2017: My Year of Writing

Even workaholics need to have fallow years if they are to continue functioning well. 2017 was such a year for me, as I needed to pull back after nearly killing myself in 2016 (when I hadn’t even properly recovered from 2015). I finally finished my memoir while I was on hols in Croatia, and while I might still have to do one more draft, it’s been a huge load off my shoulders. I was still unwell for most of the year, but the colds & flu weren’t as intense. And now, after a few weeks off over Xmas, I’m full of beans again. Long may it last! Below is a list of my literary doings over the past year.

Cockies on the Gold Coast

Publications

I had more academic work than creative pieces published this year, which makes sense as all my time is taken up by being an academic. If I do write fiction, it’s on the weekends, or bashed out the night before my writing group’s deadline.

At the beginning of the year, my essay on the craft of Georgiana Molloy’s writing was published in Claiming Space: Australian Women’s Writing. I started writing this essay in Rome at the end of 2014! This was followed in October by an essay on eco-memoir in Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, in which I compared Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me with Tim Winton’s Island Home.

Just before Christmas, the Journal for the Association of Australian Studies published my essay on John Molloy’s (Georgiana’s husband) involvement in a massacre against Wardandi Noongars, and the subsequent papering over of this in later accounts. Writing this paper was hard work: it took hours to piece together a timeline of what had happened, as well as the debate over the events that resurfaced in later histories, and to attend to the language that was used in covering up what had happened. I was glad when it was finished.

In each of these volumes or issues, my work sat alongside that of other wonderful scholars, and I am really grateful to the editors for publishing my work.

In August I was Southerly journal’s monthly blogger, publishing four posts (one each week) about writing, deafness and environment. You can read them all via the links on this page. In October my eight-word story was featured on a billboard courtesy of the Queensland Writers Centre. That was pretty exciting!

I was pretty dismayed, once I got to the end of the year, to realise I hadn’t published any creative work (aside from said billboard), but then I remembered I’d finished my memoir. Fingers crossed that it gets somewhere this year.

UQ Ferry

Awards/Funding

I was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize again, this time for ‘Depths Exceeded’, which is a small part of my mermaid book. I’m still trying to find a home for it; I’ll get there eventually.

I continued with my study on vernacular criticism, for which I received funding at the end of last year, and will have this written up by March. It turned out to be a much bigger project than I anticipated and is eating up a bit of time. While it’s something that engages me intellectually, it isn’t a topic I’m downright passionate about, which is problematic. I remember one of my supervisors telling me that when you choose a PhD topic, it has to be something you’re obsessed with if your interest is going to carry you over three years. The same holds, it seems, for any kind of project. Still, it’s a good short-term study, and I’m finding I’m applying some of the research methods I learnt as a research assistant at Autism Queensland, which is a boon.

Gum blossoms!

Teaching

In the second half of the year, I was course convener for Women Writers, the subject I tutored in last year. This was a very steep learning curve – a little hairy at times – but it was ultimately very rewarding. The books I set were: Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Joyce Carol Oate’s Foxfire, Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Gillian Mear’s Foal’s Bread, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Helen Oyeymi’s White is for Witching. The students responded well to all these books except for The Golden Notebook (and some were a bit mystified by The Lesbian Body). Although The Golden Notebook was revolutionary when it came out, it held little meaning for them now. I wonder how or why that matters; Jane Eyre is poles apart from the experience of women in the 21st century but readers are still enraptured by it. Perhaps it was the form of the novel, which made it hard to digest, whereas Jane Eyre is a fairly conventional romance. Aside from this it was really heartening when students told me they enjoyed the books because they were works they wouldn’t usually encounter.

I tutored a class alongside the lectures, and as with last year I loved my students – they were confident, intelligent and outspoken. But by the end of the year I was in my usual haze of fatigue because of the toll of straining to listen and to lecture (every lecture is a performance). I think most people are knackered by the end of the year anyway, and the holidays straightened me out.

As well as the lectures for Women Writers, I also delivered one on Position Doubtful for the third-year Australian studies course. This year I’ll be lecturing on James Bradley’s Clade and Tim Winton’s Island Home for this same course, but I won’t be doing any other teaching as I need to devote myself to finishing my ecobiography.

Flowers at Kew Gardens

Conferences and Supervision

In February I presented on Liptrot’s The Outrun at a conference on excess and desire at The University of Queensland. In London in June, I presented on a digital example of ecobiography, Queensland artist Pat Hoffie’s ground trothing. In retrospect this was not a great example of ecobiography but I was trying to align it with the conference’s focus on digital life writing narratives. Still, I enjoyed being back in London, thought the conference was absolutely fantastic, and met some great Aussie writers and academics, including Ellena Savage and Nicole Matthews, who presented a very memorable paper on hearing air reviews.

From England I flew to Croatia and presented at the European Society for Environmental History conference in Zagreb (preceded by a field trip to Kornati National Park near Zadar). This was the first history conference I had ever been to. I presented a similar paper to that which I’d delivered in Perth the year before, on ecotones, but my paper, I found after some rather harrowing comments from the audience, was not up to scratch (no one likes getting criticism, but having to receive it in a public forum is way worse). Once I recovered from that experience and was able to examine the comments with equanimity, I realised they were constructive. I’m intending to present at the environmental history conference in Canberra this year and to do a better job.

