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. 

Notes from the Field (i)

It’s been two months since I began my postdoc at UQ and I have loved getting up each morning to go into work. My office is on the eighth floor, but I have many visitors, particularly those of the non-human kind. A gecko made an appearance not long after I moved all my books in, but hasn’t been seen since. I hope he hasn’t perished, or been squashed by a door (his tail is a little bent; he may have already had a door encounter). Cockatoos and crows also perch outside my windows. My zanzibar, ever slow-growing, has graced me with a new shoot.

When I found out that my DECRA application was successful last year, I contacted Miles Noel, a graphic artist in Western Australia. The year before, when searching the internet for images for a presentation on Georgiana Molloy, I came across his portrait of her, which he created in 2013 for his SCI-POP portraits exhibition of Western Australian scientists. I’d long wanted to buy a copy, and now I finally had some cash. Conversations were had, art was made, and soon after I started work, the print was installed in my office. I like looking at it when I walk in, or drift away from my screen, musing.

I’ve been reading up on the history of south-west WA (and wished I was a robot with automatic uploads), and almost completed an essay on ecobiography, analysing Kim Scott’s Kayang and Me and Annamaria Weldon’s The Lake’s Apprentice. Following a conference at which I presented in early Feb, I found some new information on Georgiana’s husband (which I wrote about in this post), which has made me think much about extinction and massacres – topics on which ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose writes with clarity and urgency (such as in this one). I’m also helping to organise a work-in-progress conference for postgrads, which is enjoyable because I’m meeting new people and generating new ideas.

While it is mostly roses working at UQ, the coffee on campus is a great disappointment to me. There is only one decent outlet at which to forage, and that necessitates a long walk, which isn’t convenient on busy days, or hot ones, of which there have been many (climate change is afoot, the Reef has bleached and the pollies fiddle as we burn).

I have also struggled enormously with the lack of time to do my creative writing, and have been writing on evenings and weekends, which is wearing me down. I often worked six days a week before I began this job, but the pace wasn’t quite as intense. I’m hoping that I will adjust soon, and get into a rhythm.

For the next few months I'll be researching affect, and how stories and reading can shape our thinking – which is important when it comes to capturing people's attention and educating them about environmental degradation. I also have a trip planned to WA to do some research and to meet people involved in my project. So much to look forward to!

Twelve things I’ve learned over twenty years of writing

In March 1996, I started my creative writing course at the University of Wollongong (illuminated above). My parents weren’t entirely sure what they were doing in sending me there (‘We did wonder,’ my father once said to me), but the careers advisor had recommended it, and I liked his recommendation and so, marvellously, it came to be.

I was a young and naïve deaf girl from the country. I found university so stressful that I stopped eating and lost six kilos in six weeks, but I adored my course. Writing rapidly became my raison d'être: it was a balm for the isolation of deafness; crafting beautiful lines pleased my sense of aesthetics; and puzzling over the structure of a novel, essay or poem was immensely satisfying.

But the life of a writer is very difficult – I don’t think many understand just how hard it is when they set out (I sure didn’t). So below I’ve cobbled together a few things I’ve learnt over the last two decades, not as a road map to publication, but more as lamps in the darkness on the road.

*

1.     Writing take a long, long, long time. You’ll need patience, patience and more patience. It’s not just the writing itself, but finding the agent and publisher, then working with the editor. Even then it’s usually not until you’re a few books in that you even gain any traction.

2.     Find yourself a writing group. You'll feel less lonely and your writing will improve tremendously through constructive criticism and feedback.

3.     If you want to get published, you need a track record, which you can establish through publications in litmags and by winning competitions. Find every opportunity you can – write and submit and repeat. The litmag market in Australia is small, but not impossible. Try overseas as well. There are many competitions around - Aerogramme Writers' Studio have good listings of these.

4.     Subscribe to litmags (see #3). These are the life blood of Australian publishing and they are often how you get your foot in the door. If you can’t afford it, band together with some friends and get one subscription each, then share your copies.

5.     Install an internet blocker such as Self Control. Use it.

6.     Get a job. Most writers work like a dog for peanuts for a long time and it’s not enough to live on. A recent study from Macquarie University found that writers in Australia on average make $12,900 from their writing – and these are the more successful ones. T.S. Eliot was a banker and Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. I've found stability and a flexible boss to be more important than my pay rate.

7.     Create an online presence through social media and/or a website. Not only will it help potential publishers work out who you are and what your writing is like, but social media can alleviate boredom, loneliness and shyness. Once you are published, it’s a good way to maintain contact with readers. If it gets out of control, resort to #5.

