H is for Hawk, Perception and Disability

When I was young we had a ginger cat named Vincent to whom I was passionately attached. His mother had bred with one of the feral cats on the farm and he was a muscular and unlikeable creature. I spent hours trying to understand him and win him over. For the most part that was fruitless, but sometimes he’d deign to sleep in the curve of my back as I lay on my tummy on my bed.

I can’t remember if my interest in animals started with Vincent, or if it was because I grew up on a farm and, while my father and uncles worked, I watched the way sheep bustled in a herd; how hipbones jerked beneath the skin of our cows as, in the evening, they were jostled to the milking shed; or the large, liquid eyes of my aunts’ horses.

When I began researching the history of the deaf, I found, people with disabilities have long been regarded as closer to animals than humans. Deaf people, for example, were seen as subhuman because they could not hear the word of God and because they couldn’t speak clearly.

Which is why I loved reading Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, her memoir about training a goshawk in the wake of her father’s death. Aside from the originality of the subject matter and the poetry of her writing, it brought up many interesting questions about the relationship between animals and humans, between wildness and domestication, and where the line between the animal and human really lies.

Hunting with her hawk, McDonald writes, ‘took me to the edge of being human. Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all. The hawk in flight, me running after her, the land and air a pattern of deep and curving detail, sufficient to black out anything like the past or the future, so that the only things that mattered were the next thirty seconds … I crept and walked and ran. I crouched. I looked. I saw more than I’d ever seen. The world gathered around me. It made absolute sense. But the only things I knew were hawkish things, and the lines that drew me across the landscape were the lines that drew the hawk: hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill’ (195).

I paused after reading this passage, considering it with some suspicion, as humans are animals, and the division between us largely — I think — comes down to culture. In 1747, Carl Linneaus, who developed a system for classifying plants and animals (still in use today), defended his decision to separate apes from humans as thus: ‘if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all ecclesiastics. It may be that as naturalist I ought to have done so.’

Nor does heightened perception make one more animal that human. People with disabilities have extraordinarily developed senses – a person who is blind, for example, will be remarkably attuned to sound and touch. To see like a hawk does not necessarily mean that one is becoming like a hawk; it means that a human is developing their sense, rather like becoming better at the piano through practice. I think we need to widen our understanding of what it is to be human, to include those who have what seem to be extraordinary abilities. One might think that I’m writing of savants, but really, it’s anyone who operates in a way that’s different from the norm. If ‘human’ becomes more inclusive, then we can do away with the category of ‘disability’ and its concomitant inspiration porn, as Stella Young described it.

McDonald continues, ‘every time the hawk caught an animal, it pulled me back into being a human again … hunting makes you an animal, but the death of an animal makes you human’ (196), for she killed the animal to put it from its misery. This was interesting. Again, is it culture that makes McDonald act this way? Can it be said that it’s grace that makes us distinct from animals? Or do other animals behave this way as well?

While these passages made me question things, there were other parts of McDonald’s work that were gorgeous – her nature descriptions, her magical thinking, her tentative but developing relationship with Mabel, the hawk. And this passage:

‘I am beginning to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of stranger urges confession, urges confidence, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken with us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holidays … I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. It’s desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn’t entirely normal.’

McDonald and Mabel are a paean to difference, to flight, to the permeable boundaries between ourselves and other creatures.

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.

Submission to Inquiry into Arts Budget Cuts

RE: Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget decisions on the Arts

Dear Madam/Sir,

My name is Jessica White and I’m a writer and researcher based in Brisbane. As of next year, I will have been writing for twenty years. My first novel, A Curious Intimacy, was published by Penguin in 2007 and won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was shortlisted for the Dobbie award for debut women writers and the Western Australia Premier’s awards, and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. My second novel, Entitlement, appeared in 2012, also published by Penguin. My short fiction has been published in a range of literary journals, including Southerly, Island, Overland and the Review of Australian Fiction. I was recently shortlisted for the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize which attracted nearly 4000 entries from around the world.

I am also a researcher and non-fiction writer. My PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, was funded by a scholarship from the University of Melbourne. I have been shortlisted for the Calibre essay prize and Peter Blazey Prize for life writing, and my essays have been published in Griffith Review, Southerly, Island and Cordite as well as national and international academic journals.

