Review of Fishing in the Devonian

O’er November we leapt, and I didn’t get any blog posts down as I was madly tying things up before going travelling for a month for conferences, a writers festival & research. And now that I’m back I find that Christmas is less than a fortnight away and I have some nine reviews to write to meet the challenge I set myself for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. So, as usual, yours truly is hitting the panic button which will lead to an outpouring of creativity & thence a collapse in front of the Christmas tree, where the dog will find me and lick my face.

The festival was Quantum Words, a science writing festival organised by Jane McCredie, who also edited this year’s Best Australian Science Writing 2016 (a jolly good Christmas present for anyone still scratching their heads). I was on a panel titled How Science Made Me a Better Writer alongside poet Carol Jenkins and playwright James Saunders, chaired by the lovely novelist & journalist Ashley Hay. I spoke about the ecobiography I’m writing and how Georgiana Molloy was probably not only Western Australia’s first female scientist, but also its first female science writer. And I described how science makes me a better writer because it gives me fresh ideas and encourages precision and collaboration.

James described the TV programme he’s making about scientists and consciousness, which was fascinating (keep an eye out for it!) and Carol read out some of her poems. When I heard the latter, my toes began to tingle. Writing poems about science, she said, is way more interesting than writing about one’s cat or one’s ex. I agreed, and after the session I bought her second book of poems, Xn, and when I got home I ordered the first, Fishing in the Devonian.

The Devonian is a period of 60 million years, beginning at the end of the Silurian period some 400 million years ago. It’s named after Devon, in England, where the rocks from this period were first studied. It was an exciting period: plants began to stretch across land and grow into forests, evolving leaves and roots; the first seed-bearing plants appeared; the fins of the ancestors of tetrapods (four-legged creatures) evolved into legs and they began to walk on land; the oceans were increasingly populated with primitive sharks and placoderms (fish with armoured plates and pelvic fins, which gave rise to the limbs of the tetrapods) dominated watery environments. Fish in general became very diverse and the era was dubbed the ‘Age of Fish’.

Aptly, then, the first poem in the book is the titular ‘Fishing in the Devonian’ and aptly, Carol writes, ‘There is a lot/to think about in fishing in the Devonian’, including the contemplation of these life forms. You can sit in your boat and watch Tiktaalik rosae tempted by ‘the attractive ooze of mudflats/with morsels of scorpions and millipedes … trying its best to get out’ like its fellow fish, which ‘throng/up and over the shore on their lobed fins’. But, she humorously adds, be careful of the boat you use, for ‘spongey Devonian wood’ doesn’t have much by the way of ‘secondary thickening/through a stout source of carbon’ – the trees haven’t yet evolved to be strong enough!

It’s a charming poem to open with, and the poems that follow are similarly captivating. ‘A Life in Fridges’ describes fifteen fridges, capturing the arc of the narrator’s life from childhood to adulthood. As a child, she spent some time ‘opening the door to feel the engagement/and disengagement of the catch./ The term shut the door comes into/common parlance’. What child hasn’t been day absorbed in a fridge seal like this, especially on a summer’s day when the gust of cool air from the interior is so much more satisfying that a fan stirring hot air, and your mother tells you to stop wasting electricity? When she leaves home ‘someone’s old beer fridge/is dragged dripping, like adulthood/into the kitchen of McEvoy Ave’. This fridge is old and animated, it ‘coughs mechanically, a late/night shudder, as if dreaming it forgot how/to breathe and then the motor kicks back in/and gets on with it’. Then there is a baby and ‘the magnets come/the first twenty six/are the bloody alphabet which I pick up/about a thousand times a week’ and, finally, the markers of comfortable middle-age: ‘three kinds of yoghurt, five chutneys,/six varieties of soft cheese, a Tardis trail through dark matter,/time and meals’. It’s a clever way of telling a life; taking a quotidian object we never think about and investing it with personality, memory and attachment. The ending is so superb, and characteristically funny, that it’s worth quoting in full:

            Outside is a public demonstration of family life;

of the inside, I say to visitors, don’t open that fridge,

it’s like my unconscious, there are good things in there

and some things you will not want to know.

