Review of Georgiana Molloy: The Mind That Shines

A few weeks ago, I came across an article in Inside Story, ‘Everyone was a Bird.’ It opens with a reference to the author’s composition of a song cycle for baritone and orchestra. This composition included the words from a letter that 19th century Western Australian botanist Georgiana Molloy wrote to fellow botanist James Mangles in England about the death of her son by drowning. In the end, the composer writes, he wasn’t able to find the music to fit to the words, and he relied up on the sounds of birds from the bush near Augusta, where she lived before moving to Busselton: sounds of the West Australian bush near Augusta: bristlebirds, New Holland honeyeaters and spotted pardalotes, splendid fairy wrens and a Carnaby’s black cockatoo.

Georgiana Molloy emigrated from England to Augusta in 1829 with her new husband, John Molloy. Not long after her arrival, she had a baby girl, who died a few weeks later. She had another two girls, then the son, whom she lost through the drowning. This loss coincided with the request from Mangles to collect Australian specimens and seeds for him. Georgiana went into the bush to take her mind from her grief, and this engendered a radical shift in the way she perceived her environment.

Georgiana and her story has not only inspired musicians, but also artists and writers. Miles Noel created a portrait of her for his series on Western Australian scientists, using artistic licence to slip a piece of Boronia molloyae (the only specimen named after her) into her hair. Libby Hathorn wrote a children’s historical novel, Georgiana, Woman of Flowers, while my first novel A Curious Intimacy was inspired by the research I did on Molloy for my Honours year in English literature.

Until recently, there have only been two monographs on Georgiana’s life, Alexandra Hasluck’s Georgiana Molloy: Portrait with Background (1955) and William Lines’ An All Consuming Passion: Origins, Modernity and the Australian Life of Georgiana Molloy (1994). Hasluck’s work is a standard biography, citing extracts from Molloy’s letters, which Mangles had copied and bound into two letterbooks (along with others from his correspondents), now held in the Battye Library of the State Library of Western Australia.

The structure of Lines’ book is more complex,  beginning with an account of the earth itself, then the geological creation of Australia as it broke from Gondwana, and then the populating of south west Western Australia by diverse forms of flora, then Indigenous people, then white colonists. In his preface, Lines explains his approach as a way of avoiding the anthropocentrism of biographies, which ‘situates a human at the centre of the world’ (xi). Molloy, he continues ‘as the single dominating character … holds the different parts of the narrative together, but she is not the only source of that narrative’ (xii). It’s an admirable approach, but the book is unavoidably anthropocentric because humans remain its focal point. While Lines does incorporate more research than Hasluck on the Aboriginal people with whom Molloy and her neighbours interacted (often violently, and sometimes peaceably), he doesn’t refer to the environment again at any great length in his work. I am still indebted to this work, however – if I hadn’t randomly found it on the shelves of a library at the University of California, Berkely, where I was on exchange in 1999, I would never have started my research on Molloy.

Now, with the recent publication of Bernice Barry’s Georgiana Molloy: The Mind That Shines, readers have a far more comprehensive and detailed account of Georgiana’s life and her motivations. Over the last decade, Barry has painstakingly combed the archives in Cumbria to piece together Georgiana’s family history. In doing so she reveals a young girl who was forced to make a decision to travel to the other side of the world with a man she barely knew, even if her heart wasn’t entirely in it.

In writing this, I’m reminded of a class which Glenda Adams took in my writing course at UTS, in which we discussed a young woman dressing herself and curling her hair before a ball in the nineteenth century.

‘It’s a job, right?’ Glenda pointed out in her soft, American accent.

And so were every woman’s accomplishments a gentle, desperate kind of work necessary to find security. Happiness was something that came along if you were lucky.

I’d had an inkling of the strain in Georgiana’s family from reading the Cumbria archives, but I never had the time, while I was doing my PhD on Georgiana, to transcribe them. I was enthralled by Barry’s account of the disasters that rippled through the family, and by their desperate attempts to save face. Barry’s meticulous research also reveals a background that John Molloy, whom Georgiana married, wished to keep to himself in the new colony of Swan River.

For me, this was an exciting book because of its wealth of new information. Barry mentions that one of the books Georgiana placed in her trunk was The British Album, an anthology of poetry by group of English writers living in Italy. The poems in this book ‘describe physical passion, only lightly veiled by erotic imagery’ (8). She also packed a copy of The Songs of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet of high emotion. These works affirmed Georgiana’s passionate nature, which is usually bridled in her letters, but sometimes flares free

Barry also includes a transcript of the letter Georgiana wrote to her mother when her first child died not long after her arrival in Augusta. It shows Georgiana’s (often overlooked) skill as a writer. ‘I knew not what to do,’ Georgiana wrote. ‘I felt inclined to rush out into the open air and charge the winds with what weighed so heavy at my bursting head’ (172). This sentence is packed with movement (‘rushing’ and ‘charging’) and pressure (‘weighed’, ‘heavy’ and ‘bursting’), suggesting Georgiana’s emotion was too much for her body.