I have been deaf since I was four, when I lost most of my hearing to meningitis. My disability was responsible for my decision to become a writer and it has also strongly influenced my subject matter and style. I am passionate about giving space to voices which have been overlooked, including those of people with disability.

In 2013 I was the recipient of my first ever grant, $5000 from Arts Queensland, to further my research on 19th century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed. In the course of that research, I located new archival material in England relating to her daughter Maud, who was deaf. This included a 17 page letter Maud wrote to her doctor and, given the history of the suppression of the voices of the deaf, this find was of immense significance. My research on Maud has been woven into a memoir which will help general audiences understand the history and impact of deafness, which is surprisingly little known.

This grant gave me much-needed recognition, particularly in Queensland where I was a relative newcomer. In 2014 I received my first grant from the Australia Council for the Arts ($9,820) from their Artists with Disability programme to write a novel, The Sea Creatures, which is almost completed. In June 2015, I was fortunate to receive a New Work grant from the Australia Council ($15,750) to write a young adult novel, When the World Shivered. Both of these books are about disability, and once they are published I will take them into schools and use them to prompt discussions about disability, and to show that the lives of people with disability are of worth. I am not using these grants to write esoteric pieces of art, but to help knit together our social fabric.

I have been applying to the Australia Coucil for funding since 2008 and these grants were from my 11th and 13th applications respectively. Although they are not large grants, their impact on my life cannot be understated. They have given me the time to write and mean that I do not have to take on additional teaching work to survive (something that, because of my disability, makes me too exhausted to write). They have given me financial stability, which means that I can think about having a family before it’s too late (something I’ve put off because the life of an artist, let alone one with a disability, is precarious at the best of times). They have also allowed me to become financially independent of my parents, who supported me repeatedly while I found my feet as a writer and learned to manage with a disability.

My tenacity in applying for these funds came from desperation: without that money, I would not have been able to write. I have heard many artists say that they have been put off by the competitiveness of the Australia Council’s application process for funding, and I don’t blame them; it is no easy thing to be rejected year after year. Yet I often wonder about these people, and the books they would have written or the art they would have created. How much more culturally enriched would Australia be if the Australia Council had the money to fund these artists?

You can see, then, that George Brandis’s cut of $104.8 million from the already-tight budget of the Australia Council will have huge ramifications, not least by limiting the voices of emerging writers and those with disability. The arts in Australia are in threat of becoming homogenised.

In addition, the new funding mechanism, the National Programme for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA), does not have the same arms-length peer review process as the Australia Council and decisions will be up to the Minister. These undemocratic overtones are alarming, but not unsurprising from a government whose language ever more closely resembles the doublespeak of George Orwell’s dystopian novel about totalitarianism, 1984. In 2014, for example, there was a budget crisis, but in 2015 the Arts Minister thinks it fit to waste money but duplicating administrative processes through the NPEA.

In 2012, Anna Funder won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for All That I Am, a novel about the insidious creep of Nazism in the 1930s. In her acceptance speech, she criticised the then Queensland Premier Campbell Newman who had just binned the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (one of his first acts of parliament). ‘I have spent my professional life studying totalitarian regimes and the brave people who speak out against them,’ Funder said, ‘And the first thing that someone with dictatorial inclinations does is to silence the writers and the journalists.’ It is telling that there is no mention of literature or writing in the NPEA guidelines.

I have been deaf for as long as I can remember and I know what silence and silencing can mean. Artists reflect the culture that is around them. A government that hobbles the creativity of artists by cutting off funding is a government that does not want to listen to what is said of the society it moulds.

After World War Two, my relative Patrick White returned to Australia from England. In 1958 he published an essay, ‘The Prodigal Son’, in which he wrote of his experiences of returning. He commented, ‘In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions.’ Given the attenuation of the Australia Council through budget cuts, and the meagre amounts offered to artists in general, we are at risk of returning to the culture of which Patrick White wrote. Furthermore, what chance does Australia have of finding a new Nobel Prize for Literature winner when the NPEA guidelines make no mention of literature or writing? How will we find the emerging voices of Indigenous people, migrants, people with disability, or queer/gay writers when many of these minorities, as you can see from my own experience, are just struggling to get by, let alone make their art? Is the voice of Australia to become one that, as Patrick White was panicked to find, merely exalts the ‘average’?

