Review of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms

Anita Heiss’s latest novel opens with a man running from a prison: the Japanese internment camp of Cowra in 1944. Hiroshi finds safety with an Aboriginal family, who hide and care for him. Gradually, a romance develops between Hiroshi and Mary Williams, the young Aboriginal woman who takes him food.

Heiss writes what she calls ‘choc-lit’ – or chick lit with an Aboriginal focus – but you would foolish to dismiss this as fluff. Her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, is always firmly focused on educating audiences about Aboriginal culture and the ongoing effects of colonialism and racism. She’s a smart woman: popular fiction is one of the most widely read genres, and by inserting her themes into her popular novels she aims to inform a wide range of readers.

This is a difficult road to take, as readers of this genre pick up books expecting to be entertained. If there’s a whiff of anything otherwise, they don’t care for it. I don’t think that will be a problem for readers of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, for in this work Heiss blends popular fiction and politics beautifully. 

There are two main techniques she uses to achieve this. The first is Hiroshi’s point of view. By using a character who knows nothing of Aboriginal culture, who is initially ‘suspicious as to why these dark people are helping him and where they actually come from’ but who grows to love them deeply, Heiss articulates how race is a construct and that hunger, kindness, fear, homesickness and desire are qualities that belong to us all.

The second technique is the use of metaphor, specifically that of imprisonment. The prison from which Hiroshi escapes represents not only the physical camp for internees, but also the camps on which Aboriginal people were forced to live – the mission stations and reserves – when their land was taken from them. As Banjo, Mary’s father, says, ‘We are treated like prisoners too, at Erambie. We shouldn’t be on rations. We should all be paid the same for the same work and have enough money to buy food for our families – not just flour, tea and sugar rations and whatever we can hunt or manage to grow. It’s not fair for anyone. The prisoners of war are just like us’.

Heiss also addresses contemporary concerns, such as negative representations of Aboriginal people in the media. Merv, a singer and football player, makes a name for himself in Sydney and is written up in the paper. Mary, who reads the article about him out to the family, comments ‘At least this is a positive article about Aboriginal people. You’re always saying what they write about us is bad, Mum.’ And in Mary’s family itself there is much to be proud of. The Williams take in a stranger and scrimp to find food for him, as many Aboriginal people did for Europeans they were shipwrecked on Australia’s coasts. They take an interest in Hiroshi and his culture, as Noongars did in whalers and the first colonists when they arrived in south west Western Australia (Kim Scott writes about this beautifully in That Deadman Dance). At the same time they aren’t saints, for no one is. Through Kevin, who is jealous and has a temper, Heiss shows that every family has its arguments, and that different viewpoints need to be aired before one can arrive at a resolution. 

At the heart of the novel is an important emotion: empathy. Romance is definitely important too, not least because it drives the plot, but without empathy, romance can’t happen. Empathy often takes some work – intellectual as well as emotional. As Banjo exhorts his brother Kevin, ‘What if our brother escaped from a POW camp like this bloke? Wouldn’t you want someone to look after him and treat him like a human being?’ And this is what the novel does, as all good literature should do: it takes us out of our everyday lives and into a new world, where we become invested in and learn to care for its people. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who argues for the importance of including emotion in philosophy, writes in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995), novels invite us to ‘concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own’ (xvi). And this in turn is a precondition for respect for human dignity (xvi).

So if you’re reading this book by the beach (and I hope you are!), you’ll not only enjoy the plot and characters (perhaps woven with the smell of salt and sunscreen and the sounds of kids yelling), but you’ll also quietly exercise your heart as well.

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

Review of Cloudwish

I picked up this YA novel as it kept popping up in reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and my mum read it & enjoyed it, and we usually like the same things. I wasn’t disappointed – Cloudwish was a lovely post-Christmas couch read.

Vân Uớc, whose name means ‘Cloudwish’, is an Australian-born Vietnamese scholarship student at a private school. She has a gigantic crush on the most popular and attractive boy in her year and, like all shy and insecure girls, she thinks her chances of attracting him are dismal, until Billy inexplicably begins to pay attention to her.

I loved this novel for its sweetness. I guess most girls’ first crush is emblazoned in their memory, & who knows how many of them worked out – it was nice that this one did. It reminded me of the film Get Real about a romance between a nerdy boy and the most popular fellow at school, and then I wondered how many romances there are about popular girls and less socially adept boys? I haven’t come across any, though I sure would like to.