8.     Read everything. First for enjoyment, then for craft. Take the piece apart to work out how the writer has achieved certain effects. If you can’t afford to buy books or don’t have enough space, join your local or state library.

9.     Jealousy is okay and to be expected. What is not okay is when it stops you cheering for your fellow writers. Don’t be petty; they have worked as hard as you and they deserve buckets of good wishes.

10.  Agents are not essential, but they are handy if you hate finance and fine print.

11.  Conduct yourself with grace at all times, even if rejection feels like a slap in a face and you’re having a hard time managing #9. Publishing is a small and subjective business, and everyone in the industry wishes they could publish more.

12.  Persist. If you get knocked down, it’s okay to sit in a puddle of tears for a while. Then get up and keep on going. The writers who get into print those who never give up. And if you love what do you, and you’d rather not be doing anything else, then of course you’ll get there.

#fundTrove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swim for the Reef

My first encounter with the Great Barrier Reef was in a glass-bottomed boat near Brampton Island at Easter in 1985. For a small girl from the country who only saw the sea once a year in the summer holidays and who was used to the contained and chlorinated water of swimming pools, the purple and red coral and shoals of sparkling fish were astonishing. And terrifying. When I snorkelled above a giant clam, I surfaced, gasping, and asked my mother, ‘What if my feet get trapped in its mouth?’

Just as it was difficult for an eight year old to comprehend the foreignness of the reef’s creatures, so too is it hard to take in the magnitude of the reef itself. It is, as Ian McCalman writes in The Reef: A History, ‘so extensive that no human mind can take it in, the exception perhaps being astronauts who’ve seen its full length from outer space’ (3). Made up of tiny coral polyps, it is the world’s largest living structure and largest coral reef system, roughly the size of England and Ireland put together. The beauty and complexity of its formation and ecosystems have drawn explorers, scientists, writers, tourists and photographers to its atolls and cays.

McCalman notes that the Reef was ‘built by human minds as well as by coral polyps’ (9), which goes some way to explaining the many histories of the Reef that begin with the first substantial record of a European encounter with it, Captain James Cook’s journal. However, it has of course existed long before Cook’s ship became wedged on a piece of coral. The present reef structure is estimated to be 6,000-8,000 years old, while there are more than 70 Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Traditional Owner groups that have long and continuing relationships with the Reef region and its natural resources. As Wright opens The Coral Battleground, her account of the fight to save the reef from mining in the 1960s, ‘This story has no real beginning and no one knows what its end will be.’ The end, however, may be looming.

A 2012 paper from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the University of Wollongong noted that the Great Barrier Reef had lost half its coral cover over the last 27 years. 48% of this was due to storm damage, while 42% was from the invasion of crown of thorns starfish, and 10% due to bleaching on account of increasing acidity of oceans from global warming. Despite this, in December 2013, Federal environment minister Greg Hunt approved a plan for dredging to create three shipping terminals as part of the construction of a coal port.

In the ensuing outcry, the government backtracked, and a consortium of developers resubmitted a proposal for onshore dumping. They proposed dumping on the Caley Valley wetlands, which are a filter for water running into the reef. When the new Labor government was elected in Queensland in 2015, they made a decision to prevent dumping. On 1st July 2015, UNESCO made a decision to put the Reef on probation until 2019 and expressed their disappointment in the decline of the quality of the Reef.

Meanwhile the price of coal is dropping, major investors such as the National Australia Bank have withdrawn their support for Adani and in November 2015, the Queensland government passed a ban on dumping. However, the Reef’s health continues to deteriorate despite state and federal efforts, as outlined in this article in The Conversation.

I protested for the Reef at a rally in 2013, I give money to Getup to agitate for political action to protect it,  I’m writing a speculative fiction novel about the reef and climate change, and on Saturday I will be taking part in a swimathon organised by the Queensland Environmental Defenders Office. I’m part of Avid Readers and Writers for the Reef, a collection of fantastic writers and readers put together by the wonderful and independent Avid Reader bookstore in West End.

I adore swimming. I grew up in north-west New South Wales where it was so hot that we spent most of our summers in the pool. It’s also useful for me creatively: if I’m stuck with something that I can’t work out in my writing, I take it into the pool and think about it as I swim. By the time I get out, I’ve usually come up with a solution. I’m not so great with my swimming technique though, as the only lessons I had were at Boggabri Primary School and they didn’t extend to tumble turns (which I still can’t do).