As soon as I arrived back in Brisbane I turned around and went down to the Gold Coast to present on Molloy and ecobiography at a conference on Literary Environments. This was not a very smart move as I was shattered from jetlag, but I couldn’t bear to miss it because Ursuala Heise gave a keynote and a workshop, both of which were amazing.

I capped off the year with a paper on Georgiana Molloy’s participation in botanical connoisseurship – the rage for exotics collected by Europeans and grown in their gardens – for a conference on the Nature and Spaces of Enlightenment. I really enjoyed this conference as well but I was completely wrung out from the year, so I couldn’t make it to all the sessions.

Throughout the year I also took on the supervision of four creative writing students, three doing MPhils and one a PhD. I found this unexpectedly rewarding, as I could chat to them about their ideas and help them with their critical essays. I also supervised a wonderful third-year student who wrote a brilliant essay on young adult novels and their representation of deafness. Aside from my research, supervision is one of the satisfying parts of my job.

Kornati National Park, Croatia

Research

I used my funding to fly to the UK and comb through the archives relating to Mangles and his contemporaries. This was a great trip but it was jam-packed and involved zig-zagging up the country from south to north. I like travelling and the distances didn’t faze me, but I could have done with a more leisurely pace. My next big task over this month and next is to collate and transcribe everything so that I’m ready to write in March, as well as writing up the rest of my trip (it's happening, but v.e.r.y s.l.o.w.l.y).

V cool plants in the UNESCO Stari Grad Plains, Croatia

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

I put the ball for AWW on the shelf last year as I had too much going on, but managed to co-ordinate guest posts from lesbian/queer authors (Kelly Gardiner; Eden S. French; Jess Davidson; and my own thoughts on the themes that have appeared in guest posts by lesbian/queer women writers), and authors with disability (Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench, editors of Defying Doomsday; and Anna Spargo-Ryan). This year I’m picking up the baton from Marisa Wikramanayake and am going back to bi-monthly roundups, as well as the usual guest posts. This year, the theme for NAIDOC is ‘Because of her, we can!’ so I really want to feature more posts from Indigenous women writers.

BrisVegas rainforest

The Year Ahead

I have tried not to take on too much this year as I need to focus on finishing my ecobiography, but already there are quite a few pots on the stove. Aside from the two lectures which I need to write and present, and my vernacular criticism study to complete and write up, I’m co-ordinating, with Clare-Archer Lean from the University of the Sunshine Coast, two panels on the interface between science and literature at the annual literature conference in Canberra in July, as well as subsequent publication of these papers in the Australian Humanities Review. I'm also giving a workshop on Writing Animals and Their Worlds for the Queensland Writers Centre on Saturday 28th April.

On top of this I need to prepare a fellowship application for gainful employment next year, as my contract ends in January 2019. I think I had pretty much better say ‘no’ to anything else that comes into my inbox this year.

Health-wise I am determined to start running again, with the aim of doing a half-marathon in August, and of getting out of the city into bush more often. Exercise and the environment will help ameliorate my stress. I’m also casting about for some kind of hobby, instead of working all through the weekend. I think dancing, drawing and going to the movies are back on the cards. Well, time to dive into 2018!

Everything is going to be ok if there are peonies in the world.

#8WordStory

Those on the Queensland feeds might have come across #8WordStory, a project organised by the awesome folk at the Queensland Writers Centre to put eight word stories on billboards across Brisbane.

It was October when the call first went out and I was swooning, as I do every year, over the purple bliss of Brisbane’s jacarandas.

So I penned a paean to purple & lo! it was selected to be shown across town. I did not get a lot of work done that day because I was glued to the webcams, thus:

The #8WordStory project is on for another fortnight or so. Head to the QWC website and submit, & you might see your name up in orange lights! Trust me, it’s pretty darn exciting. And here's another jacaranda pic for the heck of it.

On Deafness & Creating a Living

Yesterday I gave my last lecture for the year, on Position Doubtful, a marvelous book about author Kim Mahood’s attempts to reconcile white and Indigenous modes of representing the Australian desert. We are also in the National Week of Deaf People, so I thought it worthwhile to pen some thoughts on teaching and writing as a deaf person.

This was the fifth lecture I had written in as many months. I always underestimate how long they take to put together, and how long they need to be – about 6,000 words, because I speak fast. As I walked to the ferry after work I did the calculations and realised that, instead of those lectures, I could have had a third of a book written by now. I put that thought out of my head, because I enjoy teaching. It forces me to explore new ideas, I like the buzz of interacting with students in my tutorials, and it makes me a better scholar and writer because I’m studying texts in detail and examining how they are put together. This course, which was on Women Writers, also gave me an opportunity to discuss topics that are meaningful to me: feminism, the environment and disability, among others. I also organised a series of marvellous guest lecturers - Melissa Fagan, Marianne de Pierres, Shamara Ransirini, Marg Henderson and Caitlin Francis - who were passionate thinkers and writers about female authorship and the conditions that shape it.

