Rebooting

At long last, I am getting back to my blog, if only because I am incapacitated from too much Christmas merriment yesterday and I have not been able to a) get out of my pjs or b) get off the couch.

I pen this from Munich, where I’ve relocated for six months to take up a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Society and the Environment. I’m writing a scholarly book on the genre of ecobiography because it is, surprisingly, little-researched, despite the term being coined some two decades ago. I presented on my work at the RCC’s Lunchtime Colloquium last Thursday and a screening of this will eventually appear on YouTube. In the meantime, you can watch this video on my work which my excellent friend Prue Gibson made as part of a series on plant blindness. Prue is a plant studies expert and does loads of interesting, multidisciplinary work with plants and herbariums.

When I finish here at the end of May, I’ll move to Edinburgh for two months for another fellowship at the Environmental Humanities Network at the University of Edinburgh, then I have a month-long fellowship at Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia in the US (this is an offshoot of the wonderful Hedgebrook Foundation for women writers). Over these three months I’ll be working on my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy. I think I will need to relocate to WA for a few weeks to finish a few things off when I get back to Australia, and then the book will be done. Moving to Scotland is critical for my research as it will give me an understanding of how Georgiana perceived her environment, and how this both shaped and was altered by her translocation to Australia. And the OSGF is a centre for garden history so that will be very helpful for my research on Georgiana’s gardening.

I applied for these fellowships when my postdoc was ending and I was staring down the barrel of destitution. As it transpired, my institution also created some new appointments for people like me who are coming off Australia Research Council grants, and so I applied for one of those too, and then I was successful in all my applications. I was lucky that I’ve been able to take LWOP and do these fellowships overseas, & also have a job to come back to, although it’s only for a year (such precariousness in academia is the norm – secure jobs are few and far between these days).

As readers of this blog will know, trying to get my book done while on a postdoc was really hard. Partly it was because finishing Hearing Maud took way longer than I thought, but it was also because the expectations that I teach just about killed me because of my deafness. It was getting easier before I left, and I have some new hearing devices via the NDIS which work really well, but I have been so flattened by stress and anxiety that I really need to get away from academia & get better. I haven’t been writing creatively (this is not the same as writing academic papers) and that has also been extremely difficult as it’s integral to my mental health.

I’ve also realised that I’ll only ever be able to work part-time as an academic if I want to write, because of the expectation that I teach – it’s exhausting for most able-bodied people, but when you throw severe-to-profound deafness into the mix, it’s impossible. Which means, essentially, that my disability will curtail the amount I can earn. In this I am hardly alone. I was so pleased when a young deaf writer whom I mentored earlier this year, Fiona Murphy, won the Overland FAP Prize for her essay ‘Reasonable Adjustments,’ about the discrimination against deaf people by Australian employers. This is a beautifully written essay and Fiona articulated my despair and frustrations, using facts and statistics, in a clear and erudite way. I urge you to read it. 

The first few weeks here have been anxiety-inducing because I am a deaf person in a country where English is not the first language (although practically everyone in Munich can speak English, a source of great embarrassment to me as I only know one language & that makes me feel uncharitable). The flight over was horrendous as the plane in Armidale was broken (I flew out from Armidale because I was visiting my parents and also gave a keynote at a UNE symposium on ecopoetics). They had to fly an engineer down from Sydney, which meant I was delayed by four hours and missed all my connections, including picking up my apartment keys at the other end. On the plus side, though, when I woke up there was snow!

SNOW!!!

I also, a few days after arriving, attended a conference in nearby Augsburg on life writing in the dystopic present. It was a fantastic conference  — it was small, which meant I had the chance to meet some great people — and it was held in a hotel & conference centre which had once been a monastery, and the building retained its austere aesthetic. I applied to go to the conference with a friend who is in Aberdeen for a year and luckily we were both successful, which meant we caught up over gluhwein & the Christmas markets. However the conference also meant two days of solid listening which, together with jetlag, was pretty crushing.

Did I mention how much we endorse the gluhwein?

My partner is here for a few weeks now, which is just lovely, and we’ve partaken (arguably too much) of the gluhwein at the Christmas markets, visited Regensburg and Nuremburg, and tomorrow we’re off to Dresden. All this has been a great restorative. A few days after we get back he will return to Oz and I will throw myself into my work not only to distract myself, but because writing is like wandering from dry regions to a waterhole.

The Danube in Regensburg.

Silencing: The Decision to Close UWA Publishing

This is a letter I have written to Professor Tayyeb Shah, Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, regarding his decision to close University of Western Australia Publishing. If you, too, don’t wish the press to close, I urge you to sign the Change.org petition and to express your concerns to tayyeb[dot]shah[at]uwa[dot]edu[dot]au.

Dear Professor Shah,

I am writing in relation to your recent decision to close University of Western Australia publishing. I am an academic and award-wining writer (I was shortlisted, among other prizes, for the WA Premier’s award), and my third book, Hearing Maud, was recently published by UWAP. This book is a hybrid memoir about my experiences of deafness, the history of deaf education, and the life of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed.

As a person who has been deaf since age 4, my life depends on watching watching how people communicate. I notice those who listen, those whose voices are amplified, and those who are muted. The decision to silence a press of 85 years standing, at the helm of which is a publisher who is innovative, committed to creating Australian literature of quality and who takes risks (which many major publishers are not nimble enough to do), signals to me that you do not value the way in which this press elevate the voices of several hundred writers (many of them Western Australian, including Noongar writers as well as Miles Franklin award winners) and their significant contributions to Australia’s literary landscape.

