Notes from the Field (ii)

This year has turned out to be such a rollercoaster that the best I could do was hold onto my hair, rather than pen any blog posts about my research. However, it’s the post-Christmas lull and, in between sleeping off an exhausting year and swimming off the excesses of the festive season, I’m catching up on my posts.

In July I headed to Canberra to present on my research at the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature association. This was a really good conference hosted by the ADFA branch of UNSW, and fittingly the theme was ‘Capital-Empire-Print-Dissent’. Also fittingly, the first speaker (for the Barry Andrews Lecture at the National Library) was Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko, the first keynote was American Indian scholar Chadwick Allen from the University of Washington, and the first panel consisted of three excellent Indigenous scholars: Alice te Punga Somerville, Jeanine Leane and Evelyn Araluen Corr. I also went to a masterclass held by Chadwick on Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run, about the Blood Run earthworks site and Indigenous mathematics, which totally knocked my socks off. I also ducked off to the National Gallery of Australia to look at Fiona Hall's latest exhibition. I've always loved her work because she plays around with plants.

National Gallery of Australia.

When I returned to Brisbane I had to move house, which was stressful and exhausting, then I turned around and flew to Perth for some more research in the archives and also for a tour of the wheatbelt hosted by the literary journal Westerly. I was keen to expand my knowledge of things literary in WA in general, but what really compelled me to sign up was that our guide was Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, who has been doing some excellent ecocritical work.

The tour was fabulous. We began at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre and were given a guided tour of the house and gardens by an Irish woman who had lived there after the Prichards sold it. She became interested in Prichard when random people such as literary devotees or Russians (Prichard was a committed Communist) turned up on her doorstep. Her talk was entertaining and interesting and I liked listening to the sway of her voice.

Labelled shelf in Katharine Susannah Prichard's writing shack.

We were then bussed off to York, where we had morning tea in the Flour Mill Cafe. The orange soil of this area was striking against the blue sky. In fact all of teh sky in WA is incredible.

Flour Mill Cafe, York.

Thence we went up to Mt Brown lookout, which had excellent views. On the way I chatted to UWA publisher Terri-Ann White about books on water (or the increasing lack thereof) and firestick farming in WA. After a potter around the York Wildflower Garden and some lunch, we headed to St Saviour’s Church at Katrine, where poet John Kinsella and his partner Tracy Ryan read out some of their work over a cuppa.

York Wildflower Garden

I also did a guided walk with volunteers at the Kings Park Botanical Gardens. These free tours are fantastic – the guides are extremely knowledgeable and tell really good stories about the plants in the park. For someone who finds reading science papers quite difficult, it’s a great way to learn about botany.

Kings Park.

Back in Brisbane I led a couple of classes in poetics for a tutor who was away, and also began tutoring fora Women Writers course. I gave lectures on Keri Hulme’s The Bone People for this course, and also The Timeless Land for the Australian literature course. Teaching was pretty time consuming, although my students were the best I’ve ever taught – they were intelligent, motivated and politically savvy – and gave me much hope for our future, which we desperately need in these times of Brexit, Trump and the stale, unimaginative and faint-hearted politicians who currently lead Australia, although that verb might be generous.

I also helped the graduate students put together their Work in Progress conference, the theme of which was 'On the Edge', and organised an evening of creative writing alongside this, which went really well. And then it was time to head to Sydney, Wollongong and Fremantle for conferences and research, but more of this in another post.

#fundTrove

A few weeks ago, I presented at a symposium on Queensland Modernism on writer Dorothy Cottrell, who spent her life in a wheelchair and whose 1929 novel The Singing Gold was a sensation. After the symposium I was approached by a scholar who knew about my project on 19th century Western Australian botanist Georgiana Molloy.

‘Did you know,’ he asked, ‘that her husband was responsible for a massacre of Aboriginal people?’

‘What! No way, there’s been three biographies written on her, and none of them have mentioned him instigating a massacre.’

