2020: My Year of Reading

Last year, in that weirdest of years, I didn’t quite make it to 100 books, despite binge reading over Christmas and generally lying supine for most of the year – I was 5 short. C’est la vie.

My proportions changes slightly compared to other years - 42% Australian women writers (up from 36% in 2019, 39% in 2018); 13% Australian Male writers (pretty much the same at 14% in 2019 and 13% in 2018); 37% international women writers (up from 33% in 2019) and 8% international male writers (down from 20% in 2019 and 15% in 2018).

I finally made good on my intention to read more poetry (I read 7 titles which, while not huge, is an improvement on zero), and I got back into the habit of reading work by First Nations Writers (6 titles from Australia, and one from Canada). Of these I really liked Muninjali writer Ellen van Neerven’s Throat and Metis Nation writer Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves.

The highlight of my year was reading Madeline Miller’s work. I gave my brother The Song of Achilles for Christmas a few years back, but only read it this year, burning through it at the hairdresser’s in Munich. Then I picked up Circe and fell in love with the language and Circe’s character and desires. Another favourite was Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog, about two brothers on a ranch whose relationship changes when one of them marries. The book was both subtle and masterful in its use of structure, voice and character – a very clever piece of work. My other great love was Emmanuelle Pagano’s One Day I’ll Tell You Everything, about a trans school bus driver in the mountains of France. I adored the descriptions of the dangerous, freezing environment and the protagonist Adèle’s relationships with the children whom she drove to and from school, and how her changing gender inflected her responses to her family and people around her. I loved too the localism of the book, that Adèle was drawn back to her home town despite having left it a different person.

I discovered this book through the High Noon Bookclub at Avid Reader, which also introduced me to a slew of other interesting titles, including Japanese author Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs and US author Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, which uses the motif of a family’s house to explore racism in New Orleans, particularly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I also enjoyed a number of other books by non-Australian authors – Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, Bernadine Evaristo’s Woman, Girl, Other, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay With Me, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Ingrid Persaud’s Love After Love (at least until she killed off her protagonist, which was stupid decision – authors should know better these days than to indulge in the cliché of dispensing with a marginalised character) and Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary. All of these books articulate women’s lives and desires in realistic and interesting ways, although to buck the trend I also really enjoyed Daniel Mason’s collection of stories, A Registry of my Passage upon the Earth, because they canvassed nineteenth century science with a very interesting style. And, because I am desperate for a dog, I loved Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, and chortled much over its sly digs at egocentric writers (the majority of us, I would say).

Of Australian authors, I laughed all the way through Gabrielle Carey’s droll Only Happiness Here and was completely sucked into Rick Morton’s account of the latent violence of rural Australian in 100 Years of Dirt, while Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron was just gorgeous. Fiona Murphy’s memoir about deafness, The Shape of Sound, is a beautifully crafted book coming out at the end of March. Reading it was like holding a mirror up to myself and seeing things that I hadn’t seen before. I’m writing a review of this for the Sydney Review of Books, so you can read my thoughts on the book in a few months. And after listening to an interview by Brigitta Olubus, who is writing a biography of Shirley Hazzard, I picked up Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon and loved the sparse, evocative writing and setting, though that also has much to do with my enduring love affair with Italy.

I found that many works that critics fawned over didn’t do much for me at all – Where the Crawdads Sing (cheesy), Overstory (Powers didn’t have control over his material), Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (anthropocentric and inconsistent) and Trent Dalton’s All Our Shimmering Skies (shallow characters and a ludicrous plot, although I did enjoy his descriptions of the natural world).

This year I will pootle on as usual, although I do need to read more writing about the environment to get a sense of how to place my next book, my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy. While I know how I will write it (with an emphasis on plants and their agency), I need to get a stronger sense of what is happening in the field, and how it is changing. And I am still planning (for the Xth year in a row) to get to a book of 19th C fiction!

