Australian Women Writers Challenge – Completed!

Ok so it's kind of eleventh hour (the story of my life in 2016), but I got my ten reviews done for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and I read 36 books by Australian women writers altogether (I’ll list these in a later post when I sum up my reading for 2016).

Here are the books I reviewed:

1.     Comfort Food, Ellen van Neerven

2.     Defying Doomsday, Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench

3.     Fishing in the Devonian, Carol Jenkins

4.     Not Just Black and White, Lesley and Tammy Williams

5.     Painting Red Orchids, Eileen Chong

6.     Cloudwish, Fiona Wood

7.     Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, Anita Heiss

8.     Everywhere I Look, Helen Garner

9.     The Soul of Countess Adrian, Rosa Praed

10.  Close to Home, Robin Barker

With three Indigenous authors, two editors with disability and one author from a migrant background, this list is happily much more diverse than last year’s.

Over at the AWW challenge, I arranged a focus on Australian women writers with disability in April which featured guest posts by Gaele Sobott and Amanda Tink, as well as my own thoughts on why we need diverse books. In October I organised a focus on Australian women writers of migrant heritage, with posts from Eileen Chong, Lee Kofman and Michelle Cahill. And in July I interviewed Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko as part of a celebration of NAIDOC week

Sadly, this is the last year of my role as diversity editor. What with working full time and trying to do my creative writing in my spare time, my life has become completely overloaded and I need to try and balance things better. I’ll continue to arrange the guest posts (and am going to try to include more by Indigenous writers), but the roundups will be done by the excellent and capable Marisa Wikramanayake.

I’ll sign up for the challenge next year, but I won’t set myself a target (part the trying to minimise strain business). It’s a wonderful and valuable initiative, and it’s introduced me to a new way of thinking about discussing books. In fact I’ve found this so interesting that I successfully applied for an internal grant at UQ to study vernacular criticism in more detail.

I don’t know if my reading habits have changed that much over the past five years, as the reason why I gravitated towards the challenge in the first place was because I naturally read a lot of books by women. However it has definitely raised my awareness of gender bias and I’ve started having conversations with other people about the books they and their children read (my sister, for example, is now actively getting her son to read books with female protagonists). I'm really grateful, too, to the challenge creator Elizabeth Lhuede for approaching me five years ago after she read a post I'd written on Eva Hornung's Dog Boy and disability. It's made me far more aware of the representations of disability in literature, and given me an opportunity to be part of sorely-needed conversations in Australia about diversity.

The challenge is still going strong and Elizabeth has new volunteers helping out and looking over stats. I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens in 2017!

Notes from the Field (iv)

I headed to WA again in late November for conferences & research, and took my boyfriend with me so I wouldn’t have to drive & bushwalk on my own. We stayed in Fremantle and I left him to his own devices while I went to the Ecological Society of Australia conference to listen to a symposium on Indigenous Biocultural Knowledge. There were plenty of interesting presentations, such as the investigation of dieback in culturally significant Melaleucas in the Laynhapuy Indigenous Protected Area in northern Australia. The results of Western scientific methods of investigating dieback corresponded with the information derived from interviews with senior traditional owners ie both methods indicated that 70% of the problems were caused by salinity and erosion from pigs and buffalo. Another team monitored bilby populations by drawing on Indigenous ecological knowledge on where bilbies were distributed an how they liked to live, and combined this with their data on population levels. I was dismayed to see that these bilbies had once lived in the eastern states too but now their last stronghold is in Indigenous land that covers the deserts of WA and the NT. Their populations had also shrunk in quite a small space of time.

Some of the presentations also described different models of working with scientists. Some maintained their autonomy and slowly built up relationships with stakeholders, others are employed via the federal government, but worryingly funding for this is not secure. The Country Needs People campaign is raising awareness about this – you can head to their page to read about the work rangers do and sign a petition to support them. Speakers also stressed the importance of collaboration, rather than appropriating information, or coming in and doing a project and leaving again, rather than forming continuing relationships.

As a literary scholar at a conference for scientists, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to understand anything, but the presentations were all clear and straightforward.

Then we headed down to the south west, stopping on the way at Lake Clifton, which houses thrombolites (our ancestors!). Annamaria Weldon writes about this lake in The Lake’s Apprentice and the area was beautiful – the light silvered, the lake choppy and foamy with wind. The b/f, whose first degree is in ecology, looked around for bugs while I took photos.

We headed on to Margaret River, through which I’d travelled when researching A Curious Intimacy, but never stayed at. We were a little way out of town in a lovely house among the eucalypts. Nearby was an abandoned vineyard through which wallabies hopped.