In 2016 I began an ARC DECRA at the University of Queensland to write an ecobiography of Western Australia's first female scientist, Georgiana Molloy. Although three biographies have been written on Molloy, they have not closely examined the role of science and writing in her life, nor the significant impact which the remarkable flora of south-west Western Australia had on her sense of self. Molloy is another example of a woman who, like my deaf research subject Maud Praed, was not allowed to speak as she wished because the culture into which she was born did not value her voice. Although she was a writer and a scientist, Molloy could not publish scientific papers because of her gender, and her literary and scientific skill was confined to her letters.

I have been researching this book for two decades and was planning, when it is completed next year, to submit my manuscript to UWA Publishing. This is a scholarly book, but is written in a way that makes it easy to be read by a general audience. If UWA Publishing is disbanded, I will be required to find an east coast-based publisher. As a writer I have heard often how difficult it is for Western Australian stories to find audiences in the east, and shutting down the press will, no doubt, marginalise these stories further.

The associations between deafness and colonisation are well-established (historically, deaf people have been discouraged from using their language, sign, and have been assimilated into hearing culture), and I cannot help but see the same pattern appearing in your decision to shut down UWA Publishing and the voices of its authors, particularly given the context of your relocation from Britain to Australia. I urge you to listen to those who have signed the recent Change.org petition (now approaching 7500 signatures), and statements from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the International Australian Studies Association, Westerly journal and innumerable high profile scholars and writers, and to reconsider this appalling decision.

Jessica White.

Hearing Maud

After nearly 15 years, my hybrid memoir is finally coming into being. We have a cover, typesetting is underway, and you can pre-order a copy (the book will be released in July). Here’s the blurb:

Hearing Maud: a Journey for a Voice is a work of creative non-fiction that details the author’s experiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age four. It charts how, as she grew up, she was estranged from people and turned to reading and writing for solace, eventually establishing a career as a writer.

Central to her narrative is the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland expatriate novelist Rosa Praed. Although Maud was deaf from infancy, she was educated at a school which taught her to speak rather than sign, a mode difficult for someone with little hearing. The breakup of Maud’s family destabilised her mental health and at age twenty-eight she was admitted to an asylum, where she stayed until she died almost forty years later. It was through uncovering Maud’s story that the author began to understand her own experiences of deafness and how they contributed to her emotional landscape, relationships and career.

I still don’t think it will feel real, though, until I have the physical copy in my hand. That will happen soon!

I’ll have a launch in Brisbane, and will be speaking at the Byron Bay Writers Festival - I’ll put the deets on my News & Events page as they become available.

Grounding Story

True to form, I’m writing an update for an event months after it occurred – this time it’s the Aust & NZ chapter of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (ASLEC-ANZ) biennial conference, which was held at the University of New England in Armidale. This was one of the best conferences I’ve been to, rivalling another which was also held at UNE – the 2015 Association for the Study of Australian Literature on ‘The Power and the Passion: Contemporary Australian Literature and Politics’. Maybe it’s because I can stay at Parental Unit’s & therefore the anxiety of conferences is mitigated, and/or maybe it’s because the folk are UNE are really nice. Below are my notes from the conference, which come with the caveat that there might be some errors because I am never 100% sure that I can hear everything properly.

The conference was from Wednesday 13th – Friday 15th February. I caught the tiny plane down from Brisbane, which I loathe because it gives me claustrophobia and the vibrations from the engine rattle through my body, but the 1980s safety card never fails to put a smile on my dial (no Gone with the Wind! It’s outrageous).

 On Wednesday morning (and every morning thereafter) Parental Unit kindly stopped by Seesaw Coffee to service my caffeine addiction then drove me to the uni, though the organising committee also helpfully arranged car pools, bus & coffee for other participants from the Goldfish Bowl. Once I was dropped off at UNE, I located other friendly environmental folk plus my lanyard, which was the best lanyard I’ve ever had because it was compostable.

Uncle Colin Ahoy generously welcomed us to Anaiwan Country, and the Dean of HASSE, Professor Michael Whitmore, welcomed us to UNE. Then there was a brilliant plenary panel from Carolyn Briggs, Gabi Briggs & Callum Clayton-Dixon, chaired by Kate Wright, on the Reclaiming Anaiwan Language project. Here’s a vid which explains the work which the group is doing.

 As Callum pointed out, the reclamation project does not rely upon government funding to survive or progress, and nor is the group willing to use government funds, given that the government is a legacy of (and perpetuates) colonial rule, so donations are welcome. This is a really important project, as language comes from Country, as Callum explained, so the restoration of language goes some way to restoring Country. He also described how he had been out in the area a while before and it was like a dystopia, given the drought, tree clearing and the hardening of the ground from sheep’s hooves, which made me think of Claire Coleman’s Terra Nullius, which I set as a text in my Oz Lit course.

One of the great things about placing this panel first in the conference was that it acknowledged Aboriginal custodianship and set the tone for the rest of the proceedings. As one conference member noted, the Acknowledgment of Country at the beginning of each subsequent paper was like a pulse through the conference.