Speculative fiction author Marianne de Pierres giving a lecture on Octavia Butler's Fledgling, with a poltergeist overhead.

However, for someone like me with little hearing, who is conducting lessons through speaking and listening rather than sign language, teaching is much more demanding than for someone with all their hearing. Giving a lecture is a performance which takes physical and mental energy, and tutorials are even more difficult. I need to use all my energy to listen, lipread, and work out where voices are coming from, although my students are very good and raise their hands to get my attention. My FM is helpful, but I still need to be on my toes to get everything. If the class had been any larger I might have been able to ask for additional help through an aide, but as it was I was able to get by.

I knew teaching would wear me out, but I agreed to convene the course this semester because I need the experience – if I can’t find another research-focussed job when my contract ends, I’ll need to get a regular academic job which does involve teaching. It’s not the best option, but it might be the only one. Besides, academia is a nice way of paying the bills and satisfying my craving for new ideas, and if exhaustion comes with that, it’s just a price I pay. I could find a job that doesn’t need much hearing & which bores me, but for someone who finds boredom stressful, this is not a good option.

Lecturer & tutor Shamara Ransirini (far right) chairing a panel on intersectionality at the Brisbane Writers Festival.

I’ve been thinking about these things, and the kind of options available to me and other deaf folk in terms of creating a living, because a while ago I was approached by Connect Hearing to describe my career path into writing and academia. I became a writer because I loved reading and I was good at English, and I needed some way of expressing the frustration and loneliness of being deaf in a hearing world. Being a writer never brings in enough cash, though, so I needed another job to survive, and academia allows me to continue to write, although in different forms.

I was really interested to read of the other pathways for creative deaf people mentioned in Connect Hearing’s interviews. Many of these are physical, focusing on the body and its expression, such as Vulcana Women’s Circus, Riverside Theatres and Bust a Move. QArt Studio in Kew, Melbourne, offers support and training to artists, while HoneyBee Creations enables deaf people to explore and participate in creative arts. I identified with many of these options and the comments made by their representatives – I love dance and moving my body; I like making art with my hands because I don’t have to listen and I can focus entirely on what’s before me; and, as I have written many times before, deafness is inherently creative because it forces you to problem-solve and think laterally. So I identified, too, with Lisa Miller of HoneyBee Creations when she described herself as someone who thinks outside the box. I particularly appreciated her comments on staying positive, and focusing on what you are good at. I think this would apply to anyone, whether with a disability or not.

I have a lull next week before my marking comes in, during which I’m going to catch up on my research, and then I’m going to Melbourne to see the Dior exhibition. After all that hard work, surely some frocks must be on the agenda!  

Incubating Writers

Nearly four years ago, I answered a call out from writer Michelle Vlatkovic, via the Queensland Writers Centre, for members to form a writers group. I’d been in Brisbane for a few years but was finding it hard to meet other writers. I walked into Avid Reader to find Michelle waiting for me at a table, a copy of the story I’d sent on the table before her. As we chatted over coffee, I found that Michelle hadn’t followed the now-standard approach of going to uni to study creative writing, but had immersed herself in community radio and not-for-profit organisations. Her writing was striking in its unconventionality - abstract but full of heart at the same time.

Since that meeting the group has grown and shrunk as people come and go but we still have four core members – Michelle, myself, Pamela Greet and Rose Anderson. Pam has just finished a PhD in creative writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast and has a wry, quiet but incisive way of writing, and Rose’s tiny fiction is off-the-wall and marvelous.

The group has grown us as writers. One of the first stories Michelle and I workshopped made its way into Griffith Review. With feedback from others (including, at one point, artist and writer Julie Kearney) my story Old Honey was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and published in adda. Michelle’s work has been published in the Review of Australian Fiction, Southerly and Gargouille. Rose’s work has been read on Quart Short  and published in a fine line, The School Magazine and 4th Floor Journal.

We haven’t met much in the last year because I fell off my horse with full-time academia and Michelle and Pam have started an exciting new venture, Salon REaD.

In response to difficulty of finding publication in literary journals, which usually only have a select readership and are highly competitive, Salon REaD showcases the work of artists and writers in the Brisbane community. It’s about growing audiences and gaining exposure at a grassroots level. Michelle and Pam have hosted a couple of salons over the past year and it’s working: the audiences are expanding, artists are selling their work and writers are finding their feet. Poet Nic Addenbrooke for example, who read at the last salon, is part of this year’s Queensland Poetry Festival.

This Saturday I’ll be reading at Salon REaD5 with Pam and Stefan Jatschka. Artist Manu, whose chalk art is at the Burrow in West End, will exhibit his work. Music will be performed by Nigel Kimber Llewellyn of the Dustbin Hoffmans.

Art by Manu.

The salon will be held at 59 Ekibin Road Annerley, and entry is by a gold coin donation to community radio station 4ZZZ. Performances and readings at the salon will also be recorded for broadcast on 4ZZZ. Hope to see you there!