Barry’s writing is clean and detailed and, aside from a few moments of authorial intrusion that annoyed me (which would in any biography), the narrative pulled me along. There is also a lovely set of colour plates, and the cover is gorgeous. The research is also testimony to Barry’s patience, because transcribing the letters, which were often crossed to save postage (which the recipient paid) would have taken hours and hours of work.

I read this book as I was travelling back to Brisbane from Goondiwindi after giving a writing workshop. The flat, orange-brown landscape outside was worlds away from the lush greenness of Roseneath, where Georgiana stayed with friends before moving to Western Australia, and from the tall tuarts of south west Western Australia. It reminded me of what I love so much about Georgiana’s life: her precise vision of the natural world, and her poetic rendition of this in her letters. 

I’m a biased reviewer because I’ve been researching Georgiana on and off for fifteen years, but anyone who is interested in remarkable women writers and scientists of Australia should pick up this book. It does much justice to an intelligent, brave and creative woman who achieved an astonishing amount in her too-short, but intensely rich life.

This is my fourth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. If you'd like to subscribe to these posts and other updates, you can sign up here.

2015 National Writers' Congress

After two weeks of frantic socialising and travelling, I’m very happy to be back at my desk, and I’m not budging until Christmas. I travelled to Armidale for a school reunion (20 years! jeepers), then caught the train (instead of the plane, to save carbon emissions) to Sydney. I met up with a billion friends and attended the second National Writers’ Congress organised by the Australian Society of Authors. I went to the first congress two years ago at the Maritime Museum and loved it, so I figured that as I was in the same state for the reunion, I should go again.

Continuing with things nautical, the venue this year was at Luna Park, beneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The views were spectacular, and in his opening address David Marr (whom I had followed into the mouth of the clown with a coffee), urged us to preserve the ludic spirit. We were out and about and talking to real people, after all, instead of cramping over our desks with our characters. His entertaining delivery certainly set the tone for the two days, and we needed our humour when George Brandis walked into our midst.

The first session was my favourite, with a panel made up of writer Michael Mohammed Ahmed, Aboriginal artist Bronwyn Bancroft, writer and veteran reviewer Kerryn Goldsworthy and Australian literature afficiondo Brigitta Olubus, whom I often run into at conferences and who is lovely. Michael pointed out that conversations about whiteness centre around the relation of Aboriginal, Indian, Arab, Asian people to white people, which is ridiculous, especially when whiteness is something that’s completely arbitrary. He exhorted the gatekeepers of Australian literature – publishers, editors, assessors and judging panels - to have more transparency and diversity. This is something Maxine Beneba Clarke wrote about recently in an essay for Overland. At the Q&A at the end of the conference, I added that I'd like to see more writers with disability, as well as writers of colour, also recognised and represented by the ASA.

Brigitta reiterated that the study of Australian literature is far from dead, with AustLit, the Australian literature database, showing that it was taught in 199 courses in 2014 (and many of these courses are taught to teachers, who go on to talk about what they learn to their students). However, writers are readers as well. Debra Adelaide said that she always began her writing courses with two questions: 1) Who wants to be an author? 2) Who has bought a book by an Australian author in the past month? The same question is pertinent to those who’d like to be published in literary journals, as Matt Lamb, the editor of Island, has written.

Debra also mentioned that there was only one Australian book featured on the ABC book show last year, and that it was heavily criticised. Could we imagine, she posited, the US book show only ever discussing David Malouf and not Jonathon Franzen?

Jackie French (to whom I have bequeathed a small fortune, as I buy Diary of a Wombat for each of my friends’ children – and there are many) remarked that if your work is good enough, it will find a market overseas, and it will sell better than in Oz. I and a few others had some qualms about this, however. Perhaps it’s because we’re younger, and have seen just how damn hard it is to get anywhere in the industry.

On things international, Elizabeth Weiss, publisher at Allen and Unwin, said that many of the publishers operating in Australia are multi-national, and consequently there’s a lack of recognition of Indigenous authors. And while ebooks and digital publishing have enabled the distribution of Australian literature in unprecedented ways, there’s a smorgasboard of literature for readers and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be heard.

And then came Brandis, brandishing his doom and gloom. In the panel prior we’d had the shadow minister for the arts, Mark Dreyfus, citing that 87% of Australians had read some form of literature, making it the most favoured art form in Australia. He mentioned that at the Labor conference in July the party had reaffirmed its commitment to Creative Australia, and pointed out that the senate inquiry into Brandis’s snatch of $105 million from the Australia Council to create a National Program for Excellence in the Arts (which offers no funding whatsoever to writers) had one of the highest number of submissions for any inquiry (the average number is 50-100 but this inquiry had 2,500).

Brandis tried to make some jokes about his bookshelves and his poetry reading in parliament, but as he’d taken our livelihood, they fell pretty flat. And then came a fifteen minute litany (or liturgy) on his admired (mostly dead) writers, and politicians who were writers, not one of whom, it seemed, were women (although when chatting to some writers afterwards, I was told that one had been the daughter of a politician). He re-announced the Book Council of Australia, offered a tiny bit more detail on its make up, & then finished. He left no time for questions, though I had one prepared, but afterwards I noticed he was mobbed by angry authors. David Marr had joked that Brandis was always pursued by a long line of suitors beseeching him for money, and so it came to pass. I was very glad that David Day, the Chair of the Australian Society of Authors, had the balls to say that he had grave reservations about Brandis’s announcement, even if he was admonished for it by Louise Adler, chair of the Book Council.