After that was the first trio of papers, of which I was a part. I presented an update on my 2014 article on climate fiction & referenced James Bradley’s Clade and Jennifer Mills’ Dystopia by way of example, and also mentioned the impact of climate change on non-fiction by way of Delia Falconer’s brilliant essay in the Sydney Review of Books, ‘The Opposite of Glamour’. She has also published a follow up essay, which is compelling reading. I also mentioned Austlit’s soon-to-be-released dataset on Climate Change in Australian Narratives, which is spearheaded by scholar Deborah Jordan. In this panel I was alongside Fiona Utley, a philosopher at UNE, and Ian Collinson of Macquarie University, who spoke about popular music and the environmental crisis – an element I’ve never really thought of before, so it was eye (or ear?) opening. Also, my dad took a break from his renos, changed his shirt & cycled up to the uni to listen to my paper, which was lovely of him.

After that was lunch (all vegetarian!), and then a set of papers centred around Storying with Nonhuman Beings and Concepts. Grace Moore gave a fantastic paper on Trollope’s descriptions of mining, and Kay Are of Melbourne Uni drew on Vicky Kirby’s ideas in relation to biosemiotics, raising the interesting question of whether the world wants to know itself by telling its stories through us.

The next keynote was a wonderful presentation of Dan Hikuroa from the University of Auckland on ‘Te Awaroa – the Voice of the River’, which was about granting rights to the rivers in New Zealand. Dan is an Earth Systems Scientist who incorporates mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) into his work, drawing together Māori science and Western science to benefit communities with whom he works. Much of his presentation was in Māori and it was such a pleasure to hear the language tumbling into the room.

Bushfires were raging near Tingha at this time, and as we boarded the bus to go to the community gardens, the sky was an apocalyptic orange. I sat next to a poet who had grown up not far (in Australian terms) from where I’d been raised – she was from near Coonabarabran, & I from Boggabri, & I’d met her earlier in the year at a conference on postcolonialism and climate change at the UNE campus in Parramatta. It was lovely to catch up, & also nice, I reflected, to have a year book-ended by environmental conferences. 

The event at the Armidale Aboriginal Community Gardens exhibited of a series of portraits of local Aboriginal Matriarchs by local Anaiwan woman, Gabi Briggs, honouring matriarchs who played important roles within their families, clans and wider community. The images were fantastic - bold and strong - and there were lovely people to meet, speeches and a dance performance from a young woman, but I was pretty whacked after a day of trying to hear, & I knew once the sun fell I wouldn’t hear anything as I wouldn’t be able to lipread, so I had to cut my time short & head home.

Day 2 began with a keynote from Gomeroi lawyer & poet Alison Whittaker which absolutely knocked my socks off. She described the consumption of her poems at events such as the Sydney Writers Festival (where attendees touched her on the arm for being ‘brave’) alongside the injustice of deaths in custody (out of 150 referrals relating to deaths in custody, only 11 were referred for investigation, 5 went to court, 1 was convicted & then was acquitted) and asked us: where do we locate justice-seeking literature when it doesn’t locate justice? She also called for a focus on black joy, particularly given how white people absorb & adjust (to the point of ignorance) to black suffering.

The next session I attended was a panel of writers from the University of Wollongong; Joshua Lobb, who’s just released a book, The Flight of Birds, Catherine McKinnon, who published the acclaimed Storyland, and Sue Ballard, a New Zealand curator & writer. Their process was collaborative – they had written the pieces they read out together – which to me, as a writer who works predominantly on her own, was fascinating. Their writing, which was on things nuclear, was also very good.

As it was Valentine’s Day, at lunchtime I bustled off with some other folk to declare love to a gum tree. A scientist met us near said tree and told us how last year 70 trees were removed & chipped because management were worried about them dropping branches onto people, but after some protests & a campaign they stopped chopping them down. However nearly 400 trees are listed for removal in the future. The scientist read his paean to the tree, then leapt over the ground and hugged the trunk.

Arboreal love on V-Day.

Due to tree poems, I missed a bit of the next panel, but listened to poet Kate Middleton’s musings on the ghosts of people who had been exiled because of leprosy. In the next suite of papers, Alexis Harley discussed mycelium & fungal narratives, & described how if logs with fungi spores are bashed a bit, fungi sprouts more than it otherwise would (which I thought was a perfect metaphor for the stressed out, precariously placed, and brutally productive 21st C academic), much to gourmands’ delight; Emily O’Gorman presented her research on Indigenous women who weave sedges & rushes from three particular wetlands in the Murray-Darling basin, & illuminated their ongoing connection to Country; and Kate Judith presented on storying with mangroves. The writing of those three papers wended in and out of their ecosystems in lovely ways.

That evening there was a poetry reading at the Armidale Tree Group, & then the conference dinner at the Goldfish Bowl, but I had to bypass those events as I was worn out from listening all day, even though the loop systems were great and people took care to use the microphones, which was such a boon for me (usually there is no hearing equipment or it doesn’t work).

The AGM was held the next morning at 8.30am. I’m not a good morning person, but staggered in on time with a coffee. Usually I avoid AGMs they’re too hard to follow, but this was a small group which meant I could hear, which I appreciated. And then it was time for a series of plenaries and keynotes. The first was a video conference with ecofeminist Greta Gaard on air, which was apposite given that the sky was still smoky from the fires, although by the time her presentation finished (apparently canned smog was a thing in the 60s!) I realised how lucky we are in Oz to have largely clean air. This was followed by a plenary on the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, which was superb in the way that it drew together artists, scientists & farmers. One of the things I loved about this conference was that it went beyond the academy & engaged with communities and organisations, which is so important in terms of getting knowledge out of the ivory tower. This was followed by a keynote from Thom van Dooren on moving & growing a population of Nihoa Millerbirds to Laysan Island in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands, as a way of creating an insurance population in the face of climate change, and the implications of such assisted colonisation in the context of the ongoing history of dispossession of Kānaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people. The final plenary was a rountable on remembering Deborah Bird Rose, who sadly passed late last year. It was very emotional and I felt for the presenters, who had been friends with Debbie. They created a moving tribute to her amazing and world-changing life and work, and it was a fitting and poignant end to the conference that was, as a fellow attendee said to me over coffee, full of people who thoughtful and well-intentioned. I agreed with that wholeheartedly, as I’ve never felt so well cared-for as a deaf person at a conference.