As an emerging author with a disability, the Australia Council has irrevocably changed my life. It distresses me deeply that so many other artists may not have the funding they need to practice their craft or acquire recognition. I urge you to reverse the cuts to the Australia Council – it is so little money, and yet to Australia’s artists and Australian culture, its worth is inestimable.

On Exhaustion

People never ask me what it's like to be deaf, or what I find hard about it. As I lost most of my hearing when I was four and had some speech therapy, my speech is fine, and people don't realise I have a disability until I tell them. Even then, they don't realise how bad it is, because I seem to listen so well. And because I am polite, and hate people making a fuss, I rarely remind them to speak clearly.

It's not the isolation that's difficult – I’ve found ways around that through writing, reading and a small circle of close friends, though it took me a good twenty years to learn the social skills I needed to make friends, and those twenty years were excruciating. Nor is it the inconsideration of people who assume that you’re rude or simple because you haven’t heard them; I accept that I don’t have a visible disability and that, for the most part, people aren’t deliberately unkind. Nor is it the cultural apartheid of cinemas and performance venues that don’t care enough about their deaf patrons to ensure working loop systems, or even to install such systems at all, such as the Cineplex cinemas in Brisbane. On asking the manager at Hawthorne why they didn’t have a hearing system, I was told that the movies they showed were blockbusters, which were so loud that deaf people can hear them. I would have laughed if I wasn’t so angry; it’s quality of sound, not loudness, that makes the difference. Meanwhile, the headphones at Palace Centro are patched up with duct tape, and those at Palace Barracks were broken for months. When I complained about the latter and pointed out that it was discriminatory, I was told that I was being ridiculous. I never went back. I have taken my money elsewhere and I watch films at home, or only go to screenings with subtitles, or watch dance performances that don’t require listening to words.

These are irritations and, like cuts and scratches, they always heal and fade. But the one thing I can never get over is the perpetual exhaustion. I have 25% of an average person’s hearing, and I rely on this bit of hearing and lipreading to get by. I can’t hear with loud background noise, nor in a group larger than three, and even then that’s hard. And as I’ve lost one sense, I’m constantly alert to compensate for it – to check someone’s face in case they’re speaking to me, to strain to hear the words in a sentence and match them with body language, to read lips and put the words into context, to work out how to get some information at a train or bus station when I can’t hear the overhead speakers. The energy necessary to maintain this level of vigilance is enormous.

These past few months I’ve been teaching creative writing one day a week at the University of Queensland. The classes were small enough for me to hear without passing round the transmitter of my FM system (which is like a small walkie talkie for deaf people), though I asked students to use it when they were reading because their heads dipped down to their papers and I couldn’t read their lips. I had to be completely alert so that I could hear their contributions and respond to them. It made the discussions a bit stilted as I could only hear one person talking at a time, but I figured they were adult enough to deal with that.

I loved my students. They tried hard, they listened to the lectures and my tutorials, and they improved in a very short time. Teaching creative writing also helped me to remember my own knowledge about writing, and to refocus on the nuts and bolts of my craft. However, I was so tired by the semester’s end, and so frustrated that I hadn’t had any energy to write, that I resolved to stick to my other, two-days-a-week admin job and write, even if that meant living on baked beans for six months.

Then I was insanely lucky enough to get funding from the Australia Council to work on my young adult novel, When the World Shivered, and the future isn’t looking quite so grim - a huge and unutterable relief. I've only had a handful of days off since February, and this means that I can have evenings and weekends off.

This novel will be based on my short story of the same name, which was published in the Review of Australian Fiction. The novel about the relationships between children with disabilities and their animals. I started thinking about it when I went to the Artists with Disabilities conference in Sydney last year, and watched people with their carers. The carers were people who wanted to be there and who were paid for it, but what would happen, I wondered, if a person with a disability was matched with someone who wasn’t temperamentally suited to caring? I was lucky as I grew up because my brother has a generous disposition and likes an audience, so he was happy to relay information to me that I missed (albeit often elaborated upon; the Whites are nothing if not performers). But what if I hadn’t had that kind of sibling, if my sibling was someone who just wanted to be left alone and not have to look after someone else?