It was altogether a dispiriting moment in an otherwise energetic programme. Even Kate Forsyth, ever positive and graceful (we had a lovely chat about Leona Edmiston frocks and her suitcase of Leonas that she takes travelling), was upset enough to pen a post on what she’d say to Brandis, while Jessica Friedman, in another plea for diversity (are people hearing this, yet??), has written on the Book Council’s make-up: ‘Where is the representation for disabled or non-neurotypical writers; writers of colour; writers whose first language is other than English, or the young or disadvantaged or experimental? It is a remarkably staid collection of voices, one that does not represent Australian letters in their diverse and exciting entirety.'

There is a letter that writers can sign if they would like a fairer representation in the Book Council. And let’s hope that Brandis’s successor (hooray!) will reverse the insane cuts to Oz Co.

I was also delighted to meet up with a fellow writer, Annabel Smith, whom I’d met on social media. Annabel was on a panel about opportunities for creators in the digital space, and was discussing the creation of her ebook The Ark, which sounded like a terrifyingly steep learning curve. I also caught up with feminist, writer and fellow Uni of Wollongong graduate Van Badham, who was on her deathbed with illness but still soldiering on. Kudos to brave women!

I haven’t covered all of the sessions here, but I would like to nod to the last one, on reviewing. Kerryn Goldsworthy spoke alongside literary agent Benython Oldfield and blogger Kat Mayo. Kat pointed out that readers speak to other readers, and offered advice on how to connect with readers, including through newsletters (by authors and booksellers), and providing excerpts and giveaways to core readers. She also, interestingly, added that iBooks is a great platform for blind readers because they can adjust the pace, something that hadn’t occurred to me before. Benython noted that a good professional review can take a book far, including overseas. When I raised the issue that this might create some problems for women writers given that there’s still a gender disparity in mainstream media reviews, Kerryn replied that as editor of the Australian Book Review she had made sure that the gender of the reviewed authors was 50-50, but since she has left, it’s gone backwards. Geez, it’s the 21st century! Distressing stuff.

On the whole it was a great two days but I was relieved, as I always am, to get back to warmer climes in Brisbane. After two weeks of hard socialising with real people, I’m now very happily going back into my writing cave.

Review of Hopscotch

When I was slipping this book into my bag to take to work, my boyfriend asked me, ‘What’s that one about?’

‘It’s a family drama.’

‘Why not just a drama?’

I paused, blinking. ‘I don’t know.’

As I sat on the bus and fell into my usual habit of staring out the window and thinking, I wondered if I had unconsciously taken on some kind of bias. Why should a drama always signify war zones or shoot-em-ups? Why, when it enters the (historically feminised) realm of the family should it be classified as a different type of drama?

I made a note not to use that phrase again, particularly as I’d offered to review this book for the Australian Women Writers Challenge when I got talking to Jan Zwar (who knows the author, Jane Messer) at a conference. One of the aims of the AWW Challenge is to redress the tendency to overlook writing that is written by women, or may have feminine subject matter.

The drama in Hopscotch comes not from car chases, but from the tension in the Rosen family. The Prologue finds them gathered around the table for Sam, their father’s, birthday. Already there is bickering, tentative singing, forced jollity, tears and shouting, while the opening line, ‘Hours before the spring winds crashed through, the sash windows rattled only a little’ signals the disorder to come.

The novel then backtracks to four months earlier and follows the lives of the three Rosen children, Mark, Jemma and Liza. Mired in debt as the GFC hits, Mark and his marriage begin to crack with strain. Jemma, a new resident of Redfern, finds her stereotypical assumptions of Aborigines are challenged when she becomes the victim of crime. Liza is desperate for a child, which doesn’t look like it’s going to happen with her current boyfriend.

This is a middle-class family, dealing with the everyday concerns of mortgages and relationships in Sydney. The strength of the novel lies in its detailed rendition of how the characters negotiate their daily lives, buffeted by the unpredictable forces of illness, desire, violence and financial markets. Although there was so many people in the Prologue that it took me a while to work out who was who, and I found the metaphor of Jemma pleading with her family to harmonise the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’ somewhat forced, I was soon pulled into these characters’ worlds.

Each person was well-drawn and consistent, and the push-pull of their relationships was believable. Sam, edging towards death with cystic fibrosis, is apathetic with tiredness, much to his wife’s frustration. Life doesn’t stop when one becomes sick, and Rhonda, impatient, arranges for them to sell up and move. The use of focalisation (of narrating a character’s thoughts in third person), is excellent: ‘He would always be out of reach; she would never be able to repair him or love him or make him well again. She couldn’t stand him … In the kitchen, the boiling kettle whistled. She would make him tea’ (213).

Neither does life stop for Mark, who is crushed by the debris of falling markets. His paranoia, then full-blown terror, over losing his job is mesmerising. Up to his neck in debt, panicking about how to find money for his wife and potential child, he becomes deluded and resentful: ‘He was going to be sacked in the morning, Ingrid was on the lounge resting and not working to save their financial arses, and he was going to struggle to get the funds for the Dee Why deal’ (275). Ingrid is irritating, with her nose constantly in pregnancy magazines, but she rallies when disaster strikes.

