Notes from the Field (ii)

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

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

National Gallery of Australia.

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

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

Labelled shelf in Katharine Susannah Prichard's writing shack.

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

Flour Mill Cafe, York.

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

York Wildflower Garden

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

Kings Park.

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

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

Review of Cloudwish

I picked up this YA novel as it kept popping up in reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and my mum read it & enjoyed it, and we usually like the same things. I wasn’t disappointed – Cloudwish was a lovely post-Christmas couch read.

Vân Uớc, whose name means ‘Cloudwish’, is an Australian-born Vietnamese scholarship student at a private school. She has a gigantic crush on the most popular and attractive boy in her year and, like all shy and insecure girls, she thinks her chances of attracting him are dismal, until Billy inexplicably begins to pay attention to her.

I loved this novel for its sweetness. I guess most girls’ first crush is emblazoned in their memory, & who knows how many of them worked out – it was nice that this one did. It reminded me of the film Get Real about a romance between a nerdy boy and the most popular fellow at school, and then I wondered how many romances there are about popular girls and less socially adept boys? I haven’t come across any, though I sure would like to.

The novel blends poverty and privilege in a believable, illuminating way. Van’s council housing apartment is described in detail, with the ‘stained concrete floor’ on the way to the lift, the ‘low ceiling and exposed pipes of the hallway’. It’s also contrasted with the lusciousness of Billy’s expansive house with its coterie of staff, and reminded me of Alice Pung’s excellent essay for AWW on race and class.

The weight of parental expectation is also explored. Billy is cramped by his father’s assumption that he’ll become a brilliant rower and study overseas, and his mother’s desire for a girlfriend of the right social éclat. Van is weighed down by the guilt of her parents’ experiences as boat people and their belief that she ought to become a doctor, when she really wants to be an artist. 

I enjoyed Van’s skillful negotiation of her relationship with her parents, for whom she is spokesperson as her mother only speaks ‘survival English’, so as to snatchsome freedom with Billy. I also liked watching her confidence grow through her relationship with Billy. Initially a quiet girl who doesn’t want to draw attention to herself, with Billy’s attentions Van becomes outspoken, much like her role model Jane Eyre. People who dismiss romance as frippery also overlook how it can create valuable emotions: security, confidence, and a willingness to change.

Some of the work seemed staged: the creative writing exercise in which Van expresses her fantasy that Billy would pay attention to her, and Billy’s sudden interest in Van. It wasn’t until Billy became three-dimensional, revealed as a boy who was as cramped by his parents’ expectations as Van was by hers, that I began to believe in his attraction Van. A big part of me was also sceptical that a seventeen year old boy could be so romantically-minded and thoughtful, but then I stopped being critical and gave myself up for the ride.

And having said that, there are plenty of other beautiful details throughout: a grove of scented orange trees, the ‘bright-beaten pieces of silver [coins], half buried in the blue-black asphalt’, and the kindness of a community that looks out for and takes care of its young people. What a lovely, rewarding book. 

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

Review of Painting Red Orchids

I came across Eileen Chong via Jon Shaw, a participant in the Australian Women Writers Challenge, when I was putting together a roundup on books featuring diversity. Eileen has published three volumes of poetry: Burning Rice, Peony and Paining Red Orchids. The latter two contain poems about plants, and as I’m interested in botanical writing, my interest was piqued.

A while later, I asked Eileen if she’d be interested in writing a guest post for a focus on Australian women writers of ethnic heritage, and to my delight she agreed. She wrote about how, although English was the language of commerce, education and law in Singapore, where she lived for twenty years before moving to Australia, her qualifications and education in English were not recognised here because

This was a frustrating set of circumstances but, happily, it led her to poetry.