Australian Women Writers

1.     The Shape of Sound, Fiona Murphy

2.     Fiona Wood: Inventor of Spray-On Skin, Christy Burne

3.     Georgia Ward-Fear: Reptile Biologist and Explorer, Claire Saxby

4.     Munjed Al Muderis: From Refugee to Surgical Inventor, Dianne Wolfer

5.     In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World, Danielle Clode

6.     Nobody, Nowhere, Donna Williams

7.     Only Happiness Here, Gabrielle Carey

8.     Vida, Jacqueline Kent

9.     Tell Me Where it Hurts, Kylie Maslen

10.  Hysteria, Katerina Bryant

11.  Night Fishing, Vicki Hastrich

12.  Darkfall, Indigo Perry

13.  Sky Swimming, Sylvia Martin

14.  The Shelf Life of Zora Cross, Cathy Perkins

15.  Accidental Feminists, Jane Caro

16.  None Shall Sleep, Ellie Marney

17.  Bloody Blockies, Rosie Abbott

18.  Flyaway, Kathleen Jennings

19.  The Bay of Noon, Shirley Hazzard

20.  Where the Fruit Falls, Karen Wyld

21.  Dreams They Forgot, Emma Ashmere

22.  Ghost Bird, Lisa Fuller

23.  Future Girl, Asphyxia

24.  Our Shadows, Gail Jones

25.  Dark Harvest, Cat Sparks

26.  Ordinary Matter, Laura Elvery

27.  The Yield, Tara June Winch

28.  The Salt Madonna, Catherine Noske

29.  There Was Still Love, Favel Parrett

30.  The Animals in that Country, Laura Jean McKay

31.  Stone Sky Gold Mountain, Mirandi Riwoe

32.  Almost a Mirror, Kirsten Krauth

33.  Fauna, Donna Mazza

34.  Ask Me About the Future, Rebecca Jessen

35.  Breathing Plural, Em König

36.  Lake, Claire Nashar

37.  Throat, Ellen van Neerven

38.  Ruby Moonlight, Ali Cobby Eckermann

39.  Autobiochemistry, Tricia Dearborn

40.  Nganajungu Yagu, Charmaine Papertalk Green

Australian Male Writers

41.  All Our Shimmering Skies, Trent Dalton

42.  Flames, Robbie Arnott

43.  Airplane Baby Banana Blanket, Benjamin Dodds

44.  The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan

45.  The Burning Island, Jock Serong

46.  One Hundred Years of Dirt, Rick Morton

47.  Our Inside Voices, Matthew Wengert (ed.)

48.  Mammoth, Chris Flynn

49.  The Rain Heron, Robbie Arnott

50.  Pig City, Andrew Stafford

51.  Ghost Species, James Bradley

52.  The Windy Season, Sam Carmody

Non-Australian Women Writers

53.  The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel

54.  A Tall History of Sugar, Curdella Forbes

55.  Always Coming Home, Ursula le Guin

56.  Three Women, Lisa Taddeo

57.  Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami

58.  One Day I’ll Tell You Everything, Emmanuelle Pagano

59.  Love After Love, Ingrid Persaud

60.  Woman, Girl, Other, Bernadine Evaristo

61.  Inferno, Catherine Cho

62.  Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss

63.  The Braided River, Diane Comer

64.  The Illness Lesson, Claire Beams

65.  The Dutch House, Ann Patchett

66.  The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline

67.  Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala

68.  Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami

69.  Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

70.  Flash Count Diary, Darcey Steinke

71.  Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

72.  The Yellow House, Sarah Broom

73.  Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica Lee

74.  The Friend, Sigrid Nunez

75.  Circe, Madeline Miller

76.  The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller

77.  Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff

78.  Just Kids, Patti Smith

79.  Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia Butler

80.  A God in Every Stone, Kamila Shamsie

81.  Stay with Me, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

82.  Sudden Traveller, Sarah Hall

83.  My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Otessa Mossfegh

84.  Dreamquake, Elizabeth Knox

85.  Dreamhunter, Elizabeth Knox

86.  Tanglewreck, Jeanette Winterson

87.  War, So Much War, Merce Rodoreda

Non-Australian Male Writers

88.  A Registry of my Passage upon the Earth, Daniel Mason

89.  Overstorey, Richard Powers

90.  On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong

91.  The Power of the Dog, Thomas Savage

92.  Pauliska, or, Modern Perversity, Jacques-Antoine Révéroni

93.  Call Me By Your Name, André Aciman

94.  Blindsight, Peter Watts

95.  The Plague, Albert Camus

2019: My Year of Reading

I was flu-ridden & fatigued for much of 2018, which meant I was resting and reading while trying to get better, so I met my target of 100 books. However, last year I spent 6 months promoting Hearing Maud in between convening and teaching, so I was 16 short, at 84 books. On the plus side, I didn’t get sick, except for a terrible virus donated by my nephew in April. I think the flu shot worked last year, and that my immune system is improving in general (yay).

My proportions remained roughly the same - 36% Australian women writers (39% last year); 14% Australian male writers (13% last year); 30% international women writers (33% last year) and 20% international male writers (15% last year).

