Review of Snake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borrowed as an eBook from Brisbane City Council Library.

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

On 'Entitlement'

I had been intending to write this post a little later, when I’d gained some distance from my novel, but given that Saturday was National Sorry Day and today is the centenary of my relative Patrick White’s birthday and ten years to the day I walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge with H and his friends for reconciliation, I thought now would be more opportune. Entitlement is almost done, aside from the proofreading over the next couple of weeks. The last two months have nearly killed me.  My final edit, then the copy edit, went incredibly fast and the weekend before last saw me at my desk for some 30 hours, sending it off to my editor not long before dawn broke.  I didn’t go outside or check the news or any kind of social media, not wanting to break open the world I was writing.  And then, going to sleep, the characters were still interacting in my head and, for a few days afterwards, they were still walking with me to the bus stop.

I had forgotten how much these things sap you.  I haven’t been able to shake this cold and flu that has lingered for a month now.  I’ve lost weight, I’ve barely seen my friends, the pain from an old root canal flared, I haven’t been skating, although I tried to keep swimming, and some of my pet fish have died, either through negligence or because I introduced too many new ones to their tank, although they do have a history of carking it when I am phenomenally stressed.  I did, at least, put on a lovely new blue-and-red Elise frock from Birdsnest and go dancing.  Now, having finally stopped, my body is letting me know how truly bone tired I am, but I’m trying to cobble together some remnants of energy to start socialising again.

However, it was worth it.  The novel feels good which, coming from a perfectionist, means that it probably is.  The writing is polished, the plot is superb, we have a cover which I love, and it will be on the shelves in September.

Entitlement is about Cate McConville and her brother, who went missing 8 years ago.  Their parents want to sell the family property, but Cate is vehement that they can’t.  ‘What if Eliot comes back, and he doesn’t have a home?’ she asks them. An old Aboriginal friend, Mellor, whose country is owned by the McConvilles, offers Cate a solution, but it’s one that nearly tears her apart.

The idea for Entitlement came to me ten years ago when I’d just started writing A Curious Intimacy and was flatting with an historian in Sydney, in a terrace house in Paddington which features in the novel.  She asked me if I had ever considered how my life of privilege had come from the Indigenous people whose land we owned.  I was 23, and the thought had never occurred to me, which was appalling.  However, at that stage my education regarding Aborigines largely consisted of that delivered to me by Mrs Woodley in Year 2, when I had diligently copied down information on hunting tools and glued a picture of a bark humpy into my exercise book.

I started wondering about the Indigenous people who had walked over the property on which I’d grown up, a mixed farm of 5,500 acres, which must have been taken from them not long ago.  I also remembered a black stone my father had found which was smooth and heavy in my hand, and sat in the wooden marble-topped table on our verandah.  Later, when my sister married an Indigenous man and I began doing research for the novel, she pointed out that Native Title could never have been claimed for our property because there was no record of unbroken descent, despite the fact that that tool showed they had obviously lived off that land.  That seemed to me to be wholly unfair.

I can’t remember when I started to learn about the Stolen Generations, though it must have been while at university in Wollongong.  I don’t know why I can’t remember one defining moment, nor why the horror of it didn’t become apparent to me until I read Anna Haebich’s Broken Circles.  I think it was because I never listen to the radio or watch the news as, being deaf, it takes too much effort (and the spelling errors in teletext drive me mad), so if I learn something it’s usually through reading.

Nor can I remember how I arrived at the plot device on which the novel turns and which involves Cate, the protagonist’s brother, which frustrates me because usually my memory is very good.  I chose to write about my relationship with my own brother (although it has been largely fictionalised) because I wanted to write about our childhood and, on the farm, we were rarely ever apart.  To this day, he is my closest friend and seems as much a part of me as I am of myself.  We have the same sense of humour, complement each other and think alike, as evidenced by the fact that one year we gave each other the same Christmas present.  To lose him would mean losing much of myself, and this is tied up with our childhood on the land.

This, then, became the crux of the novel: I wanted to describe what it was like for a white person to lose their identity and their family through the loss of their land, in the hope that readers would then understand what it might be like for an Indigenous person to lose their country.  Of course, this is a very basic premise and, not being Indigenous, I can hardly begin to conceptualise the entirety of such a relationship.  There are many who will argue that I’m presumptuous to even try, given my background, which is similar to that of my forebear Patrick White’s: I come from pastoralists who made their wealth from the dispossession of the Indigenous.