There was a final event, a screening of Terror Nullius at the Belgrave Twin Cinema. The movie looked really good but I had pretty much used up all my powers of concentration and, from past experience, the loop system at the Belgrave doesn’t work. So I said my farewells, went home & drank wine in front of the TV with Parental Unit & their dogs.

April.

2018: My Year of Writing

2018 was a bit of a bastard, I have to say. The stress of the past seven years – it’s been accumulating since I decided to apply for a postdoctoral fellowship, & has been exacerbated by teaching – caught up with me, bowling me over with an ear infection in May. The eardrum in my good ear ruptured and for a few weeks I was left completely deaf, even with my hearing aid turned to its maximum. So last year was mostly about trying to keep it together & get better, rather than doing half marathons as I had imagined (god knows what I was thinking). I dropped to 0.7FTE in July – something that took six months to be processed, even as I got sicker and sicker with repeated colds & flu & the infection. Much of last year was also spent wondering if I could even be an academic, particularly given that most positions are teaching and research, and I’m currently research-focussed. However, reducing my load really helped; I’m seeing a specialist for chronic fatigue; and I’m trying to stop working on the weekends. And on the plus side, due to needing to rest I’ve been reading much more, which has been such a pleasure.

Publications

The big highlight of last year was getting a contract for Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice, which will be published by University of Western Australia press on 1st July this year. I’ll be at the Byron Bay Writers Festival and am lining up some ducks for appearances in Perth, Armidale, Tamworth & Brisbane, & hopefully also Sydney, Melbourne & Canberra. The editor for the book also edited A Curious Intimacy & she loved Hearing Maud & said that my craft had really improved, so that made me extremely happy.

In terms of scholarly publications, I published an essay on Annamaria Weldon’s ecobiography The Lake’s Apprentice in Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice, edited by Donna Lee Brien & Quinn Eades. This was my first publication on ecobiography & it will be part of a critical monograph that I’m writing on the form next year. I also had a piece of creative nonfiction published in one of my favourite outlets, the Sydney Review of Books, on Georgiana Molloy & my decision not to have children. This was part of their New Nature series & I was delighted to be featured among other Oz environmental writers. I worry about being typecast as a writer on disability, & while this is an issue that’s important to me, my writing life has always ranged widely across genres and subjects, & at the moment it’s my driving force to educate people about what we’re doing to the planet.

As with 2017, I didn’t publish any fiction, although that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. I wrote a 12,000 word novella for the Griffith Review novella prize on tree clearing in Queensland and the mythic salting of Carthage in the Punic Wars, & I’m now going to turn this into a book.

Teaching

Due to physical collapse last year, I didn’t take on any teaching. I wrote and presented two lectures for a third-year Australian literature course, one on Tim Winton’s Island Home (which I hope I never have to read again in my lifetime) and the other on James Bradley’s Clade. I also delivered a lecture on the Environmental Humanities to a group of advanced students at the Australian Catholic University in Banyo. This year I’m convening that third year Australian literature course & tutoring two of the four classes.

King’s Park. So gorgeous.

Conferences

2018 was the year of overkill when it came to conferences – I went to seven of them and was on the organising committee for one – never again! The first, in February in Parramatta, was on postcolonial literature and climate change. It was a small and very enjoyable conference, but I was struck forcefully by how few young people were there. It’s part of the hollowing out of the humanities, & young people thinking that the humanities won’t help them find a job (I think studying humanities is one of the best things you can do in a coming world of automation but that’s a blog for another time). In the middle of the year I headed south to Canberra for two conferences – The Literary Interface, for which I organised two panels on science and literature with Dr Clare Archer-Lean of the University of the Sunshine Coast, and the Australian Historical Association conference. The latter was only the second history conference I’d been to and it was absolutely huge. I had a ball & met some cool people. I also caught up with my good friends in Canbez which is always a bonus.

Then, although I was still not feeling great & had depleted my reserves of energy with a week of listening, I flew up to Sydney for the Deaf History International conference. I was a bit nervous about this – I never know whether Deaf people are going to accept me or not because I wasn’t raised Deaf, even though I’ve lost 75% of my hearing – but they turned out to all be lovely. And the most wonderful thing, aside from the people, was that the equipment worked beautifully. All I had to do was turn up at the conference, put my hearing aid on its T-switch to access the loop system and I heard everything so clearly. I even had the luxury of being late one day, when usually I have to panic about getting places early so that I can check that equipment is working & that I can hear. I was inspired to start learning sign again, but after I looked into it with Deaf Services Queensland I realised I have no time this year because of my exhausting job. It’s either nearly a full day of lessons or two nights a week, and the day classes were full and I’m too tired in the evenings to function. So learning sign is on hold again.

At the end of the year I flew to Perth for the Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference. This was my first ever creative writing conference and I’m always glad of a reason to go to Perth. I met some great people, caught up with others who I knew, met my publisher for coffee and went for walks in Kings Park. Gosh I love Perth! I would move over there in a heartbeat, except that I know I would miss my family terribly.