My favourite read for the year was probably Idaho by Emily Ruskovich, as it was well-written and the plot was interesting and unexpected. Alice Hoffman’s The Marriage of Opposites was an indulgent delight, with gorgeous prose full of sensory detail and an interesting, subject - Rachel Pizzarro, the mother of impressionist artist Camille Pissaro. Lloyd Jones’ The Cage, a horrifying fable about asylum seekers, was beautifully written and tightly constructed, but nauseating in its depiction of the banality of human cruelty. By contrast Martin Edmond’s Isinglass was also a fable about refugees, but its dreamlike quality was much gentler and more rhythmic. Its prose, too, was taut and flawless. And I loved two books of non-fiction by Australian women writers: Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics, with its sense of warding the reader away from the sharp cliffs of family life, and Julienne van Loon’s The Thinking Woman, which blends thoughts on philosophy and gender with everyday life in an accessible and engaging way.

Other books which I also thoroughly enjoyed include Claire Corbett’s Watch Over Me (tight plot, perfect encapsulation of young, female desire), Julie Keys’ The Artist’s Portrait (good writing and fantastic characters), Jock Serong’s Preservation (great plot & research), Patrick Allington’s Figurehead (an original, fictional biography), Kamil Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (solid plot, setting and character – Shamsie is the reason why I want to go to the Iceland Writers Retreat this year), Viv Albertine’s memoir which veers from punk to middle class life to fragile and carefully-preserved solitude, Becky Chambers’ books about androids (which help to explain what it’s like to have autism), Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller (a favourite author, although it’s not his best book), and The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall, who can do no wrong. I picked up her latest book of short stories while in London, Sudden Traveller, and am waiting to knock off my last few deadlines before I read it.

I failed in my aspirations to read more 19th century literature and poetry, so I’m aiming for that again this year, plus more writing by Indigenous Australians, as I haven’t been reading much of that of late. The pace of my life has slowed considerably (thank goodness) so I’m hopeful of hitting the one hundred mark again. Much to look forward to this year!