I started thinking about companion animals, and dogs, and how we have domesticated them, which can also be seen as a way of keeping them close to us without their will. Do dogs really want to be dependent on us? Do horses want to carry people around? These are the kinds of ideas I’ll be exploring in the novel. I’ll also be reading books about animals and humans (if you have any recommendations, leave them in the box below!), and I’m about to write a post on Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk. With luck, given my tortured schedule, I should have it up later this week.

I’ve also finally got back on the bandwagon with my author newsletters. If you’d like to be on the mailing list for these, you can sign up here.

Just Read Readathon

The last readathon I did was in Boggabri Primary School, when I asked my rellies to sponsor me for each book I read. They nervously nominated 5c per book, knowing how fast I read. I watched their faces as they calculated how much they’d be left out of pocket.  

That at least was a more interesting enterprise than the Multiple Sclerosis Walkathon around the school. I finished the course early, got bored, sat in the grass, then found some catheads to put in the path of stragglers. Someone dobbed me in, so I was made to stand in the circle of shame at lunchtime to be interrogated by Mrs Woodley.

Fortunately I am now an adult and can do adult readathons which don’t involve catheads or burnt grass or heat rashes. I do however, still want some cash.

This is for an initiative organised by author Jane Rawson to raise money for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. The ILF, founded by Suzy Wilson (who runs Riverbend Books in Brisbane), aims to address literacy levels in remote communities.

Many Indigenous kids, particularly in remote communities, cannot get their hands on books. Here are some stats from the Indigenous Literacy Foundation:

·      Indigenous homes, particularly those in remote communities, have fewer books, computers and other educational resources than non-Indigenous homes.

·      The gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students emerges early. Non-Indigenous students far out-perform Indigenous students in benchmark tests for reading, writing and numeracy in Year 3 and Year 5.

·      By the age of 15, more than one-third of Australia’s Indigenous students ‘do not have the adequate skills and knowledge in reading literacy to meet real-life challenges and may well be disadvantaged in their lives beyond school’.

·      In the Northern Territory, only one in five children living in very remote Indigenous communities can read at the accepted minimum standard.

The Indigenous Literacy Foundation gets books for these kids and helps them learn to read.

Books have nourished me all my life, particularly when I was younger & didn’t have the social skills necessary for interacting with people. It would be wonderful if more kids had access to the vivid worlds of literature; they certainly kept me from boredom & loneliness,

The Just Read challenge is on over June & July, and I’m using it to read the swathe of unread books on my shelves, including:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan

The Island Within, Richard Nelson

Z: a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Therese Anne Fowler

The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane

Not that Kind of Girl Lena Dunham

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert

Georgiana Molloy, Bernice Barry

As well as the 50 billion literary journals lying in piles around my flat.

If you want to throw money at me for reading (please do!), here’s my fundraising page. At least this way you can pay a flat rate, and avoid my rellies’ nervousness as their hands hovered over their purses.

Review of The Floating Garden

Soooo … it’s June, and it feels like my year is just beginning. After the postdoc application, which nearly killed me, I finished my book proposal for Finding Maud, my memoir about deafness. I’ve also been teaching creative writing at the University of Queensland one day a week (on top of my other job), which has been fantastic, but it requires truckloads of energy, at least for a deaf person. I only have one more batch of marking to do, then presentations at a workshop, symposium and two conferences, and I’ll be a free agent again.

And so, after a blogging hiatus on account of my perpetual exhaustion, I’m penning my first review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (better late than never!). Emma Ashmere’s very pretty novel, The Floating Garden, has been sitting on my desk awaiting a review all this time. I was approached by Spinifex Press to write a blurb for the book, and my beau & I intended to travel to Mullumbimby for Emma’s launch, but the heavens opened that Friday and it wasn’t safe to travel, so we sadly rainchecked the trip.