On Science Communication

A few weeks back I presented at a symposium at UQ hosted by the Translational Research in Creative Practice group, which explores how creative practice can translate complex research in the humanities into the public realm. It borrows this idea from the medical sciences, which translates knowledge created in the lab to everyday environments – the phrase used to describe this is ‘bench-to beside’, which I like. I signed up to present on writing an ecobiography, because I’m interested in how writers can use their craft to convey science, and I think it's imperative to transmit knowledge from the academy to the public.

Last year I presented at the inaugural Quantum Words Science Writing festival hosted by the NSW Writers’ Centre, where I met plenty of wonderful writers, including poet Carol Jenkins who wrote the marvellous Fishing in the Devonian, and Indigenous writer Tony Birch, who is doing interesting and important work on colonialism and climate change, looking at how the resilience of Indigenous communities surviving colonialism might educate people on how to negotiate the increasing instability which climate change brings. I also caught up with my pal Cat Sparks, a spec fic writer who has just published Lotus Blue and who makes every occasion entertaining, even when she’s talking about the coming environmental Armageddon (which really is on its way, although Cat maintains we’ll be killed by robots first).

At this festival, Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty gave a marvelous keynote. He expressed his ideas clearly and had a very good sense of humour, which was a balm for everyone’s depression about the US election and the implications of this for our climate. He mentioned how one of the difficulties about communicating science is that science is about quantifying uncertainty and is therefore conservative in its analysis, whereas journalism, which relies on headlines on to sell its news (at least in these days of clickbaiting), is more interested in dramatisation (these are not his exact words, but the gist of them - I had to consult ecologist-philospher-b/f for clarification).

Another part of the difficulty in communicating science is confirmation bias: the more emotionally charged an issue is, the more people will interpret information (especially ambiguous information) in favour of their beliefs.

So, what to do?

Jamie Freestone, a literature PhD student at UQ, talks about the need for making science fun, and points to the success of the World Science Festival in Brisbane. He also mentions films such as Interstellar, and I would also add that docos such as David Attenborough’s Earth II can raise awareness, although Attenborough was criticised for creating an ‘escapist wildlife fantasy’ in which‘worldwide mass extinction is simply not happening’.

I’m a bit disappointed that Freestone didn’t mention literature, however, especially as this is his field of focus.

And mine too. While entertainment has its place, I also believe in seduction, in pulling the reader into a text through imagery, language, plot and character. And this is what I’m trying to do in my ecobiography, as I explained in my presentation. The impetus for writing the book is to raise awareness of the South West Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) which is one of 25 biodiversity hotspots around the world (and the only one in Australia), by rendering the lives of the plants Georgiana Molloy collected. I’m following them from the south-west at the time she collected them in the 1830s, to England, where they were distributed by James Mangles, a plant middleman, and then back to the south-west to see how they’re faring now. This forms the book’s plot. The characters are Georgiana and the Noongars with whom she interacted, the botanist Mangles to whom she sent his specimens, and his acquaintances, among whom he distributed Georgiana's’s specimens.

The plants, too, are characters, with different colours and textures, and ways of trapping and acquiring food, and responding to air and light. Through rendering them, I’m trying to explain that they are as just as important as humans. In a traditional biography, a human is the focus of the work, but in an eco-biography, the non-human is of equal significance. My premise is that, if we want to have a life, we need to write the lives that support us. And language is of the utmost importance in this respect - through it, I show readers the beauty and vitality of plants.

I’m nearly halfway through the project, and soon I’m heading to England to do research on Mangles and his botanical buddies, which will require much trawling through archives. Hopefully I’ll have time to post as I go, but if not, I’ll be updating my Instagram and Facebook author pages fairly often, in case you want to see what I uncover of 19th century science!

2016: My Year of Writing

This past year has been like being flattened by a freight train, and I’m only just now picking myself up and straightening out my limbs. After being perpetually unwell for pretty much twelve months due to stress and working too hard, I have resolved to do something about my work-life balance this year and to stop working on weekends. That is kind of happening, which is good, but hence the lateness of this post. Anyways, here are my literary doings for 2016.

Publications

In July my short story ‘Melliodora’ was published alongside William Lane’s ‘Vivienne’s Fingers’ in the Review of Australian Fiction. I’ve always loved Bill’s writing and was very happy to be working alongside him with this issue. It was a short piece, but most of my creative work seems to be like that of late, probably because my time is so compressed.

In August, my short story ‘Unfurling’ was published in Griffith Review. I’d been working on this story for nearly two decades so I was really glad it found a home!

I also read an extract of the work at the Powerhouse at an event organised by Griffith Review, which was a wonderful evening.

In November, my short story ‘Old Honey’, which was shortlisted for the 2015Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize, was published on adda. I worked with Grenada-born writer Jacob Ross, a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, to edit the piece, which was illuminating.

Also in November, my essay on Rosa Praed and her deaf daughter Maud was published in the Sydney Review of Books. I love this journal – their essayists are splendid and the editor Catriona Menzies-Pike has been commissioning really interesting work – so I was delighted to be published on their pages.