I needed to get to know the area, so I’d arranged a tour with Sean Blocksidge, who was informative, funny and very personable. I couldn’t get over how blue the sea and sky were. A few wildflowers were still out; it had been an incredible season because there’d been quite a bit of rain, but generally the rainfall is decreasing. The wineries also use a lot of water so it’s uncertain what will happen to them as climate change affects the area. Sean took us canoeing on the Margaret River, which was still and tranquil, and showed us a part of the Three Capes Track. I also just about turned inside out when I saw the Nuytsia floribunda was in flower - botanists in England were desperate for this plant but they could never get it to grow, because they didn't realise it was a parasite. I hadn't seen it on previous trips because it only flowers at Christmas (and is known as the Christmas tree, although the Noongar names for it are moojar, moojerool, munjah and mutyal).

We did another tour with Josh Koomal Whiteland which was fantastic. Josh is a Wadandi man, and he's now based in Dunsborough. With a stick he drew a map in the dirt of the different groups which lived in the south west, and explained about the six seasons, and how eating different plants and animals is contingent on their breeding or flowering times. I wished I could have learnt more about this, as it made my brain explode, I but figured he needed a tour that interests a wide range of people (it also included a look around Ngigli Cave where he played his didge, which was wonderful). Josh had a great sense of humour and a gentle disposition. A snake lived near the drain, so he got out his stick in case he needed to move it on. ‘It’s their place, too,’ he explained.

Another highlight of the trip was having a cuppa with Bernice Barry, who has published a very detailed and extensively-researched biography on Georgiana Molloy, The Mind That Shines. There were plenty of parallels between her own life and Georgiana’s, and after researching Rosa and Maud Praed for so long, I wondered if, as researchers, we’re drawn to those whom we have synchronicities because we understand their motivations and actions. At any rate, that sense of connection is important when you’re working on a project that takes a long time, otherwise you’d get bored and walk away.

We were heading to Augusta the next day to have a look around, and Bernice suggested we check out the granite rock where Georgiana sometimes collected (and would have had to get there by boat). She also recommended Castle Rock, to which Georgiana dreamed of moving, and when we got there I could see why – the water was exquisite. I was bitterly disappointed that I hadn’t packed my swimmers, but the b/f said we could come back – I hope so!

Thence it was back to Fremantle for the bi-annual InASA conference, the theme of which was ‘Encountering Australia’. I presented my research on ecotones and caught up with some fab folk who I hadn’t seen for a while, and listened to a splendid keynote by Kim Scott on the importance of listening to and growing Noongar language.

Before we caught the plane back, we ducked into the art gallery to see the ‘Unknown Land’ exhibition, about Europeans’ first views of Western Australia. I’d seen a few of these in books, but I hadn’t known that Louisa Clifton, who came to Australia as part of the ill-fated Australind settlement in the 1840s, was also an artist. Her lithograph of Koombana Bay was intricate, its muted, melancholy blues very unlike the bright seas we'd seen, although that could just be my interpretation as I know she wasn’thappy about having to leave England. Women didn’t get much of a say in those days.

I was a bit sad to fly back east – I loved Freo and the south west is a marvelous and overlooked part of Australia – but after a month of living out of a suitcase I was also desperate to wake up in my own bed, tend to my beleaguered plants, and get a coffee from the café on the corner.

Review of Close to Home

I met and became friends with Robin Barker when we were doing an MA in Writing course at the University of Technology, Sydney. Robin was famous because she had published two books of advice on babies, Baby Love and The Mighty Toddler. I was a twenty-three year old who loved nineteenth-century fiction and wanted to write my first novel and didn’t have a clue about babies in any shape or form. Somehow we hit it off. I’ve always enjoyed the company of older women – they’re more interesting and emotionally complex than younger women and, having done more, they often have good stories too. I’m not sure why Rob was interested in me, unless it was that she recognised my ambition and wanted to help, which she certainly did. When I later won a mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors, she introduced me to her editor Julia Stiles, who in turn helped me with my manuscript and introduced me to some agents, and then A Curious Intimacy finally found its feet.

Rob has been working on the stories in Close to Home since that time (I discovered I still had a draft of one in my writing box) and it was fantastic to see them in print, particularly the stories I knew she was struggling with, as all writers do. Plus the cover is gorgeous. I read the book a while back, leaving it in a tequila bar when I took everything out of my handbag to find my wallet. To my relief, the bartender still had it when I went back the following week.