Painting Red Orchids has been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and when you read it, you can see why. The first poem, the titular ‘Painting Red Orchids’, dips back and forth between animal, plant and human, reminding us of their interconnectedness and how this manifests as art: ‘My wife has made/this paper with mulberry from our gardens. I lift/my brush, pull back my sleeve and saturate the hairs.’ These hairs come from animals – weasel, wolf, mink and leopard – showing us how art binds us to the natural world. Yet art not only needs the labour of growing mulberries, it also needs emotion. This, too, is bound up with environment. The artist’s inkstone ‘was my father’s: slate/quarried from the lake where my great-grandfather/drowned himself one spring night’. The loss of breath returns, though, in the final stanza, to suggest renewal:

One stroke, one breath: leaves give way to blossom.

More water – rain and cloud above the trees.

Cochineal paste, jade seal – red orchid bloom on white.

It’s a beautifully crafted poem, carrying on conversations within itself.

Other poems about plants follow, slow, quiet and complex pieces. In ‘Fern’ each frond is ‘a sister/to another, so many fingers and hands/learning to flourish on the underside/of things’, a suggestion not only of how the plant grows in the understory, but also how it steadily, unshowily, grows, ‘unafraid/of the dark, pushing through stem, bark/growing vein by stubborn vein through morning dew and winter rain’.

‘Orchidaceae: Vanda ‘Miss Joaquin’ is named for Ashkhen Hovakimian, who bred the hybrid orchid, now Singapore’s national flower. The flower’s back is ‘turned to front, violet frills — blooms/like bruises along a curving spine’, a mingling of human and plant that reappears in ‘her petal skin calling to attention/the minute hairs on my thighs’, and which aptly mirrors the fact that the woman is now the plant, as it was named after her. However, as the spelling wasn’t accurate, ‘The heart of the flower/is the misnamed woman’ who is now ‘forced to live on always’.

Not all the poems in Painting Red Orchids are about plants. Many of them circle around the domestic: the friends, lovers, music and food, all contained within houses, or gardens, as Leike is in ‘Elegy’. A cat that was once ‘sinuous, pliant, a wound/spring’, he is no longer ‘among the violets or seeking shade/in the agapanthus, but buried. Dirt/covering honey, amber eyes now glassed’. The line breaks emphasise energy —wound, with its double meaning of tightness and loss — and bluntness — the finality of soil, which covers the loveliness of honey. The poem shunts back and forth between beauty, comfort and loss, summarising life in a way.

In ‘Revisit’ the narrator visits her grandmother who ‘forgets that she has made the tea./She boils water again, and forgets the leaves./Yet my grandmother has not forgotten me’. The rhyme in the poem – tea, leaves, me – mirrors the repetitiveness of trying to remember, and forgetting, and remembering again.

What I love about these poems is their simplicity. They’re so pared back that they are like plinths, holding up their images. Each of her books, too, are beautiful, and I like taking them out, looking at them and reading them. You can check them out at Pitt Street Poetry or on Eileen’s website.

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

Australian Women's Writing: A Retrospective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Elizabeth Lhuede

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of Not Just Black and White

In February this year, on another balmy Brisbane evening, I went off to Avid Reader to listen to a panel discussion, ‘Indigenous Women Writing Their Stories’ presented by The Stella Prize and black&write. The courtyard was packed, the stars were out, the wine was cold and the panelists were fantastic.

Ellen van Neerven, author of the wonderful Heat and Light, hosted the session, which included Lesley and Tammy Williams, winners of the 2014 David Unaipon award for Not Just Black and White; Melissa Lucashenko, author (most recently) of Mullumbimby; and black&write intern Yasmin Smith. It was a wonderful, stimulating evening. Tammy told a joke about how their book was mistaken for one by the Williams sisters (of tennis fame) in a store (obviously not Avid!).

At the end of the evening, I stepped onto the bus with a copy of Not Just Black and White and started to read. The authors are a mother-daughter duo, and their stories are braided together into a dialogue. The work opens with Lesley’s narrative, which highlights the centrality of place to her identity: ‘The sound of water droplets hitting the geranium leaves brought back childhood memories of rain beating down on the tin roof back home in Cherbourg’ (1). Cherbourg was the Aboriginal settlement in Queensland in which she grew up. The opening passage also provides what was to become one of Lesley’s (and therefore the work’s) driving forces – the search for Aboriginal people’s missing wages and savings that were held in ‘trust’ by the government.