To illustrate this, and that the term vegetable crisper

is an oxymoron, I gently lever up a liquid zucchini,

fizzing slightly yellow, photograph it and post this on the door. (51)

 So yes, not all the poems are about science. Many are about childhood and growing up, sex, romance and women, one whom ‘throws herself/ – perfect body, less one breast – /off the cliff onto the rocks’ (How Much, p. 40) – and all of them, whether muted or bold – carry sensory detail that pulls the reader into another moment, then releases them.

I found only one poem to be clunky – ‘Kulin Seasons’ – a braiding of descriptions of the seasons described by the Kulin people and a series of events throughout the year advertising sales in stores. While some of the descriptions are delicate and gorgeous – witness ‘In kangaroo-apple season/you can watch small bats/harvesting insects from twilight’ – the author’s intent was too obvious, and it unsettled me.

And my favourite? Too hard to pick, but I loved these few lines from ‘Disorders of Belief’: ‘She wanted to believe in bone, muscle, blood,/skin and pheromones but ran into the anaesthetic/of romance, the predisposition to delusional/sexually receptive states’ (11), for what is romance but the swish of chemicals? And what are clouds, but symbols of inexpressibility, viz.:

I am photographing clouds, they are so hard

to talk to, carrying in an elegiac mass all the words

I didn’t say that were perfect for when we weren’t

lying together on a paisley cotton quilt, that

your great aunt, who bred silkworms, didn’t make. (‘Fifteen Tangents, p. 69).

Are clouds all that isn’t there? At any rate they are good metaphors for poems – we study their shapes and try to decode their meaning.

All this year I’ve been buying poetry books to compel myself to start writing poetry again, but I’ve been so busy & tired that I haven’t had time to do anything except get to the end of my nonfiction book, Hearing Maud. However, 2017 awaits, and Carol is such a marvelous writer that she has persuaded me, when gaps of time open, to plug them with poetry.

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

A Blogging Birthday

Ten years ago, on October 15th 2016, I wrote my first blog post on Blogger. I sat in the kitchen of my housing commission apartment in East London with my flatmate, who’d suggested to me, ‘Perhaps you should think about starting a blog.’

‘Why?’

‘If you’re a writer, it’s a good way to express your thoughts and create a presence.’

‘Okay.’

She showed me how to put together a template, then I had a look at her blog, & poked around on the internet, and slowly, hesitantly, I began to write.

Mostly, it seems, I wrote a litany of complaints about London, where I was constantly unhappy. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t complained so much and that I'd appreciated my time there more – a lecture with Donna Harraway & Rosi Braidotti, after all, is amazing – I use them both in my research now. But there were mitigating circumstances: a broken heart, debilitating homesickness, the constant craving for sunlight.

I wrote lightly about books, and not with the intent that I do now; these were more musings, whereas now I write reviews so that I can contemplate the craft and structure of a work. And for the past five years while I’ve worked with the Australian Women Writers Challenge, I’ve reviewed books by Australian women. It’s given me a good feel for the market and for the issues which women writers face, but I’ve been so pressed for time this year I’m not sure if I can commit toreviewing next year. I also want to broaden my consumption; I miss my 19th century literature and I want to read more globally.

I wrote about my travels around Britain with H, and when I returned to Australia I stopped complaining and wrote about the gorgeousness of running and swimming again. I made an effort to learn about and become part of the Brisbane literary community, which was difficult at first, but I got there in the end. Thank god for Avid Reader’s literary salons; that bookshop was my intellectual home for a long time.

These past few years my posts have thinned out, due to my incessant busyness, and have alternated between reviews, politics and descriptions of my trips (which are handy for working out where I was & when!). However, my book on Rosa & Maud Praed is largely done, and now that my weekends and evenings are my own again I’d like to return to my earlier style, with whimsical descriptions of things that I notice, rather than banging on about politics all the time, though that is important too. I also want to review books for pleasure; I have pushed myself with the Australian Women Writers Challenge, & that can make it a chore, at least this year when I've been flattened by work.