My essay on Dorothy Cottrell, an artist and writer from the Queensland outback who spent her life in a wheelchair, was also published in Queensland Review. One day, when I eventually find some time, I’ll expand this research into a book.

Awards/Funding

As I have funding to write my ecobiography for another two years I haven’t been seeking any extra cash – instead, I’m trying to save what I earn so that I can write for a few years once my postdoc finishes. However I was successful in winning an internal grant at the university to do a study on gender and vernacular criticism. This will pay for a research assistant to look at stats and compare the content of written reviews with online reviews.

In terms of awards, my short story ‘Black Soil’ was also longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story prize. I would have liked to have entered more competitions but there just wasn’t enough time.

Teaching

In the second half of last year I was a tutor for a course on women writers convened by Professor Carole Ferrier. This was one of the best classes I’ve ever taught, covering books such as Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. My students responded really well to the texts, as well as being motivated, politically savvy and articulate. I was hugely impressed with all of them. In the second half of this year I’ll be convening this course, though with slightly different texts.

Conferences and Presentations

In July I attended the annual conference for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature at Canberra. Usually I love these conferences but I was a bit too stressed this time around as I was moving house and, having turned into a wussy Queenslander, the cold rain really got me down.

At the end of the year I was in much sunnier climes in Sydney, where I was delighted to take part in a symposium on Nineteenth Century Australian women’s writing.

I also presented a paper on ecobiography at the bi-annual ASLEC-ANZ environmental humanities conference, then headed to Fremantle for the International Australian Studies Association conference. Where the paper I presented in Canberra was on violent clashes between Noongars and white colonists, this paper was on the positive interactions between them.

Another highlight was presenting on Georgiana Molloy at the inaugural Science Writing Festival at the NSW Writers’ Centre.

Research

My research was huge this year, consisting of background reading on environment, literature and Aboriginal relationships to Country, as well as archival research. I made two trips to Western Australia. For the first I was based in Perth, copying archives about the colonisation of the south west by Europeans. For the second I was travelling around the south west of Western Australia to get an idea of the country through which Molloy moved. This year I’m travelling to England to look at the archives of the men to whom her specimens were distributed, and I’ll also head up to Scotland as Georgiana spent time there with her friends and I want to get a sense of the environment which formed her impressions of landscape. In all this I have been aided by Bernice Barry’s comprehensive biography The Mind That Shines, which is a fantastic resource.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

Sadly, after five years, this was my last year as editor of diversity for the AWW Challenge. I’ve been too pressed for time and am trying to cut back on the amount of work that I’m doing. I coordinated a focus on Australian women writers with disability, and another one on Australian women writers of migrant background, and also arranged an interview with Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko. I came to know some lovely writers through this, including poet Eileen Chong and fiction writer Michelle Cahill. I was already familiar with Melissa Lucashenko, Lee Kofman, Gaele Sobott and Amanda Tink and it was great to talk to them further as I coordinated the posts. I also penned my thoughts on fiction for young readers with disability.

The Year Ahead

Gosh, well, we’re already into February! After feedback from my brother and writer friends in November, I realised that my draft of Hearing Maud was dull & still too academic, and that I had to rewrite it (for the fifth time). I spent all of Christmas & New Year working on it, and now I only need another week to edit it. Then I’m going to let it fallow for a bit so that I can return to it with fresh eyes and do one final draft. As my time was so constrained this year, trying to get this book across the finishing line has been ridiculous.

The two books for which I won OzCo grants, The Sea Creatures and When the World Shivered, are going to have to wait until I’m done with the postdoc. I didn’t get to my poems, as I had wanted to, but I'm still planning on writing a novella based on my experiences in Rome. Often, I wish there were two of me as there’s so much I want to write and no time to get to it, and sometimes I feel like I’m going mad. In the meantime, though, there is my ecobiography, which is going well and which is a delight to research and write.

And hopefully I'll get some time to relax, as my writing companion Hudson demonstrates admirably.

Australian Women's Writing: A Retrospective

Earlier this year, I was approached by Dr Anne Jamison of the University of Western Sydney to see if I was interested in writing an essay on Rosa Praed for the Sydney Review of Books and participating in a symposium on nineteenth century Australian women’s writing. I just about jumped out of my chair with excitement. Not only because I’d been writing on Praed for more than a decade, but because more people would know of her work. A successful and prolific expatriate author, her writing is sadly still much neglected.

For the essay (which you can read here), I wrote about my relationship to Praed and her writing, and how this was altered by my research on Maud, her deaf daughter. This is also the essence of my book, which is nearing completion (one more draft to go, thank god).

The symposium was held at the State Library of NSW on 3rd November 2016. It was delicious to be in a room with the best scholars on 19th century women’s writing, although we were sadly missing Julieanne Lamond, who was away. We first heard from Tanya Dalziell of the University of Western Australia, whose work I knew, and it was really good to meet her in person and listen to her paper ‘Coo-ee! Responding to the call of late nineteenth century women’s writing’. She discussed close and distant reading and how, while the latter can stretch across borders and find patterns through the digital humanities, it also needs to take into account specificity, difference and subjectivity. She called a coo-ee, as it were, to continue to gather scholars face-to-face and map what is happening in the field.

