Review of Comfort Food

When Ellen van Neerven’s first book Heat and Light came out a few years ago, I fell in love with its gorgeous writing, sensuality, and interesting structure. I was pleased, then, to see that she’d put out a book of poems, Comfort Food, and used my Avid Reader points to buy a copy. I felt like I should have read the poems over a nicely-prepared curry, but I was interstate on a train (thin books and e-readers are good for travelling) and shovelled chilli-and-lime soy twists into my mouth. For someone who rarely lets herself eat junk food, they were good.

And the poems were good too: sometimes rich and chewable, sometimes dainty morsels, sometimes strange in one’s mouth, sometimes nourishing, and always delightful.

In ‘Pasta’, the warmth of a bowl of pasta is conveyed through the narrator’s consideration: ‘When my parents come to stay/I sneak out across the road/to the bathroom at McDonald’s/so I don’t wake them’; for a mother’s kindness for her daughter: ‘Mum hems my jeans/while I’m at work’; for the familiarity of family: ‘we read to each other in the car/condensation at our feet’. It’s a simple, heartening poem.

Food and sensuality go hand-in-hand, in life and poetry. In ‘Smoking Chutney’ the narrator is on the dance floor ‘just to get a closer look. Those/hips, yes. That flank. Her hair fragrant and viral. The band/also her. The beat mortar and pestle. She’s pushing down,/grinding those spices in the air’. Body, music, smell and taste become one.

But food and sex are not all comfort in a racist country. In ‘Chips’ the narrator is ‘tired with what’s unmentioned/idling in surf club bathrooms’, while that which is unspoken can be just as harmful as what is spoken: ‘what is happening with the dialogue of this country/they are killing people with words’ (21). In ‘Invisible Spears’ I was glad to read the lines ‘the tiddling fear/of invisible spears’ because I was pissed off with the overreaction to Adam Goode’s war cry: we put up with aggression from white men all the time, but can’t cope with it in black men? Jesus.

My favourite story in Heat and Light was ‘Water’, about a narrator who falls in love with a plant person. One of the things I liked about the story were its oceanic elements, and these watery associations were what I loved in ‘Meteorite’ too. This poem describes our lack of care for the environment:

The planet

is built for sea-living

but we do not pay

these creatures due respect

the porpoises

            are merely pig fish

the reef

            is a public art gallery

People mourn the passing of the reef because it’s beautiful and they don’t think their kids will be able to see it (and at the rate we’re going, it’s unlikely they will), but it’s also an incredible ecosystem that supports a vast number of animals. If we recognised that rather than seeing it as a place for visual consumption, perhaps more would be concerned for its welfare.

The sea is linked with the image of a meteorite, plunging into the poem in the opening line: ‘Your name changes when you land/on earth. What you were is now/your past.’ and it returns to the meteor at the end:

sometimes you stare

at the sky

and wish to be

what you were:

a meteor

The play with tenses suggests that we have no recourse but to exist as we are in the present, although it’s not always a nice place to be. However we carry the memory of what we were: something otherworldly, burning bright, crashing and transforming.

This is my first review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. Due to starting a new job, travelling and moving house, it’s an even later start than last year – but better that than never!

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 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 Anchor Point

I grew up on a property in northwest NSW. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I remember my grandmother, who had raised her sons on that piece of land, saying, ‘We use to have such gentle rain. None of these mad storms that we have now.’ This would have been 1990 or 1991. In primary school my brother and I did projects on the greenhouse effect, and I remember the publication date of the book we pored over: 1982. And yet here we are, 25 years later, still squabbling over climate change in Paris.

We live on one of the driest continents on earth, and climate change is already increasing the intensity of droughts and bushfires. Alice Robinson’s debut novel, Anchor Point, which spans from 1984 to 2018, reflects this.

After negotiating some confusion at the opening, which was crowded with people, I was pulled into the work by Robinson’s characters, particularly the protagonist, Laura. When her mother disappears, Laura and her sister are forced to help their father run the farm, which means permanent exhaustion. Laura’s father is a hard man, probably from necessity. When her sister, debilitated by hayfever, pleads for a break from fencing, his face is ‘horribly devoid of warmth’ and he refers to her as a ‘precious invalid’ (58). Vik escapes when she finishes school, but Laura, without ambition, adjusts to the hard life and works beside her father. I recognised in her the women I’d grown up around, so strong that when her estranged husband Luc returns and tries to hold her, she ‘yanked free. Too strong for a woman, she thought later’ (219). But only if you believe in censoring our lives along the line of gender.

As Laura works, she develops a deep love for the country. At one stage she follows in her sisters footsteps and tries to live in the city, with some access to the natural world through managing her husband’s nursery. However her longing to be back on the land eventually draws her away, even though it breaks her heart and she is later ‘maddened by the brutal sum of what she had lost’ (219).