My great-grandfather F.G. White descended from James White, who had arrived in Australia in 1826 from Somerset as manager of stock for the Australian Agricultural Country.  F.G. White bought ‘Mittabah’ in Exeter, NSW, and a swathe of other properties in NSW and Queensland.  He married Ivy Voss, a Queenslander, who hated the cold and was happier on her property in north west NSW, which she bequeathed to my grandparents, and which my father and his two brothers came to run.  There was an element of snobbery, pride in a blueblood heritage, and of learning to speak ‘properly’ hovering in our family.  ‘Are you from England?’ people would ask me, although my lack of a strong Australian accent has also been as a result of some speech therapy because of my deafness.  Somehow, despite this background – probably because of my paternal grandmother’s more democratic background and my own mother’s levelheadedness - my brother, sister and I have become hardened leftists.  This position manifests in my writing through a constant return to the lives of those who are on the margins: lesbians, Indigenous people, the disabled, refugees and so on, which no doubt also stems from my own marginalisation on account of my deafness.  And, while I am in no way comparing my writing to that of my illustrious forebear, it is true that discussions of his similar background, and of his literary intent and style, are often held in tandem.

In a Sydney Writers' Festival panel titled ‘Is Patrick White anti-Australian?’, consisting of Gail Jones, Ivor Indyk and Geordie Williamson and chaired by Michael Cathcart of ABC Radio National's Books and Arts Daily, the now-tedious question of Patrick White’s relevance and the inaccessibility of his work was raised.  My detestation of the term ‘anti-Australian’ must be reserved for another post as this one is already too long, but my impression of the questions delivered to this panel was that White’s background was somehow yoked with the impenetrability of his writing.  He was an irascible man, therefore his texts must be too, an insinuation which all three speakers heartily rejected.  Ivor Indyk referred to White’s identity as a homosexual which ran together with the many references to and compassion for the displaced and foreign in his work; Gail Jones, in her beautiful, delicate phrasing, noted White’s attention to physicality and how this was often rendered affectionately; while Geordie Williamson commented that, ‘To try and draw White into his social utterances and judge him by them is almost to come at it from the wrong angle’.  Gail re-iterated this, noting that White has been co-opted into cultural arguments, and she would like to see a return to his literariness, to the text themselves.

It’s true, Patrick White takes effort, but I have always found him amply rewarding, not least through the richness of his language, to which Ivor referred as ‘baroque’.  Besides, what kind of reader are you if don’t want a text to make you think a little?  There was some mention towards the end of the panel about White’s use of parody, and I was disappointed they hadn’t dwelled on this more, because above all, his writing is stuffed full of humour.  When I began Riders in the Chariot, I burst out laughing at his description of how ‘several barbs of several strands [of blackberry bushes] attached themselves to the folds of [Miss Hare’s] skirt, pulling on it tight, tight, tighter, until she was all spread out behind, part woman, part umbrella’.

Cathcart also mentioned White’s references to Australia as 'the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions’.  This was taken by the panellists to mean a lack of cultural connection and a lack of spirituality, while I maintain it exists very strongly still in the recent actions of Queensland’s premier in scrapping the Premier’s Literary Awards and pushing this state towards a cultural wasteland.

That aside, how might someone who is ‘born of the conquerors’ (Judith Wright, ‘Two Dreamtimes’ 1973) and who may have, as Brigid Rooney writes of Wright in the marvelous Literary Activists, a similar ‘characteristic fearlessness and principles certainty of view … legible as signs of a born-to-rule patrician outlook' (UQP, 2009, p. 10) attempt to reconcile their privileged background with the effects of that background, namely the disenfranchisement of ‘the persecuted’ (Wright, 'Two Dreamtimes')? I have tried to do this through Entitlement by using empathy.  Regardless of my background, I still have the capacity to feel for those whose children and country were taken from them, and I hope that this novel communicates that to its readers and that they, too, might pause and consider how their lives have been shaped by Indigenous history.  Certainly, it’s a risk that I’ve taken, because I can be accused of speaking for Indigenous people with a white voice, and with a White surname, but I’m not the kind of person who will ever stay silent on issues about which I am passionate.