Of all the stories, the one that’s stayed with me is ‘Josephine’s Face’. A fairly long, meandering story in the second person, it doesn’t have a great deal of tension, but it achieves nuance and complexity through the use of hindsight. The narrator, posted to America with her army husband and kids, befriends an African-American mother in the park attached to the military’s housing complex. As the narrator comes to know her, it slowly becomes apparent to her how race is entwined with class. Where the white women make their menfolk lunch and listen to their day, Josephine goes out to work. Young and naïve, the narrator comments how ‘It didn’t take long for Don and me to be drawn into a welcoming circle of officers and wives, which I soon noticed you and AJ weren’t part of. It didn’t seem to be because you were deliberately excluded, and nor did you ever give me that impression. At the time I presumed it was because you were working shifts in that hospital in Alexandria’. Subtlety, the use of ‘at that time’ shows it wasn’t this reason at all. The accounts of subtle racism continue in conversations at dinner parties or at shops. There are tiny, dropped words that, on their own, are hard to pick out, but when they’re laid in a line with the benefit of hindsight, they accumulate into something cruel. In the midst of it all is this glamorous, intelligent, accomplished woman, ignoring the insults with aplomb.

Children bind together many of these stories, illuminating the messes that adults get caught up in, and sometimes make for themselves. I loved the shifting relationships and liaisons occasioned by a couple trying to conceive in ‘First Love’, and its unexpected twists. In other stories there are complications arising from inadequate parenting, or parents wrestling over custody, but joy always wells up, from employers, babies, unexpected strangers.

The first and last stories are pieces of memoir, and they resonated with me most strongly. The last is about the complex legacy of war and its memories, and how writing can help soothe and smooth the trauma that war carries. The first, story about Rob’s two grandmothers, shows her skillful rendering of character and class. There is the fat grandmother, who vacuums in the nude and takes in an Aboriginal family when floods threaten. Meanwhile the thin grandmother, to survive, takes in boarders, ‘New Australians with broken English and glistening hair’. Later, a part of her history unexpectedly emerges, leaving her with a ‘silent, rebellious anger’. I loved this story for its clear rendition of class through dialogue and contrast, and its illustration impact of poverty upon women, and how tough they have to be to survive. It’s a good way to end my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge this year.

This is my tenth and final review for the Challenge. And here is a pic of Rob and I in 2003.

Review of The Soul of Countess Adrian

I was surprised and kind of annoyed with myself to realise that, in all of my years of reviewing for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (five of them!) I hadn’t thought to write a review of a Rosa Praed novel. Maybe it’s because I’ve written of them so often in my scholarly work (which, if you’re interested, can be found on my website).

Praed was a prolific author. From the publication of her first novel in England in 1880, she published at least one work nearly every year. She became well known in literary circles in London, becoming acquainted with writers Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, and theosophist founders Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott. Her first two novels An Australian Girl (1880) and Policy and Passion (1881) were based on her Australian experiences. After this she moved into themes of spiritualism and theosophy such as communicating with the dead, reincarnation and mesmerism, although she returned often to her memories of Australia.

The most recent Praed novel I’ve read is The Soul of Countess Adrian. I picked this up a while back but I’m revisiting her oeuvre as I do the final bit of work on my book. One of her many works dealing with spiritualist themes, this one dwells largely upon mesmerism, otherwise known as ‘animal magnetism’ or, later, ‘hypnotism’. Mesmer, who developed the idea of animal magnetism, believed that a subtle physical fluid fills the universe and forms connecting mediums between humans, the earth and heavenly bodies. Diseases form when this fluid is unevenly distributed in the body, and the person recovers when equilibrium is restored through the chanelling of the fluid to other people. Although the basis of his ideas were in fluid, they were more believably exercised through the concept of power in interpersonal relations between himself and patients, and this is how the notion manifests in The Soul of Countess Adrian.

The novel features the stock Praed characters of a young, vulnerable, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman and a strong-willed, potentially dangerous older woman who exerts her influence over the younger woman. The former is Miss Beatrice Brett, a performer, and the latter is Countess Adrian, who ‘was far too large, too tall, too bounteously made for beauty. But then, how perfectly she was proportioned, and what a graceful snake-like way she had of moving, and what a grand carriage of head and magnificence of bust! Her eyes were too close together. But the eyes! Surely they might have illustrated Professor Viall's theory of Magnetic Dynamics. They were all pupil and yellow light. When the pupil dilated, there was nothing else; when it contracted, the iris showed queer golden gleams, like those the eyes of some savage animal … And who cared that the rich red lips, parted so as to show a double row of small glistening teeth, were so red and so ripe as to suggest sense rather than soul? Soul somehow was the last attribute one would associate with Countess Adrian’ (35-6).

By contrast, Beatrice had a soul which, Lenton muses, ‘might be likened, as in Dryden's metaphor, to a rare and well-tempered blade fretting its too delicate scabbard, so frail was her physique, so ethereal her look’ (10).

Beatrice is known as an ‘Improvisatrice’, traditionally a female poet who performs verse, but in this novel she acts out plays without a script. She performs as a compulsion, not as a desire, explainign to her admirer Lenton, ‘I can’t think of anything now, but what I am going to do. I don’t know why I want to do it, but I can’t help it; it’s been in me all day, making me so restless’ (34).