Different attitudes to land management is one of the core themes of the work. Laura’s father clears all the trees on their property so they can run sheep. Laura, attentive to the changes this creates, ‘sensed the land growing quiet. There were fewer birds’ (52). When out walking with her Aboriginal friend Joseph, they pass a group of Aboriginal women, one of whom is laughing, ‘the mirth on her face … so absolute that Laura came to a stop. How long it had been since she’d seen a smile that big’ (53). After prodding Joseph, however, she finds that they are laughing at her father’s venture.

Soon enough, the country is no joke. After a bushfire comes a drought, one made relentless by climate change. The treeless land creates erosion: ‘Without roots to sew soil, the fabric of the earth had torn’ (180). The house becomes a raft ‘they clung to in the midst of a big, dead sea’ (178).

These threads are tied in a poignant moment in which Luc, Laura’s husband from the city, recognises a canoe tree next to the house on the farm. Earlier in the novel, Laura and Joseph had bonded over this tree, which Aborigines once used to make their canoes.

When Luc recognises the tree, Laura, rattled by its association with Joseph, snaps, “Where on earth would anyone canoe ‘round here?” to which Luc replies, “Didn’t you say something about a lake? … A dam?”

The dam had dried, and so did the river which took Laura’s mother. In the bushfires that razed the country, the tree had survived, but Laura muses, “What else had burned up?” (200).

The unspoken answer is the bond and knowledge Aboriginal people have for the land. At the end of the novel, Joseph asks to buy part of Laura’s land so his people can have access to it. The implication, I thought, was that he could only have the land once it was no longer useful to white people.

Professor Stephen Hopper, a former director of Kew Gardens now at the University of Western Australia, has written about how ‘attempts to shoehorn understanding into mainstream Northern Hemisphere thinking and world view remains the starting point for concepts of environmental management, only reluctantly giving way to a truly antipodean perspective when all else seems to fail.’ This is also apparent in Margaret Merilees’ novel The First Week, which opens with the protagonist contemplating the salt-ridden soil which has been returned to Noongars, the Indigenous people of south west Western Australia. We need, as Ellen van Neerven writes in her fantastic essay on climate change, a ‘multi-nation’ approach to climate, one that uses Indigenous knowledge instead of turning to it as a last resort. After all, as Alexis Wright writes in Carpentaria, ‘Can someone who did not grow up in a place that is sometimes under water, sometimes bone-dry, know when the trade winds blowing off the southern and northern hemispheres will merge in summer? Know the moment of climactic change better than they know themselves? (3).

Australia has been ranked third-last in terms of the climate change performance of 58 countries. With mostly white, male politicians setting the agenda in Paris and Australia, it makes me despair. We need to listen to the voices of Aboriginal people if we are to make any headway in staving off the more catastrophic effects of climate change.

Laura’s mention of what is lost through fire is a segue into the final section of the novel, set in 2018, in which Laura tries to redress her father’s damage to the land by replanting the trees. This was the saddest part of the book for me, probably because Laura, too, was sad. Her mother was a disappointment, and the land, for which Laura had given up her life and her relationship, never flourished with her father’s ill-suited European farming practices. Nor does she find romantic fulfilment with Joseph, who had adored her since they were young. ‘If only they had kept in touch, Laura thought, things might now be different. But what might have been seemed long gone, with the rain’ (247). Is this a metaphor for what’s happening with our environment, and with black and white relations in Australia?

This, and the ending, with bushfire closing in on Melbourne and Vik’s apartment block threatening to overheat like a greenhouse, is a warning that we must redress things now, before it’s too late. Politicians may not listen – Australia’s certainly don’t – but writers do, and they reflect the quiet hum of anxiety among us.

This is my 6th 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.

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.

Review of Me, Antman and Fleabag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

2014: My Year of Reading

2014 was the year I discovered GoodReads, and now I can’t imagine how I was keeping track of my reading without it. In fact, I don’t think I was at all. Last year’s list of the books I read was compiled from memory, but I don’t think my mind can encompass that this year. According to GoodReads (bless ‘em) I read 71 books, which is 9 more than last year. 

I read and reviewed slightly fewer books for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (read 42 and reviewed 10 in 2014, as opposed to reading 43 and reviewing 14 in 2013), but I also increased the time I gave to the Challenge by organising guests authors, giveaways and interviews (more of this in a soon-to-be posted post on my year of writing). Given my hectic schedule, I’m aiming to read and review roughly the same number this year, but I’m also signing up to the 2015 South Asian Women Writers Challenge. This was prompted by a Twitter conversation with a lady who pointed out that there was only one woman on a list of 10 award-winning books by Asian writers which I had re-posted in my feed, and I realised my own ignorance about our neighbouring women writers.

