch, contemporary Indigenous fashion is able to connect with social and political events in recent history as well as ancient cultural knowledge’ (46).

I also loved Melissa Bellanta and Alana Piper’s essay on the ‘flashy’ dressing of late 19th and early 20th century prostitutes, especially the description of their finery (including fur, kimonos and smoking caps), tattoos and sass. Under the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868, they were required to undergo fortnightly examinations (Tasmania was the only other state to pass this kind of law – go Queensland! Still conservative 150 years later and still outlawing abortion). The women stuck two fingers up at the law and ‘ordered hansom cabs to take them to the doctor’s and entered them dressed in the showiest of styles’ (51).

The collection of essays closes with one by Nadia Buick, who discusses the huge popularity of exhibitions on fashion, both in Australia and internationally. These shows indicate that there is widespread interest in fashion and that it shouldn’t be dismissed as a trivial topic.

The rest of the book has images of vintage Queensland fashion, and entries on people and places that are significant in Queensland’s fashion history. This is a book that’s interesting to read and lovely to look at – and a great Xmas pressie for all the fashionistas out there.

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

Review of Anchor Point

I grew up on a property in northwest NSW. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I remember my grandmother, who had raised her sons on that piece of land, saying, ‘We use to have such gentle rain. None of these mad storms that we have now.’ This would have been 1990 or 1991. In primary school my brother and I did projects on the greenhouse effect, and I remember the publication date of the book we pored over: 1982. And yet here we are, 25 years later, still squabbling over climate change in Paris.

We live on one of the driest continents on earth, and climate change is already increasing the intensity of droughts and bushfires. Alice Robinson’s debut novel, Anchor Point, which spans from 1984 to 2018, reflects this.

After negotiating some confusion at the opening, which was crowded with people, I was pulled into the work by Robinson’s characters, particularly the protagonist, Laura. When her mother disappears, Laura and her sister are forced to help their father run the farm, which means permanent exhaustion. Laura’s father is a hard man, probably from necessity. When her sister, debilitated by hayfever, pleads for a break from fencing, his face is ‘horribly devoid of warmth’ and he refers to her as a ‘precious invalid’ (58). Vik escapes when she finishes school, but Laura, without ambition, adjusts to the hard life and works beside her father. I recognised in her the women I’d grown up around, so strong that when her estranged husband Luc returns and tries to hold her, she ‘yanked free. Too strong for a woman, she thought later’ (219). But only if you believe in censoring our lives along the line of gender.

As Laura works, she develops a deep love for the country. At one stage she follows in her sisters footsteps and tries to live in the city, with some access to the natural world through managing her husband’s nursery. However her longing to be back on the land eventually draws her away, even though it breaks her heart and she is later ‘maddened by the brutal sum of what she had lost’ (219).

Different attitudes to land management is one of the core themes of the work. Laura’s father clears all the trees on their property so they can run sheep. Laura, attentive to the changes this creates, ‘sensed the land growing quiet. There were fewer birds’ (52). When out walking with her Aboriginal friend Joseph, they pass a group of Aboriginal women, one of whom is laughing, ‘the mirth on her face … so absolute that Laura came to a stop. How long it had been since she’d seen a smile that big’ (53). After prodding Joseph, however, she finds that they are laughing at her father’s venture.

Soon enough, the country is no joke. After a bushfire comes a drought, one made relentless by climate change. The treeless land creates erosion: ‘Without roots to sew soil, the fabric of the earth had torn’ (180). The house becomes a raft ‘they clung to in the midst of a big, dead sea’ (178).

These threads are tied in a poignant moment in which Luc, Laura’s husband from the city, recognises a canoe tree next to the house on the farm. Earlier in the novel, Laura and Joseph had bonded over this tree, which Aborigines once used to make their canoes.

When Luc recognises the tree, Laura, rattled by its association with Joseph, snaps, “Where on earth would anyone canoe ‘round here?” to which Luc replies, “Didn’t you say something about a lake? … A dam?”