In other words, she is a medium, a woman who channels spirits. Her uncle refers to her ‘genuis’ as ‘the unconscious power of access to the highest influences of the past … It’s the open door through which these bodiless beings from the other side can enter into our world again – the body by which they can vent their unsatisfied cravings and pen-up aspirations’ (43).

Both women love Lenton, who adores the purity of Beatrice. When the countess discovers that Lenton is engaged to Beatrice, she mesmerises the young girl and, in a vampiric kiss, transfers her soul to Beatrice, then dies. Beatrice is left unconscious, but when she finally wakes she has undergone a personality change. Acting as the Duchess in The Duchess of Malfi, Lenton observes how ‘With her eyes and her voice and her gesture, she stood the embodied lust of the flesh’ (179). No longer shy and shrinking, her form ‘seemed more luxuriantly moulded than before her illness, and her lips and eyes had acquired a peculiar and voluptuous expression’ (181). However, through the intervention of a mystic, this new, sexualised personality is exorcised and the previous Beatrice returns.

It’s interesting that Beatrice is a performer, as it was through mediumship that women were able to gain authority in a culture in which they were terribly circumscribed. Some such as Katie King became famous, although they were later exposed as frauds. What I’ve always found peculiar in Praed’s novels is her representation of these passionate, sexual women who exert a mesmerising force that must be removed. Praed was a terrifically strong woman (although she didn’t much like sex), and perhaps these novels express her awareness that her personality was too powerful for the culture in which she lived.

As far as Praed novels go, this was one was fairly simply. Others, such as Policy and Passion are more complex and interesting. For those who are interested in reading more (and you can always be guaranteed of a good plot in a Praed novel), some of her works are available on Project Gutenberg.

This is my ninth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Notes from the Field (iii)

The last few months of this year were unbelievably hectic, being filled with conferences and travel. Despite the exhaustion occasioned by running around the country, I met plenty of great people and listened to some wonderful papers.

At the beginning of November I flew to Sydney to listen to and present at the Australian Women’s Writing Symposium, which I wrote about here. I returned to Brisbane to do my marking, then came back to Sydney to speak at Quantum Words, a science writing festival organised by the NSW Writers Centre – a post about this is in the pipeline.

I’d booked a week of annual leave to try to finish my Praed book at my brother’s place in the Blue Mountains, but as it was the first time I’d stopped properly for a while, I got sick. I also ended up having to finish my marking and write conference papers, so that was a bit of a disaster.

Passed this fellow when out for fresh air & caffeine.

Then it was back to Sydney for the ASLEC-ANZ environmental humanities conference, where I presented on two ecobiographies, Dick Roughsey’s Moon and Rainbow and Margaret Somerville’s Body/Landscape Journals. There were wonderful keynotes at this conference, including Alice Te Punga Somerville, Elspeth Probyn and the wonderful artist John Woolsley, pictured here with his taped-together notes. Alice stressed the importance of included Indigenous scholars in one's work. 'Who's in your ecology?' she asked. 'And does it include Indigenous academics?' It's a point worth remembering & acting upon.

Alas I could only spend a day at this conference, as the next day I headed down to Wollongong for the Colonial Formations conference, which was just fantastic. I wish it hadn’t been on at the same time and that I could have stayed there for longer. In a keynote, Jane Lydon discussed how anti-slavery contexts were applied to Australia, for example the second fleet to Australia was contracted by slave owners, and the 1830s saw the height of anti-slavery discussions but it was also when colonial violence was endemic in the south west. She referred to the limits of empathy, in that we might feel but not act and a representation of suffering might obscure a slave's subjectivity. Coldness and compassion are two sides of a coin, which I thought was an interesting idea. There was also the secrecy of massacres - the frontier violence of Myall Creek was obscured for decades. Even Rosa Praed, writing about the Hornet Bank massacre decades afterwards, distorted her narrative.

Then there was an absolutely brilliant panel on collectors. Deidre Coleman of The University of Melbourne spoke about Henry Smeathman (1742-1786) an entomologist about whom she is writing a biography. In 1781 he wrote an essay 'Some account of the termites, which are found in hot Countries', and Deidre looked at how he used the termitary and the way in which termites colonised as a metaphor for human colonisation. She also described how insects helped him to communicate with a range of classes, including wealthy collectors and the people of Sierra Leone, where he collected. He sent natives to collect for him but their curiosity and bartering was overwhelming and drove him nuts. Ann Coote of UNE then spoke about Indigenous guides and collectors in a very clear and well laid-out presentation on why Indigenous people agreed to collect for Europeans. Reasons included obtaining useful goods and information, personal prestige, communal stability and the protection of Country by controlling the movements of collectors. Jude Philp, senior curator at The University of Sydney, then talked about collectors in Papua New Guinea in the 19th Century, and how some of these made their way into Aberdeen University so that people in Scotland could know something of Papua New Guinea. And Simon Ville, a professor of economics and business history at Wollongong, ended the session with a discussion of how the commerce of collecting - how prices were negotiated, for example, or the reputation signalling of naming.