Following on from Tanya was Susan Martin, who has written much on gardens and gardening in the nineteenth century. Sue’s topic this time was Millie Finkelstein, author of The Newest Woman: The Destined Monarch of the World. Finkelstein complicated the worlds of sport and writing, which we tend to separate and stressed inversions of traditional roles for women in her creation of bushrangeresses (although this is still a diminuitive term). Finkelstein’s book has been digitised by Reason in Revolt: Source Documents of Australian Radicalism and is available for all to read.

Anne Jamison took the baton next and spoke on Catherine Helen Spence and women’s literature for children in the nineteenth century. Spence thought that the best way to learn is through enjoyment, but she wrote terribly didactic stories. She was also a close reader of English writer Maria Edgewortha and both were interested in education for girls. Writer and Stella schools ambassador Emily McGuire picked up this thread, discussing how patriarchy minimises an entire field of writing ie children’s and young adults’ literature, because women are predominantly responsible for children’s education. And yet when men enter a field that is dominated by women they are disproportionately praised (it’s become known as the ‘John Green effect). These ‘genre transcenders’ have implications because a child learns about culture through what they read, and so there’s a negative feedback loop in literary culture which we see playing out in reviews and prizes (which are dominated by blokes). In addition if a book has fewer reviews, it’s less likely to be included on a curriculum. This in turn sends messages to boys & girls about who is worthwhile and it raises a generation that associates literary merit with men. Not much has changed, then, since the nineteenth century, as Julieanne Lamond has observed in an excellent article in Meanjin.

In the questions and comments following this panel, Lucy Sussex pointed out that Lianne Moriaty has been written up as a superstar of domestic fiction, and yet Christos Tsiolkas, who writes about similar topics, has never been described with this moniker. Emily Maguire added that writers such as Susan Johnson who write about women are incredibly under-celebrated (I agree!) and Sue Martin added that teachers are often still recycling what they learn at university, so the cycle of under-valuing women writers is perpetuated.

Elizabeth Webby, a much-loved doyenne of scholarship on Australian literature, spoke next on nineteenth century women’s poetry which is still overlooked, even by feminist scholars. Likewise, as writer and academic Lucy Sussex added with her paper ‘The lady vanishes: women and crime writing in nineteenth-century Australia’, if you look at Trove you’ll see just how much crime women wrote, but it still hasn’t received that much attention. Mary Fortune ended up in a home for homeless women despite being the most published woman in Australia.

Much like The Stella Prize, the Davitt Awards were set up to recognise crime writing by Australian women, because they barely get a look in at the ‘Neddies’ (the Ned Kelly awards for crime writing). Again, things are still not altogether different from the nineteenth century.

Image credit: Elizabeth Lhuede

After a cuppa, Maggie Mackeller (whose book When It Rains I loved) and I sat on the stage for a convo with Catriona Menzies-Pike and Anne Jamison. Maggie had written a marvellous essay on Catherine Helen Spence for the Sydney Review of Books in which she described how, settling down to read Spence’s novel Clara, she expected it to be another pious work. Instead, she was taken for a galloping ride. Alas Fiona Wright, the third contributor to the Sydney Review of Books suite of essays, couldn’t join us, but you can read her precise, detailed close reading of Barbara Baynton’s work on the site.

Why don’t we read more nineteenth century women writers? Anne asked, opening a conversation she'd been thinking of for a while. I confess to being a bit stumped. I fell in love with Jane Eyre when I was eighteen, Rachel Henning when I was twenty, and Rosa Praed when I was twenty-five, and there was never any looking back.

‘Well, they’re racy, exciting, and passionate,’ I replied, although it wasn’t an adequate answer. I thought on it again as I contemplated writing this post, and asked my boyfriend the same.

‘Why don’t you read nineteenth century fiction?’

‘It’s boring,’ he replied. ‘And I did it at school.’

‘I love it,’ I told him, and enumerated the reasons why: writers weren’t afraid to dwell at length on their characters rich emotional lives and I liked watching how women operated when their power was constrained (the same reason I like Game of Thrones, aside from the excellent dresses). Yet many readers don’t find this interesting, as Maggie wrote in her essay:

‘In contrast to the celebrated male writers of nineteenth-century Australian literature Spence’s stage was not the wide-open plains, it was not mountain ranges or river crossings, her enemies were not drought or drink or fire or flood. The new land was not a character. Instead her drama is enacted nearly always inside – studies, kitchens, bedrooms, parlours – and the danger is in poverty and powerlessness.’

And these constraints are still in place, and they are still dismissed. Women’s lives, spaces, bodies and writing are still dismissed. Just look at the US election: the unsubstantiated claims about Clinton’s emails practically brought her down, while a lewd showman, whose comments about women as objects were caught on film, strode into power.

Why do we need nineteenth century women writers? Maggie says it perfectly:

‘Read Clara to see how strongly racial prejudice and stereotypes infiltrated our culture. Read her to see where we have come from and read her to see how far we’ve still got to go.’

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.