The dam had dried, and so did the river which took Laura’s mother. In the bushfires that razed the country, the tree had survived, but Laura muses, “What else had burned up?” (200).

The unspoken answer is the bond and knowledge Aboriginal people have for the land. At the end of the novel, Joseph asks to buy part of Laura’s land so his people can have access to it. The implication, I thought, was that he could only have the land once it was no longer useful to white people.

Professor Stephen Hopper, a former director of Kew Gardens now at the University of Western Australia, has written about how ‘attempts to shoehorn understanding into mainstream Northern Hemisphere thinking and world view remains the starting point for concepts of environmental management, only reluctantly giving way to a truly antipodean perspective when all else seems to fail.’ This is also apparent in Margaret Merilees’ novel The First Week, which opens with the protagonist contemplating the salt-ridden soil which has been returned to Noongars, the Indigenous people of south west Western Australia. We need, as Ellen van Neerven writes in her fantastic essay on climate change, a ‘multi-nation’ approach to climate, one that uses Indigenous knowledge instead of turning to it as a last resort. After all, as Alexis Wright writes in Carpentaria, ‘Can someone who did not grow up in a place that is sometimes under water, sometimes bone-dry, know when the trade winds blowing off the southern and northern hemispheres will merge in summer? Know the moment of climactic change better than they know themselves? (3).

Australia has been ranked third-last in terms of the climate change performance of 58 countries. With mostly white, male politicians setting the agenda in Paris and Australia, it makes me despair. We need to listen to the voices of Aboriginal people if we are to make any headway in staving off the more catastrophic effects of climate change.

Laura’s mention of what is lost through fire is a segue into the final section of the novel, set in 2018, in which Laura tries to redress her father’s damage to the land by replanting the trees. This was the saddest part of the book for me, probably because Laura, too, was sad. Her mother was a disappointment, and the land, for which Laura had given up her life and her relationship, never flourished with her father’s ill-suited European farming practices. Nor does she find romantic fulfilment with Joseph, who had adored her since they were young. ‘If only they had kept in touch, Laura thought, things might now be different. But what might have been seemed long gone, with the rain’ (247). Is this a metaphor for what’s happening with our environment, and with black and white relations in Australia?

This, and the ending, with bushfire closing in on Melbourne and Vik’s apartment block threatening to overheat like a greenhouse, is a warning that we must redress things now, before it’s too late. Politicians may not listen – Australia’s certainly don’t – but writers do, and they reflect the quiet hum of anxiety among us.

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

Review of Stanley and Sophie

I picked up this small volume from the library after I’d written my review of Hopscotch, Jane Messer’s account of the impact of the Global Financial Crisis upon a middle-class Sydney family. I dimly remembered having read another review or article about Jennings’ 2003 novel about Wall Street, Moral Hazard, which commented about how few women write about the financial world, or feature in it as characters with agency.

As I searched in vain for that article, I disappeared down the rabbit hole of the internet, and came up with Jennings’ memoir Stanley and Sophie. Having been revising my own memoir, and researching writing about animals for my young adult novel, I thought I might kill two birds with one stone by reading this book.

The factual and fictional blur frequently in Jennings’ writing. Moral Hazard is a novel about a woman who writes speeches for financiers by day, and by night cares for a husband losing his mind to Alzheimer’s. This book, as a memoir, picks up where that left off, with Jennings living in New York and mourning to her husband who also had died from Alzheimer’s.

Jennings had been raised on a farm in Australia and for her, dogs were working animals kept outside, ‘housed in kennels made from corrugated iron that were well away from where we lived, with no concession to the weather, which in winter was cold enough for ice form on puddles and dams and in the summer hot enough to make the lead fall out of pencils’ (11). When the dogs grew old, they ‘were retired under a rainwater tank where it was blessedly shady, sweetly cool’ (11). In her personality, she was avowedly unsentimental. ‘Call me cold,’ she states. ‘Actually, call me vinegary’ (10).