View from train window.

It also happened to be the last day at the university for my good friend and former poetry teacher, Alan Wearne. At lunch we had a coffee and Alan printed out his latest poem for me. Then I caught the train back to Sydney, a trip which is simultaneously too long and invested with my ambivalent memories of Wollongong, but also very pretty.

Review of Everywhere I Look

I’m gearing up to do the last lot of work on my book, which involves, as it always does, reading other writers to work out how to fix things and make it better. A friend told me to pick up Helen Garner’s Everywhere I Look so I could figure out how to tighten my prose. It was good advice.

These are gorgeous pieces, shaped and buffed into brilliant little stones, bristling with an electricity that comes from Garner’s quickness, pique and furtive passions. It’s there in ‘Whisper and Hum’ when, despite an unappealing holiday on Vanuatu which coalesced in a repugnance for ‘a certain parasitic creeper that flourished aggressively, bowing the treetops down and binding them to each other in a dense, undifferentiated mat of choking foliage’, Garner comes across a Melanesian man ‘playing a tiny stringed instrument … just to keep himself company’. Inspired, she buys a ukulele and instruction book when she gets home, but ‘put them in a cupboard under a pile of blankets and said nothing about them to anyone’. Her joy in the instrument is subterranean from by a fear of mockery and, later, marriage to a ‘severe modernist’ but it rises to the surface in her admission, ‘I love it as I would any harmless little creature. I love to hear it whisper and hum’. As it does when, hearing ‘the faintest, airiest twanging sound’, she realises that ‘a breeze coming up the hill from Bondi was puffing over the windowsill and drawing the hem of the calico curtain back and forth over the open strings’. And people overlook the domestic in fiction because they think it’s dull!

On that note, this is a book about places and houses, unsurprisingly, for Garner moved house twenty-six times she writes in ‘White Paint and Calico’. There is a paean to Monee Ponds in ‘Suburbia’; the use of a table as a metaphor for a body at a somewhat settled stage of life; the labour of packing, which is likened to childbirth. And children run in and out of the houses. They call for Nanny; act out cowboys; discuss farts; crawl into her bed after a bad dream and sleep diagonally, cramming her into a corner and causing her to complain, ‘God damn it, I think at 5 a.m., this is worse than being married’. It’s endearing.

When I read This House of Grief, I admired Garner’s refusal to commit to a black-and-white version of events. There is always another side to the story, and she strove to render this with humanity. I don’t doubt it was hard, exhausting work (writing a book requires huge emotional labour at the best of times, let alone trying to negotiate the complexities of a court case), but Garner’s wry humour still prevailed. Two of the jurors were young fellows who became chummy as the case went on:

‘He and another languid youth became inseparable. They entered and left the court together, exchanging whispered comments, and muffling their amusement. It was a bromance. Much later, when the journalists were herded into their dismal office so the deliberating jurors could take the air, these two romped together in the sunny yard like puppies’.

I laughed with delight when I read this, and I laughed throughout Everywhere I Look as well. Often that laughter was prompted by the brutal honesty of children, as in ‘Lift-Rat’.

‘Last week I had my hair cut. I was pleased, in the limited way one dares to be at this age. The next day my five-year-old granddaughter came home from kinder. She studied me up and down, and said with a crooked smile, ‘I don’t like your haircut, Nanna. You look like Luke Skywalker. It’s dumb at the sides.’

I sobered up as I read on. The essay segued into an elaboration of Garner’s correspondence and friendship with Elizabeth Jolley, but the wry tone was held throughout, appearing, like a punctuation mark, at the end:

‘[i]t was too late for me to say goodbye, or to thank [Jolley] for the last sentence of The Orchard Thieves, where an old woman points out comfortingly to her daughter that the difference between a bad haircut and a good one is only a week’.

I met Garner at an ASAL mini-conference in Armidale. This was one of the loveliest conferences I’ve ever been to. I’d had two guiltily homesick months writing in Rome and I was glad to see my parents again. It was a beautiful summer, in the way New England summers are – cool, with long, low light in the evenings. An Australian friend whom I’d met at another conference in Prato, who now lives in Oxford, was also unexpectedly there, and it was lovely to see her. Amidst the presentations, we jumped in a bus for a tour of places significant to Judith Wright, including the home in which she was born. ‘In a homestead of deep, flowering verandahs,’ Garner writes, ‘we were welcomed by female relatives with the long legs and quiet authority of horsewomen, not to mention the ability to knock up an airy sponge’. Afterwards there was tea from a giant teapot (used for tennis parties) beneath a shady tree and a visit to the tiny local church.