While Mark’s life falls apart, the sisters’ lives knit slowly and surely into something stronger. Jemma, uptight, neurotic and recently moved out of home, is traumatised by violence but released into the delight of a new relationship. Liza, after dating a string of deadbeats, slowly becomes more secure through managing a childcare centre. I loved the administrative details of her job and her placation of fractious parents, maybe because I'm obsessed with order myself.

When the novel finished, I was disappointed that I couldn’t read anymore of the characters’ thoughts about childcare, the cloud, or the invasion of online privacy. I wanted to stay involved in their lives, and kept thinking about them for a week afterwards.

Usually, for me, this is the sign of a good book. Yet, while Hopscotch is an undeniably enjoyable read, I also found the plot frustratingly formless and I wanted more ideas to mull over. I couldn’t get much more from it that the notion that people must always deal with the stressors and unpredictability of life regardless of how well-off they are. This aside, if you’d like an engaging snapshot of middle-class relationships in Sydney’s mid-noughties, with drama aplenty to keep you turning the pages, play Hopscotch and you’ll find yourself having fun!

This is my third review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. If you'd like to subscribe to these posts and other updates, you can sign up here.

H is for Hawk, Perception and Disability

When I was young we had a ginger cat named Vincent to whom I was passionately attached. His mother had bred with one of the feral cats on the farm and he was a muscular and unlikeable creature. I spent hours trying to understand him and win him over. For the most part that was fruitless, but sometimes he’d deign to sleep in the curve of my back as I lay on my tummy on my bed.

I can’t remember if my interest in animals started with Vincent, or if it was because I grew up on a farm and, while my father and uncles worked, I watched the way sheep bustled in a herd; how hipbones jerked beneath the skin of our cows as, in the evening, they were jostled to the milking shed; or the large, liquid eyes of my aunts’ horses.

When I began researching the history of the deaf, I found, people with disabilities have long been regarded as closer to animals than humans. Deaf people, for example, were seen as subhuman because they could not hear the word of God and because they couldn’t speak clearly.

Which is why I loved reading Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, her memoir about training a goshawk in the wake of her father’s death. Aside from the originality of the subject matter and the poetry of her writing, it brought up many interesting questions about the relationship between animals and humans, between wildness and domestication, and where the line between the animal and human really lies.

Hunting with her hawk, McDonald writes, ‘took me to the edge of being human. Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all. The hawk in flight, me running after her, the land and air a pattern of deep and curving detail, sufficient to black out anything like the past or the future, so that the only things that mattered were the next thirty seconds … I crept and walked and ran. I crouched. I looked. I saw more than I’d ever seen. The world gathered around me. It made absolute sense. But the only things I knew were hawkish things, and the lines that drew me across the landscape were the lines that drew the hawk: hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill’ (195).

I paused after reading this passage, considering it with some suspicion, as humans are animals, and the division between us largely — I think — comes down to culture. In 1747, Carl Linneaus, who developed a system for classifying plants and animals (still in use today), defended his decision to separate apes from humans as thus: ‘if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all ecclesiastics. It may be that as naturalist I ought to have done so.’

Nor does heightened perception make one more animal that human. People with disabilities have extraordinarily developed senses – a person who is blind, for example, will be remarkably attuned to sound and touch. To see like a hawk does not necessarily mean that one is becoming like a hawk; it means that a human is developing their sense, rather like becoming better at the piano through practice. I think we need to widen our understanding of what it is to be human, to include those who have what seem to be extraordinary abilities. One might think that I’m writing of savants, but really, it’s anyone who operates in a way that’s different from the norm. If ‘human’ becomes more inclusive, then we can do away with the category of ‘disability’ and its concomitant inspiration porn, as Stella Young described it.

McDonald continues, ‘every time the hawk caught an animal, it pulled me back into being a human again … hunting makes you an animal, but the death of an animal makes you human’ (196), for she killed the animal to put it from its misery. This was interesting. Again, is it culture that makes McDonald act this way? Can it be said that it’s grace that makes us distinct from animals? Or do other animals behave this way as well?

While these passages made me question things, there were other parts of McDonald’s work that were gorgeous – her nature descriptions, her magical thinking, her tentative but developing relationship with Mabel, the hawk. And this passage:

‘I am beginning to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of stranger urges confession, urges confidence, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken with us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holidays … I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. It’s desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn’t entirely normal.’

McDonald and Mabel are a paean to difference, to flight, to the permeable boundaries between ourselves and other creatures.

Review of Me, Antman and Fleabag

After reading the first page of Gayle Kennedy’s Me, Antman and Fleabag, you know you’re in the hands of a born storyteller. The narrator’s voice is distinctive and entertaining, with plenty of swearing – I loved it! After being told off too many time at the local park by rigid policemen, she, Antman & their dog Fleabag ‘stay home and party in a yard the size of an old hanky with trains roarin by every time ya favourite song comes on’ (1). They consult their lawyer cousin who explains that they’re doing the park scene the wrong way. He tells them to wash Fleabag and takes them to a ‘deadly park right on the harbour’ (2) near his place in Balmain. The dog gets on with other dogs in the park like a house on fire, ‘but that’s okay cos he got his nuts cut out a couple of years ago so he don’t go bluin no more’ (2). I was reading this on the bus, and started laughing.