When I began blogging, I leapt into an online community, largely care of a friend, Heidi, who now blogs for Strictly Come Dancing and The Great British Bake Off in England. I found it strange, negotiating the manners of an online world, but it was also lovely to chat to random folk & quietly find out about them. I didn’t sustain it though, & I’ve noticedI’m not very good with commenting in general on other people’s blogs, or even with interacting on Twitter; I remain insular in that regard. It used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore; I love writing for the heck of it, & am not particularly interested in using my blog for any other reason. It’s mostly a place of brain dumps.

I began with a red room & finish with a red building: the exterior of the Powerhouse, lit up by red lights on the night I gave a reading from my story published in the sport edition of Griffith Review. It’s a nice way of showing continuity: I remained captivated by ideas & am drawn to the institutions that deliver them, even as I remain ambivalent about that. And of course, there’s writing itself – still so hard but so satisfying, even despite poor pecuniary returns & the government’s abhorrence of the literary arts. With a pen, a pad of blank paper, a café with good coffee on the corner and the jacarandas blazing along the river, the next ten years promise much.

2015: My Year of Reading

Once again I’m a bit slow on the uptake with my end-of-year summaries of my literary life in 2015, but better late than never!

Last year I participated in the Australian Women Writers Challenge and the GoodReads challenge. While I met my goal of reading 20 books and reviewing 10 books for the former (I read 44 and reviewed 10), for the latter I only made it to 76 out of 100 books, which was 5 more books than last year’s.

One of my absolute favourite books for the year was Michael Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, which I read on a dark and wintry New Year’s Day in Newcastle in England, in the house of some lovely friends. It’s a peculiar work about a missionary sent to colonise aliens on another planet. About six months after I read it, I realised the swirling rain on the planet, which came and went like a three-dimensional thing, was a metaphor for grief, and my admiration for the book was renewed.

I also loved Kazuo Ishiguoro’s The Buried Giant, a retelling of the fable of the Green Knight, because I could never quite work out what was happening and I like being unsettled by texts. I also liked the almost child-like way in which it was narrated. While in Rome I finished Peter Watts’ Rifters trilogy which my boyfriend suggested to me as research for my mermaid book. I still think often about that pressurised, underwater world with its attenuated bodies and tough female protagonist.

Closer to home, Fiona Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance, about her struggle with anorexia, was exquisite. I would have written a review of it except that it was a little too close to home and I couldn’t have been objective. I also enjoyed the clever puzzle of Debra Adelaide’s latest novel, The Women’s Pages.

My reading of Indigenous women writers over the year was woeful – I only managed two books, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Too Afraid to Cry and Gayle Kennedy’s Me, Antman and Fleabag. I’m aiming to redress this in 2016. I’m also going to try and read and review books of poetry, as I’ll be writing more of this and need to study it.

In terms of international writers, for whom I wasn’t setting myself a target or making myself aware of gender bias, I read 5 more books by male writers (15 books) than female writers (10 books). Last year this was the opposite, with 7 books by male writers and 11 by female writers, so it doesn’t look like there’s a pattern yet.

I’ve set myself the same challenges again this year, and am more hopeful of meeting them, if only because I’ll be forcing myself to have the evenings off to read and rest. Having just come back from a gorgeous holiday in Thailand with plenty of luxurious reading time, I’m already ahead!

The list below is more for my own records than anyone else’s, and because I find the interface at GoodReads to be almost impossible.

Australian Women Writers (reviews have hyperlinks)