Off to have a look at the church at Jeogla.

Always sensitive to people’s body language (necessary for someone who is deaf), I was wary of the forcefield radiating from Garner tight shoulders, resolute refusal of eye contact and endlessly moving hands. It seemed to me that this was a women who didn’t want to be spoken to. If I was famous, I reasoned, I’d probably be tired of groupies too. I was grateful, then, when my friend’s mother introduced me to Garner and I was able to express my admiration for This House of Grief and to tell her of my research on Rosa Praed and Maud. She suggested that I read Far from the Tree, which I did, and enjoyed.

There’s much more of which I could write of this collection: Garner’s surprising finding about her primary school teacher; her relationships with other writers, both tentative and fierce; her brilliant essay on ageing, but really, you should pick up the book yourself and explore and savour it. In the meantime, it’s time to start the last bit of my book, and to try and make my sentences ping.

This is my eighth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms

Anita Heiss’s latest novel opens with a man running from a prison: the Japanese internment camp of Cowra in 1944. Hiroshi finds safety with an Aboriginal family, who hide and care for him. Gradually, a romance develops between Hiroshi and Mary Williams, the young Aboriginal woman who takes him food.

Heiss writes what she calls ‘choc-lit’ – or chick lit with an Aboriginal focus – but you would foolish to dismiss this as fluff. Her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, is always firmly focused on educating audiences about Aboriginal culture and the ongoing effects of colonialism and racism. She’s a smart woman: popular fiction is one of the most widely read genres, and by inserting her themes into her popular novels she aims to inform a wide range of readers.

This is a difficult road to take, as readers of this genre pick up books expecting to be entertained. If there’s a whiff of anything otherwise, they don’t care for it. I don’t think that will be a problem for readers of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, for in this work Heiss blends popular fiction and politics beautifully. 

There are two main techniques she uses to achieve this. The first is Hiroshi’s point of view. By using a character who knows nothing of Aboriginal culture, who is initially ‘suspicious as to why these dark people are helping him and where they actually come from’ but who grows to love them deeply, Heiss articulates how race is a construct and that hunger, kindness, fear, homesickness and desire are qualities that belong to us all.

The second technique is the use of metaphor, specifically that of imprisonment. The prison from which Hiroshi escapes represents not only the physical camp for internees, but also the camps on which Aboriginal people were forced to live – the mission stations and reserves – when their land was taken from them. As Banjo, Mary’s father, says, ‘We are treated like prisoners too, at Erambie. We shouldn’t be on rations. We should all be paid the same for the same work and have enough money to buy food for our families – not just flour, tea and sugar rations and whatever we can hunt or manage to grow. It’s not fair for anyone. The prisoners of war are just like us’.

Heiss also addresses contemporary concerns, such as negative representations of Aboriginal people in the media. Merv, a singer and football player, makes a name for himself in Sydney and is written up in the paper. Mary, who reads the article about him out to the family, comments ‘At least this is a positive article about Aboriginal people. You’re always saying what they write about us is bad, Mum.’ And in Mary’s family itself there is much to be proud of. The Williams take in a stranger and scrimp to find food for him, as many Aboriginal people did for Europeans they were shipwrecked on Australia’s coasts. They take an interest in Hiroshi and his culture, as Noongars did in whalers and the first colonists when they arrived in south west Western Australia (Kim Scott writes about this beautifully in That Deadman Dance). At the same time they aren’t saints, for no one is. Through Kevin, who is jealous and has a temper, Heiss shows that every family has its arguments, and that different viewpoints need to be aired before one can arrive at a resolution. 

At the heart of the novel is an important emotion: empathy. Romance is definitely important too, not least because it drives the plot, but without empathy, romance can’t happen. Empathy often takes some work – intellectual as well as emotional. As Banjo exhorts his brother Kevin, ‘What if our brother escaped from a POW camp like this bloke? Wouldn’t you want someone to look after him and treat him like a human being?’ And this is what the novel does, as all good literature should do: it takes us out of our everyday lives and into a new world, where we become invested in and learn to care for its people. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who argues for the importance of including emotion in philosophy, writes in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995), novels invite us to ‘concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own’ (xvi). And this in turn is a precondition for respect for human dignity (xvi).

So if you’re reading this book by the beach (and I hope you are!), you’ll not only enjoy the plot and characters (perhaps woven with the smell of salt and sunscreen and the sounds of kids yelling), but you’ll also quietly exercise your heart as well.

This is my seventh review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Notes from the Field (ii)

This year has turned out to be such a rollercoaster that the best I could do was hold onto my hair, rather than pen any blog posts about my research. However, it’s the post-Christmas lull and, in between sleeping off an exhausting year and swimming off the excesses of the festive season, I’m catching up on my posts.