It transpired that this scholar had refereed a journal article by a playwright, Angela Campbell, who had written a play on Georgiana. An anthropologist named Howard Pederson had approached Campbell and asked her if she knew about the massacre. Like me, her reaction was one of surprise. In all of the research she had undertaken on Georgiana, and of the many people she had spoken to about her, there was no mention of John Molloy (who had fought at Waterloo) ordering a massacre. Pederson directed her to W.B. Kimberly’s History of West Australia, published in 1897. Kimberly described how, in retaliation for the spearing of John Layman by an Aboriginal man (whom Layman had antagonised), Captain Molloy ‘ordered his soldiers to march, and he took command of them and the chief settlers in the south west district. He gave special instructions that no woman or child should be killed, but that no mercy should be shown the men’.

While I was aware of this incident, I hadn’t known that John Molloy had instigated the violence. Campbell was astonished that this fact had been covered up, as was I. And so too was historian J.S. Battye, who wrote a more circumscribed account of the event when he published his 1924 history of the state, Western Australia: a history from its discovery to the inauguration of the Commonwealth.

When I went searching for more information on what had happened, I turned to Trove, a free online service provided by the National Library of Australia which includes information on over four million books, articles, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives, datasets and more. Following a series of articles published in the Western Mail in 1925, I found that Battye was taken to task for besmirching John Molloy’s name and for asking why, ‘where possible, accounts of [the incident] have been suppressed, and where that was not possible that the accounts have been watered down’. There was no answer to this, except for a heated reply from AG Layman, the grandson of John Layman, who wrote in August 1925 'I was well acquainted with many of the natives that were at Wonnerup when my grandfather was murdered, and I did not have to go to old Wheela for information. Wheela was too young at the time to know much about it, and at the most he was a most unreliable man.' Wheela was at least 86 in 1925 (on the presumption that he might have been at least two when the event happened); even if he was too young to witness a massacre his people would have known about it.

To me, this was a fascinating example of how history can be distorted by the valuing of some voices and the denigration of others. Historically, testimony by Aboriginal people has been dismissed because it is oral history. And yet the stories of some Aboriginal people are about climactic events that occurred thousands of years ago, and which contemporary scientists have corroborated.

I would never have been able to find this information without Trove, a service which, in yet another example of our government’s slow starvation of our arts and culture, is now facing funding cuts (and of course this is a government that will never tax rich corporations instead). As former manager of Trove writes of the service, ‘Our history is not in the past – it lives as a source of inspiration and unease, understanding and critique. Trove helps me to connect to that. I want it to be safe, and I want it to grow.’

The searches that I did on Trove show clearly how it can help us to critique and understand the past. Also, on a practical level – it’s online. With travel being expensive and polluting, this makes it an accessible, useful resource for scholars all over Australia.

There is a petition going around to #fundTrove, which you can sign. You can also tweet or write about the value of Trove, as I have done. And you can write to Senator Fifield or other government ministers. The people at the eScholarship Research Centre at Melbourne University have already drafted a sample letter.

Trove is an amazing resource. Please help us to keep it.

2015: My Year of Writing

Last year was pretty tiring, but thankfully much less hectic than the year before. As soon as I came home from Rome, I hit the ground running and put together an application for a Discovery Early Career Research Award through the University of Queensland, a process that just about killed me. Happily, the hard work paid off and in a few weeks I’ll begin writing and researching an ecobiography of 19th Century botanist Georgiana Molloy.

For the rest of the year, I was teaching and writing. Below is a list of my literary happenings.

Publications

In February, my short story ‘When the World Shivered’ was published in the Review of Australian Fiction, together with Nike Sulway’s ‘The Nature of Things’. I loved doing this collaboration with Nike, especially as I was moving into a new genre and was a bit uncertain of myself. You can buy both stories for less than the price of a cup of coffee!

In March my essay on Georgiana Molloy was published in the ‘Looking West’ edition of Griffith Review. This was the first time my writing had appeared in this Queensland journal and I was very proud, and even more so when I did a reading from my essay at Avid Reader for the Griffith Review Christmas party at the end of the year.