I was on the organising panel for the International Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, which was held at UQ in December. I arranged an event on sexuality and sport with writer Inga Simpson, scholar Rebecca Olive and artist Eric Bridgeman, which was prompted by the current exhibition of the UQ Art Museum, Play On. Following that conference I flew to Melbourne for a conference on colonialism and archives, which also went well, but by that stage I was pretty dead from my massive year & I just wanted to be back home again. I organised a panel on collecting with Anna Johnstone, a colleague from UQ, and Deidre Coleman from the University of Melbourne who does fabulous work on entomologists, and that worked out really well. However, fewer conferences this year are in order.

Supervision

Nearly all of my 4 students have submitted their work now. One passed with flying colours, two are being examined and one more has yet to submit. I’m always impressed with how well their work scrubs up, particularly when I consider my own paltry efforts with my PhD 10 years ago. Along the way they have done really well, with one winning a fellowship for creating digital art biographies, and another winning a Griffith Review fellowship which led to this fantastic publication.

Research

September saw me heading to Perth for the Cape to Cape trek. This gave me a fantastic sense of the environment through which Molloy moved, and the time and distance it took for Noongar people and colonists to move through the area. A blog post on this in the pipeline - I have to get my photos up at least because the environment was just extraordinary. I also made contact with some wonderful scholars working in botanical history - Alex George in Perth, and Sarah Maroske at the Herbarium in Melbourne. Sara and I will be presenting at a conference at Baltimore next year with my pin-up scholar Ann Shteir - I was pretty over teh moon when I received their invitation. Other than this, I was very much stymied in the writing of my ecobiography, which is starting to drive me quite mad.

The Year Ahead

At the end of April I’m moving onto a new contract which is teaching and research, rather than the research-focussed contract which I’m on now. This means that I won’t get much more research or writing done, although I’m certainly going to try. I’m sure able-bodied people can do both teaching and research, but the impact of teaching on my body is so severe that I need a much longer recovery time. However, my options are pretty limited at the moment so I don’t really have a choice. The rest of this year will be about writing what I can, when I can, amidst lecture preparation, tutoring, marking & publicity for Hearing Maud. My consolation is that I ever was, & will be, a tortoise rather than a hare, and I always get there in the end.

2018: My Year of Reading

After being slammed by a freight train full of work for the last six weeks, I’m only now getting to my summaries of reading & writing for last year. For the first time I met my goal of reading 100 books, which is a good thing – it meant that I was taking time to read (a critical tool in any writer’s toolbox) and that I was resting more. As with last year, approximately half of my reading was by Australian writers and the other half by international writers. In both instances I read more literature by women writers, although I didn’t participate in the Australian Women Writers Challenge again, being too time-poor (75:25 for Australian writers and 70:30 for international writers).

The highlight of my reading year was Italian author Paolo Cognetti’s The Eight Mountains, a bildungsroman set in the mountains around the village of Grana. It follows the relationship between Pietro, who visits the mountains with his family every year, and Bruno who is a local at Grana. I loved the novel’s understatement and the descriptions of the mountains, and the friendship between the boys as they grew into men. I also loved Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, which was hilarious, Anna Burns’ thick and gritty Milkman, and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone about refugees in Germany. These book came out of a new bookclub at Avid Reader focussing on award-winning fiction and I have loved pretty much all of the books we’ve read.

Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fires, Sally Rooney’s books, Curtis Sittenfield’s American Wife and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko were also great reads. Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper was a nice surprise and Under the Skin by Michel Faber (whose novel The Book of Strange New Things is one of my favourites) gave me the absolute creeps & I still can’t stop thinking about it – always the sign of a good book.

In terms of Aussie literature, I enjoyed Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip which I thought a better book than Mullumbimby in terms of its craft. I also liked Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe, Jennifer Livett’s Wild Island, Melissa Fagan’s What Will be Worn and Gabrielle Carey’s Falling Out of Love with Ivan Southall.

I didn’t get through much non-contemporary fiction, other than John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces which was marvelous (& one of b/f faves) & Elizabeth Bowen’s writing, which didn’t set me on fire although her descriptions of bombed-out London were marvelous. I don’t know why people would bother to read contemporary fiction of WW2 when they could read Bowen. She also writes about the impact of the war on her own craft and this made for fascinating reading.

This year I aspire, as always, to read more poetry & 19th century fiction (my favourite genre), but it’s always difficult to balance this with the demands of keeping up with new releases. However, seeing as this is a year of trying to do something about my terrible work-life balance, I may just get there.

Australian Women Writers

1.     Dyschronia, Jennifer Mills

2.     Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, Anita Heiss (ed.)