On Creative Practice

My father's first studio was the laundry, with the rifles for roo shooting hanging on the wall, an old-fashioned meat mincer clamped to the bench and his sloping desk squashed against the door to outside. Often, bored during the school holidays, I sat on the washing machine and watched him paint. Once we looked through the windows to see Mum, who had just woken from a nap, yawning as she pulled out weeds near the tankstand. I, who must have been 6 or so, asked, 'How can she be tired if she's just had a sleep?' Dad replied, 'She's still waking up.' I found this an unscientific and unsatisfactory answer, but even then I sensed my father's moods and knew when a conversation wouldn't continue.

A few years later Dad built his own studio, and H and I would often go there after dinner to draw on the discarded pieces of cardboard from which he cut his mounts. Dad played LPs and tapes from musicals as he painted. H drew cartoons which he cut out and stuck on the wall in our bedroom next to his Halley's Comet poster. As with my piano playing, I became technically proficient and was able to copy anything, but I lacked H's imagination and flair.

My sister, brother and I all studied art at school, and later Dad left the farm to teach art himself, littering the house with art books and study notes. It was because of this education — formal and informal — that I was able to recognise the community of artists featured in Alex Miller's new novel, Autumn Laing, as being loosely based upon the Modernists at Heide. As I lay on my red velvet couch reading, I thought I was in for an exciting ride. However, as I turned the pages, I became increasingly disappointed by the lack of momentum and dull writing, and found myself skimming the text, which I rarely do. There was an absence of detail grounding the work and, breaking the most fundamental rule in the writing book, far too much 'telling' over 'showing'.

The novel is the memoir of Autumn Laing, written, she says, to put Edith, the wife of her lover Pat Donlon, back into the picture, to 'give her portrait the first place in this testament' (21). While attention is paid to Edith at first, the work is overtaken by Autumn's focus on Pat Donlon, relegating Edith and her art to the margins as she had been all along.

After Miller's perfectly pitched Lovesong, with its delicate rendition of how a woman's desperation for a child eroded a relationship, the depiction of infertility in this work was a caricature. Following 'a period of aggressive and exaggerated sexual behaviour' in her late teens (178), Autumn is unable to have children. When she finds that Pat Donlon is to father a child with Edith, her reaction is to knock over her wine glass and slam the door, while 'a moment later her wail came from the deep night, “I hate men!”' (210). Continuing in this hyperbolic vein, Autumn's carers, a nurse and her biographer Adeli, have breasts like 'great melons diving about like bloated water bombs' (185) and 'trembling balloons of naked flesh' (187), an unsubtle affront to Autumn's angularity and infertility.

Each of these complaints could of course be explained by the voice and biases of Autumn, but a writer who has published his tenth novel should be capable of shaping better sentences than 'I hated him. I wanted him to make love to me. To lose himself in a wild torment of passion for me' (369). Mills and Boon territory, indeed.

Aside from allowing me to recognise the loose skeleton upon which Autumn Laing hung, my father's creative practice has been instrumental in showing me how to become, and to live, as an artist. Although he doesn't have the all-consuming passion and ambition that I do (for he would, ultimately, prefer to be renovating houses than painting), his art does seem to tug at him the same way that writing never leaves me alone.

At home for Christmas, when he was painting and I was writing, we came out for coffee (or rather, he heard me in the kitchen and came out for someone to talk to).

'It's so boring,' he complained. 'Why do we do it?'

'Because it's a vocation,' I replied.

The word comes from the Latin word vocare, meaning 'to call'. It's a voice you can't ignore. Certainly, if I don't write, I start to feel a bit shitty and ill, and other writers I have spoken to feel this way as well.

Dad also taught me the importance of a single-minded dedication to a cause. His father once said to him, 'There's no such word as can't', and he relayed this to me in turn as I was growing up, as he did the phrase, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.' For a stubborn little girl who always wanted to be the best but was sometimes thwarted by a disability, these mantras helped drive me on. Even now, when I despair that my friends have houses and cars and I am walking away from the white picket fences and down the dusty road to post yet another grant application, I remind myself that I can never lose faith in my capacity to succeed. To do so would be to give up my raison d'être.