On Swimming and Writing

A story on which I’ve been working since 1999, ‘Unfurling’, has been published in Our Sporting Life, an edition of Griffith Review about sport. Needless to say, I’m excited!

I wrote the first incarnation of the story when I was on exchange at The University of California, Berkeley. When I workshopped it in my prose class, my teacher Clark Blaise described it as a representation of ‘unadulterated adolescent lust’. Then, it was a story about a podgy girl named Eva who falls for a boy, decides she needs to lose weight to get his attention, becomes obsessed with running and runs until she becomes ill. She doesn’t get the boy. Luckily, it wasn’t published.

But Eva always loved swimming, because in the pool she couldn’t feel her body. A few years ago, I trimmed the story, emphasised her love of swimming and showed it to my short story group. There was a disconnection, I was told, between the girl’s body and mind. I looked at the story again. My writing group was right. What kind of girl didn’t want to feel her body? I got distracted by the usual mania of my life and left if for another year or two.

When I took it out again, I realised it was a hopeless story for a woman to write. Girl changes her body to please boy? Ugh. What I liked about it – and what I like about women athletes in general – is the sense of power and capability that comes from having a strong, healthy body. I changed the story again to illuminate this. All of a sudden, it pinged and it was published.

I’m no athlete, although I ran plenty when I was an adolescent. Every afternoon, when I came home from high school, I’d swap my school shoes for running shoes and head out into the paddocks. On the weekends I’d head into the bush in the hills. Running was a respite from the stress and isolation of school. It made me feel like I had control over my body when everything else was out of control, as it generally is when you’re a teenager.

My routine died when we moved into town, which was just as well because like the girl in the story I was dangerously thin. I tried hockey for a while, but I was hopeless at team sports because meningitis had ruined my balance and I couldn’t hear my teammates on the field, nor the instructor during lessons. I was good at swimming, though, as my mother had been when she was young. I passed my bronze medallion test, but I didn’t return to the sport until I came home from London in 2009. I was ecstatic to be in the sunshine again and swam at Stones Corner pool two or three times a week. I toned and went brown, except for two curved white lines on my back from my straps.

I've found swimming to be immensely meditative. If I have a writing problem I take it into the pool, and by the time I’ve finished my laps I’ve usually solved it. I like that it’s so easy an exercise and that it’s safe. I’m not likely to drown in a town pool and I don’t have to be constantly alert, as I do when I’m running, for random nutters I can’t hear who might come up behind me and stab me with a fork. Novelists tend to have active imaginations, yes.

And earlier this year, I and a bunch of other literati swam laps at Musgrave Park Pool to raise money for the Great Barrier Reef, which has been one of the highlights of my year.

So I was chuffed to be in an issue about sport. It made me think of English author Louise Doughty, who wrote a column in the Telegraph about the nuts and bolts of writing which turned into A Novel in One Year. People complained to her that there were already too many writers in the world, so why was she encouraging more? She replied, ‘At the age of forty, I started learning the piano. I am fully aware that I will never have a solo concert at the Barbican, but I have got hours of pleasure from plinky-ponking away in my own ham-fisted fashion … Just as importantly, I listen to piano compositions now with an immeasurably enriched understanding of the skills of those who compose and perform them’. Not everyone picks up a pen intending to get published, and I certainly don’t dive into a pool wanting to swim in the Olympics. There is a pleasure in simply doing it, and this was something I tried to convey in my story. In so intense a focus on winning, the pleasure of an activity seems to be lost. I also wanted to write against representations of sport as heavily masculinised, and to bring the pleasure of the body - that thing which had been missing - back into the story. It's not accidental, after all, that Eva experiences orgasms as she swims.

On things literary and athletic, I’ll be giving a reading at the Brisbane Powerhouse on Thursday 25th August at 7pm, which will be followed by an invigorating conversation between sports tragics, writers & ex-Olympians. You can find out more about it here.

And if writing is to be considered an endurance sport, well, that’s one in which we authors are clutching medals to our chests!

Read. Think. Speak. Vote.

Show us your arts!

You’ve had a long and tiring day at work. You catch the train home and take out your phone to watch a movie, but they killed off the script writers and set designers so it’s like watching charades when you’re drunk. You get home. You switch the kettle on for a cuppa and load up your laptop to play a game, but the coders have been sent home. On the TV, there’s only the news. The newsreader is monotonous because the speechwriters were sacked. You flick through a magazine. The photos look like something you might have taken when you were eight and the page layout reminds you of your gran’s scrapbook. You think about picking up a novel, but the writers were the first to go, because they were the most outspoken. There are no longer any novels. You sigh, sit on the floor with your tea and pick at the carpet.

Welcome to a world without creativity. The one which our Liberal government is engineering.

Those of you who follow happenings in the arts might have realised that things have been kind of awful over the past few years. The fact that I’ve had to write two submissions to public inquiries in under twelve months signals that artists and writers are under siege.

Last year I protested against the savage cuts to the Australia Council for the Arts, the national funding body for artists, and the establishment of the National Program for Excellent in the Arts, which wasted money by duplicating administration and has definitely not made its decisions with transparency, as with the Australia Council. The effects of these cuts have meant that many arts organisations, particularly those that are small, are struggling to remain viable. From little things, big things grow, but we’re never going to have the next Cate Blanchett or Patrick White if there are no fertile plots of earth from which to spring.