3.     Too Much Lip, Melissa Lucashenko

4.     Bird Country, Claire Aman

5.     Shell, Kristina Olssen

6.     Eggshell Skull, Bri Lee

7.     All Being Equal, Ashley Hay (ed.)

8.     Pulse Points, Jennifer Down

9.     Falling Out of Love with Ivan Southall, Gabrielle Carey

10.  Finding Theodore and Brina, Terri-ann White

11.  Last Day in the Dynamite Factory, Annah Faulkner

12.  What Will be Worn, Melissa Fagan

13.  Reckoning, Magda Szubanski

14.  Black Glass, Meg Mundell

15.  Wintering, Krissy Kneen

16.  The Geography of Friendship, Sally Piper

17.  The Rules of Backyard Croquet, Sunni Overend

18.  Australia Day, Melanie Cheng

19.  Bluebottle, Belinda Castle

20.  Luminescent Threads, Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (eds.)

21.  The Paper House, Anna Spargo-Ryan

22.  Staying, Jessie Cole

23.  Letters to Pessoa, Michelle Cahill

24.  The Life to Come, Michelle de Krester

25.  The Last Garden, Eva Hornug

26.  The Yellow House, Emily O’Grady

27.  Wildflowering: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur, Margaret Somerville

28.  The Lucky Galah, Tracy Sorensen

29.  The Death of Noah Glass, Gail Jones

30.  Trick of the Light, Laura Elvery

31.  The Eye of the Sheep, Sofie Laguna

32.  The Secrets at Ocean's Edge, Kali Napier

33.  Celebrant Sleuth, Hazel Edwards

34.  The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Holly Ringland

35.  Oodgeroo, Kathleen Cochrane

36.  Between the Leaves: Stories of Australian Women, Writing and Gardens, Katie Holmes

37.  The High Places, Fiona McFarlane

38.  Wild Island, Jennifer Livett

39.  A Week in the Life of Cassandra Aberline, Glenda Guest

Australian Male Writers

40.  Boy Swallows Universe, Trent Dalton

41.  I Can Jump Puddles, Alan Marshall

42.  Hammers Over the Anvil, Alan Marshall

43.  To Become a Whale, Ben Hobson

44.  12 Edmonstone Street, David Malouf

45.  The Art of Time Travel, Tom Griffiths

46.  Scrublands, Chris Hammer

47.  The Buried Ark, James Bradley

48.  Common People, Tony Birch

49.  Dirt Music, Tim Winton

50.  Land’s Edge: A Coastal Memoir, Tim Winton

51.  So Much Smoke, Felix Calvino

52.  Letting Go: How to Plan for a Good Death, Charlie Corke

International Women Writers

53.  Conversations with People, Sally Rooney

54.  Washington Black, Esi Eougyan

55.  Normal People, Sally Rooney

56.  Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman

57.  Milkman, Anna Burns

58.  The Women’s Courtyard, Khadija Mastur

59.  A Different Light, Elizabeth A. Lynn

60.  The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen

61.  The Demon Lover and Other Stories, Elizabeth Bowen

62.  The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen

63.  Barkskins, Annie Proulx

64.  Motherhood, Sheila Heti

65.  Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata

66.  Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie

67.  The Cry of the Gull, Emmanuelle Laborit

68.  The Wallcreeper, Nell Zink

69.  The Round House, Louise Erdrich

70.  Larchfield, Polly Clark

71.  Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

72.  Digging to America, Anne Tyler

73.  Wilding, Isabella Tree

74.  Salt Fish Girl, Larissa Lai

75.  Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng

76.  Lab Girl, Hope Jahren

77.  An Unremarkable Body, Elisa Lodato

78.  Go, Went, Gone, Jenny Erpenbeck

79.  Magonia, Maria DahvanaHeadley

80.  Under the Sea Wind, Rachel Carson

81.  American Wife, Curtis Sittenfield

82.  To the Bright Edge of the World, Eowyn Ivey

83.  The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey

84.  The Sound of Butterflies, Rachel King

85.  The Paris Winter, Imogen Robertson

International Male Writers

86.  The Shape of Water, Daniel Kraus and Guillermo del Toro

87.  A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

88.  Census, Jesse Ball

89.  Less, Andrew Sean Greer

90.  Under the Skin, Michael Faber

91.  Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

92.  The Eight Mountains, Paolo Cognetti

93.  The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben

94.  The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham

95.  The Memory of Running, Ron McLarty

96.  The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguoro

97.  Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, John Keats

98.  The Lamberts, Andrew Motion

99.  Little Brother, Cory Doctorow

100.  What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Huraki Murakami

Review of Rosa Praed's 'Sister Sorrow'

Over at The Australian Legend, Bill has been hosting a Gen2 Week to draw attention to what he defines as the second generation of Australia’s white women writers, who were writing from 1890 – 1918. Last year he hosted a Gen1 week for the first generation of white women writers, who wrote in the period 1788 – 1890. Ever a last-minuter, I managed to scrape in with a review of Georgiana Molloy’s letters. I’d wanted to do one on Rosa Praed as well but as usual I ran out of time.

However, Praed’s oeuvre stretches from 1880 to 1931, so she slots easily into Gen2. In the late 80s and early 90s she was at the height of her fame, but I’ve chosen her penultimate novel to review, because I need to revisit her works ahead of the edits for my book. However this review has turned into a minor essay full of spoilers, so if you plan to read the novel, you might want to shelve this until afterwards.

Sister Sorrow was published in 1916, and after that there wasn’t a novel until 1931, with Soul of Nyria: The Memory of a Past Life in Ancient Rome. Rosa’s companion Nancy, whom she met in 1899 through theosophist friends Alfred Sinnett and Arthur Conan Doyle (who was friends with Nancy’s father), had the capacity to go into a trance and take on the persona of a German princess who was abducted and made a slave in ancient Rome. As Nancy spoke as the princess Nyria, Rosa wrote down the story and turned it into a novel, Nyria, published in 1904.

Nancy died in 1927 and Rosa was heartbroken. To assuage her grief, she consulted a famous medium, Hester Dowden, so that she could continue talking to Nancy. Rosa believed that when people died, they continued to live on the astral plane, which she called ‘The Memory of the Great Whole’, described in a letter to her sister as ‘‘a sort of “Talking Film” region in space where everything that ever has been is preserved.’ She thought that she could use a medium to reach Nancy in this region after Nancy had died. She also believed that she and Nancy were reincarnations of people who had lived since Atlantis, and that one of their incarnations were as Nyria and the woman she adored, Valeria.