In a piece of poetic dovetailing, my father's art supports my own, for my parents help to put a roof over my head so that I can work part-time and keep writing. Likewise, my childhood on the property he worked with his brothers has given rise to almost all my themes, and the character of the artist/farmer has appeared in at least one short story, and will feature in novel #6.

Dad's paintings are available here. If you're stuck for gifts for weddings, birthdays or generally esoteric occasions, these will fit the bill. Plus Mum keeps at him to clean out his drawers, so divesting them of paintings is always helpful for household harmony.

On Partying

I had thought that, once teaching finished for the semester, I would find myself with a plethora of time at my disposal to recover, write and read. Instead, the pendulum swung in the other direction, from WORK to PARTY.

Consequently I have no idea where the last six weeks have gone, and have been lucky to write in my journal twice a month (and here I think wistfully of my undergraduate days in Wollongong when it was once a day until, over the course of a summer, my style improved considerably and led my lecturer to ask, 'Have you been drinking?') so I can't rely upon it for recollection. However I do, thankfully, have some entries in my calendar.

These indicate that I attended salon talks at Avid Reader by Charlotte Wood and Anna Funder; dressed up as a tart for a friend's 40th birthday ('Please tell me that you're wearing more than that,' H had said when I showed him the dark red corset with cream ribbons. 'Not much more,' I replied brightly); attended a lecture at the State Library by Melissa Lucashenko organised by Griffith Review; started salsa classes, or rather, picked up where I left them 10 years ago; had a friend from Sydney to stay, whereupon we drank cocktails at Bistrot Bistro and pedalled to see Henri Cartier Bresson at the Queensland Art Gallery; watched a performance of Pygmalion, of which I heard very little as the acoustics were terrible, though I'd managed to read the script beforehand and was entertained well enough; attended a friend's baby naming ceremony on four hours' sleep, having been out on the turps the night before at a cocktail pool party; went to a samba fitness class with T and loved it; organised a bike ride over the rail trails north of Brisbane, returning sore and burnt in all the wrong places, leading to a hideously striped epidermis of brown and white; travelled to Parkes with H for a week for Dr P's nuptials; caught up with friends in Sydney and, back in Brisbane, attended a trapeze performance by some stunning gay men. Is it any wonder that I am still tired, still broke, and slightly fatter?

On the plane to Sydney I finished Anna Funder's All That I Am which was the best book I've read all year. It elucidated a period and people with which I was unfamiliar – the German resistance movement in the lead-up to World War Two – with beautiful writing, a clever plot and thorough research which the text wore very lightly. Funder was a highly articulate speaker and her intelligence was stunning.

In Parkes H and I visited the dish with a uni friend of H's who had a charming one year old, from whom I elicited some smiles. H tried to explain the physics of gravity to me but that wasn't very interesting so I wandered to the shop and found a Christmas present for Nephew. We stayed with Dr P's Parental Unit who plied us with food and booze (hence uncomely weight gain). I wrote 129 place names, had my toenails painted pink and finished another book I was in the middle of reading, Alex Miller's new novel Autumn Laing which was disappointing (more of this in another post). After this novel I read The Tiger's Wife which, though it took a while to get into, turned into a wonderful piece of magic realism with a clever blending of myth and reality. Now I'm onto Gillian Mears' Foal's Bread which is thus far quite good. An excellent piece on Mears and her writing by Susan Johnson, whose writing I enjoy, can be found here.

It rained for five days before the wedding, and on the sixth the sky bloomed with blue. Everyone was relieved. Jokes were made about the sacrifice of goats. The wedding ceremony was beautiful. I wrote a poem for L&G and read it out, and H was MC. I wore a new frock from Kitten d'Amour with dark red Nude shoes (Nude is my favourite favourite favourite fashion find of the year) that I had worn at the 40th birthday party, and in which I had blackened a toenail from dancing too much. Fortunately, this didn't happen again. By the time the party bus came to pick us up at midnight I was already on my way out. Those at the back of the bus erupted into song as I laid my cheek against the cold glass window and went to sleep. The others went to an after party in someone's hotel room and I staggered around and eventually fell onto the bed and passed out, waking pained and somewhat surly the next morning.