Australian Women Writers

1.     Otherland, Maria Tumarkin

2.     My People, Oodgeroo Noonuccal

3.     Paris Savages, Katherine Johnson

4.     Pescador’s Wake, Katherine Johnson

5.     Meet Me at Lennon's, Melanie Myers

6.     Stone Girl, Eleni Hale

7.     The Girls, Chloe Higgins

8.     Watch Over Me, Claire Corbett

9.     The Artist’s Portrait, Julie Keys

10.  Lenny’s Book of Everything, Karen Foxlee

11.  Wolfe Island, Lucy Treloar

12.  Hive, A.J. Betts

13.  The Breeding Season, Amanda Niehaus

14.  The Heart of the Grass Tree, Molly Murn

15.  Zebra and other Stories, Debra Adelaide

16.  Diving into Glass, Caro Llewellyn

17.  Room for a Stranger, Melanie Cheng

18.  This Taste for Silence, Amanda O' Callaghan

19.  The Island Will Sink, Briohny Doyle

20.  The Erratics, Vicki Laveau-Harvie

21.  Imperfect, Lee Kofman

22.  The Thinking Woman, Julienne van Loon

23.  Say Hello, Carly Findlay

24.  Madame Izan, Rosa Praed

25.  Sister Sorrow, Rosa Praed

26.  The Fragments, Toni Jordan

27.  Beyond Words: A Year With Kenneth Cook, Jacqueline Kent

28.  Fusion, Kate Richards

29.  Haxby’s Circus, Katharine Susannah Prichard

30.  The Trauma Cleaner, Sarah Krasnostein

Australian Male Writers

31.  The Honeyman and the Hunter, Neil Grant

32.  Preservation, Jock Serong

33.  Finding My Way, Graeme Innes

34.  You Belong Here, Laurie Steed

35.  Isinglass, Martin Edmond

36.  Writers on Writers: Nam Le on David Malouf, Nam Le

37.  Last Drinks, Andrew McGahan

38.  Figurehead, Patrick Allington

39.  Fever of Animals, Miles Allinson

40.  David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

41.  The Sea and Summer, George Turner

42.  This is the Grass, Alan Marshall

International Women Writers

43.  Outline, Rachel Cust

44.  M-Train, Patti Smith

45.  Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie

46.  The Lowlands, Jhumpa Lahiri

47.  The Bees, Laline Paull

48.  The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

49.  Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin

50.  The Living Mounain, Nan Shepherd

51.  The Marriage of Opposites, Alice Hoffman

52.  The Water Cure, Sophie Mackintosh

53.  Bright, Duanwad Pimwana

54.  A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

55.  Idaho, Emily Ruskovich

56.  Swimming with Seals, Victoria Whitworth

57.  Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself, Radclyff Hall

58.  Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit

59.  The Mermaid's Three Wisdoms, Jane Yolen

60.  A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers

61.  The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers

62.  Gingerbread, Helen Oyeyemi

63.  Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine

64.  Madame Zero, Sarah Hall

65.  Black Water, Louise Doughty

66.  The Turning, A Swimming Memoir

67.  The Carhullan Army, Sarah Hall

International Male Writers

68.  The Marches, Rory Stewart

69.  Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

70.  Coraline, Neil Gamain

71.  Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, Andrew Miller

72.  A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness

73.  Blackfish City, Sam J Miller

74.  Wintering: A Season with Geese, Stephen Rutt

75.  Undying, Michael Faber

76.  The Cage, Lloyd Jones

77.  The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi

78.  The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi

79.  The Blackwater Lightship, Colm Toibin

80.  Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton

81.  The Book of M, Peng  Shepherd

82.  The Castle, Franz Kafka

83.  Feral, George Monbiot

84.  The Maze Runner, James Dashner

Review of 'The Mysterious Box' by Dorothy Cottrell

Over at The Australian Legend, my blogging pal and sometimes-correspondent and yet-to-be caffeinating acquaintance Bill is running his annual spotlight on Australian women writers. This year he is up to Generation 3, which consists of women who wrote between 1919-1960. Dorothy Cottrell featured on one of his lists, and as I’m planning to write a book about her one day, I thought I would revisit her writing.

Cottrell was born in Picton, NSW in 1905 and contracted polio five years later. She spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair. This didn’t stop her from attending art school, moving to her uncle’s farm and becoming a crack shot with a rifle, eloping with her uncle’s bookkeeper to Dunk Island, moving back to Sydney to make money from her drawings, and then to American to escape the tax office because she was so successful. In America, she and her husband sailed around the Caribbean in a yacht and she continued to publish stories in newspapers and magazines. A couple of films were also based upon her work (for eg Wilderness Orphan based on a pet kangaroo).

With the encouragement of Mary Gilmore (herself a writer whose style shifted from Victorian to the more experimental Modernism), Cottrell published her first novel The Singing Gold in 1928. In an essay in a special issue on Modernism published in Queensland Review a few years ago, I argue that this heavily autobiographical novel is an example of Modernism (which has traditionally been considered in the context of urban life) transposed to the regions. It’s a very visual novel, which is not surprising as Cottrell trained as an artist in Sydney with Datillo Rubbo, and her sketches and paintings show the broad brushstrokes and geometric planes of Modernism. In The Singing Gold, a scene of droving in the dry and dusty outback, attended by flocks of tiny larks that hover over the sheep, is transformed through long, lyrical sentences into a vision of lustrous, shimmering gold (see here for the passage that knocked my socks off). This novel also focusses on the quotidian, another feature of Modernist writers, particularly female Modernist writers and artists (think of Margaret Preston’s paintings of native flower arrangements).

The Cottrells’ move to America coincided with the Depression, so Dorothy abandoned Modernism and began to write more commercial work to bring in money. Her plot-driven stories were serialised in the Ladies Home Journal, among others, and feature romances and life on the high seas, drawing on her love of sailing - the wheelchair didn’t stop her there, either – the Australian Dictionary of Biography states that ‘with an adventurous spirit and 'resolute recklessness', she would board any boat that would take her wheelchair—she once returned to Florida in a 24 ft (7.3 m) ketch.’

In this sense Cottrell broke free of the throttling post-war conservatism that, as scholar Susan Sheridan discusses in her 2001 Dorothy Green Lecture, shoehorned women into femininity and domesticity. As Sheridan points out, women were actively making art during this period, but were described as creating ‘in their spare time’ so as not to rock the boat. Thea Astley, Sheridan writes, ‘tells a horror story of how she felt she had to “neuter” herself, to take on a masculine narrative stance, in order to be taken seriously as a writer.’ Female poets such as Judith Wright fared a bit better, possibly because of male mentors such as Douglas Stewart, poetry editor of the Bulletin, and because poetry tended to escape the censor’s pen.

Cottrell, sailing in the clear seas of the Caribbean rather than the hotbed of anti-communist and nationalistic fervour of post-war Australia, was motivated by a different set of concerns. The most obvious of these, as mentioned above, was the need to make money; another was her wanderlust (she said that if she had travelled less, she might have written more) and a third was her love of the natural world. This latter is what I enjoy most about her work, particularly her descriptions of its sensory profusion and its force (hurricanes feature often in her stories). However her depictions of Caribbean people grate on me (there is usually a white saviour), even as I recognise that Cottrell was of her time.