1.     Waiting Room: A Memoir, Gabrielle Carey

2.     The World Without Us, Mireille Juchau

4.     Puberty Blues, Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey

5.     Remotely Fashionable: A Story of Subtropical Style, Nadia Buick and Madeleine King

6.     Anchor Point, Alice Robinson

7.     The Women's Pages, Debra Adelaide

8.     The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories, Jo Anderton

9.     The Golden Age, Joan London

10.  Small Acts of Disappearance, Fiona Wright

11.  The Dangerous Bride, Lee Kofman

12. Elemental, Amanda Curtin

13.  Vulture's Gate, Kirsty Murray

14.  Stanley and Sophie, Kate Jennings

15.  Grimsdon, Deborah Abela

16.  Pieces Of A Girl, Charlotte Wood

17.  The Landing, Susan Johnson

18.  The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood

19.  Too afraid to cry, Ali Cobby Eckermann

20.  The Delinquents: Text Classics, Criena Rohan

21.  Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

22.  In My Mother's Hands, Biff Ward

23.  Georgiana Molloy: The Mind That Shines, Bernice Barry

24.  The Life Of Houses, Lisa Gorton

25.  That Oceanic Feeling, Fiona Capp

26.  The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane

27.  Me, Antman & Fleabag, Gayle Kennedy

28.  Hopscotch, Jane Messer

29.  My Blood's Country: A Journey Through the Landscape that Inspired Judith Wright's Poetry, Fiona Capp

30.  The Strays, Emily Bitto

31.  The Floating Garden, Emma Ashmere

32.  The Anchoress, Robyn Cadwallader

33.  Snowy River Man, Lizzy Chandler

34.  The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine, Krissy Kneen

35.  Salt Rain, Sarah Armstrong

36.  Deeper Water, Jessie Cole

37.  Razorhurst, Justine Larbalestier

38.  Sustenance, Simone Lazaroo

39.  This House of Grief, Helen Garner

40.  Reefscape: Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef, Rosaleen Love

41.  Only the Animals, Ceridwen Dovey

42.  The Coral Battleground, Judith A. Wright

43.  Piano Lessons, Anna Goldsworthy

44.  The Midnight Dress, Karen Foxlee

Australian Male Writers

45.  Ugly: My Memoir, Robert Hoge

46.  The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan

47.  The Horses, William Lane

48.  A World of Other People, Steven Carroll

49.  The Reef: A Passionate History, Iain McCalman

50.  Clade, JamesBradley

51.  The Element of Need: Murder and Memory in Adelaide, James Bradley

International Women Writers

52.  Allegiant (Divergent, #3), Veronica Roth

53.  Insurgent (Divergent, #2), Veronica Roth

54.  Divergence (Divergence, #1), Veronica Roth

55.  Blue Nights, Joan Didion

56.  Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

57.  A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride

58.  Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned", Lena Dunham

59.  Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay

60.  H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

61.  Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture, Jennifer Esmail

International Male Writers

62.  The Dreaming Land, Martin Edmond

63.  Loosed upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, John Joseph Adams

64.  The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss

65.  All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

66.  Railsea, China Mieville

67.  The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks

68.  The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro

69.  These Are the Names, Tommy Wieringa

70.  Aquarium, David Vann

71.  The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal

72.  Behemoth (Rifters, #3), Peter Watts

73.  Maelstrom (Rifters, #2), Peter Watts

74.  A History of Silence: a memoir, Lloyd Jones

75.  Starfish (Rifters, #1), Peter Watts

76.  The Book of Strange New Things, Michel Faber

The Australian Women Writers Challenge – completed!

This is my fourth year of undertaking a challenge to read and review more books by Australian women writers. The initiative was established in 2012 Elizabeth Lhuede, who wanted to redress the gender bias in reviewing.

I’m the diversity editor at AWW, and throughout the year I arranged guest posts from women writers of ethnic heritage, including Queenie Chan, Marisa Wikramanayake and Maxine Beneba Clarke, as well as lesbian/queer writers Inga Simpson, Tricia Dearborn, Lee Winter and Francesca Rendle-Short.

I was also very happy that Gayle Kennedy, an Aboriginal woman writer whom I met at an artists with disability conference last year, wrote a guest post for us during NAIDOC week, while Bec Kavanagh also write a guest post on the importance of reading diverse texts, particularly for younger readers.

I presented on the AWW challenge and writing vernacular criticism at the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature in Wollongong in July. I really enjoy taking part in the challenge because I’m interested in women’s writing and diversity, and in promoting these subjects. It also helps me to keep up to date with what’s being published, and I like interacting with the other volunteers. I get good reading suggestions from Sue T of Whispering Gums; Marisa Wikramanayake put together a series of conversations with writers throughout the year; Annabel Smith interviewed more writers, and it’s been great to watch Elizabeth’s writing career start to take off. It’s just so lovely to be part of the AWW community.