H and I dropped L&G off at the airport for their honeymoon before going to dinner with another friend. As usual, H was unable to talk and navigate at the same time, so for a while it looked like we would end up in Wollongong. While queuing to get back onto the right road, H, to our mutual hilarity, pointed out the man in the car behind us doing his toilette, viz. looking up his nostrils and baring his teeth in the mirror. It was worth taking the scenic route (read: getting lost) just for that.

Despite all my avowals to stop drinking and going out and to actually sit and do some writing, I found myself booked to see Briefs with a friend from London. It was a wonderful performance by a troupe of gay trapeze artists with a commentary from a drag queen that I couldn't entirely hear but was highly entertaining to watch. I got more than I bargained for when, as we were at a table near the front, I was the target of a half-empty can of coke, which sprayed over most of me. I didn't mind as it was still funny, and I had on my pink patent Alannah Hill pumps which were water resistant, but my lovely handbag had stains on it. Oh, these first world problems.

Now I have only two weeks or so of work before I go home to Parental Unit's, whereupon there will be nothing to do but write and exercise. What bliss.

On Trauma

The last few months have been harrowing. I've been working too hard and this, combined with barely having had a day off since Easter and training for the Bridge to Brisbane, meant that my body made an executive decision for me. While delivering my first ever lecture at uni, I fainted in front of 180 students.

Ironically, the lecture was on trauma and narrative in conjunction with Louise Doughty's Whatever you Love. I was speaking on muscle memory and how the body acts out trauma that it can't consciously articulate. As a fellow tutor said appreciatively, 'Jessica, not only did you deliver a lecture on trauma, you enacted it!'

It wasn't all bad as, when I came to, I found a very nice-looking student holding my hand. I managed to get up and the course convener fetched me a seat. To the students I joked, 'There's nothing like a bit of drama to keep you all awake!' and kept on going, though a number of them told me afterwards they were quite concerned. Or traumatised, rather. However, as a cousin pointed out (amidst a myriad of jokes on Jane Austen and swooning), I wouldn't be a White if there wasn't any drama, and least they will never forget that lecture.

Soon it transpired that I had a flu virus that confined me to the house for more than a week of enforced rest and utter boredom. A few days after toppling, I dragged my carcass into Avid Reader (J1 very kindly dropped me off after stopping by for a cup of tea) to listen to an interview between Radio National's Paul Barclay and Nigel Brennan, Nicole Bonney and Kellie Brennan, authors of The Price of Life. Nigel was an Old Boy of the school at which my parents work, and gave a talk at the valedictory speech day last year. I remembered his name when Avid sent me an invite and decided to go along.

I had to get there early so I could get a seat near the front to hear. I sat very still to conserve energy, got bored, and watched Paul Barclay, who was restless, and the sound technician fiddling with his wires. When Nigel came in there was an immediate energy in the air. He looked like the quintessential tanned Aussie with a white Bonds t-shirt and dark blue jeans. His sister, Nicole Bonney, wore an orange and red kaftan with ruffles, and his sister-in-law, Kellie Brennan, had on cute leopard print ballet flats. They were like the country people I had grown up among, but when they began to speak, the story that unfolded was completely removed from picnic races with champagne or CWA meetings on recipe books.

In 2008, Nigel, a photojournalist, travelled into Somalia with Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout to document the Somalian refugee camps. They had been intending to stay no longer than 10 days due to the country's instability. Instead, they were captured by a gang and held for ransom, and finally got out after the heroic efforts of their families some 462 days later, following beatings, psychological torture, solitary confinement and, for Amanda, sexual assault.

The theme that resonated the most through the book was communication. Nicole and Kellie, two tough country women, battled for months with unhinged and morally dubious Africans with poor English, trying to make it clear that the family didn't have the amount of money they were asking for, and that not every Westerner was automatically wealthy. The Australian government initially came on board to try and get Nigel out, but wouldn't offer the hostage-takers more than a certain amount because this would be seen as setting a precedent for the bailing-out of future hostages. This was fair enough (and was more proactive than the Canadian government, which largely sat on its hands), but it was never made clear to the family that this was their tactic. Nicky and Kellie said in the interview that had they known this was government policy, they would have done something of their own accord sooner, particularly as incidents occured such as Nigel calling home and getting an answering machine because the Australian Federal Police weren't manning the phones 24-7 as expected.