A few years after Nancy died Rosa hired an historian (and former editor of the Occult Review), Ralph Shirley, to prove that the events in Nyria were true and that Nancy couldn’t have made them up. Eventually they came to blows because Shirley was being pedantic, which suggests that he couldn’t verify everything in the book. Rosa was by this stage nearly 80 and the amount of effort she spent on the book was extraordinary for a woman her age. It illuminates how much she missed Nancy and longed to be with her again. It seems to me that Rosa believed if she could prove Nyria was real, then the reincarnations were also real, and she and Nancy would be together again in the future in another incarnation.

It’s an amazing love story, but I do think that Rosa was off her scone and that Nyria is fiction (and that Nancy was acting to please Rosa, or because she enjoyed it), but Rosa firmly believed that Nyria’s story was true (hence her attempts at verifications). In his excellent and exhaustive bibliography of her work, Chris Tiffin has listed Soul of Nyria under non-fiction.

Rosa was a woman born out of time, because she was full of contradictions. She loved Nancy but couldn’t admit she was a lesbian; she thought her husband was a brute (and from her novels I expect there was some domestic violence) and wrote a bestselling feminist novel (The Bonds of Wedlock) about the dud deal women got in marriage, but still she refused to divorce him; she expressed some sympathy for Aboriginal people and their treatment by white people but is almost uniformly derogatory in her descriptions of them.

Sister Sorrow returns to Rosa’s love for Nancy, but not just in the garb in which she usually clads it ie a spiritual connection, although this makes its usual appearance. Rather, she renders it in terms of sisterly love. The novel, though published in 1916, is set a few years after Tess of the D’Ubervilles was published in 1891 (the protagonist Agatha mentions reading this with the governess Dolores), which places it around the mid-1890s. There are some mentions of contemporary (ie. 1910s) life for women, in that girls have nursing training, and in the opening, in response to some male burliness, Praed writes of the protagonist, Agatha: ‘My whole Australian soul determined upon asserting its feminine rights’ (11). Robert Dixon has described the healthy fortitude of Praed’s Australian girls in Writing the Colonial Adventure, but the mention of ‘rights’ is new I think.

The story opens in a hotel in Liechardt’s Town, Praed’s name for Brisbane (her father travelled with the explorer to Moreton Bay in 1843; she always spelled the name without the extra ‘h’). In the dining room, Agatha encounters two men, and speaks to one of them, a Mr Phil Wilkins, while the other remains mysterious and makes an exit. When Agatha’s stepmother, stepsisters and their governess, Dolores (named thus because her mother died giving birth to her), join her, Dolores is immediately bewitched by Mr Wilkins. Agatha’s father, a parliamentarian, also appears & meets Mr Wilkins.

The family then move to a classic Praed setting - a house at Emu Point (ie Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point; she called Rockhampton ‘Stonehampton’ … you get the drift) – which they had rented out for the summer. I always love Praed’s descriptions of Brisbane, as they show what it was like before it was urbanised. I also used to live at East Brisbane, which is not far from Kangaroo Point, so I know the area well. Sitting on a cane chair on the verandah by moonlight, Agatha describes:

The moon, close on the full, was shining over the river, making a broad, slanting road of milky light. Along the opposite shore, lay strange-shaped blotches of shadow where clumps of bamboos and a few tall gum-trees were eerily reflected so that they looked like monstrous creatures floating on the water. The lights of river-craft and their reflections seemed double red stars dropped into the stream. The humped shapes of cida retusa and lantarna [sic] shrubs which grew in the little paddock between our garden and the river, made me think of heraldic, couchant beasts. In the garden were more ghostly shapes of trees and blossoms – the black pyramids of bunyas: the pale oleanders: the spectral sheaves of white yucca, and a datura, shaking great creamy bells. A wind from the river, drove before it a blend of strong odours, and as the gusts went sweeping through the broad banana-fronds in the plantation, they made strange sibilant noises, tearing the great leaf-banners into tatters.

            Except for the wind in the leaves, everything was still. Only, every now and then, a boatman’s call, the long musical “O-O-O-ver” of the ferryman starting to cross the river (31-32).

Kangaroo Point is heavily built up now with apartment blocks, and a patch of park at the point, so to think of it with lush vegetation & terraced gardens (as well as the period before it was shaped by colonists) is remarkable.

Mr Wilkins comes for dinner, invited by Agatha’s father so they can talk business. Dolores continues to be mesmerised by Wilkins, explaining to Agatha that she had seen him in a dream and she was powerless to resist. He is invited to stay overnight, as the ship taking him back to his home is leaving early the next morning.

Dolores is despatched to attend to his room. Agatha is irritated by the sway Wilkins has over Dolores and, in a clear moment of sexual jealousy, drags Dolores from his room. Meanwhile the mysterious other from the hotel, Torvald Helsing, is also invited to stay because he’s heading back on the same boat as Wilkins – it transpires that they inhabit the same island.

As the evening proceeds, Wilkins becomes increasingly drunk and relates the story of a robbery in America. Dolores, executing her prescience (akin to Nancy’s), makes some observations about the robbery which she couldn’t possibly have known. The next day, Dolores and Wilkins announce their engagement, and both men travel back upriver to the island on the Princess Maud, named after Praed’s daughter Maud, who was by the book’s publication 42 years old and in a mental asylum at Canford Cliffs.