The book is composed of a series of vivid vignettes. They revolve around people whom the narrator and Antman meet, and these characters are deftly drawn. Mrs Howard, a drunk, has scaly skin. When she picks it, ‘the flakes are layin all around her. It looks just like ashes after a bush fire’ (8). Meanwhile, little nephew Bunting, born in the middle of a drought, freaks out when he finally sees rain and gets into ‘such a state he’s almost stopped breathin’ (105). There’s also a heavy dose of irony throughout, which reminded me of Vivienne Cleven’s Bitin’ Back. On that note, I loved the talking back to whites. At a music festival, at which the narrator and Antman are the only Aborigines, even though it's a dreaming festival, a white man 'plonks himself down at our table and says, "Hello Aboriginal people." We look at im and say, "Hello Anglo man."' (69). I started laughing, again.

Amidst the humour, though, there is sadness. Grandfather, who fought in World War Two and won two rows of medals for service and bravery, wasn’t allowed to celebrate with his mates at the pub; he had to go round the back. And despite fighting for his country and being a Japanese POW, he had to ‘git a piece of paper to say he was good enough to go and git a job’ (62). It’s pretty painful, still, that there are amazing sportsmen like Adam Goodes on the field and people don’t think they’re good enough to play because they’re Aboriginal. Politicans like to bandy about the idea that Australia is the land of the ‘fair go’ but often it’s only a fair go for those who are white and male.

I identified with ‘Me, Antman and Fleabag hook up’, the story that Gayle read at the Accessible Arts conference last year. It’s about how the narrator was sent away from her family because she had polio, and when she came back her parents were strangers to her. It took them all a long time to get used to one another again. ‘For a long time I lived in two worlds,’ she writes. ‘One white, one black, and never really fitting into either’ (97). As someone neither completely hearing nor completely deaf, I often don’t feel like I belong anywhere either.

This book is a ball, but it’s important and serious too. It conveys the fun and laughter of families, but also the tragedy caused by colonisation. In a note at the beginning of the book, Gayle writes that the characters of the narrator, Antman and Fleabag 'were created for a story that won the NSW Writers Centre Inner City Life Short Story Competition. She liked them so much she wrote a book about them.' I loved these characters as well, as did the David Unaipon judges in 2006. If you read this book and get to know them, they'll win you over too.

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

Submission to Inquiry into Arts Budget Cuts

RE: Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget decisions on the Arts

Dear Madam/Sir,

My name is Jessica White and I’m a writer and researcher based in Brisbane. As of next year, I will have been writing for twenty years. My first novel, A Curious Intimacy, was published by Penguin in 2007 and won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was shortlisted for the Dobbie award for debut women writers and the Western Australia Premier’s awards, and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. My second novel, Entitlement, appeared in 2012, also published by Penguin. My short fiction has been published in a range of literary journals, including Southerly, Island, Overland and the Review of Australian Fiction. I was recently shortlisted for the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize which attracted nearly 4000 entries from around the world.

I am also a researcher and non-fiction writer. My PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, was funded by a scholarship from the University of Melbourne. I have been shortlisted for the Calibre essay prize and Peter Blazey Prize for life writing, and my essays have been published in Griffith Review, Southerly, Island and Cordite as well as national and international academic journals.

I have been deaf since I was four, when I lost most of my hearing to meningitis. My disability was responsible for my decision to become a writer and it has also strongly influenced my subject matter and style. I am passionate about giving space to voices which have been overlooked, including those of people with disability.

In 2013 I was the recipient of my first ever grant, $5000 from Arts Queensland, to further my research on 19th century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed. In the course of that research, I located new archival material in England relating to her daughter Maud, who was deaf. This included a 17 page letter Maud wrote to her doctor and, given the history of the suppression of the voices of the deaf, this find was of immense significance. My research on Maud has been woven into a memoir which will help general audiences understand the history and impact of deafness, which is surprisingly little known.

This grant gave me much-needed recognition, particularly in Queensland where I was a relative newcomer. In 2014 I received my first grant from the Australia Council for the Arts ($9,820) from their Artists with Disability programme to write a novel, The Sea Creatures, which is almost completed. In June 2015, I was fortunate to receive a New Work grant from the Australia Council ($15,750) to write a young adult novel, When the World Shivered. Both of these books are about disability, and once they are published I will take them into schools and use them to prompt discussions about disability, and to show that the lives of people with disability are of worth. I am not using these grants to write esoteric pieces of art, but to help knit together our social fabric.

I have been applying to the Australia Coucil for funding since 2008 and these grants were from my 11th and 13th applications respectively. Although they are not large grants, their impact on my life cannot be understated. They have given me the time to write and mean that I do not have to take on additional teaching work to survive (something that, because of my disability, makes me too exhausted to write). They have given me financial stability, which means that I can think about having a family before it’s too late (something I’ve put off because the life of an artist, let alone one with a disability, is precarious at the best of times). They have also allowed me to become financially independent of my parents, who supported me repeatedly while I found my feet as a writer and learned to manage with a disability.