Why, then, does she fall head over heels in love with a dog? She missed her husband and her marriage, but she was also suffering from ‘the prolonged exposure to Alzheimer’s … I hadn’t been released from it. Instead, I was trapped in a place where reluctance leached through the walls, nihilism pooled on the floor. I tried caulking the holes with work and antidepressants, but still the insistent seepage, still the sorrow. Ashes and dishwater’ (20). When she met Stanley, ‘an aristocratic alpha male border terrier’ (4), it’s love at first sight. ‘Stanley had a job’, she writes, ‘to bring me into the sunlight’ (21).

And so he did, by offering structure to her days, walks, companionship and entertainment. However, Stanley was lonely, and when another border terrier, Sophie, was offered up as a companion, Jennings adopted her too. Despite their daily walks, however, the dogs were confined to an apartment, and Jennings was confined ‘by memories of my marriage, by places and possessions that triggered the memories’ (91). She made the heartbreaking decision to give the dogs away.

The second part of the book is set in Bali, where Jennings stays with her brother. The dogs in this place are not reared for companionship, but as offerings. Once despatched, they keep watch on the house as spirits. Jennings comes to know as macaque known as Chico, who becomes tetchy for a mate. They find him a small female known as Cheeky at the bird market in Denpasar, where macaques ‘sat on top of cages, drooping and despondent, their will to live all but extinguished. Some would become pets, while others would be slaughtered for their brains, believed to impart energy. All of them had been poached, their mothers killed’ (125).

It was at this point that the book came alive for me; previously I’d had no connection to it, possibly because Jennings hadn’t been feeling much either. Cheeky, motherless, attaches herself to Jennings and wails when she leaves, ‘a never-ending susurrus of complaint and dispossession’ (128). The sounds and the experience, she writes, ‘tapped directly into the sadness that had accumulated in me. My stiff upper lip, kept as firmly in place as possible since my husband’s death, went slack. I started to cry and couldn’t stop’ (129).

It was also at this point that the book became more intellectually engaging. Is a dog, however cossetted, well-fed, well-walked and groomed, any different to a monkey tied to a chain, or to the endangered baboon and baby Sumatran tiger, kept under the floorboards by a vendor at the bird market for buyers of stature? We keep animals for our pleasure, but what about theirs? Do they want to be our pets, and are we right to make them so even after thousands of years of domestication? And why do we keep doing this: making them our own? Is it because their humanity sometimes exceeds ours?

For against Jennings’ grief and interactions with animals is set the destruction of the World Trade Towers and the Bali bombings. ‘I loved my dogs,’ she writes, ‘and my heart went out to the monkeys. When we cry for our animals, we cross for the whole sodding mess. The whole sodding, sorry mess’ (156).

Perhaps the answer lies in a story written by Sophie’s new owner, who fell for her too and knew she would be hers. He describes how dogs ‘take us out of our brains and down into the street, where we are more real, more vivid; their attention keeps us in place and allows us constant contact with the sensate world in which we live’ (179). Animals, in other words, remind us that we are animals too, and therein lies their joy. For people corralled in houses away from the brush of undergrowth, with tarmac instead of soil underfoot, the sensations of stroking a dog’s head, of feeling a cat’s claws as they knead before settling into your lap, of studying the glossy round of a bird’s eye, all remind us of who we are and where we have come from.

As with many of Jennings’ other works (such as Snake, which I reviewed last year), this is a small book which, like gelato, melts on the tongue, her phrases like dissolving sugar. Stanley slept with her at night, ‘starting the evening curled into a tight comma, by morning monopolising all the pillow like a grand pasha’ (21). The chapters are succinct, their endings often a perfect cadence, as in ‘If I Could Stop the Wind Blowing’. After an altercation with a Republican over Stanley’s marking of his door, Sophie is encouraged to forever after ‘hoist her bottom high in the air and splash her message on the glossy black paint’ (79) and she is subsequently rewarded with the superlative, ‘Best girl in the world’ (79). I could read Jennings’ dogs on the page as well as if I might have in person, and this lent extra charm to the work.