The standout book for my year was Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists, a story about a woman brutalised in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Malaysia, who, once she’s free, creates a Japanese garden as an act of penance. The writing was crisp and restrained, the story symbolic and suspenseful. The setting, in the Cameron highlands of Malaysia, was familiar, as we holidayed there when I turned 14 (another overseas birthday, this one in a hotel in Malacca with a cake from a bakery), but richly detailed.

Close on the heels of this was Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, which I loved for its sensuality, and also because I’d read nothing like it before. And Kristell Thornell’s Night Street about artist Clarice Beckett (although I read it in 2013, I reviewed it last year), which was a poignant, moving book.

Other fantastic reads (in no order) were Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch for its dense and luscious prose; Diane Cook’s uneasy, dystopian stories in Man V. Nature; Nicola Griffith’s Hild, a lengthy historical fiction novel about a smart and perceptive girl who used her brains for power in a Christianising England; Donna McDonald’s indispensable memoir The Art of Being Deaf; Nike Sulway’s speculative fiction novel Rupetta for its originality and sadness; the quiet, contained and peculiar Traitor by Stephen Daisley, about an old New Zealand soldier; Inga Simpson’s tender Mr Wigg, which had a slow and cumulative power; Barbara Kingsolver’s climate change novel Flight Behaviour which every man, woman & household pet should read; and Andrew McGahan’s novels Wonders of a Godless World and Underground. McGahan is the kind of novelist I aspire to be: he’s not afraid to try new genres, and each time he does so masterfully. 

Below is the complete list of my the books I read, more for my own records than for the assumption that anyone will be interested (!)

Australian Women Writers Challenge – books reviewed

1.    Heat and Light, Ellen Van Neerven 

2.    Ghost Wife: A Memoir of Love and Defiance, Michelle Dicinoski

3.    The First Week, Margaret Merrilees

4.    Snake, Kate Jennings

5.    The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir, Donna McDonald

6.    Rupetta, Nike Sulway

7.    Thornwood House, Anna Romer

8.    Kayang and Me, Kim Scott    

9.    The Singing Gold, Dorothy Cottrell

10. Night Street, Kristel Thornell (read in 2013)

Australian Women Writers Challenge – books read

11.    The Women in Black, Madeleine St. John

12.    Foreign Soil, Maxine Beneba Clarke

13.    The Etched City, K.J. Bishop

14.    Resurrection, P.A. McDermott

15.    Beams Falling, P.M. Newton

16.    A Kindness Cup, Thea Astley

17.    Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, Jane Rawson

18.I for Isobel, Amy Witting

19.    Amy's Children, Olga Masters

20.Dancing on Coral, Glenda Adams

21.    The Ark, Annabel Smith

22.Madness: a Memoir, Kate  Richards

23.All the Birds, Singing, Evie Wyld

24.When the Night Comes, Favel Parrett

25.The Good Daughter, Honey Brown

26.Red Queen, Honey Brown

27.Darkness on the Edge of Town, Jessie Cole

28.Nest, Inga Simpson

29.The Seal Woman, Beverley Farmer

30.The Disappearance of Ember Crow, Ambelin Kwaymullina

31. The Great Unknown, Angela Meyer

32.Anguli Ma, a Gothic Tale, Chi Vu

33.The Romance of a Station, Rosa Praed

34.Unpolished Gem, Alice Pung

35.Camera Obscura, Kathryn Lomer

36.The Bride Price, Cat Sparks

37.An Australian Heroine, R Murray Prior

38.The Watch Tower, Elizabeth Harrower

39.The Swan Book, Alexis Wright

40.Mr Wigg, Inga Simpson

41. Policy and Passion, Rosa Praed

42.My Beautiful Enemy, Cory Taylor

43.Red Dirt Talking, Jacqueline Wright

Other Australian books:

44.To Name Those Lost, Rohan Wilson

45.Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas

46.Traitor, Stephen Daisley

47.The Weaver Fish, Robert Edeson

48.Over the Water, William  Lane

49.The Tribe, Michael Mohammed Ahmad

50.Wonders of a Godless World, Andrew McGahan

51. Underground, Andrew McGahan

52.The Roving Party, Rohan Wilson

53.The Local Wildlife, Robert Drewe

Other international books:

54.We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler

55.The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

56.Watership Down, Richard Adams

57.Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves, James Nestor

58.The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

59.Man V. Nature: Stories, Diane Cook

60.Hild, Nicola Griffith

61. How to Build a Girl, Caitlin Moran

62.Nora Webster, Colm Toibin

63.Daniel Deronda, George Eliot

64.The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón

65.Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

66.Don't Cry, Mary Gaitskill

67.Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

68.Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Julie Maroh

69.The Lover, Marguerite Duras

70.The Mermaid Chair, Sue Monk Kidd

71.  My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell

72.The Garden of Evening Mists, Twan Eng Tan