My tenacity in applying for these funds came from desperation: without that money, I would not have been able to write. I have heard many artists say that they have been put off by the competitiveness of the Australia Council’s application process for funding, and I don’t blame them; it is no easy thing to be rejected year after year. Yet I often wonder about these people, and the books they would have written or the art they would have created. How much more culturally enriched would Australia be if the Australia Council had the money to fund these artists?

You can see, then, that George Brandis’s cut of $104.8 million from the already-tight budget of the Australia Council will have huge ramifications, not least by limiting the voices of emerging writers and those with disability. The arts in Australia are in threat of becoming homogenised.

In addition, the new funding mechanism, the National Programme for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA), does not have the same arms-length peer review process as the Australia Council and decisions will be up to the Minister. These undemocratic overtones are alarming, but not unsurprising from a government whose language ever more closely resembles the doublespeak of George Orwell’s dystopian novel about totalitarianism, 1984. In 2014, for example, there was a budget crisis, but in 2015 the Arts Minister thinks it fit to waste money but duplicating administrative processes through the NPEA.

In 2012, Anna Funder won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for All That I Am, a novel about the insidious creep of Nazism in the 1930s. In her acceptance speech, she criticised the then Queensland Premier Campbell Newman who had just binned the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (one of his first acts of parliament). ‘I have spent my professional life studying totalitarian regimes and the brave people who speak out against them,’ Funder said, ‘And the first thing that someone with dictatorial inclinations does is to silence the writers and the journalists.’ It is telling that there is no mention of literature or writing in the NPEA guidelines.

I have been deaf for as long as I can remember and I know what silence and silencing can mean. Artists reflect the culture that is around them. A government that hobbles the creativity of artists by cutting off funding is a government that does not want to listen to what is said of the society it moulds.

After World War Two, my relative Patrick White returned to Australia from England. In 1958 he published an essay, ‘The Prodigal Son’, in which he wrote of his experiences of returning. He commented, ‘In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions.’ Given the attenuation of the Australia Council through budget cuts, and the meagre amounts offered to artists in general, we are at risk of returning to the culture of which Patrick White wrote. Furthermore, what chance does Australia have of finding a new Nobel Prize for Literature winner when the NPEA guidelines make no mention of literature or writing? How will we find the emerging voices of Indigenous people, migrants, people with disability, or queer/gay writers when many of these minorities, as you can see from my own experience, are just struggling to get by, let alone make their art? Is the voice of Australia to become one that, as Patrick White was panicked to find, merely exalts the ‘average’?

As an emerging author with a disability, the Australia Council has irrevocably changed my life. It distresses me deeply that so many other artists may not have the funding they need to practice their craft or acquire recognition. I urge you to reverse the cuts to the Australia Council – it is so little money, and yet to Australia’s artists and Australian culture, its worth is inestimable.

On Exhaustion

People never ask me what it's like to be deaf, or what I find hard about it. As I lost most of my hearing when I was four and had some speech therapy, my speech is fine, and people don't realise I have a disability until I tell them. Even then, they don't realise how bad it is, because I seem to listen so well. And because I am polite, and hate people making a fuss, I rarely remind them to speak clearly.

It's not the isolation that's difficult – I’ve found ways around that through writing, reading and a small circle of close friends, though it took me a good twenty years to learn the social skills I needed to make friends, and those twenty years were excruciating. Nor is it the inconsideration of people who assume that you’re rude or simple because you haven’t heard them; I accept that I don’t have a visible disability and that, for the most part, people aren’t deliberately unkind. Nor is it the cultural apartheid of cinemas and performance venues that don’t care enough about their deaf patrons to ensure working loop systems, or even to install such systems at all, such as the Cineplex cinemas in Brisbane. On asking the manager at Hawthorne why they didn’t have a hearing system, I was told that the movies they showed were blockbusters, which were so loud that deaf people can hear them. I would have laughed if I wasn’t so angry; it’s quality of sound, not loudness, that makes the difference. Meanwhile, the headphones at Palace Centro are patched up with duct tape, and those at Palace Barracks were broken for months. When I complained about the latter and pointed out that it was discriminatory, I was told that I was being ridiculous. I never went back. I have taken my money elsewhere and I watch films at home, or only go to screenings with subtitles, or watch dance performances that don’t require listening to words.

These are irritations and, like cuts and scratches, they always heal and fade. But the one thing I can never get over is the perpetual exhaustion. I have 25% of an average person’s hearing, and I rely on this bit of hearing and lipreading to get by. I can’t hear with loud background noise, nor in a group larger than three, and even then that’s hard. And as I’ve lost one sense, I’m constantly alert to compensate for it – to check someone’s face in case they’re speaking to me, to strain to hear the words in a sentence and match them with body language, to read lips and put the words into context, to work out how to get some information at a train or bus station when I can’t hear the overhead speakers. The energy necessary to maintain this level of vigilance is enormous.