And this time I have written a submission on the Productivity Commission’s draft report on copyright.

The Productivity Commission is arguing that we should remove Parallel Import Restrictions. Currently, books are published in Australia by Australian publishing houses. If this restriction is removed, this means that cheaper editions by international publishers can be imported and sold alongside the Australian editions.

What’s wrong with that? I hear people asking. Surely cheaper books means more readers?

The problem is that it means less money for Australian publishers, which means they can’t afford to support as many Australian writers, which means fewer Australian stories. This has already happened in New Zealand – they removed PIR a few years ago and their literary industry has been decimated. The UK and the USA have, unsurprisingly, not gone down this route.

Fewer Australian stories also means less diversity. Over the twenty years that I’ve been writing, not only have I seen writers’ incomes dwindle (my own included), but publishers have become increasingly conservative and averse to risk. This often means that voices which are not mainstream are missing out.

Why should we care?

I have read time and time again how children love to see themselves reflected in books, particularly if they have a disability, are queer, or Indigenous, or have a migrant background. Melina Marchetta, author of Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca explains this situation well (and her whole blog post on this issue is worth reading too):

If these copyright rules are changed, kids today are back in a world similar to the one I grew up in; reading fantastic novels about places over there, but needing something more. I wrote Looking For Alibrandi from a selfish place. I wanted to see me on the pages of a book, because I loved reading and I loved film, but I never felt that I counted outside my extended family and my high school friends. I wanted to be part of a bigger identity.

Imagine if this situation is replicated on a larger scale, and Australians can’t even see themselves in their books at all. If we want Australian stories, we need to nurture Australian authors.

And now I hear a people clamouring to ask: why should taxpayers pay for artists? To which I reply: give me an industry which is not supported by the government in some way – what of mining, farming and manufacturing, for example? The investment in artists is miniscule (the Australia Council granted approximately $200 million in 2013/14), but the payoffs are huge: the GDP of the creative sector was valued at $86 billion in 2014. I appreciate that artists and writers are not the whole of the creative sector, but they make a significant contribution, and their prizes, grants and training are taxed, unlike sportspeople who also contribute to the entertainment industry, but get a free ride.

These cuts are indicative of a wider contempt for freedom of speech and expression. As I watch the Liberal government in action, I keep returning to novelist Anna Funder’s words when she accepted the Miles Franklin award for All That I Am (a novel about the encroachment of Nazism) the same day that Queensland Premier Campbell Newman axed the state’s literary awards: ‘I have spent my professional life studying totalitarian regimes and the brave people who speak out against them, and the first thing that someone with dictatorial inclinations does is to silence the writers and the journalists.’

Tellingly, in the new National Program for Excellence in the Arts there was no mention of funding for writers, and the cuts to the Australia Council are already having ramifications. In the recent UNESCO report on climate change, every mention of Australia (and the appalling state of the Great Barrier Reef) was excised. Journalists are referred to the police, and doctors and teachers are gagged, for speaking about asylum seekers and detention centres.

It isn’t difficult to join up the dots. In this current political climate, writers and readers are threats. As Richard Flanagan said in his speech at the Australian Book Industry Awards on 19th May 2016, ‘Who benefits from ignorance and silence other than the most powerful and the richest?’

A person who reads is a person who is informed. A person who is informed is a person who can challenge and argue. A person who challenges is a person who participates in democracy. Quelle surprise, then, that Turnbull, who has retreated miserably from his bold pitch for ideas and innovation, is invested in killing off the people who provide differing viewpoints: Australia’s writers.

The answer, as Richard Flanagan said, is simple: ‘If you care at all about books don’t vote Liberal at this election. If you care at all about what books mean, don’t vote Liberal. If you value how books can enrich lives, don’t vote Liberal. If you think Australian books matter to an Australian society, don’t vote Liberal.’

I will be voting for the Arts Party, even though I usually vote Greens. The party was set up in 2013 to support the arts industry & has the endorsement of luminaries such as Bryan Brown. Australia's writers have also spoken out angrily against the threats to our industry, and have the support of huge international names such as Jonathon Franzen and Jeanette Winterson.

You can also make a submission to the Productivity Commission. Submissions close on Friday 3rd June. You can make a submission here. You can also register to attend a public hearing.

Above all, though, we need to continue to read and to buy Australian books and support Australia’s authors. As Charlotte Wood, author of The Natural Way of Things, said in her acceptance speech for the Stella Prize:

It often feels to me that we have entered a new dark age – an age in which science is rejected in favour of greed and superstition, in which our planet is in desperate need of rescue; an age in which bigotry and religion are inseparable, and presidential candidates promise to punish women for controlling their own bodies. I feel that in the midst of this gloom we need art more than ever. Art is a candle flame in the darkness: it urges us to imagine and inhabit lives other than our own, to be more thoughtful, to feel more deeply, to challenge what we think we already know.

Read. Think. Speak. Vote.