With its pellucid prose and descriptions of gardens and early 20th century spiritualists, I loved this novel. It opens in the bedroom of a boarding house run by Ellis Gilbey, in which everything is ‘coated in a chalky sheen’ (3) from the construction of the nearby Sydney Harbour Bridge. Ellis is a quiet, self-contained woman, who shies from the intrusive interest of others. She loves women, writes a gardening column under a nom-de-plume, and is being kicked out of the boarding house to make way for the bridge.

Her story intertwines with that of Rennie, an English artist married to a wealthy, brutal man. While elucidating their painful relationship and Rennie’s hopes of flight, the narrative delves into Ellis’ escape from the country as a girl, and how she fell in with theosophists in Sydney and fell, too, for a fellow performer. I thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions of spiritual chicanery, being familiar with them from my research on Rosa Praed, who was a theosophist (among many other religious persuasions).

When Ellis and Rennie cross paths, the story shifts to Lane Cove and to a beautiful garden: ‘Tufts of nodding russet-coloured grasses were alive with the whirr of insects. Drifts of white flannel flowers brightened an untamed bed of greenery. Beside them waratahs raised their waxy flaming heads. Wattle trees draped across the path. Green and red kangaroo paws raised their slender hands to the sky’ (223). By the end, both women, although not entirely comfortable with one another, still find niches into which they nestle.

This novel is driven by character rather than plot. I like people and so I enjoy these kinds of books, but what I enjoyed even more was the evocation of 1920s Sydney and the wealth of sensory description – not just visual details, but touch and smell as well: ‘The smell of the man's tobacco threaded towards her on the wind. There was another smell, the smell of spring, of working with her mother in the garden before the drought’ (28). These details brought the novel to vividly to life.

The descriptions of women’s clothes was also charming. At a gallery exhibition, Rennie’s friend shrieked ‘amid a frisson of beads swinging wildly from a dress cut so low at the Back Rennie couldn’t help but stare down the slender ravine of Bertha’s derriere’ (19). Fashion is also used to delineate class. On meeting Rennie, Ellis observes how ‘her hat was made of fine pale straw, fashionably moulded to the head. Against the falling darkness of the street, smoke swirled around her in a diaphanous cape. Her silk white stockings glimmered against the cobblestones as if her torso had been set on two pillars of light. Ellis’ eyes went to the woman’s lapel where a yellow rose rested its delicate head against a spray of ivy leaves’ (107). 

Thematically, the novel evokes the marginalisation of lesbians and their stories. It focuses  not on the arches of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but what happens at its feet. The setting suggests that we should not always focus on dominant, obvious narratives, because what happens in their shadow is equally interesting. Emma spoke about her novel on ABC Radio, and you can listen to it here. 

This sumptuous book was a joy to read, and it’s apt that it has kicked off my reviewing, however belated, for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. I'm really looking forward to seeing what Emma does next.

When the World Shivered

I hit the ground running when I returned to Oz from Rome, travelling almost immediately to Armidale for a conference for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the theme of which was politics and passion. I presented a paper on representations of the Great Barrier Reef and how these can mobilise political action to save the reef. I also caught up with Parental Unit and H, who was in town for a friend’s wedding, which was lovely.

I then spent five gruelling weeks putting together and refining a postdoc proposal on an ecobiography of 19th C botanist Georgiana Molloy. This just about killed me, and I staggered onto the side of the road with exhaustion. Now, still wheezing, I’m throwing myself back onto the blogging bandwagon for a minor bout of self-aggrandizement.

My short story, ‘When the World Shivered’, has been published in the Review of Australian Fiction. This is an online journal which pairs one emerging author with one established author, and releases two stories every two weeks for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

I was paired with Nike Sulway, author of Rupetta which I absolutely adored. Nike wrote a quiet, sad and delicate little piece about loss. Mine mirrored this in that it was also about loss, but I explored the theme through the connections between animals and children with disabilities.

I’d been thinking about this story for a few months, and I was glad that the RAF galvanised me into writing it. I was interested specifically in the bond between carers and people with disability, not just its strength, but also its uneven power dynamics.