In May, my essay ‘“Can I Do My Words?” On the Poetics of Deafness’ was published in Cordite Poetry Review. This essay was about how deafness lends itself to creativity. It was a new area for me and one that I liked exploring. I was also grateful that the editor published one of my poems, as I’m slowly moving back into this field and feel a bit rusty as a poet.

I also had two more academic papers published, one on Rosa Pread in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature titled ‘“I actually hear you think of me”: Voices, Mediums and Deafness in the Writing of Rosa Praed’. This looks at Praed’s use of sound in her novels, and how her attitudes towards listening and deafness influenced the trajectory of her daughter Maud’s life.

An essay on Georgiana Molloy and the implications of the naming system she used for the plants she collected appeared in the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. This was for an issue titled ‘Encountering Australia, Confronting Catastrophe’ which came out of the conference at Prato, Italy in 2014 (you might have to create a login if you want to read the essay).

‘Hearing Maud’, a piece on how I found Maud Praed’s’s medical records and a letter she wrote to her doctor, and the implications of writing as a deaf person, was published online at Meanjin in December.

In January, Arts Queensland used me as a case study to show how I had used their funding for this research on Maud.

I also penned an article for Writing Queensland, the magazine for the Queensland Writers’ Centre, on opening lines and chapters. I also recently had one on endings published in the same outlet. It’s cheating a bit to include it in this summary but I like how they go together!

Awards/Funding

I taught creative writing at the University of Queensland for the first six months of last year, and just when I thought I would have to take my begging bowl back to the beleaguered coordinators for more work, I received a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Hooray! This bought me six months of writing time to write a young adult novel based on my short story ‘When the World Shivered’.

That process was both a blessing and a curse. While it was heavenly to have time to write, I realised that the project wasn’t going to be just one book, but three, as it was too complex to be contained in just the one book. So now I have added these books to my pipeline of novels to be written.

Getting these grants has absolutely saved my bacon financially and allowed me to progress and evolve as a writer. I was absolutely horrified when George Brandis butchered the Australia Council by taking away $104.8 million to create a new program, the National Program for Excellence in the Arts. Due to an outcry and a senate inquiry, this program never got off the ground (and Brandis was removed when Turnbull became PM). A third of the money has been returned and the rest siphoned off for a new program (still similar to the NPEA) retitled Catalyst. The money taken from the Australia Council to establish the Book Council of Australia has not been returned and there has still not been any word of what's happening with this council. Needless to say, my disgust with politics is complete, but at least Tony Abbott is no longer with us. You can read my submission to the senate inquiry here.

In April, I found out that my story ‘Old Honey’, which was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley prize last year, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This totally knocked my socks off as there were 22 shortlistees out of 4000 entries. Although I didn’t make it to the regional shortlisting, the story that won the Asia/Pacific region was published in Granta and I thought it was absolutely lovely (you can read it here).

Conferences

My conference circuit was not quite as hectic as last year’s, thankfully. In February, shortly after I stepped off the plane from Rome, I headed to Armidale and presented a paper on writing about the Great Barrier Reef at the University of New England. The conference theme was ‘The Power and the Passion: Contemporary Australian Literature and Politics’. This was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to – it was intimate, the weather was gorgeous, we travelled to Judith Wright’s homestead and I met Helen Garner. It was also good because I got to catch up with Parental Unit & their fur children.

In the middle of the year I was invited to present at a workshop on Amateur Knowledges at the University of Wollongong. This was prior to the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, which was combined with two other literary organisations to make a Literary Studies Convention. I presented on vernacular criticism in the context of online blogging and the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

I did my undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing at Wollongong and it was odd to be back on campus again. I also stayed with a wonderful writer, Cat Sparks, who with her partner took me out to dinner with Richard Harland, who had been one of my lecturers for Forms of the Imagination (and whose delivery I still vividly remember!).

In September I travelled to Sydney for the National Writers Congress, which was a wonderful opportunity to meet other writers and see what's happening in the industry. I wrote up my observations of the congress in this post.