These past few months I’ve been teaching creative writing one day a week at the University of Queensland. The classes were small enough for me to hear without passing round the transmitter of my FM system (which is like a small walkie talkie for deaf people), though I asked students to use it when they were reading because their heads dipped down to their papers and I couldn’t read their lips. I had to be completely alert so that I could hear their contributions and respond to them. It made the discussions a bit stilted as I could only hear one person talking at a time, but I figured they were adult enough to deal with that.

I loved my students. They tried hard, they listened to the lectures and my tutorials, and they improved in a very short time. Teaching creative writing also helped me to remember my own knowledge about writing, and to refocus on the nuts and bolts of my craft. However, I was so tired by the semester’s end, and so frustrated that I hadn’t had any energy to write, that I resolved to stick to my other, two-days-a-week admin job and write, even if that meant living on baked beans for six months.

Then I was insanely lucky enough to get funding from the Australia Council to work on my young adult novel, When the World Shivered, and the future isn’t looking quite so grim - a huge and unutterable relief. I've only had a handful of days off since February, and this means that I can have evenings and weekends off.

This novel will be based on my short story of the same name, which was published in the Review of Australian Fiction. The novel about the relationships between children with disabilities and their animals. I started thinking about it when I went to the Artists with Disabilities conference in Sydney last year, and watched people with their carers. The carers were people who wanted to be there and who were paid for it, but what would happen, I wondered, if a person with a disability was matched with someone who wasn’t temperamentally suited to caring? I was lucky as I grew up because my brother has a generous disposition and likes an audience, so he was happy to relay information to me that I missed (albeit often elaborated upon; the Whites are nothing if not performers). But what if I hadn’t had that kind of sibling, if my sibling was someone who just wanted to be left alone and not have to look after someone else?

I started thinking about companion animals, and dogs, and how we have domesticated them, which can also be seen as a way of keeping them close to us without their will. Do dogs really want to be dependent on us? Do horses want to carry people around? These are the kinds of ideas I’ll be exploring in the novel. I’ll also be reading books about animals and humans (if you have any recommendations, leave them in the box below!), and I’m about to write a post on Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk. With luck, given my tortured schedule, I should have it up later this week.

I’ve also finally got back on the bandwagon with my author newsletters. If you’d like to be on the mailing list for these, you can sign up here.

Just Read Readathon

The last readathon I did was in Boggabri Primary School, when I asked my rellies to sponsor me for each book I read. They nervously nominated 5c per book, knowing how fast I read. I watched their faces as they calculated how much they’d be left out of pocket.  

That at least was a more interesting enterprise than the Multiple Sclerosis Walkathon around the school. I finished the course early, got bored, sat in the grass, then found some catheads to put in the path of stragglers. Someone dobbed me in, so I was made to stand in the circle of shame at lunchtime to be interrogated by Mrs Woodley.

Fortunately I am now an adult and can do adult readathons which don’t involve catheads or burnt grass or heat rashes. I do however, still want some cash.

This is for an initiative organised by author Jane Rawson to raise money for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. The ILF, founded by Suzy Wilson (who runs Riverbend Books in Brisbane), aims to address literacy levels in remote communities.

Many Indigenous kids, particularly in remote communities, cannot get their hands on books. Here are some stats from the Indigenous Literacy Foundation:

·      Indigenous homes, particularly those in remote communities, have fewer books, computers and other educational resources than non-Indigenous homes.

·      The gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students emerges early. Non-Indigenous students far out-perform Indigenous students in benchmark tests for reading, writing and numeracy in Year 3 and Year 5.

·      By the age of 15, more than one-third of Australia’s Indigenous students ‘do not have the adequate skills and knowledge in reading literacy to meet real-life challenges and may well be disadvantaged in their lives beyond school’.

·      In the Northern Territory, only one in five children living in very remote Indigenous communities can read at the accepted minimum standard.

The Indigenous Literacy Foundation gets books for these kids and helps them learn to read.

Books have nourished me all my life, particularly when I was younger & didn’t have the social skills necessary for interacting with people. It would be wonderful if more kids had access to the vivid worlds of literature; they certainly kept me from boredom & loneliness,

The Just Read challenge is on over June & July, and I’m using it to read the swathe of unread books on my shelves, including:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan

The Island Within, Richard Nelson

Z: a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Therese Anne Fowler

The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane

Not that Kind of Girl Lena Dunham

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert

Georgiana Molloy, Bernice Barry

As well as the 50 billion literary journals lying in piles around my flat.

If you want to throw money at me for reading (please do!), here’s my fundraising page. At least this way you can pay a flat rate, and avoid my rellies’ nervousness as their hands hovered over their purses.

Review of The Floating Garden

Soooo … it’s June, and it feels like my year is just beginning. After the postdoc application, which nearly killed me, I finished my book proposal for Finding Maud, my memoir about deafness. I’ve also been teaching creative writing at the University of Queensland one day a week (on top of my other job), which has been fantastic, but it requires truckloads of energy, at least for a deaf person. I only have one more batch of marking to do, then presentations at a workshop, symposium and two conferences, and I’ll be a free agent again.

And so, after a blogging hiatus on account of my perpetual exhaustion, I’m penning my first review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (better late than never!). Emma Ashmere’s very pretty novel, The Floating Garden, has been sitting on my desk awaiting a review all this time. I was approached by Spinifex Press to write a blurb for the book, and my beau & I intended to travel to Mullumbimby for Emma’s launch, but the heavens opened that Friday and it wasn’t safe to travel, so we sadly rainchecked the trip.