However, swimming with the literati on Saturday! I’m so excited. Other swimmers are Mary-Rose MacColl, Anita Heiss and Ellen van Neerven, plus some Avid staff (who are so lovely you sometimes want to steal them) and readers (without whom there would be no writers).

If you’d like to make a donation to support our swimming efforts and to conserve this gorgeous and irreplaceable (at least in our lifetime) piece of the environment, you can do so on this page.

2015: My Year of Writing

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

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

Publications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awards/Funding

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

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

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

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

Conferences

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

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

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

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

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

Research

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

Teaching and Workshops

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

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

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

The Year Ahead

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

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

2016 is going to be busy and fabulous!

2015: My Year of Reading

Once again I’m a bit slow on the uptake with my end-of-year summaries of my literary life in 2015, but better late than never!

Last year I participated in the Australian Women Writers Challenge and the GoodReads challenge. While I met my goal of reading 20 books and reviewing 10 books for the former (I read 44 and reviewed 10), for the latter I only made it to 76 out of 100 books, which was 5 more books than last year’s.

One of my absolute favourite books for the year was Michael Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, which I read on a dark and wintry New Year’s Day in Newcastle in England, in the house of some lovely friends. It’s a peculiar work about a missionary sent to colonise aliens on another planet. About six months after I read it, I realised the swirling rain on the planet, which came and went like a three-dimensional thing, was a metaphor for grief, and my admiration for the book was renewed.

I also loved Kazuo Ishiguoro’s The Buried Giant, a retelling of the fable of the Green Knight, because I could never quite work out what was happening and I like being unsettled by texts. I also liked the almost child-like way in which it was narrated. While in Rome I finished Peter Watts’ Rifters trilogy which my boyfriend suggested to me as research for my mermaid book. I still think often about that pressurised, underwater world with its attenuated bodies and tough female protagonist.

Closer to home, Fiona Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance, about her struggle with anorexia, was exquisite. I would have written a review of it except that it was a little too close to home and I couldn’t have been objective. I also enjoyed the clever puzzle of Debra Adelaide’s latest novel, The Women’s Pages.

My reading of Indigenous women writers over the year was woeful – I only managed two books, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Too Afraid to Cry and Gayle Kennedy’s Me, Antman and Fleabag. I’m aiming to redress this in 2016. I’m also going to try and read and review books of poetry, as I’ll be writing more of this and need to study it.

In terms of international writers, for whom I wasn’t setting myself a target or making myself aware of gender bias, I read 5 more books by male writers (15 books) than female writers (10 books). Last year this was the opposite, with 7 books by male writers and 11 by female writers, so it doesn’t look like there’s a pattern yet.

I’ve set myself the same challenges again this year, and am more hopeful of meeting them, if only because I’ll be forcing myself to have the evenings off to read and rest. Having just come back from a gorgeous holiday in Thailand with plenty of luxurious reading time, I’m already ahead!

The list below is more for my own records than anyone else’s, and because I find the interface at GoodReads to be almost impossible.

Australian Women Writers (reviews have hyperlinks)