The novel blends poverty and privilege in a believable, illuminating way. Van’s council housing apartment is described in detail, with the ‘stained concrete floor’ on the way to the lift, the ‘low ceiling and exposed pipes of the hallway’. It’s also contrasted with the lusciousness of Billy’s expansive house with its coterie of staff, and reminded me of Alice Pung’s excellent essay for AWW on race and class.

The weight of parental expectation is also explored. Billy is cramped by his father’s assumption that he’ll become a brilliant rower and study overseas, and his mother’s desire for a girlfriend of the right social éclat. Van is weighed down by the guilt of her parents’ experiences as boat people and their belief that she ought to become a doctor, when she really wants to be an artist. 

I enjoyed Van’s skillful negotiation of her relationship with her parents, for whom she is spokesperson as her mother only speaks ‘survival English’, so as to snatchsome freedom with Billy. I also liked watching her confidence grow through her relationship with Billy. Initially a quiet girl who doesn’t want to draw attention to herself, with Billy’s attentions Van becomes outspoken, much like her role model Jane Eyre. People who dismiss romance as frippery also overlook how it can create valuable emotions: security, confidence, and a willingness to change.

Some of the work seemed staged: the creative writing exercise in which Van expresses her fantasy that Billy would pay attention to her, and Billy’s sudden interest in Van. It wasn’t until Billy became three-dimensional, revealed as a boy who was as cramped by his parents’ expectations as Van was by hers, that I began to believe in his attraction Van. A big part of me was also sceptical that a seventeen year old boy could be so romantically-minded and thoughtful, but then I stopped being critical and gave myself up for the ride.

And having said that, there are plenty of other beautiful details throughout: a grove of scented orange trees, the ‘bright-beaten pieces of silver [coins], half buried in the blue-black asphalt’, and the kindness of a community that looks out for and takes care of its young people. What a lovely, rewarding book. 

This is my sixth 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

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 Stanley and Sophie

I picked up this small volume from the library after I’d written my review of Hopscotch, Jane Messer’s account of the impact of the Global Financial Crisis upon a middle-class Sydney family. I dimly remembered having read another review or article about Jennings’ 2003 novel about Wall Street, Moral Hazard, which commented about how few women write about the financial world, or feature in it as characters with agency.

As I searched in vain for that article, I disappeared down the rabbit hole of the internet, and came up with Jennings’ memoir Stanley and Sophie. Having been revising my own memoir, and researching writing about animals for my young adult novel, I thought I might kill two birds with one stone by reading this book.

The factual and fictional blur frequently in Jennings’ writing. Moral Hazard is a novel about a woman who writes speeches for financiers by day, and by night cares for a husband losing his mind to Alzheimer’s. This book, as a memoir, picks up where that left off, with Jennings living in New York and mourning to her husband who also had died from Alzheimer’s.

Jennings had been raised on a farm in Australia and for her, dogs were working animals kept outside, ‘housed in kennels made from corrugated iron that were well away from where we lived, with no concession to the weather, which in winter was cold enough for ice form on puddles and dams and in the summer hot enough to make the lead fall out of pencils’ (11). When the dogs grew old, they ‘were retired under a rainwater tank where it was blessedly shady, sweetly cool’ (11). In her personality, she was avowedly unsentimental. ‘Call me cold,’ she states. ‘Actually, call me vinegary’ (10).

Why, then, does she fall head over heels in love with a dog? She missed her husband and her marriage, but she was also suffering from ‘the prolonged exposure to Alzheimer’s … I hadn’t been released from it. Instead, I was trapped in a place where reluctance leached through the walls, nihilism pooled on the floor. I tried caulking the holes with work and antidepressants, but still the insistent seepage, still the sorrow. Ashes and dishwater’ (20). When she met Stanley, ‘an aristocratic alpha male border terrier’ (4), it’s love at first sight. ‘Stanley had a job’, she writes, ‘to bring me into the sunlight’ (21).

And so he did, by offering structure to her days, walks, companionship and entertainment. However, Stanley was lonely, and when another border terrier, Sophie, was offered up as a companion, Jennings adopted her too. Despite their daily walks, however, the dogs were confined to an apartment, and Jennings was confined ‘by memories of my marriage, by places and possessions that triggered the memories’ (91). She made the heartbreaking decision to give the dogs away.