The book is subtitled A conversation between a mother and daughter, and Lesley’s account is in conversation with her daughter Tammy. Lesley began telling her story to Tammy when Tammy was a teenager. She initially spoke into a tape recorder because she would ‘always clam up whenever it came time to put pen to paper’ (3) and thought this was due to her limited education but, as Tammy explains, it was also because Aboriginal culture is an oral culture and Aboriginal people of Lesley's generation were more accustomed to passing stories and memories down through recollection and speech. In the book, Tammy responds to each of her mother’s sections, bringing in her insights as she grows up and becomes a lawyer. Her mother’s personal story, she says, ‘was as entwined in mine as mine was in hers’ (4).

Lesley describes growing up in Cherbourg, the closeness of her family and how they often used humour to survive; her growing awareness of the divisions between races and how this was tied to class; how she went out to work as a domestic servant in the country and in Brisbane and worked hard for no pay, except maybe a ticket to the movies; her evening as a debutante in a lovely dress; her marriage to a man who was initially very good and kind but suffered from depression, which killed him. Lesley then needed to work even harder to support her family, but she was tough and determined. She became an Aboriginal teacher’s aide and she showed Tammy that a girl could be anything she wanted.

Although Tammy also worked hard, she ‘hardly ever saw Indigenous people in the kind of roles I imagined could be for me’ (179). Michael Jackson, however, was one of the first images of a successful black person that she saw. In the Cosby show, she found that the wife of Dr Huxtable was a lawyer. ‘It seemed irrelevant,’ Tammy writes, ‘that the Huxtables were a different kind of black people in a different country. I identified more with this fictitious black family living on the other side of the world that the people I saw regularly on the local streets’ (181). And in this way she had ‘a clear image of at least one professional black woman I wanted to be like’.

Tammy was teased at school, while her mother was continued her fight for stolen wages. Needing to express the continuing injustice she experienced and witnessed, Tammy wrote an essay about racism and the need for role models, which she submitted to a competition run by Michael Jackson’s Heal the World Foundation, and won! She and Lesley travelled to a conference at Neverland and then around America, before attending the World Summit of Children in San Francisco. While travelling, they also learned of similarities between the experiences of Indigenous Australians and ethnic Americans, who were also dispossessed of their land. On their return to Australia, Tammy and Lesley were invited to speak at the United Nations Human Rights Council Headquarters in Geneva, and their community rallied around to help them finance the trip.

In Geneva, Lesley gathered her courage and spoke to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on this trip about Indigenous people’s stolen wages. After this, she figured she could speak to anyone, including the Queensland premier. On her return to Australia, she continued her fight, working with researchers who estimated the amount of the lost wages. She compiled media kits; and organised rallies and community meetings amidst some hostility from white people (Pauline Hanson was enjoying her first flush of power) and from some of the Indigenous community as well. She accessed the government records relating to her family, but the documents she needed most were ‘noticeably missing’ (306). Finally, with the help of an Indigenous woman, Kerrie Tim, the executive director of the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy, and her policy advisor, Lesley obtained the passbook showing her savings. It had been held in a safe that had belonged to the former director of Native Affairs. Even despite this evidence, the Queensland government was prepared to fight Lesley in court - the racism that confined Indigenous people in settlements such as Cherbourg was clearly continuing. Eventually, however, the government offered an apology and compensation not just to Lesley, but also to individual claimants.

This was a great book to read. I found Lesley’s account more gripping, perhaps because her recollections were more detailed and descriptive, and her tenacity, intelligence and lateral thinking were incredible. That the passbook was kept locked in a safe also speaks volumes, as does the government's reticence to redress injustice. But Tammy’s account showed how the past moulds the future, and that the qualities parents learn shape their children too. I was glad that this book not only won the David Unaipon award, which meant it could be published, but also the Queensland Premier's award for a Work of State Significance in this year’s Queensland Literary Awards – it means that, although we still have a long way to go, representations of Queensland’s history are finally becoming more inclusive.