Being in Munich rather that Brisbane, where I could have gone to the State Library of Queensland to look up Earth Battle, Cottrell’s second novel which I’ve been meaning to read for years, I’ve selected one of her stories saved in my folders, ‘The Mysterious Box,’ published in The Saturday Evening Post on 26th June 1954. The story opens with a Caribbean man, Daniel, on his way towards his boat on the shore. He stops to part the ‘heart-leaved trees’ to see a dilapidated cottage on which he has his heart set to make his home (complete with a pearl-grey cat). However, he feels (and must have felt before) a terrible sense of loss ‘for the non-existent cat, for the brilliance and perfection of the cottage as it could be and was not.’

I thought this was going to be another tedious story along the lines of ‘Hurricane, North Atlantic’ published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1947, in which the white doctor and his wife struggle to save an island’s inhabitants during a hurricane (and the wife, who has told her husband she is leaving because she’s sick of island life, suddenly realises how much she loves him and decides to stay, blergh), but the next few lines of the story diverted me. Cottrell continues Daniel’s story: ‘Threading through the final stunted mangroves bordering the sound, [Daniel] considered the three things that put the cottage beyond his reach: the poorness of the islands, the fact that he was black, and the fact that he was “simple”.’ I was interested because of the mention of disability, race and poverty, and read on to see how Cottrell treated these subjects.

As a 25 year old captain, Daniel, who was preparing dynamite to blast a pathway through the reef (I’ve read of this happening a few times in Cottrell’s stories, it must have been a common technique), accidentally sets off the dynamite, killing his young wife and damaging his head. Cottrell describes Daniel’s disability thus: ‘It took him longer to think of things than it took other men; longer to make a reply. But he was also much closer to the birds and the animals and the insects than were normal people.’ 

Daniel’s perspective offers Cottrell an opportunity to pen her detailed descriptions of the living world: ‘he noted now that the sound was full from the east wind and that where the salt water lapped in round the little mangroves it was very clear; part sky reflections, part glimpses of submerged roots and rock, part shadow patterns of the little trees. And on the exposed rock were segmented ice plants and the brighter green of purslane – that had made new leaves since yesterday – while the lappety, floppety slap of the sea was a whisper and a running tune.’ It’s lovely writing.

Here, too, is evidence of Cottrell’s plotting: create a character, create enough sympathy for that character to enable the reader to root for them, and then put something in the character’s way to make the reader read on to see if the character gets what they want. Daniel creates beautiful quilts and embroideries, and ‘each year he sold one quilt locally to pay for materials and for the postage on the rest, which were sent to delight children who would never walk again.’ That engendered my sympathy for Daniel, perhaps also because it’s clear that Cottrell is drawing on her own experience here.

However, I didn’t buy her depiction of Daniel as someone who is intellectually impaired. Daniel’s close observation of the natural world leads him to contemplate the crabs on the beach that collect pieces of jewellery in their claws. After searching the area for six months, he unearths some treasure (the ‘mysterious box’ of the title) while diving in a storm. The only way that Daniel seems different to anyone else is his need to ask an elderly fellow inhabitant, Granny Fich (who seems to have seizures, if I interpreted ‘fits’ correctly) what he should do with his heavy spoils. Daniel muses that he wishes the island’s commissioner, who had once been kind to him and commented favourably on his quilts, would tell him what to do. Granny Fich recommends that Daniel hide the box in a watermelon in a crate and take it to the commissioner.

Daniel sets sail for the commissioner’s residence, but the watermelon begins to suppurate in the heat and the captain threatens to throw it overboard. Daniel is adamant about holding onto the melon and an interesting switch occurs: it is thought that because Daniel is intellectually impaired, he shouldn’t be parted from his attachment. He is allowed to keep the melon, and when he docks he takes it to the commissioner, benefits from his spoils and buys his house with the pearl-grey cat and some proper black tea for Granny Fich. Cottrell, although she positions Daniel as subordinate to white people, at least recognises and seeks to convey the inequality created by structures of capitalism, colonialism and ablelism.

I don’t know how well this story fits into Bill’s discussion of the defining features of Gen 3 – Modernism and social realism – because the story isn’t Modernist and I think it’s romantic rather than realist. However Cottrell has largely been forgotten in analyses of Australian literature, which seems remiss when her time on her uncle’s station at Ularunda and on Dunk Island indelibly shaped her writing and her adventurous spirit. If these spotlights are about drawing attention to (still overlooked) women writers in Australian literature, Cottrell should be on the stage.

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

2017: My Year of Reading

Everything leading up to Christmas is such a mad rush of tying up loose ends while running on an empty battery, that I can never get to my yearly reviews until January. Ah well, c’est la vie.