My previous story for the RAF, 'Unearthed', published in 2012, was also about deafness: a young, belligerent deaf young woman works on a farm and moves in and out of a world in which the borders of the real and unreal are destabilised.

As I’ve mentioned in this post which I wrote recently for Arts Queensland, the genre of magic realism (into which these stories slot )is a means for me to explore the fantastic elements which disability can bring into one’s life. The fact that I could do this and knew it would be published brought, I think, a confidence into my work – it compelled me to think about and shape these ideas more carefully and clearly. Consequently, I’m now going to turn ‘When the World Shivered’ into a young adult novel.

Like any other literary magazine in Autralia, the Review of Australian Fiction needs subscribers to survive. If you’d like to be exposed to a wide range of authors, both big names and emerging names, parting with a few dollars a fortnight is a cheap and easy way to go about it. You also get that warm glow of supporting writers and contributing to Australia’s lively literary culture.

On Georgiana Molloy

Over Christmas and New Year, I flew from Rome to England to stay with some friends, first in Dorchester and then in Newcastle. My part-Geordie, part-Australian friends drove me to the outskirts of Carlisle to look at Crosby Lodge, the house in which my research subject Georgiana Molloy lived until she was 16.

I’ve been researching and writing about Georgiana since 1999, when I pulled William Lines’ 1994 biography about her, An All Consuming Passion, from the shelves of the library at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was on exchange. At 16 her father was killed by a fall from his lodge, so they moved away to Rugby. At 24, she married John Molloy, 25 years old than her, and in 1829 she sailed with him to Augusta in south west Western Australia. There, she began to collect flowers and seeds for a botanist in London, becoming, arguably, Western Australia’s first female scientist.

Before stopping at Crosby Lodge, we ventured to Solway Firth, an estuary leading to the Irish Sea. On the other side of the estuary was Scotland. My friends told me how the Scots would cross the water to work, then go to the pub after work (as this was frowned upon in Scotland), then stagger back across the water on stilts. Because they were often drunk, some would fall into the water and drown. Yikes.

Even though I was wearing several layers of clothes, including thermals, I froze, but the water was beautiful and the air crisp and clear. As we drove away, it suddenly occurred to me that on the next day, which was my birthday, I would the same age as Georgiana (37) when she died. Where she had conceived eight children and lost three of them (one was a miscarriage, one died ten days after she was born and the other when he was 16 months old, from drowning), I had the liberty to decide if and how many children I wanted to have. I was allowed to go university, I could write books, I could travel on my own, I could even study science if I had the inclination. All these things were denied to Georgiana, for her primary purpose was to breed.

When I saw Crosby Lodge, which was enormous (to an Australian, at least), it brought into sharp relief how remarkable Georgiana was. She’d had an incredibly privileged upbringing, yet ended up working like a drudge on the opposite side of the world. Even though she was permanently exhausted, she still found time to collect specimens and seeds, and to observe and write about her environment with both a poet and a scientist’s gaze.

My latest essay on Georgiana is in the ‘Looking West’ edition of Griffith Review, released on 28th January (it’s already in the post to subscribers). This is the first time I’ve ever been published in Griffith Review and I’m overjoyed to be in the company of brilliant writers such as Kim Scott and Tim Winton. Unfortunately I can’t get hold of a copy until I come home next week – it’s something to look forward to at the end of the flight. If you’d like to read my essay, and the others by wonderful Australian authors, head to the Griffith Review website or your local independent bookstore. Literary journals are Australia’s literary lifeblood as they nurture new talent and have a diverse range of new and emerging authors. If you buy a copy, you won’t be disappointed!

2014: My Year of Writing

In reading over the summary of my writing and associated work in 2013, I’ve realised I completed abandoned any pretense of taking a more balanced approach to my life. Writing prevailed - this is what I love and I can’t stop filling every spare second of my time with it. 

2013 wasn’t such a great year, for my self-esteem was bound up with Entitlement and when it wasn’t as successful as A Curious Intimacy, I was heartbroken. Since then, I’ve learnt that it’s impossible to account for the vagaries of the market, and that what is most important is that I enjoy the process of creating, and that I do the very best I can with marketing my book. After that, it’s time to move onto the next work. 