I met my challenge of reading more than 20 books (I read 38) and reviewing 10 of these. The books that I reviewed, however, were disappointingly very un-diverse. Here’s my list:

The Floating Garden, Emma Ashmere

Me, Antman & Fleabag, Gayle Kennedy

Hopscotch, Jane Messer

Georgiana Molloy: The Mind that Shines, Bernice Barry

Stanley and Sophie, Kate Jennings

Anchor Point, Alice Robinson

Remotely Fashionable, Nadia Buick and Madeleine King

The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane

The World Without Us, Mireille Juchau

The Women’s Pages, Debra Adelaide

I mostly chose to review these books because I needed to think them through for books or papers that I’m working on, which are about animals, carers, and climate change. Others, such as Remotely Fashionable or The Women’s Pages I reviewed because I loved them.

I’m sticking to my challenge level for 2016 (read at least 20, review 10), as it’s a struggle to find time to review books. However I’m going to make a concerted effort next year to review more works by Indigenous authors, and I’m hoping to arrange more guest posts by Indigenous authors throughout the year. I’m also going to arrange a focus on writers with disability, and another on writers of migrant background.

Another busy year ahead! In the meantime I’m signing off, packing my bags & heading to Thailand for two weeks of sun, water, cocktails & burning through the 25+ books on my ereader. Glorious!

Review of The Women's Pages

To pick up a piece of writing by Debra Adelaide is be instantly assured that one is in calm, capable hands. The kind that can smooth down bed sheets, whip up a meringue, tally up a line of numbers without error, guide you steadily through a narrative and deliver you to a satisfying ending (although it might, as in The Household Guide to Dying, make you cry). The narrators in Adelaide’s stories are problem solvers, and in her most recent novel The Women’s Pages, the problem is one of writing itself.

As her mother lies dying, Dove reads her Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and she begins to write a novel. She is compelled into the act of writing by reading this text, which she had picked up when she was young and which ‘was like a malaria of the brain, lying dormant then leaping up at unexpected times to attack with the fever of unresolved narrative’ (7). The same might be said of Dove’s attempts at writing: she is plagued by dreams, her characters intrude into her consciousness, and she is puzzled by how to fit it all together. As she tries to work out what’s happening so, too, does her reader.

The novel which Dove writes is set in the 50s, with all of its thick and casual sexism. When Ellis, her character (named for Ellis Bell, the pseudonym of Emily Bronte), refuses the advances of her friend’s husband, he calls her a ‘tight bitch’ (23). Ellis looks for a job designing typefaces and is cowed by the weight of male disapproval of a woman who should be at home, doing the laundry. Unwanted pregnancies are hidden, their attendant pain smothered beneath the daily rituals of cooking, cleaning and earning an income. Yet even some decades years later, sexism is still rife: while at university, Dove finds her breast groped by a man mid-conversation and is paralysed with indecision about whether to voice the violation, until she ‘thought she might gag with the effort of doing nothing’ (59). The scene reminded me of The First Stone, in which Helen Garner was groped during a massage, but still paid the masseuse afterwards because she was unsure of how to deal with the situation. It still seems there is no language for some acts, although I think this is (thankfully) beginning to shift with social media.

I sometimes found myself confused as to who was speaking throughout the narrative, and it took me a while to work out whose story I was in, Ellis’s or Dove’s. And yet this was apt, for this is what happens to a writer (well, to me at least) when in the thick of writing a novel – it’s hard to shake off your characters, and you carry them around with you. You know they’re not real, but they’re not phantoms either. To Dove, Emily Bronte is so real that she enters her dreams, while Ellis plagues her with questions, pushing through the narrative in search of their answers.

The two stories hinge in the final scene, which I thought was wonderful for its elegance and surprise. My own mother, however, was unimpressed: she’d seen it coming. I didn’t mind; the novel has so many intricacies in it that I know I’ll return to puzzle it out. It has also occurred to me that this might be more of a writer’s novel, rather than a reader’s, as so much of it is about the process of writing.