In July I headed to Canberra to present on my research at the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature association. This was a really good conference hosted by the ADFA branch of UNSW, and fittingly the theme was ‘Capital-Empire-Print-Dissent’. Also fittingly, the first speaker (for the Barry Andrews Lecture at the National Library) was Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko, the first keynote was American Indian scholar Chadwick Allen from the University of Washington, and the first panel consisted of three excellent Indigenous scholars: Alice te Punga Somerville, Jeanine Leane and Evelyn Araluen Corr. I also went to a masterclass held by Chadwick on Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run, about the Blood Run earthworks site and Indigenous mathematics, which totally knocked my socks off. I also ducked off to the National Gallery of Australia to look at Fiona Hall's latest exhibition. I've always loved her work because she plays around with plants.

National Gallery of Australia.

When I returned to Brisbane I had to move house, which was stressful and exhausting, then I turned around and flew to Perth for some more research in the archives and also for a tour of the wheatbelt hosted by the literary journal Westerly. I was keen to expand my knowledge of things literary in WA in general, but what really compelled me to sign up was that our guide was Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, who has been doing some excellent ecocritical work.

The tour was fabulous. We began at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre and were given a guided tour of the house and gardens by an Irish woman who had lived there after the Prichards sold it. She became interested in Prichard when random people such as literary devotees or Russians (Prichard was a committed Communist) turned up on her doorstep. Her talk was entertaining and interesting and I liked listening to the sway of her voice.

Labelled shelf in Katharine Susannah Prichard's writing shack.

We were then bussed off to York, where we had morning tea in the Flour Mill Cafe. The orange soil of this area was striking against the blue sky. In fact all of teh sky in WA is incredible.

Flour Mill Cafe, York.

Thence we went up to Mt Brown lookout, which had excellent views. On the way I chatted to UWA publisher Terri-Ann White about books on water (or the increasing lack thereof) and firestick farming in WA. After a potter around the York Wildflower Garden and some lunch, we headed to St Saviour’s Church at Katrine, where poet John Kinsella and his partner Tracy Ryan read out some of their work over a cuppa.

York Wildflower Garden

I also did a guided walk with volunteers at the Kings Park Botanical Gardens. These free tours are fantastic – the guides are extremely knowledgeable and tell really good stories about the plants in the park. For someone who finds reading science papers quite difficult, it’s a great way to learn about botany.

Kings Park.

Back in Brisbane I led a couple of classes in poetics for a tutor who was away, and also began tutoring fora Women Writers course. I gave lectures on Keri Hulme’s The Bone People for this course, and also The Timeless Land for the Australian literature course. Teaching was pretty time consuming, although my students were the best I’ve ever taught – they were intelligent, motivated and politically savvy – and gave me much hope for our future, which we desperately need in these times of Brexit, Trump and the stale, unimaginative and faint-hearted politicians who currently lead Australia, although that verb might be generous.

I also helped the graduate students put together their Work in Progress conference, the theme of which was 'On the Edge', and organised an evening of creative writing alongside this, which went really well. And then it was time to head to Sydney, Wollongong and Fremantle for conferences and research, but more of this in another post.

Review of Cloudwish

I picked up this YA novel as it kept popping up in reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and my mum read it & enjoyed it, and we usually like the same things. I wasn’t disappointed – Cloudwish was a lovely post-Christmas couch read.

Vân Uớc, whose name means ‘Cloudwish’, is an Australian-born Vietnamese scholarship student at a private school. She has a gigantic crush on the most popular and attractive boy in her year and, like all shy and insecure girls, she thinks her chances of attracting him are dismal, until Billy inexplicably begins to pay attention to her.

I loved this novel for its sweetness. I guess most girls’ first crush is emblazoned in their memory, & who knows how many of them worked out – it was nice that this one did. It reminded me of the film Get Real about a romance between a nerdy boy and the most popular fellow at school, and then I wondered how many romances there are about popular girls and less socially adept boys? I haven’t come across any, though I sure would like to.

The novel blends poverty and privilege in a believable, illuminating way. Van’s council housing apartment is described in detail, with the ‘stained concrete floor’ on the way to the lift, the ‘low ceiling and exposed pipes of the hallway’. It’s also contrasted with the lusciousness of Billy’s expansive house with its coterie of staff, and reminded me of Alice Pung’s excellent essay for AWW on race and class.

The weight of parental expectation is also explored. Billy is cramped by his father’s assumption that he’ll become a brilliant rower and study overseas, and his mother’s desire for a girlfriend of the right social éclat. Van is weighed down by the guilt of her parents’ experiences as boat people and their belief that she ought to become a doctor, when she really wants to be an artist. 