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

Review of Defying Doomsday

When I worked at Autism Queensland, where my job was to inform employees about the latest research in autism, I read an article about the experiences of young people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) immediately following the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake in Italy. People with autism often rely on routine and sometimes process sensory information differently to typically developing folk. Unsurprisingly, the study found that the adaptive functioning (ie the skills they use to adapt to everyday life) of the young people with ASD declined after the earthquake.

I thought of this study as I read Defying Doomsday earlier this year. This collection of short stories was edited by AWW’s own Tsana Dolchiva and Holly Kench, who noticed that there was a lack of characters with disability or chronic illness in fiction about the apocalypse. Likewise, this study mentioned that there was no research on the impact of natural disasters upon people with autism. There is clearly a sore need, in both our real and imagined worlds, for contemplation of disability and apocalypse.

And this seems strange, for people with disability, as Robert Hoge writes in his introduction to the stories, ‘live in a post-apocalyptic world. Stairs remain at stubborn right angles. Communications can wash over us, unheard, unseen. Some social interactions elude—a millimetre away, a mile away … So much of our world is a not-made-for-us space that disaster may as well have already struck. And that’s exactly what makes the stories in this anthology so crunchy and interesting—we are already fighting and thriving in interesting and diverse ways. When the apocalypse comes, we’ve got a head start.’

It’s a great note to begin with – people assume that when the world falls apart, people with disabilities will be a burden, but these stories challenge that idea. There is a character with autism – Holly – who keeps herself alive through precise measurements of when the lethal rains will arrive, and by methodically sealing of her clothes with tape before she sets outside (‘Something in the Rain’, Seanan McGuire). Most of the neurotypical people she knows, by contrast, are caught by the rain, and dissolve.

The story I enjoyed most was Tansy Rayner Roberts’ ‘Did We Break the End of the World?’, not only because it had deaf protagonists but because it was very well crafted, with a twist that related to the characters’ hearing. The characters have personality and verve, with different degrees of deafness – Jin can sign and also uses hearing aids, and takes them out when he needs some peace or when he’s pissed off and wants to ignore someone – I found it a very good representation.

I also liked ‘Octavia Cade’s ‘Portabello Blind’, which follows a blind, fourteen year old girl deserted in a research lab in Dunedin. Anna knows the layout of the buildings, but when it comes to catching food such as fish, things get difficult. The sensory detail is pronounced, as it is for most people who lose a sense – their brain compensates by finding extra information through their other senses. In Cade’s story, this adds a richness and precision to the writing: ‘There were life jackets in the shed. She put one on and it smelled of salt and rubber, of plastic. The life jacket had a whistle attached: a sharp, high sound like a gull.’ And ‘Anna could smell the tides, knew when they were out. The soft-sweet scent of mud was a dead giveaway.’ Although it’s a muted story, the reader identifies with Anna’s sense of achievement at learning to survive. This, I think, is the best thing about fiction - it puts readers in other people's shoes and helps them to imagine what life is like for those who have disabilities.

The stories are set in towns, cities and outer space, but there isn’t a whole lot of nature throughout, which I thought was strange. Even in an apocalypse, nature persists, and can be the cause of apocalypses too (as with the Italian earthquake). The protagonists are also all fairly young. This is no bad thing, particularly as there’s a lack of positive young adult literature about people with disabilities in general, as I wrote in a post for a focus on Australian women writers with disability at AWW in March. However, disability affects people of all ages, and I was left wondering what it would be like for parents or grandparents with disability, for example, who needed to care for their families in an apocalypse.

These are minor quibbles, though, in an anthology that shows people with disability negotiating difficult circumstances with ingenuity, stoicism, and a sense of humour – the qualities that get us through our everyday lives in the 21st century.