What I have always loved about Adelaide’s writing is her celebration of domesticity and the feminine, particularly her descriptions of cooking. For example Ellis’s carer, Mrs Wood, ‘taught Ellis how to add a few pinches of curry powder – she favoured Clive of India – to the batter for fried flathead, which took care of the fishy smell in the house’ (108). Much of Mrs Wood’s knowledge has been gleaned ‘from the women’s pages of the Sunday newspapers over the years’ (108).

Ellis, in need of an income, finds work sorting out the recipes for one such magazine, titled the Women’s Pages, although most refer to it as the Pages. This becomes its official title as a way of increasing its appeal for, as Ellis observes, ‘the Pages turned out to be read by a surprising number of men’ (187). It’s a simple reference that underscores the difficulties we’re still having with selling women’s writing and asking people (well, men, mostly) to take it seriously. Siri Hustvedt discusses these issues beautifully in her essay about the reception of Knausgaard’s emotional writing, and his dismissal of women writers as ‘No competition’.

I adored so much about The Women's Pages, including its intertextual references to other quietly domestic novels such as Camille’s Bread, and movies such as Love and Other Catastrophes (one of my favourites). It’s the perfect way to wrap up my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

This is my 10th and final review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of The World Without Us

The opening line of this novel, ‘He’d been climbing for three hours when he saw the odd colour through the tawny trees’, and the evocation of a tryst – the character comes across a naked woman roped with scars, about to take a dip in the chilly river - echoes the opening of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour so strongly that I expected a flourish of Monarch butterflies in the next few lines. Instead, there were bees, referenced through the figure of Evangeline, the woman whom Jim stumbles across. She sells the family’s honey at the market in the town of Bidgalong and her husband, Stefan, is a beekeeper. The community in which they live, with its broken commune and hippies, is reminiscent of Byron Bay.

Any book about bees, these days, is usually a reference to environmental destruction, with good reason: in the last five years in the US, 30% of the national bee population has disappeared due to colony collapse. There are a number of reasons, including pesticides and climactic extremes such as drought and harsh winters. Australian scientists have suggested that these stressors mean that the next generation matures too quickly, and then they die when they go out to forage for food because it’s such an energy-intensive activity.

In Mireille Juchau's The World Without Us, the characters’ trauma is also intergenerational. Tess and Meg have lost their sister to leukaemia. Tess becomes mute with grief, her mother Evangeline stops painting and wanders the countryside with an umbrella, and her father Stefan takes to drink. Evangeline’s grief is layered onto an older sadness occasioned by the breakdown of the Hive, a commune in which she was raised, and which is stirred up by Stefan’s discovery of bones on their property. Meanwhile, Jim, Tess’s schoolteacher who has relocated from the city, struggles to establish himself after a failed relationship involving children. He is visited by the loss of his mother when he was a boy, while another secondary character, Tommy, looks after his mother, afflicted by dementia, and searches for his absent father.

In less capable hands, this book would have been a disaster. There are so many strands, so many parentless children, that it could easily have spiralled out of control or tipped into melodrama. Instead, Juchau keeps the threads tightly bound and contained. Sometimes this makes the writing affectless, but this is a necessary characteristic when so many internal storms populate the pages, and it is still undeniably beautiful, such as when Tess sees a native hive:

'That sound getting steadily louder, the livid air pocked with busy insects. Closer, inside the dim cavern of that ruined hall, the noise is unmistakeable.

As her eyes adjust Tess sees what’s hanging from the ceiling and jutting like lichen in thick, creamy layers. They protrude from the wall and fan from the corners. They garland the roof beams. Great waxy chandeliers lit with yellow bees’ (161).'

Garland. Creamy. Chandeliers. All adjectives that denote wealthy and luxury.

Throughout the novel, the bees symbolise humans’ attempts to keep functioning when there are internal stressors such as loss and grief, and external stressors such as fracking, which divides the community. By transferring the non-human to the realm of the human, it shows us how difficult it is for anything to survive when too much strain is placed upon it. Perhaps if readers can see how a human ecosystem can fall apart, they might also see how a non-human ecosystem can be similarly impacted, particularly by their own actions.