With its pellucid prose and descriptions of gardens and early 20th century spiritualists, I loved this novel. It opens in the bedroom of a boarding house run by Ellis Gilbey, in which everything is ‘coated in a chalky sheen’ (3) from the construction of the nearby Sydney Harbour Bridge. Ellis is a quiet, self-contained woman, who shies from the intrusive interest of others. She loves women, writes a gardening column under a nom-de-plume, and is being kicked out of the boarding house to make way for the bridge.

Her story intertwines with that of Rennie, an English artist married to a wealthy, brutal man. While elucidating their painful relationship and Rennie’s hopes of flight, the narrative delves into Ellis’ escape from the country as a girl, and how she fell in with theosophists in Sydney and fell, too, for a fellow performer. I thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions of spiritual chicanery, being familiar with them from my research on Rosa Praed, who was a theosophist (among many other religious persuasions).

When Ellis and Rennie cross paths, the story shifts to Lane Cove and to a beautiful garden: ‘Tufts of nodding russet-coloured grasses were alive with the whirr of insects. Drifts of white flannel flowers brightened an untamed bed of greenery. Beside them waratahs raised their waxy flaming heads. Wattle trees draped across the path. Green and red kangaroo paws raised their slender hands to the sky’ (223). By the end, both women, although not entirely comfortable with one another, still find niches into which they nestle.

This novel is driven by character rather than plot. I like people and so I enjoy these kinds of books, but what I enjoyed even more was the evocation of 1920s Sydney and the wealth of sensory description – not just visual details, but touch and smell as well: ‘The smell of the man's tobacco threaded towards her on the wind. There was another smell, the smell of spring, of working with her mother in the garden before the drought’ (28). These details brought the novel to vividly to life.

The descriptions of women’s clothes was also charming. At a gallery exhibition, Rennie’s friend shrieked ‘amid a frisson of beads swinging wildly from a dress cut so low at the Back Rennie couldn’t help but stare down the slender ravine of Bertha’s derriere’ (19). Fashion is also used to delineate class. On meeting Rennie, Ellis observes how ‘her hat was made of fine pale straw, fashionably moulded to the head. Against the falling darkness of the street, smoke swirled around her in a diaphanous cape. Her silk white stockings glimmered against the cobblestones as if her torso had been set on two pillars of light. Ellis’ eyes went to the woman’s lapel where a yellow rose rested its delicate head against a spray of ivy leaves’ (107). 

Thematically, the novel evokes the marginalisation of lesbians and their stories. It focuses  not on the arches of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but what happens at its feet. The setting suggests that we should not always focus on dominant, obvious narratives, because what happens in their shadow is equally interesting. Emma spoke about her novel on ABC Radio, and you can listen to it here. 

This sumptuous book was a joy to read, and it’s apt that it has kicked off my reviewing, however belated, for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. I'm really looking forward to seeing what Emma does next.

When the World Shivered

I hit the ground running when I returned to Oz from Rome, travelling almost immediately to Armidale for a conference for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the theme of which was politics and passion. I presented a paper on representations of the Great Barrier Reef and how these can mobilise political action to save the reef. I also caught up with Parental Unit and H, who was in town for a friend’s wedding, which was lovely.

I then spent five gruelling weeks putting together and refining a postdoc proposal on an ecobiography of 19th C botanist Georgiana Molloy. This just about killed me, and I staggered onto the side of the road with exhaustion. Now, still wheezing, I’m throwing myself back onto the blogging bandwagon for a minor bout of self-aggrandizement.

My short story, ‘When the World Shivered’, has been published in the Review of Australian Fiction. This is an online journal which pairs one emerging author with one established author, and releases two stories every two weeks for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

I was paired with Nike Sulway, author of Rupetta which I absolutely adored. Nike wrote a quiet, sad and delicate little piece about loss. Mine mirrored this in that it was also about loss, but I explored the theme through the connections between animals and children with disabilities.

I’d been thinking about this story for a few months, and I was glad that the RAF galvanised me into writing it. I was interested specifically in the bond between carers and people with disability, not just its strength, but also its uneven power dynamics.

My previous story for the RAF, 'Unearthed', published in 2012, was also about deafness: a young, belligerent deaf young woman works on a farm and moves in and out of a world in which the borders of the real and unreal are destabilised.

As I’ve mentioned in this post which I wrote recently for Arts Queensland, the genre of magic realism (into which these stories slot )is a means for me to explore the fantastic elements which disability can bring into one’s life. The fact that I could do this and knew it would be published brought, I think, a confidence into my work – it compelled me to think about and shape these ideas more carefully and clearly. Consequently, I’m now going to turn ‘When the World Shivered’ into a young adult novel.

Like any other literary magazine in Autralia, the Review of Australian Fiction needs subscribers to survive. If you’d like to be exposed to a wide range of authors, both big names and emerging names, parting with a few dollars a fortnight is a cheap and easy way to go about it. You also get that warm glow of supporting writers and contributing to Australia’s lively literary culture.