1.     Waiting Room: A Memoir, Gabrielle Carey

2.     The World Without Us, Mireille Juchau

4.     Puberty Blues, Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey

5.     Remotely Fashionable: A Story of Subtropical Style, Nadia Buick and Madeleine King

6.     Anchor Point, Alice Robinson

7.     The Women's Pages, Debra Adelaide

8.     The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories, Jo Anderton

9.     The Golden Age, Joan London

10.  Small Acts of Disappearance, Fiona Wright

11.  The Dangerous Bride, Lee Kofman

12. Elemental, Amanda Curtin

13.  Vulture's Gate, Kirsty Murray

14.  Stanley and Sophie, Kate Jennings

15.  Grimsdon, Deborah Abela

16.  Pieces Of A Girl, Charlotte Wood

17.  The Landing, Susan Johnson

18.  The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood

19.  Too afraid to cry, Ali Cobby Eckermann

20.  The Delinquents: Text Classics, Criena Rohan

21.  Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar

22.  In My Mother's Hands, Biff Ward

23.  Georgiana Molloy: The Mind That Shines, Bernice Barry

24.  The Life Of Houses, Lisa Gorton

25.  That Oceanic Feeling, Fiona Capp

26.  The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane

27.  Me, Antman & Fleabag, Gayle Kennedy

28.  Hopscotch, Jane Messer

29.  My Blood's Country: A Journey Through the Landscape that Inspired Judith Wright's Poetry, Fiona Capp

30.  The Strays, Emily Bitto

31.  The Floating Garden, Emma Ashmere

32.  The Anchoress, Robyn Cadwallader

33.  Snowy River Man, Lizzy Chandler

34.  The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine, Krissy Kneen

35.  Salt Rain, Sarah Armstrong

36.  Deeper Water, Jessie Cole

37.  Razorhurst, Justine Larbalestier

38.  Sustenance, Simone Lazaroo

39.  This House of Grief, Helen Garner

40.  Reefscape: Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef, Rosaleen Love

41.  Only the Animals, Ceridwen Dovey

42.  The Coral Battleground, Judith A. Wright

43.  Piano Lessons, Anna Goldsworthy

44.  The Midnight Dress, Karen Foxlee

Australian Male Writers

45.  Ugly: My Memoir, Robert Hoge

46.  The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan

47.  The Horses, William Lane

48.  A World of Other People, Steven Carroll

49.  The Reef: A Passionate History, Iain McCalman

50.  Clade, JamesBradley

51.  The Element of Need: Murder and Memory in Adelaide, James Bradley

International Women Writers

52.  Allegiant (Divergent, #3), Veronica Roth

53.  Insurgent (Divergent, #2), Veronica Roth

54.  Divergence (Divergence, #1), Veronica Roth

55.  Blue Nights, Joan Didion

56.  Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

57.  A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride

58.  Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned", Lena Dunham

59.  Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay

60.  H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

61.  Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture, Jennifer Esmail

International Male Writers

62.  The Dreaming Land, Martin Edmond

63.  Loosed upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, John Joseph Adams

64.  The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss

65.  All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

66.  Railsea, China Mieville

67.  The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks

68.  The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro

69.  These Are the Names, Tommy Wieringa

70.  Aquarium, David Vann

71.  The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal

72.  Behemoth (Rifters, #3), Peter Watts

73.  Maelstrom (Rifters, #2), Peter Watts

74.  A History of Silence: a memoir, Lloyd Jones

75.  Starfish (Rifters, #1), Peter Watts

76.  The Book of Strange New Things, Michel Faber

The Australian Women Writers Challenge – completed!

This is my fourth year of undertaking a challenge to read and review more books by Australian women writers. The initiative was established in 2012 Elizabeth Lhuede, who wanted to redress the gender bias in reviewing.

I’m the diversity editor at AWW, and throughout the year I arranged guest posts from women writers of ethnic heritage, including Queenie Chan, Marisa Wikramanayake and Maxine Beneba Clarke, as well as lesbian/queer writers Inga Simpson, Tricia Dearborn, Lee Winter and Francesca Rendle-Short.

I was also very happy that Gayle Kennedy, an Aboriginal woman writer whom I met at an artists with disability conference last year, wrote a guest post for us during NAIDOC week, while Bec Kavanagh also write a guest post on the importance of reading diverse texts, particularly for younger readers.

I presented on the AWW challenge and writing vernacular criticism at the annual Association for the Study of Australian Literature in Wollongong in July. I really enjoy taking part in the challenge because I’m interested in women’s writing and diversity, and in promoting these subjects. It also helps me to keep up to date with what’s being published, and I like interacting with the other volunteers. I get good reading suggestions from Sue T of Whispering Gums; Marisa Wikramanayake put together a series of conversations with writers throughout the year; Annabel Smith interviewed more writers, and it’s been great to watch Elizabeth’s writing career start to take off. It’s just so lovely to be part of the AWW community.

I met my challenge of reading more than 20 books (I read 38) and reviewing 10 of these. The books that I reviewed, however, were disappointingly very un-diverse. Here’s my list:

The Floating Garden, Emma Ashmere

Me, Antman & Fleabag, Gayle Kennedy

Hopscotch, Jane Messer

Georgiana Molloy: The Mind that Shines, Bernice Barry

Stanley and Sophie, Kate Jennings

Anchor Point, Alice Robinson

Remotely Fashionable, Nadia Buick and Madeleine King

The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane

The World Without Us, Mireille Juchau

The Women’s Pages, Debra Adelaide

I mostly chose to review these books because I needed to think them through for books or papers that I’m working on, which are about animals, carers, and climate change. Others, such as Remotely Fashionable or The Women’s Pages I reviewed because I loved them.