Later in the year I made a jaunt to Noosa to present on Rosa Praed and mourning at a one-day Death Studies conference organised by the University of the Sunshine Coast. I loved all of the papers that I heard and wished that I’d been able to stay to hear all of them, but I had to leave early to get home to finish some work.

Research

My research this year revolved mostly around my young adult novel (well, now series) When the World Shivered. As I moved into a new genre – young adult – I needed to read up on young adult fiction. I realised how important plot and action are, and when I read Veronica Roth’s Divergent series I also realised that I wanted a strong female protagonist – not just mentally strong, but also physically strong. I want to show that people with disabilities are physically capable, but not necessarily in the ways we expect them to be.

Teaching and Workshops

The course that I taught at the University of Queensland was on Narrative. I really enjoyed teaching and my students were great. In classes I showed them how to take apart texts to see how the author had created particular effects with character or language, and facilitated workshopping that was (I hope!) sensitive and constructive.

I also presented a workshop for the Queensland Writers Centre at Goondiwindi on Writing Historical Fiction, which went very well. I was surprised though that there weren’t more participants, and I realised that I could have helped the QWC with their marketing, which I will do in future. The life of a writer is always a learning curve.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

I continued with my rewarding role as contributing editor in the area of diversity for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, which was established in 2012 to redress the bias in gender reviewing and raise awareness of Australian women’s writing.

I organised a spotlight on Australian women writers of ethnic heritage in May, which featured guest posts by author and graphic novelist Queenie Chan, Marisa Wikramanayake and Maxine Beneba Clarke.

Then in October I arranged a focus on lesbian/queer women writers, with posts by Francesca Rendle-Short, Lee Winter, Tricia Dearborn and Inga Simpson.

I was also pleased to feature a guest post by Gayle Kennedy, author of the wonderful and funny Me, Antman and Fleabag.

This year I’m planning to arrange a spotlight on writers with disability, as well as more posts by Indigenous writers.

The Year Ahead

My creative writing will probably slow down dramatically this year, as I’ll only be working on that for one day a week, on Sundays. However, from experience I’ll be a more efficient writer, as the less time I have, the more I do (which is why I like to keep myself under pressure!).

I’m planning to get back to my poems and to write a novella based on my experiences in Rome. I’m currently rewriting my memoir on Rosa and Maud Praed (it wasn’t working as it was too academic). That will be finished by Easter, and then I’ll return to The Sea Creatures. Frankly I can’t wait; I’ve missed that novel terribly. The draft for that should be finished by the end of 2016, and in 2017 I’ll return to When the World Shivered.

2016 is going to be busy and fabulous!

Finding Maud

Two years ago, I received a grant from Arts Queensland which gave me time to revisit my research on Rosa Praed and her deaf daughter Maud. I read the Murray-Prior papers in the National Library of Australia and combed Patricia Clarke’s biography, Rosa! Rosa! for references to Maud, who had been deaf since she was small. At age 28, Maud became destabilised by the fracturing of her family had a breakdown. She was admitted to Holloway Sanatorium in Surrey, and later transferred to St Ann’s at Canford Cliffs, near Poole. Clarke had written to the Sanatorium to ask for Maud’s medical records, but was informed that these were destroyed after 20 years. However, when I checked the National Archives database in the UK (which hadn’t yet been created when Clarke was writing her book), I found that they were still extant. I realised needed to go to England to find them.

When doing archival research from the other side of the world, you can pay a whack of money and get the archive’s employees to find documents for you, or you can pay even more money and get on a plane. It’s usually cheaper to get someone to make the copies, but then you risk not finding what you want. Control freaks with an eye for detail (and who liked collecting stamps when young) such as yours truly also prefer to do the work themselves. There is also serendipity in archival research: when you’re tootling among old papers, there’s more of a chance of making connections with pieces of information that you find on your way, and these connections throw up new ideas.