Within this, the native hive, so luxuriously rendered, could be seen as a symbol of hope. We have one last chance – Paris made that clear to everyone across the world – and if we squander it, we’ll die. This will be no great loss to nature – it will flourish without us – but if we lose each other, as this novel signals, we’ll be decimated by the loss of our environment and of our selves.

This is my 9th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of The Night Guest

I hadn’t intended to review The Night Guest. While I enjoyed reading it, I didn’t like the ending and the book left me with a clammy feeling that I didn’t want to revisit. However, as I’ve been musing about animals and carers for my book When the World Shivered, I thought might be worth thinking about further, as The Night Guest features both.

This is the story of Ruth, an elderly widow who lives on an isolated stretch of coast, and believes herself to be visited by a tiger. After its first foray into the house, in which she hears the noises it makes, ‘loud and wet, with a low, guttural breathing hum punctuated by little cautionary yelps’ (2), she is reminded ‘of something vital – not of youth, exactly, but of the urgency of youth’ (6). Her childhood was spent on Fiji, where her parents were missionaries, and where she fashioned an unrequited romance for a doctor.

Shortly after the tiger’s first manifestation, a woman named Frida arrives to take care of Ruth. Rather than being preyed up on by the tiger, Ruth is gradually, subtly, threatened by this carer, a muscular woman who is also from Fiji. She tends to Ruth so efficiently that Ruth cannot see how she would survive without her, and at the same time she infiltrates Ruth's few relationships and persuades her to sell her car.

McFarlane’s hand is surest when she bleeds reality and fiction into one another through Ruth’s wavering point of view. The reader is uncertain as to whether Frida is friend or foe, or whether Ruth is losing her mind and cannot read the situation clearly. The ending provides answers, but until this point, the reader is held in suspense.

Herein lies the horror of the story. Ruth is physically, intellectually and emotionally isolated, and vulnerable to the depredations of others. A woman who is mean to care for her becomes a predator, like the tiger. And yet the bond between them is close, as it would be when people’s daily rhythms are knotted together. An acquaintance, Ellen, muses ‘She remembered the way Ruth and Frida had run together like lovers, and how embarrassed she’d been by that intimacy, and, later, how unsettled’ (273). The tiger also has multivalent meanings, being at times threatening, and at other times a delight. At the end of the novel, Ruth ‘leaned her head into his soft chest, where his great heart ticked’ (268).

Frida is yoked with the tiger through this thematic similarity and their simultaneous appearance, and through a scene towards the end in which Frida fights the animal. ‘There had been no beginning to Frida and the tiger, and now there would be no end,’ McFarlane writes. ‘They both snarled and bared their teeth, Frida called out the strange syllables of a warlike alphabet’ (224). These similarities can be read as a metaphor for colonialism, for the imposition of power upon vulnerable subjects, and how they fight back. The tiger invokes Ruth’s childhood and her missionary parents, who colonised Fijians through Christianity, and at the same time it reminds us that we are really not so different from animals: we are both prey and predator as we try to survive.

The vivid evocation of Ruth’s childhood also suggests the circularity of our lives – when we are old, we become like children. Our minds, sometimes sharp and sometimes wandering, can be just as fantastical as theirs, but while this is tolerated in young people, it isn’t so much in the elderly.

There is much to plumb in this novel, which won the NSW Premier’s award and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. I heard McFarlane speak at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference last year (ASAL always have at least one session to showcase Australian writers, which I think is great) and thought her intellectually astute. She has a book of short stories coming out soon, The High Places, which will be published by Penguin and, based on this book, well worth a read.

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

Review of Remotely Fashionable

Readers who follow my blog or my feeds might have gathered that I have an addiction to frocks, shoes and handbags. I know it’s an irresponsible addiction for a writer to have, and I’ve lost track of the times I’ve told friends that I’m going to stop buying frocks because I’m so broke. Somehow, I always find the money for it, even if it means I have nothing to eat by the end of the fortnight. On the other hand, I don’t really have any other vices: I don’t eat much, I don’t drink much, I don’t smoke, I don’t have a car, and I don’t have a mortgage (though I should be saving for one). Obviously I can’t be a writer without any vices, so it’s imperative that I buy a frock now and then.