I enjoyed Van’s skillful negotiation of her relationship with her parents, for whom she is spokesperson as her mother only speaks ‘survival English’, so as to snatchsome freedom with Billy. I also liked watching her confidence grow through her relationship with Billy. Initially a quiet girl who doesn’t want to draw attention to herself, with Billy’s attentions Van becomes outspoken, much like her role model Jane Eyre. People who dismiss romance as frippery also overlook how it can create valuable emotions: security, confidence, and a willingness to change.

Some of the work seemed staged: the creative writing exercise in which Van expresses her fantasy that Billy would pay attention to her, and Billy’s sudden interest in Van. It wasn’t until Billy became three-dimensional, revealed as a boy who was as cramped by his parents’ expectations as Van was by hers, that I began to believe in his attraction Van. A big part of me was also sceptical that a seventeen year old boy could be so romantically-minded and thoughtful, but then I stopped being critical and gave myself up for the ride.

And having said that, there are plenty of other beautiful details throughout: a grove of scented orange trees, the ‘bright-beaten pieces of silver [coins], half buried in the blue-black asphalt’, and the kindness of a community that looks out for and takes care of its young people. What a lovely, rewarding book. 

This is my sixth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Painting Red Orchids

I came across Eileen Chong via Jon Shaw, a participant in the Australian Women Writers Challenge, when I was putting together a roundup on books featuring diversity. Eileen has published three volumes of poetry: Burning Rice, Peony and Paining Red Orchids. The latter two contain poems about plants, and as I’m interested in botanical writing, my interest was piqued.

A while later, I asked Eileen if she’d be interested in writing a guest post for a focus on Australian women writers of ethnic heritage, and to my delight she agreed. She wrote about how, although English was the language of commerce, education and law in Singapore, where she lived for twenty years before moving to Australia, her qualifications and education in English were not recognised here because

This was a frustrating set of circumstances but, happily, it led her to poetry.

Painting Red Orchids has been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and when you read it, you can see why. The first poem, the titular ‘Painting Red Orchids’, dips back and forth between animal, plant and human, reminding us of their interconnectedness and how this manifests as art: ‘My wife has made/this paper with mulberry from our gardens. I lift/my brush, pull back my sleeve and saturate the hairs.’ These hairs come from animals – weasel, wolf, mink and leopard – showing us how art binds us to the natural world. Yet art not only needs the labour of growing mulberries, it also needs emotion. This, too, is bound up with environment. The artist’s inkstone ‘was my father’s: slate/quarried from the lake where my great-grandfather/drowned himself one spring night’. The loss of breath returns, though, in the final stanza, to suggest renewal:

One stroke, one breath: leaves give way to blossom.

More water – rain and cloud above the trees.

Cochineal paste, jade seal – red orchid bloom on white.

It’s a beautifully crafted poem, carrying on conversations within itself.

Other poems about plants follow, slow, quiet and complex pieces. In ‘Fern’ each frond is ‘a sister/to another, so many fingers and hands/learning to flourish on the underside/of things’, a suggestion not only of how the plant grows in the understory, but also how it steadily, unshowily, grows, ‘unafraid/of the dark, pushing through stem, bark/growing vein by stubborn vein through morning dew and winter rain’.

‘Orchidaceae: Vanda ‘Miss Joaquin’ is named for Ashkhen Hovakimian, who bred the hybrid orchid, now Singapore’s national flower. The flower’s back is ‘turned to front, violet frills — blooms/like bruises along a curving spine’, a mingling of human and plant that reappears in ‘her petal skin calling to attention/the minute hairs on my thighs’, and which aptly mirrors the fact that the woman is now the plant, as it was named after her. However, as the spelling wasn’t accurate, ‘The heart of the flower/is the misnamed woman’ who is now ‘forced to live on always’.

Not all the poems in Painting Red Orchids are about plants. Many of them circle around the domestic: the friends, lovers, music and food, all contained within houses, or gardens, as Leike is in ‘Elegy’. A cat that was once ‘sinuous, pliant, a wound/spring’, he is no longer ‘among the violets or seeking shade/in the agapanthus, but buried. Dirt/covering honey, amber eyes now glassed’. The line breaks emphasise energy —wound, with its double meaning of tightness and loss — and bluntness — the finality of soil, which covers the loveliness of honey. The poem shunts back and forth between beauty, comfort and loss, summarising life in a way.

In ‘Revisit’ the narrator visits her grandmother who ‘forgets that she has made the tea./She boils water again, and forgets the leaves./Yet my grandmother has not forgotten me’. The rhyme in the poem – tea, leaves, me – mirrors the repetitiveness of trying to remember, and forgetting, and remembering again.

What I love about these poems is their simplicity. They’re so pared back that they are like plinths, holding up their images. Each of her books, too, are beautiful, and I like taking them out, looking at them and reading them. You can check them out at Pitt Street Poetry or on Eileen’s website.

This is my fifth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.