It was five and a half years since I had left England and returned to Australia after finishing my PhD. Until a few years before, I’d had nightmares about having to return to finish my thesis, and would wake with that familiar, sickening feeling of leaving my family behind yet again. So I was somewhat apprehensive about returning, but that feeling began to dissipate when I was met by my good friend C, who lived in Kent, and as I met up with other old friends in London. It was autumn, almost ten years to the day (20th September 2014) that I had boarded a plane to England for the first time to start my PhD, and the weather is rarely cruel in an English autumn.

We visited Knole, the book which inspired Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. I’d always wanted to go there with C while I was there, as she lived not far away, but we never got around to it. It was a grand but hollow building, and I wondered how they had ever kept warm.

A day later, I began my research at University College London’s Ear Institute and Action on Hearing Loss Library, located at the Royal National Ear Nose and Throat Hospital, which I’d often visited for checkups when I lived in London. I also knew the head librarian from having worked at UCL library, and that was nice too. I was specifically looking at the reports of Society for Training Teachers of the Deaf and for the Diffusion of the German System. They didn’t yield much that was interesting, although the librarian gave me a fascinating account of Benjamin St Ackers’ daughter, who had been taught to speak though she had been deaf since birth, and ended up very isolated and alone.

From London I caught a train to Leamington Spa, where some more old friends lived. One of these had been in our (predominantly Australian) bookclub, the Book Rangers. She now had two sprogs: a lively little boy who liked investigating things, and a newborn girl. The next day I caught a train to Birmingham, where the archives for the Society for Training Teachers for the Deaf (which was an amalgamation of the all teacher training colleges) were held at the Cadbury Research Library. Sadly, there was nothing in this lot, aside from some minor references to Benjamin St John Ackers.

I returned to London, and from there I went on to Woking.

‘You’re going to Woking!?’ a friend had exclaimed when I told him of my research plans over coffee at the Brisbane Writers Festival.

‘Yeah. What’s wrong with Woking?’

‘Woking’s awesome! It’s has a racing car track at a museum. Actually, it’s a Weybridge, but that’s not far away.’

‘Maybe I’ll just send you a postcard from Woking.’

He clocked the look on my face. ‘Yeah, do that. If cars aren’t your thing.’

Woking seemed a nice place, although overrun with chain stores, as are all the small towns in England, something that never failed to make me sad. I grabbed a coffee and some lunch from Pret, then caught a cab to the Surrey History Centre, which was housed in a municipal building. It was a plain, almost sterile building, at odds with the leather bound case notes which were handed to me.

I set up my camera and latptop, pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves to protect the case notes from the sweat on my skin, and opened the case notes. There was Maud, staring back at me, as well as a letter she had written to her doctor. The case notes, although not detailed, described her deterioration over about a decade.

I was beside myself, and this article I wrote for Meanjin describes why. I wandered back to the pub at which I was staying via a path beside a canal, dazed and triumphant.

A few days later, C very generously drove me to Canford Cliffs, where Maud's sanatorium was located. The building had been restored and it was beautiful, set among green lawns that slide down to the sea, but I wondered how it would have been in Maud's time. Gulls cried overhead. Maud wouldn't have been able to hear them, but she would have felt the sea breezes on her face.

I caught the train back to London and stayed with some good friends who live near Kensington Gardens, and who were also not far from one of the apartments Rosa Praed had lived in. I took myself for a walk through Holland Park to find it, stopping to marvel at the peacocks.

Then, after a gloriously sunny day in Bath with C, where we bought some dark blue suede boots from Duo Boots, it was time to leave. The Queensland election started while I was stepping onto the plane. When I flew into Brisbane, I wasn’t able to get my phone to work, so once I reached Customs I bailed up the first officer I could find.

‘Who won the election?’ I asked him.

‘They’re still counting, but it looks like it might be Labor.’

‘That’s brilliant!’ I exclaimed. Campbell Newman, an arrogant and selfish politician who, in his first act of parliament, had binned the Premier’s Literary Awards, had also squandered his majority by treating Queenslanders like trash.

He turned over my card and read my occupation. ‘So, you’re a writer. That’d be right.’

I laughed, loudly. It was good to be home.