When Dolores joins her new husband on Orunga Island, she stops writing to Agatha, despite Agatha sending a number of letters. In two years, Agatha only receives two letters in return, one with a hastily penned footnote expressing a wish that Agatha would visit. At last, Agatha does.

Orguna Island is modeled on Curtis Island, to which Praed was moved soon after her marriage to Campbell Praed. The move, geographically and emotionally, was a shock and the island appears often in Praed’s writing, including her first novel, An Australian Heroine (1880). Campbell was often away on business (including affairs with women), leaving his wife on her own with a small baby, Maud. Rosa was persecuted by mosquitoes and the barren environment must have mirrored her feelings. In Sister Sorrow, Wilkins disappears as Campbell used to, leaving Agatha with Dolores, whom she finds greatly changed – thin, nervous, and mentally unstable. At one point, Agatha snaps, ‘He had no right to marry a delicate, highly-strung woman and bring her to this desolate place. And then to leave her alone as he has done! No wonder she has been driven into a nervous fever’ (253). It’s hard not to read this – for Praed unfailingly drew on either her own or others’ lives – as a complaint about her young self.

At this point in the novel, the pace shifts and becomes much slower, cataloguing Dolores’ poor mental health. The women are trapped, for Dolores doesn’t like riding and Agatha has no horse, until she persuades one of Wilkins’ workers to give her one. Without physical movement she becomes entirely focussed on Dolores’ health and the narrative becomes claustrophobic.

While doing my research on Maud, I lost all sympathy for Praed because she abandoned her child in an asylum, even as I understood that she was abiding by the conventions of the time. However when I read the descriptions of Agatha caring for Dolores, I realised that Rosa was describing the same techniques she must have used to bring Maud back from her place of wildness – giving her needlework to do, and reminding her of the past before she became unwell. When I read, ‘If you have ever had the feeling I had then, of literally clutching back a soul which was slipping over into the Abyss, you will understand what I mean’ (272) I nearly cried.

Eventually Agatha manages to establish contact with Helsing, conveniently located at the other end of the island. Cast as the ‘St George of Australia’ (Praed longed for the historical weight of a white cultural lineage, never recognising the even longer cultural lineage of Aboriginal Australia), he helps rescue Dolores who is now near death. However there is one final stoush when Wilkins, who has been revealed to be a shady character as well as the robber in America, and who has perpetrated much else besides in Australia, comes back to claim his wife. It transpires he claimed her in the first instance to stop her seeing, with her clairvoyant qualities, more of his unsavoury side than he wanted, and that he was slowly poisoning her (and that he was a bigamist with another wife whom he had also transfixed). Dolores nearly drowns, but is saved by Helsing, who drags her unconscious onto the shore, then collapses. Agatha, who loves him as well as Dolores, leaves the latter without checking that she’s alive, and kisses Hesling, whereupon he comes back to life. Later, she is ashamed that she left Dolores unconscious on the shore, and it occurred to me that perhaps this was an expression of shame that Rosa had chosen Nancy over her daughter, which surely she must have felt. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it (‘Sometimes,’ b/f says, ‘a train going into a tunnel is just a train going into a tunnel’. Clearly he knows nothing of literary criticism).

Agatha describes her ‘romantic devotion’ (37) for Dolores as ‘strangely and inextricably bound up with those closer ties of flesh and spirit. Indeed, sometimes it has later seemed to me that my feeling for Dolores in later phases had spiritual potencies which no other love has equaled. As time and conditions developed the bond, bringing into it some of the higher elements, and as my own mind grew more receptive of world-old truths, I was brought to the belief that there could be no such recent starting-point for an association like ours. It seemed far more reasonable to conclude that it had existed in past lives and that our attraction towards each other in this one, was the result of subconscious recognition’ (37). This is a pretty standard description of Praed’s belief in the union of souls across time. Towards the end of the novel, however, when Dolores recovers, Agatha is ‘overswept by a wave of emotion that … made me put my arms round her and kiss her with my whole heart in the kiss’ (354). The two women then declare they love each other ‘like sisters’. A pash between women is unusual in Praed parlance, particularly when it isn’t motivated by some sort of spiritual possession. Perhaps, after nearly twenty years with Nancy, Rosa was starting to accept her sexuality.

One aspect of the novel which was new and interesting to me was a mention of the White Australia Policy. In conversation with Helsing, Agatha’s father says ‘And then the Chinese— and all this talk about White Australia; and the blacks going wrong with opium’ (64). One of my students is writing a biography of artist Fiona Foley, a large component of whose work (including the installations in the State Library of Queensland) explores the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and 1901. It was ostensibly to protect Aboriginal people by banning opium, as Aboriginal workers were paid in opium so that they were compliant, but it became the first piece of legislation enacted to control Aboriginal people’s lives. It was also used to outlaw sexual contact between Aboriginal and Asian people.

Interestingly, Helsing employs Malay and Chinese labour in his extensive garden on Orunga Island, of which Agatha’s uncle disapproves, ‘he being one of the most fiery advocates of a “white Australia”’ (135). Moreover, one of the gardeners has an Aboriginal wife, who tends to Dolores with sophisticated medical expertise, and Helsing is very interested in Aboriginal knowledge and customs. The descriptions of Helsing’s extensive garden were also fascinating, but I have gone on far too long with this review, and if I begin a botanical digression now else it will never end.

Rosa Praed, Sister Sorrow: a story of Australian life. London : Hutchinson, 1916.

Hathi Trust Digital Library. Accessed via University of Queensland Library.