Last year I stumbled upon The Fashion Archives when I was stuck at procrastination station. This is an online publication created by Madeleine King and Nadia Buick that looks at the history of Queensland fashion. In 2013-14 they released a 12-issue online publication, The Fashion Archives, which was followed in 2014-15 by High Street Histories, for which they received a fellowship to do research at the John Oxley Library.

Then I discovered they were putting together a book with crowd funding and that, if one threw in some money, one could get a copy of said book and go to a party at its launch. I could get frocked up! I drew out my overused plastic from my wallet.

Last week, Remotely Fashionable: A Story of Subtropical Style arrived, and what a beauty it is. The book, nestled in a box stamped with blue, is crammed with wonderful photographs and readable essays. I went to the party (at the charming Avid Reader, no less) wearing a Review frock patterned with pink hibiscus and pale green palms. I took my fashionable neighbour along too, and looked at all the other people wearing their interesting clothes. It was yet another gorgeous Brisbane evening of books, balmy weather and lovely people.

Why a book on Queensland fashion? Well, no one’s written one before. Queensland, as the authors write, ‘is typically dismissed by its savvier southern counterparts as betraying a gauche, derivative, superficial, or provincial approach to culture and taste. While its natural beauty, tropical climate, and relaxed attitude are seen as major assets for tourism and lifestyle, these same qualities are often considered anathema to the high-minded pursuits of culture and aesthetics, including style’ (13). And then there’s fashion itself which, being associated with women, has traditionally been devalued, ‘the close relationship between women and their clothing … [has] often been perceived in terms of frivolity and indulgence’ (14).

This book fills this gap in Queensland’s history in an interesting and accessible way, beginning with apt foreword by Easton & Pearson. When they started their label, these designers didn’t mention that they were from Brisbane until they started showing in Paris.

There follows an essay by Associate Professor Margaret Maynard, a dress historian, who discusses how Queensland’s climate and class impacted on the state’s fashion. Although the fashionable upper classes looked to Paris for style, they modified the fabrics to suit the climate, using muslin and light silk in summer, while men wore light-coloured jackets or trousers.

I was impressed with Amanda Hayman’s ‘A Brief Redress of Indigenous Fashion in Australia’. Amanda, who is an Indigenous artist and Digital Exhibitions Program Officer at kuril dhagan at the State Library, describes how ‘clothing and body adornment have a close relationship to Indigenous identity and can be viewed as a reflection of country’ (41) and are made from natural materials such as wood, bark, fur, feathers, grass, twine and seeds. Following colonisation however, Aboriginal cultural identity and expression was suppressed, and it wasn’t until after the 1967 referendum that Indigenous people’s wardrobes began to reflect their increasing opportunities. I thought her closing line neat and apt: ‘Just as fashion often resembles trends from the past, with certain cuts and styles from eras gone by reinvigorated by the designer’s personal touch, contemporary Indigenous fashion is able to connect with social and political events in recent history as well as ancient cultural knowledge’ (46).

I also loved Melissa Bellanta and Alana Piper’s essay on the ‘flashy’ dressing of late 19th and early 20th century prostitutes, especially the description of their finery (including fur, kimonos and smoking caps), tattoos and sass. Under the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868, they were required to undergo fortnightly examinations (Tasmania was the only other state to pass this kind of law – go Queensland! Still conservative 150 years later and still outlawing abortion). The women stuck two fingers up at the law and ‘ordered hansom cabs to take them to the doctor’s and entered them dressed in the showiest of styles’ (51).

The collection of essays closes with one by Nadia Buick, who discusses the huge popularity of exhibitions on fashion, both in Australia and internationally. These shows indicate that there is widespread interest in fashion and that it shouldn’t be dismissed as a trivial topic.

The rest of the book has images of vintage Queensland fashion, and entries on people and places that are significant in Queensland’s fashion history. This is a book that’s interesting to read and lovely to look at – and a great Xmas pressie for all the fashionistas out there.

This is my 7th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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.

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.