Once again I tried to reach my goal of 100 books. I fell short by 8, which was still 9 more than last year. As I was trying to cut back on my workload, for the first time in five years I didn’t participate in the Australian Women Writers Challenge. I also stepped back from my role as contributing editor of diversity, although I continued to co-ordinate (albeit in a not-very-organised way) guest posts. I wondered if this would have an impact on my stats, but it didn’t, really - 47% of my reading was of Australian women writers, compared to 45% last year. 13% were Australian male writers, meaning that half of my reading consisted of Australian writers and the other half were international. I like that!

The absolute highlight of my year was Norwegian author Roy Jacobson’s The Unseen, set on the island of Barrøy. It chronicles the lives of the family members on the island with writing that is alive with sensation and sound, including the region’s dialect. It’s also written in present tense, which I enjoyed. I also loved other non-Australian authors I encountered, particularly Octavia Butler, whom I taught in my Women Writers Course. Muriel Spark, Colette and Marguerite Duras were also memorable, although the George Eliot I picked up (The Lifted Veil) was a dud. Burton’s The Miniaturist was a delight, Kingsolver’s The Lacuna was reassuringly engaging, and pretty much all the YA books I picked up (to read before giving to niece & nephew) were great: Donnelly’s A Gathering Light, Gray’s Defy the Stars and Rowell’s Eleanor and Park which b/f found on the feeds & recommended to me. By contrast, my worst book of the year was Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. What a waste of time.

Of Australian authors, I fell in love with Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink, something that’s been on my TBR list for a while. It was vivid and imaginative and I loved its rendition of Sydney, something McGregor also captured in her Sydney Review of Books essay, ‘Surro’, on Surry Hills. I was moved by Mary-Rose Maccoll’s For A Girl; although it was simply written, it captured her solid and continuing grief over the loss of her child. I adored the quiet artfulness of Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love (on a par with her earlier fable The River Wife); was impressed by the plotting of Moriaty’s Big Little Lies, and was totally entertained and absorbed by Belinda Burns' The Dark Part of Me. Krissy Kneen’s An Uncertain Grace was an intellectual delight, with its tentacular explorations of different consciousnesses and ethics, while the heft and scope of Mahood’s Position Doubtful left me puzzling over the book for weeks as I unpicked it for an essay on ecobiography, and was ultimately rewarded once I understood (even in part) its complexity.

Sadly, my reading of Aboriginal authors was pretty dismal this year, with only three books – Kim Scott’s Taboo, Clare Coleman’s Terra Nullius and Marie Munkara’s A Most Peculiar Act. Being an editor in diversity at the AWW Challenge obviously pushes me in this area. I continue to find it interesting how Aboriginal authors exploit the elements of different genres to express their & their community’s experiences of invasion and colonisation – in this instance realism, speculative fiction and satire.

My year ended on a high note with Andrew McGahan’s Ship Kings series, which showed such mastery of plotting that I’m going to take the books apart to see how he did it. I loved the themes of passion, desperation, courage and love; the developing complexity of the protagonist; and there was barely a line out of place. McGahan continues to be one of my favourite authors because he isn’t afraid to try something new, and he writes well in a range of genres rather than churning out the same stuff.

I didn’t get to any reading of poetry, as I’d hoped to do – that’s on the list again for this year. As is a great deal of reading for my ecobiography, so I’ll be canvassing many more environmental books this year. So below is my list of books canvassed - here's hoping it propagates in 2018.

Australian Women Writers

1.     The Long Goodbye: Coral, Coal and Australia's Climate Deadlock, Anna Krien

2.     Moloch A Story of Sacrifice, Rosa Praed

3.     On Doubt, Leigh Sales

4.     Nightsiders, Sue Isle

5.     Stravinsky’s Lunch, Drusilla Modjeska

6.     Goodwood, Holly Throsby

7.     A Country in Mind, Saskia Buedel

8.     The Dry, Jane Harper

9.     For a Girl, Mary-Rose Maccoll

10.  Foal’s Bread, Gillian Mears

11.  Terra Nullius, Clare Coleman

12.  Parting Words, Cass Moriaty

13.  And Fire Came Down, Emma Viskic

14.  Storyland, Catherine McKinnon

15.  Storm and Grace, Kathryn Heyman

16.  A Most Peculiar Act, Marie Munkara

17.  Big Little Lies, Liane Moriaty

18.  In the Quiet, Eliza Henry-Jones

19.  Indelible Ink, Fiona McGregor

20.  Poum and Alexandre: A Paris Memoir, Catherine de Saint Phalle

21.  An Isolated Incident, Emile Maguire

22.  Understory: A Life with Trees, Inga Simpson

23.  The Other Side of the World, Stephanie Bishop

24.  Between a Wolf and a Dog, Georgia Blain

25.  Whisper, Chrissie Keighery

26.  The Museum of Modern Love, Heather Rose

27.  From the Wreck, Jane Rawson

28.  The Helen One Hundred, Helen Razer

29.  Invisible, Cecily Anne Paterson

30.  Lotus Blue, Cat Sparks

31.  A Hundred Small Lessons, Ashley Hay

32.  Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land: A Story of Australian Life, Rosa Praed