Nigel and Amanda converted to Islam to aid their survival. When they managed to escape, they sprinted for a mosque, where they couldn't be harmed because they were Islamic. Their captors caught up with them and, after the shots of AK47s, dragged them out. The most heartbreaking part of this scene was that in the mosque Amanda was able to communicate, using sign language, to an old woman in a niqab that she was being raped. The woman began to cry. Even though she and Amanda didn't share the same language, there was an unspoken understanding of what Amanda was suffering.

When it became clear to the Australian government that their involvement was becoming too costly, they gradually extricated themselves from the situation, but covered their tracks with bureaucratic language such as that noted by Nicky: 'we have to look at where we are in regards to negotiator strategies with other government agencies' (121). The distancing effect of obscure language is one I've encountered often in academia, and I could understand her frustration. Eventually the family turned to a private agency who got the Nigel and Amanda out in a matter of months, but not before the family members were mortgaged to the hilt and were disintegrating from stress. Dick Smith also offered financial aid, and Bob Brown took out a personal loan and offered that as well. As Nigel noted in the interview, regardless of what one might think of Brown's policies, it's clear he is a good man.

I read the book almost in one sitting as, being ill, I allowed myself the rare luxury of lying in bed in the morning reading, and the story was gripping. When I reached the end, I was struck Nigel's psychological strength, which reminded me of Primo Levy's as he struggled to survive in Auschwitz. In his autobiography, If This is a Man, Levy wrote:

'Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains' (21).

Nigel struggled to do this — to hold onto his sense of himself — through writing. When his pens died he became very distressed, and when he was kept in solitary confinement he committed his diary to memory. I asked, in the Q&A afterwards, if it had been difficult for him to get his story down once he had returned home, because often for those who had suffered trauma there are simply no words to articulate what has happened. Nigel replied that the writing process had been quite therapeutic, and that I can understand – even Chaucer was writing about this The Book of the Duchess in the 14th Century, where his narrator wrote down a dream of lost love to alleviate his insomnia.

There are also some beautiful moments in Nigel's text which spring from scenes of intense deprivation. There is the shock of touch during a haircut after months of skin hunger, the deliciousness of fresh greens, and the iridescent colours of a gecko's head.  Nigel, with Amanda's encouragement, focussed on that which was beautiful in an ugly situation, in order to keep going. There was also, of course, the family's dark humour that helped them through it, and which was evident in the interview they gave at Avid Reader.

As I staggered home on the bus after that interview, my pathetic body weak with the adrenalin that had coursed through it while listening to the interview, I figured that, even if I was overworked and as sick as a dog and had failed abysmally in my first attempt at an illustrious academic career, I had very little to complain about in the light of Nigel and Amanda's ordeal. If you ever need testimony of the courage and ingenuity of the human spirit in its fight to survive, and of the endurance that love fosters, I urge you to read The Price of Life.

As for me, I had lost too much fitness to compete in the Bridge to Brisbane, so I've decided to drag myself up a bloody great hill (Mt Coot-tha) for Movember. I think a post on the hirsute will be in order.

When it Rains

As I write, most of Queensland is underwater, hundreds of people have been dispossessed, kangaroos are being ferried to land in tinnies and still the rain slashes onto my corrugated iron roof. Two years ago we had dreadful bushfires in Victoria, and we are just emerging from a decade of drought. Australia truly is, as Dorothea Mackellar wrote in 'My Country', her iconic (if saccharine) poem, 'a sunburnt country … Of droughts and flooding rains', although climate change increasingly has much to answer for on that front.

One cold morning in London a few years ago, I sat in the British Library with a copy of Core of my Heart, my Country, a book I had ordered from the stacks purely because of its title, which hails from Mackellar's poem and which encapsulates my own bond with Australia. The book, by Maggie MacKellar, examines the relationships between women's bodies and the lands to which they emigrated (in this instance Canada and Australia), and how their confrontation with that land altered their sense of self.

However, before I even began reading, I was arrested by the acknowledgements. MacKeller paid tribute to her partner in a way that suggested he was no longer there. Something dreadful had happened, I sensed.