I’m sticking to my challenge level for 2016 (read at least 20, review 10), as it’s a struggle to find time to review books. However I’m going to make a concerted effort next year to review more works by Indigenous authors, and I’m hoping to arrange more guest posts by Indigenous authors throughout the year. I’m also going to arrange a focus on writers with disability, and another on writers of migrant background.

Another busy year ahead! In the meantime I’m signing off, packing my bags & heading to Thailand for two weeks of sun, water, cocktails & burning through the 25+ books on my ereader. Glorious!

Review of The Women's Pages

To pick up a piece of writing by Debra Adelaide is be instantly assured that one is in calm, capable hands. The kind that can smooth down bed sheets, whip up a meringue, tally up a line of numbers without error, guide you steadily through a narrative and deliver you to a satisfying ending (although it might, as in The Household Guide to Dying, make you cry). The narrators in Adelaide’s stories are problem solvers, and in her most recent novel The Women’s Pages, the problem is one of writing itself.

As her mother lies dying, Dove reads her Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and she begins to write a novel. She is compelled into the act of writing by reading this text, which she had picked up when she was young and which ‘was like a malaria of the brain, lying dormant then leaping up at unexpected times to attack with the fever of unresolved narrative’ (7). The same might be said of Dove’s attempts at writing: she is plagued by dreams, her characters intrude into her consciousness, and she is puzzled by how to fit it all together. As she tries to work out what’s happening so, too, does her reader.

The novel which Dove writes is set in the 50s, with all of its thick and casual sexism. When Ellis, her character (named for Ellis Bell, the pseudonym of Emily Bronte), refuses the advances of her friend’s husband, he calls her a ‘tight bitch’ (23). Ellis looks for a job designing typefaces and is cowed by the weight of male disapproval of a woman who should be at home, doing the laundry. Unwanted pregnancies are hidden, their attendant pain smothered beneath the daily rituals of cooking, cleaning and earning an income. Yet even some decades years later, sexism is still rife: while at university, Dove finds her breast groped by a man mid-conversation and is paralysed with indecision about whether to voice the violation, until she ‘thought she might gag with the effort of doing nothing’ (59). The scene reminded me of The First Stone, in which Helen Garner was groped during a massage, but still paid the masseuse afterwards because she was unsure of how to deal with the situation. It still seems there is no language for some acts, although I think this is (thankfully) beginning to shift with social media.

I sometimes found myself confused as to who was speaking throughout the narrative, and it took me a while to work out whose story I was in, Ellis’s or Dove’s. And yet this was apt, for this is what happens to a writer (well, to me at least) when in the thick of writing a novel – it’s hard to shake off your characters, and you carry them around with you. You know they’re not real, but they’re not phantoms either. To Dove, Emily Bronte is so real that she enters her dreams, while Ellis plagues her with questions, pushing through the narrative in search of their answers.

The two stories hinge in the final scene, which I thought was wonderful for its elegance and surprise. My own mother, however, was unimpressed: she’d seen it coming. I didn’t mind; the novel has so many intricacies in it that I know I’ll return to puzzle it out. It has also occurred to me that this might be more of a writer’s novel, rather than a reader’s, as so much of it is about the process of writing.

What I have always loved about Adelaide’s writing is her celebration of domesticity and the feminine, particularly her descriptions of cooking. For example Ellis’s carer, Mrs Wood, ‘taught Ellis how to add a few pinches of curry powder – she favoured Clive of India – to the batter for fried flathead, which took care of the fishy smell in the house’ (108). Much of Mrs Wood’s knowledge has been gleaned ‘from the women’s pages of the Sunday newspapers over the years’ (108).

Ellis, in need of an income, finds work sorting out the recipes for one such magazine, titled the Women’s Pages, although most refer to it as the Pages. This becomes its official title as a way of increasing its appeal for, as Ellis observes, ‘the Pages turned out to be read by a surprising number of men’ (187). It’s a simple reference that underscores the difficulties we’re still having with selling women’s writing and asking people (well, men, mostly) to take it seriously. Siri Hustvedt discusses these issues beautifully in her essay about the reception of Knausgaard’s emotional writing, and his dismissal of women writers as ‘No competition’.

I adored so much about The Women's Pages, including its intertextual references to other quietly domestic novels such as Camille’s Bread, and movies such as Love and Other Catastrophes (one of my favourites). It’s the perfect way to wrap up my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

This is my 10th and final review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Finding Maud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yeah. What’s wrong with Woking?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who won the election?’ I asked him.

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

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

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

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