33.  An Uncertain Grace, Krissy Kneen

34.  Only, Caroline Baum

35.  Music And Freedom, Zoe Morrison

36.  Family Skeleton, Carmel Bird

37.  Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories, Kim Mahood

38.  Truly Madly Guilty, Liane Moriaty

39.  Craft for a Dry Lake, Kim Mahood

40.  The Children’s Bach, Helen Garner

41.  Monkey Grip, Helen Garner

42.  The Dark Part Of Me, Belinda Burns

43.  Jack's Story, Donna McDonald

Australian Male Writers

44.  The Ocean of the Dead, Andrew McGahan

45.  The War of the Four Isles, Andrew McGahan

46.  The Voyage of the Unquiet Ice, Andrew McGahan

47.  The Coming of the Whirlpool, Andrew McGahan

48.  Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam

49.  Holding the Man, Eliot Conigrave

50.  The Running Man, Michael Bauer

51.  The Last Days of Ava Langdon, Mark O’Flynn

52.  Taboo, Kim Scott

53.  The Restorer, Michael Sala

54.  1988, Andrew McGahan

55.  Burning Down, Veny Armanno

International Women Writers

56.  Not to Disturb, Muriel Spark

57.  A Gathering Light, Jennifer Donnelly

58.  Defy the Stars, Claudia Gray

59.  The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters

60.  How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall

61.  Eleanor and Park, Rainbow Rowell

62.  The Miniaturist, Jessie Burton

63.  What Lies Between Us, Nayomi Munaweera

64.  The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver

65.  Moderato Cantabile, Marguerite Duras

66.  Ripening Seed, Colette

67.  History of Wolves, Emily Fridlund

68.  The Lifted Veil, George Eliot

69.  Autumn, Ali Smith

70.  The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry

71.  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

72.  Kindred, Octavia Butler

73.  The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

74.  Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler

75.  Fledgling, Octavia Butler

76.  Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

77.  A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir

78.  The Vegetarian, Kang Han

79.  The Wonder, Emma Donoghue

80.  The Shore, Sara Taylor

81.  The Girls, Emma Cline

82.  Run, Ann Patchett

83.  The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit

International Male Writers

84.  Far Tortuga, Peter Matthiessen

85.  Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

86.  Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor

87.  Winter Count, Barry Lopez

88.  Engleby, Sebastian Faulks

89.  The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen

90.  Being Dead, Jim Crace

91.  The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin

92.  The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy

2016: My Year of Reading

While everyone is gearing up for 2017 with their best books to watch for lists, I’m still straggling behind with my notes on 2016. One day I’ll catch up, but alas, ‘tis not to be this year.

I signed up for GoodReads’ 100 book challenge but only made it to 84, which at least is 8 more than last year. So I’m slowing inching towards that target.

By far, my favourite books were Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I loved the rich emotional lives of the female characters, which provided the work with drama and momentum. I find it rare to come across character-driven works in my reading, unless I pick up something 19th century, though Ann Patchett always does a good job of it.

I also adored Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, an ecobiography which I found more seamless and elegant than Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk. And on things environmental, Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, about the repopulation of England with wolves, was superb. It was thick with money and politics, animals and sex, and I loved the protagonist – a strong, pregnant woman. The only other pregnant protagonists which I’ve come across are in films – Steve Zissou’s The Life Acquatic and the Coen brothers’ Fargo.

In terms of contemporary Australian literature I was pretty disappointed. I was part of a reading group of Australian women’s writing that made its way through the Stella Prize, then the female shortlistees of the Miles Franklin. Aside from the power of The Natural Way of Things and the delicacy of Small Acts of Disappearance I was underwhelmed, & I certainly didn’t think that Leap or Hope Farm deserved to be on the shortlist of Australia’s richest literary prize. I picked A.S. Patric’s Black Rock, White City to see if it was on a par with Wood’s book and I thought it was, but if you hold Australian shortlists up to shortlists in the UK or America, their innovation seems fairly lacklustre by comparison. Are Australian publishers more conservative? It often feels like they are; I guess a lack of money makes them less inclined to take risks. Thank god for publishers like Text & Transit Lounge, who go out on a limb.