However, if 2013 was dismal, 2014 was completely and utterly brilliant! Here is a list of the writerly things that happened throughout the year

Publications

In January, my story ‘A Mercurial Man’ was selected by Geordie Williamson, the fiction editor for Island, and published in Issue 136. In March, my essay ‘Ghostliness and Un/Belonging as a Hard-of-Hearing Writer’ on the advantages of deafness was published in New Scholar. My essay on Patrick White, ‘Inscribing Landscapes in Patrick White’s Novels’ was published in Patrick White Centenary: The Legacy of a Prodigal Son in August, while my essay on climate change fiction in Australia, ‘Fluid Worlds: Reflecting Climate Change in The Swan Book and The Sunlit Zone’, was published in Southerly 74.1 in November.

Research

For the first half of the year I did research for my book on Rosa Praed and her deaf daughter Maud, with the help of funding from Arts Queensland which I received in December 2013. This involved reading Praed’s novels in the John Oxley library to note down any references she made to sound. I turned this research into an essay which will be published in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature sometime this year.

In June I travelled to Canberra to look at the Praed archives in the National Library of Australia. While re-reading Patricia Clarke’s excellent biography of Praed, I found in the footnotes that she had written to the sanatorium into which Maud had been placed after she had a breakdown following her father’s death. The note said that all medical records were destroyed after 25 years. Out of interest, I looked up the archives for the sanatorium on the UK’s National Archives database, and found they were still extant. I made some enquiries, obtained Maud’s death certificate, and in October I travelled to the Surrey History Centre at the Surrey County Council in Woking to have a look. Sure enough, they had Maud’s medical records, a lengthy letter which she wrote to her doctor asking to be let out (which she never was) and a photo. It was like hitting the jackpot! I’m now writing up this research for an essay for Meanjin, which will be published mid this year.

Awards/Funding

A grant from Arts Queensland was pretty damn good, but then in June I found out I had won funding from the Australia Council through their pilot Artists with Disability programme! Cue gigantic excitement, particularly as it was hugely competitive. This gave me four months to research and write my novel, The Sea Creatures. I thought writing it would be a breeze but it’s taken a while to get a handle on the voices. So it looks like the book will take longer than I thought and will be finished later this year.

Then, as if things couldn’t get any better, at the end of November I was unexpectedly offered two months to write at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome. I packed my bags and went off overseas again. I have two week left here - it’s been fantastic and I’ve been writing like a maniac.

Meanwhile my short story ‘Old Honey’ was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley short story prize (50 stories out of 1200 made the longlist). I was also shortlisted for the 2015 Peter Blazey Fellowship for my non-fiction proposal Blue Shadows and Morning Light: Tracing the Art Collection of F.G. White, which examines the dispersal of my great-grandfather’s art collection and the breakdown of the pastoral industry.

Conferences

I love conferences. As an independent scholar (ie I write academic work but am not affiliated with an institution), they’re a great opportunity to learn a whole bunch of stuff at once, talk to and meet other academics and travel to different parts of Oz or overseas. In June I presented at the ‘Affective Habitus’ conference at the Australian National University. This was the fifth biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment & Culture, Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ) and was organised in conjunction with The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. This was my first ever environmental humanities conference and it totally knocked my socks off. I presented a paper on the impact of masculinity in rural environments. I never know how my papers things are received so I couldn’t really tell if I did a good job or not. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to everyone else’s papers though.

In July I presented a paper on dispossession, landscape and the Australian pastoral at a conference on ‘The Afterlives of Pastoral’ organised by the School of English, Media Studies and Arts at the University of Queensland. I’ve just finished turning my paper into an essay, which also forms part of my research on my non-fiction book about F.G. White’s art collection and the pastoral industry.

The week after that I travelled to Sydney for the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, where I presented on Rosa Praed’s appropriation and elaboration of memory. The theme of this conference was ‘Worlds Within’ and it introduced me to the fantastic concept of deep time, which I’m incorporating into my research on 19th Century botanist Georgiana Molloy.