The second part of the book is set in Bali, where Jennings stays with her brother. The dogs in this place are not reared for companionship, but as offerings. Once despatched, they keep watch on the house as spirits. Jennings comes to know as macaque known as Chico, who becomes tetchy for a mate. They find him a small female known as Cheeky at the bird market in Denpasar, where macaques ‘sat on top of cages, drooping and despondent, their will to live all but extinguished. Some would become pets, while others would be slaughtered for their brains, believed to impart energy. All of them had been poached, their mothers killed’ (125).

It was at this point that the book came alive for me; previously I’d had no connection to it, possibly because Jennings hadn’t been feeling much either. Cheeky, motherless, attaches herself to Jennings and wails when she leaves, ‘a never-ending susurrus of complaint and dispossession’ (128). The sounds and the experience, she writes, ‘tapped directly into the sadness that had accumulated in me. My stiff upper lip, kept as firmly in place as possible since my husband’s death, went slack. I started to cry and couldn’t stop’ (129).

It was also at this point that the book became more intellectually engaging. Is a dog, however cossetted, well-fed, well-walked and groomed, any different to a monkey tied to a chain, or to the endangered baboon and baby Sumatran tiger, kept under the floorboards by a vendor at the bird market for buyers of stature? We keep animals for our pleasure, but what about theirs? Do they want to be our pets, and are we right to make them so even after thousands of years of domestication? And why do we keep doing this: making them our own? Is it because their humanity sometimes exceeds ours?

For against Jennings’ grief and interactions with animals is set the destruction of the World Trade Towers and the Bali bombings. ‘I loved my dogs,’ she writes, ‘and my heart went out to the monkeys. When we cry for our animals, we cross for the whole sodding mess. The whole sodding, sorry mess’ (156).

Perhaps the answer lies in a story written by Sophie’s new owner, who fell for her too and knew she would be hers. He describes how dogs ‘take us out of our brains and down into the street, where we are more real, more vivid; their attention keeps us in place and allows us constant contact with the sensate world in which we live’ (179). Animals, in other words, remind us that we are animals too, and therein lies their joy. For people corralled in houses away from the brush of undergrowth, with tarmac instead of soil underfoot, the sensations of stroking a dog’s head, of feeling a cat’s claws as they knead before settling into your lap, of studying the glossy round of a bird’s eye, all remind us of who we are and where we have come from.

As with many of Jennings’ other works (such as Snake, which I reviewed last year), this is a small book which, like gelato, melts on the tongue, her phrases like dissolving sugar. Stanley slept with her at night, ‘starting the evening curled into a tight comma, by morning monopolising all the pillow like a grand pasha’ (21). The chapters are succinct, their endings often a perfect cadence, as in ‘If I Could Stop the Wind Blowing’. After an altercation with a Republican over Stanley’s marking of his door, Sophie is encouraged to forever after ‘hoist her bottom high in the air and splash her message on the glossy black paint’ (79) and she is subsequently rewarded with the superlative, ‘Best girl in the world’ (79). I could read Jennings’ dogs on the page as well as if I might have in person, and this lent extra charm to the work.

As I’m deaf, I compensate for the things I can’t hear by reading body language, and on I love reading dogs as much as I do people. When my father leaves the house to work on his renovations, his whippet paces delicately, tail between her legs, her eyes like dark saucers. She and my mother’s dog, a tiny, feisty cavadoodle, will sit by the window all day, noses pressed to the glass, until he returns. My sister’s cocker spaniel is Bentley, a dumb blonde of a dog who dug a solid hole in my heart when I lived in her house for a year. A puppy, he sat at my feet as I wrote Entitlement and followed me from room to room. Now an adult, he’ll sit when he’s told to, but quivers with the anticipation of my body loosening and bending down to embrace him, after which point he will jump uncontrollably. As Jennings puts it, ‘What we love most about dogs is that they are transparent, their emotions pure, unmuddied by ambiguity even when torn by conflicting desires. They express themselves with graphic simplicity’ (42). Even I, not demonstrative by nature, am secretly delighted by the way he comes barrelling through the door when he sees me, a 20 kg mass of fur and enthusiasm. When do we ever bowl each over with such love?

This is my 5th review for the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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.