I read 8 books by Indigenous writers (5 more than last year) and 3 books of poetry. I’d intended to read more of both those categories, so have made some incremental progress with that too. I read 37 Australian women writers, 28 international women writers, 9 Australian male writers and 8 Australian international writers.

This year I’m hoping to keep up with the poetry & Indigenous writerss, and to go back to some more 19th Century fiction.

But here’s my list of books, which I post more for myself than anyone else, so I can track my tendencies. The links are to my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, for which I read 38 books & reviewed 10 – I met my target, but only just (I was writing most of my reviews after Xmas!).

Australian Women Writers

1.     The Soul of Countess Adrian, Rosa Praed

2.     The Romance of Mademoiselle Aisse, Rosa Praed

3.     Cloudwish, Fiona Wood

4.     Painting Red Orchids, Eileen Chong

5.     Six Bedrooms, Tegan Bennett Daylight

6.     Fishing in the Devonian, Carol Jenkins

7.     A Short History of Richard Kline, Amanda Lohrey

8.     Dying: A Memoir, Corey Taylor

9.     Everywhere I Look, Helen Garner

10.  The Eye of the Sheep, Sofie Laguna

11.  Defying Doomsday, ed Tsana Dolichva & Holly Kench

12.  A Loving, Faithful Animal, Josephine Rowe

13.  The Well, Elizabeth Jolley

14.  Leap, Myfawny Jones

15.  Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, Anita Heiss

16.  His Sister’s Eye, Vivienne Cleven

17.  Body/Landscape Journals, Margaret Somerville

18.  A Few Days in the Country: And Other Stories, Elizabeth Harrower

19.  Resurrection Bay, Emma Viskic

20.  Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Christina Stead

21.  The Timeless Land, Eleanor Dark

22.  Hope Farm, Peggy Frew

23.  Second Half First, Drusilla Modjeska

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

25.  Dying in the First Person, Nike Sulway

26.  The Dressmaker, Rosalie Ham

27.  Talk Under Water, Kathryn Lomer

28.  Thunderwith, Libby Hathorn

29.  Where the Trees Were, Inga Simpson

30.  Under the Wintamarra Tree, Doris Pilkington

31.  Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, Doris Pilkington

32.  Close to Home, Robin Barker

33.  A Faithful Picture: The Letters Of Eliza And Thomas Brown At York In The Swan River Colony 1841-1852, Eliza Brown

34.  Thursday’s Child, Sonya Harnett

35.  Stradbroke Dreamtime, Oodgeroo Nunukul

36.  Elemental, Amanda Curtin

37.  Bad Behaviour, Rebecca Starford

38. Comfort Food, Ellen van Neerven

Australian Male Writers

39.  Black Rock, White City, A.S. Patric

40.  Moon and Rainbow: The Autobiography of an Aboriginal, Dick Roughsey

41.  One, Patrick Holland

42.  Island Home, Tim Winton

43.  The Salamanders, William Lane

44.  Invisible Country: Southwest Australia: Understanding a Landscape, Bill Bunbury

45.  Taronga, Victor Kelleher

46.  Jodie’s Journey, Colin Thiele

47.  The Promise, Tony Birch

International Women Writers

48.  The Mandibles: A Family, Lionel Shriver

49.  Commonwealth, Ann Patchett

50.  Life After Life, Kate Atkinson

51.  A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara

52.  The Outrun, Amy Liptrot

53.  The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer, Kate Summerscale

54.  Everyone is Watching, Megan Bradbury

55.  White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi

56.  The Bone People, Keri Hulme

57.  First There is a Mountain, Elizabeth Kadetsky

58.  She Came to Stay, Simone de Beauvoir

59.  Tar Baby, Toni Morrison

60.  The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins

61.  My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

62.  The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante

63.  Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante

64.  The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante

66.  Carol, Patricia Highsmith

66.  Alex, Tessa Duder

67.  Alex in Winter, Tessa Duder

68.  Sleeping on Jupiter, Anuradha Roy

69.  My Name Is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout

70.  The Wolf Border, Sarah Hall

71.  The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavich

72.  Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie

73.  Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie

74.  Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie

75.  The First Bad Man, Miranda July

76.  Lament for the Afterlife, Lisa L. Hannett

International Male Writers

77.  His Bloody Project, Grame Macrae Burnet

78.  Gardens of Fire, Stevan Eldred-Grigg

79.  Going Sane: Maps of Happiness, Adam Phillips

80.  The Martian, Andy Weir

81.  Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire

82.  Z for Zachariah, Robert C. O’Brien

83.  2312, Kim Stanley Robinson

84.  The Beach, Alex Garland

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!

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.