In September I travelled to Prato, near Florence in Italy, to present a paper on this research on Molloy at the European Association for Studies on Australia. I had a few days in Florence beforehand (first proper holiday all year!) and then caught up with academics who I hadn’t seen for years, including my former supervisor Ian Henderson, Director of the Menzies Centre in London, and academics who I met at the 2012 Patrick White conference at Hyderabad. 

In October I presented in the ‘Creative Connections’ panel at the Arts Activated conference for artists with disability. I spoke about how deafness had impacted on my practice as a writer (and, indeed, made me a writer) and how I use social media to make connections. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet other artists with disability, including Gaele Sobott, Amanda Yeo and Gayle Kennedy. I also met the Deaf Arts Officer for Accessible Arts, Joanna Agius, who was absolutely lovely. At this conference, it was also announced that, on account of the success of the Australia Council’s Artists with Disability pilot project, another $1 million in dedicated funding would be given to artists with disability over the next 5 years. This was absolutely fantastic, and I was so proud to have been a recipient of funding in the pilot project. 

In 2015 there will be less conferences, except for the annual ASAL conference at Wollongong, because I intend to be teaching this year and I’m too broke to go anywhere.

Workshops

In August and September I presented master classes on Research for Writers for the Queensland Writers Centre, one at Helensvale Library on the Gold Coast and another at Townsville Library. I meet a bunch of wonderful and enthusiastic writers, and explained how to brainstorm research questions, search for key terms using particular search engines or catalogues, and how to incorporate that research seamlessly into one’s writing. The staff at the libraries were also exceptionally friendly and helpful, so it was a really positive experience all round. 

This year I’m presenting another master class for the the QWC, ‘From Neanderthals to the Noughties: How to Write Historical Fiction’, at Goondiwindi sometime between June and August. Having grown up in the country, I really appreciate the opportunity to connect with regional people, so it goes without saying that I’m looking forward to this master class too.

Public Appearances

On that note, in July I gave a talk at Orange City Library about Entitlement, having struck up a conversation with Jan Richards, Manager of Central West Libraries, at the Australian Society of Authors Congress in 2013. Jan was absolutely lovely, as were her staff and all the other people who came to my talk. I love engaging with readers, and I’m always grateful to them because I couldn’t be a writer without them. I also loved Orange – it was quiet and graceful, but pretty cosmopolitan for a country town. Which is just as well as one of my closest friends works there so there’ll be many more visits in the future.

Australian Women Writers Challenge

I continued in my role as contributing editor for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, which seeks to promote books by Australia’s women writers and redress the gender bias in reviewing. In January 2014 I wrote one annual round up of books that were reviewed throughout the year, and then another 9 monthly round-ups. 

In March I co-ordinated a focus on queer/lesbian women writers, invited four writers to contribute guest posts and arranged a book giveaway. I also collated a list of Australian queer/lesbian women writers so that readers could broaden their reading selection if they wanted to. In July I interviewed Indigenous author Ambelin Kwaymullina in conjunction with NAIDOC week, and she followed this up with a guest post with reading suggestions of books by Indigenous women writers in October. 

In September I co-ordinated a focus on women writers with disability, and arranged another four guest posts throughout the month (including one by myself). I also created a list of Australian women writers with disability and arranged a book giveaway.

I really enjoy the work I do for the Challenge, as it introduces me to new books and writers, helps me keep my finger on the pulse of Australian literature, and helps increase awareness of diversity. I’m looking forward to contributing more in 2015.

Mentoring

This year I was also approached by freelance writer Naomi Fryers of Ted’s Mum’s Business for mentoring after she’d heard about my Artists with Disability grant. Naomi is great to work with – she has loads of initiative and energy and isn’t afraid to try new things. You can follow her on Facebook at Ted’s Mum’s Blog.

My god, when did I sleep? I have no idea. In 2015 I’m going to try and stay in one place, pick up some tutoring work and spend more time with my beau. I might have said a similar thing last year but at least the tutoring, and general destitution, means I can’t travel as much (said beau is also something of a diversion). If anyone wants to buy a copy of my novels or otherwise support my writing, please do!! In the meantime I’ll be working on finding a publisher for my book on Rosa and Maud Praed, and finishing The Sea Creatures by the end of the year.

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