As I’m deaf, I compensate for the things I can’t hear by reading body language, and on I love reading dogs as much as I do people. When my father leaves the house to work on his renovations, his whippet paces delicately, tail between her legs, her eyes like dark saucers. She and my mother’s dog, a tiny, feisty cavadoodle, will sit by the window all day, noses pressed to the glass, until he returns. My sister’s cocker spaniel is Bentley, a dumb blonde of a dog who dug a solid hole in my heart when I lived in her house for a year. A puppy, he sat at my feet as I wrote Entitlement and followed me from room to room. Now an adult, he’ll sit when he’s told to, but quivers with the anticipation of my body loosening and bending down to embrace him, after which point he will jump uncontrollably. As Jennings puts it, ‘What we love most about dogs is that they are transparent, their emotions pure, unmuddied by ambiguity even when torn by conflicting desires. They express themselves with graphic simplicity’ (42). Even I, not demonstrative by nature, am secretly delighted by the way he comes barrelling through the door when he sees me, a 20 kg mass of fur and enthusiasm. When do we ever bowl each over with such love?

This is my 5th review for the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

On Gratefulness

October is far and above my favourite month. The jacarandas are ablaze, lining the streets and cliffs in purple fires. The star jasmine is flowering too, staining the evening air as I walk to my boyfriend’s after French classes. There’s the joy of pulling on a summer frock and feeling it ripple against my bare calves, and of wrapping myself in a cashmere cardigan on still-chilly mornings.

And now there’s one more reason: after five years of unremitting hard work, of research in Australia and overseas, of writing and publishing, travelling to and presenting at conferences, and making applications (9 of them to 7 institutions in that time), I finally won a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, one of 200 offered to scholars across Australia who have finished their PhD within the last five years. I’ll be based at the University of Queensland and I’ll be writing an ecobiography on 19th century botanist Georgiana Molloy. A biography is a work about a person, but an ecobiography is about a person and their environment – you can’t narrate the life of one without considering the other.

The relief that comes from the promise of financial stability is unparalleled. For five years I’ve survived on a part-time wage, supplemented with Australia Council grants and assistance from my parents. I’ve written one book and the drafts for two more (and a third will be done by Xmas), and I’ve worked so hard that I’ve relapsed repeatedly and tediously into illness.

‘Listen to your body,’ the psychologist said to me two years ago when I dipped down into depression. I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t always heeded her advice, but I am at least aware of driving myself to exhaustion. The problem is that there's too much to write and too little time. The problem is also deafness – the concentration fatigue that comes from everyday interactions.

My deafness was responsible for pushing me into writing and research – it was a job that didn’t require too much listening, but which satisfied me immensely. I tried to be a fiction writer when I returned to Australia, but I missed the stimulation and the crisp exchange of ideas that comes with academia, and knew I had to find a way back into it. However, deafness and the strain of listening left me too depleted after teaching to be able to write, and so I resolved to find a postdoc. It’s been an arduous process, but the set backs that come with being a writer prepared me for that. A knock down is irrelevant - you just keep on going. I’m hoping that now, with a new role, I’ll have a better work-life balance.

I’ve just finished importing all of the blog posts I’ve ever written into my new(ish) website. I started them in 2006, when blogging was taking off in the UK. I was appalled, as I tidied them up, at how negative I was in London; so ground down by homesickness & the lack of light that I couldn’t appreciate what was before me.

The process of making oneself happy is one of deduction, and I know now that I can never be away from Australia for long, but it also takes resolve. A friend of mine, whom I took from her calm demeanour to be a naturally buoyant person, once corrected me, ‘No, I make a conscious effort every day to be positive.’ I wish I had known that while I was overseas, but perhaps we never understand how unhappy we are until we have climbed out of it.

There is so much to be grateful for: the scholars at the university who helped me pull my application into shape; Queensland’s abundant, glorious sunshine; my family, who have supported and protected me but still allowed me forge my stubborn, difficult way ahead; my smart and funny boyfriend, with whom I am never bored; and the smell of jasmine that wends through the window on these still, spring nights.