A year after I returned home I found MacKellar had published another book, When it Rains. My intuition was confirmed: the book detailed how she had lost her husband to mental illness and suicide, and then, shortly after, she lost her mother to cancer. By page 20, I was in tears.

Finding herself on the verge of a breakdown, MacKellar took her two kids and left her life in Sydney and the academic position which defined her, to live with her aunt and uncle on their property.

Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, the book is an account of loss in an attempt to make sense of it. Early on, MacKellar refers to Anne Carson's introduction to the plays of Euripides, in which Carson meditates on “why tragedy is so vital an art form. For [Carson], the tragedy becomes a frame that can be put around our grief. Inside the safety of that frame the violent expression of grief and rage can be played out without 'you or your kin having to die'” (p. 29). However, MacKellar found herself not as a character who acted out loss, but an actual person who had to deal with it.  Trapped within that frame of tragedy, she used writing as a means of stepping out of it:

For me it is the act of writing that unlocks the frame. I pin my tragedy onto the paper and with the precision of an anatomist take a scalpel to separate memory from bone. Perhaps if I can peel the layers of skin from its torso, it will stop having the power of a dark shape in the night. By writing, I risk sacrificing my deepest intimacies, but by writing, I control the shape they become (p. 29).

Interestingly, this evokes Darian Leader's The New Black, which details how we frame loss in order to let it go. Leader describes how in the dreams of the bereaved ‘a special motif frequently emerges: doorways, arches, stages and the many other features that serve to frame a space’ (p. 100). These dreams indicate how the mental images of those who are lost are becoming framed, and representational: they are entering the symbolic realm. ‘Mourning’, Leader continues, ‘involves a certain making artificial’ (p. 105). Given this, a writer’s grappling with loss naturally involves transmuting it into a literary form.

There are some writers, however, who wish to remain trapped within that frame. As I wrote in a recent article published in Southerly, Rosa Praed, the 19thC spiritualist and prolific novelist, longed to be haunted by her dead companion Nancy, for it signified that Nancy was still present.  In a similar way, Edgar Allen Poe longed to be troubled by his dead mother, with whose corpse he had been left alone at age 2, until they were found in the morning. When he became a writer, his work was littered with ‘the blank stare of the dead’ (p. 31), with cadavers, spectres and blood, as the memory of his mother’s corpse in all its permutations infiltrated his writing. Darian Leader argues that ‘Poe’s literary efforts to describe this encounter from every possible angle suggests that the work of mourning could not be completed. Rather than laying his mother to rest, her presence became increasingly real’ (p.31). Perhaps however the emphasis should not be laid on could not be completed, but rather on would not. For if the mourning process ended, so too would the dead (or whatever semblance he had of them) disappear forever from his life.

As I read When it Rains, I could feel the muscles of the book were tight with grief and anger, but gradually they loosened with happiness as MacKellar's children settled and her husband ceased to haunt her at night. MacKellar's descriptions of this haunting made it seem eerie and extreme – it wasn't just that her husband was in her dreams but that her body couldn't lose the physical memory of him; something which anyone who has lost a lover can identify with, but made more visceral by his complete, abrupt absence.

Indeed the intense physicality of the writing – which was present too in Core of my Heart — the descriptions of the sounds and sensations of the country – made me nostalgic and I thought, for a few seconds, about my friends' (disturbingly, only half-joking) suggestions that I go on “Farmer Wants a Wife” in order to shack up with a farmer and move to the country. However I'm sure I would end up like the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” if I tried country living: root-bound, neurotic, and angling into madness. Give me boutiques, cafés and the anonymity of cities any day.

But the difficulty with city living is that you lose – or indeed, never know – the experiences of our rural compatriots. It's too easy to turn off the television and close the newspaper, to worry about rain dripping through the hole in the roof rather than the river than pushed itself through someone's living room, or, if we go inland further still, to ignore the poverty of Indigenous Australians. For those of us whose lives are uncomplicated, whose bindings to those they love haven't unravelled, whose worst experience of all this rain is a sodden skirt or an umbrella bent backwards, it's important to remember that we have it easy.

Donations to the Queensland Flood Relief Appeal can be made here.