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

Review of Fishing in the Devonian

O’er November we leapt, and I didn’t get any blog posts down as I was madly tying things up before going travelling for a month for conferences, a writers festival & research. And now that I’m back I find that Christmas is less than a fortnight away and I have some nine reviews to write to meet the challenge I set myself for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. So, as usual, yours truly is hitting the panic button which will lead to an outpouring of creativity & thence a collapse in front of the Christmas tree, where the dog will find me and lick my face.

The festival was Quantum Words, a science writing festival organised by Jane McCredie, who also edited this year’s Best Australian Science Writing 2016 (a jolly good Christmas present for anyone still scratching their heads). I was on a panel titled How Science Made Me a Better Writer alongside poet Carol Jenkins and playwright James Saunders, chaired by the lovely novelist & journalist Ashley Hay. I spoke about the ecobiography I’m writing and how Georgiana Molloy was probably not only Western Australia’s first female scientist, but also its first female science writer. And I described how science makes me a better writer because it gives me fresh ideas and encourages precision and collaboration.

James described the TV programme he’s making about scientists and consciousness, which was fascinating (keep an eye out for it!) and Carol read out some of her poems. When I heard the latter, my toes began to tingle. Writing poems about science, she said, is way more interesting than writing about one’s cat or one’s ex. I agreed, and after the session I bought her second book of poems, Xn, and when I got home I ordered the first, Fishing in the Devonian.

The Devonian is a period of 60 million years, beginning at the end of the Silurian period some 400 million years ago. It’s named after Devon, in England, where the rocks from this period were first studied. It was an exciting period: plants began to stretch across land and grow into forests, evolving leaves and roots; the first seed-bearing plants appeared; the fins of the ancestors of tetrapods (four-legged creatures) evolved into legs and they began to walk on land; the oceans were increasingly populated with primitive sharks and placoderms (fish with armoured plates and pelvic fins, which gave rise to the limbs of the tetrapods) dominated watery environments. Fish in general became very diverse and the era was dubbed the ‘Age of Fish’.

Aptly, then, the first poem in the book is the titular ‘Fishing in the Devonian’ and aptly, Carol writes, ‘There is a lot/to think about in fishing in the Devonian’, including the contemplation of these life forms. You can sit in your boat and watch Tiktaalik rosae tempted by ‘the attractive ooze of mudflats/with morsels of scorpions and millipedes … trying its best to get out’ like its fellow fish, which ‘throng/up and over the shore on their lobed fins’. But, she humorously adds, be careful of the boat you use, for ‘spongey Devonian wood’ doesn’t have much by the way of ‘secondary thickening/through a stout source of carbon’ – the trees haven’t yet evolved to be strong enough!

It’s a charming poem to open with, and the poems that follow are similarly captivating. ‘A Life in Fridges’ describes fifteen fridges, capturing the arc of the narrator’s life from childhood to adulthood. As a child, she spent some time ‘opening the door to feel the engagement/and disengagement of the catch./ The term shut the door comes into/common parlance’. What child hasn’t been day absorbed in a fridge seal like this, especially on a summer’s day when the gust of cool air from the interior is so much more satisfying that a fan stirring hot air, and your mother tells you to stop wasting electricity? When she leaves home ‘someone’s old beer fridge/is dragged dripping, like adulthood/into the kitchen of McEvoy Ave’. This fridge is old and animated, it ‘coughs mechanically, a late/night shudder, as if dreaming it forgot how/to breathe and then the motor kicks back in/and gets on with it’. Then there is a baby and ‘the magnets come/the first twenty six/are the bloody alphabet which I pick up/about a thousand times a week’ and, finally, the markers of comfortable middle-age: ‘three kinds of yoghurt, five chutneys,/six varieties of soft cheese, a Tardis trail through dark matter,/time and meals’. It’s a clever way of telling a life; taking a quotidian object we never think about and investing it with personality, memory and attachment. The ending is so superb, and characteristically funny, that it’s worth quoting in full:

            Outside is a public demonstration of family life;

of the inside, I say to visitors, don’t open that fridge,

it’s like my unconscious, there are good things in there

and some things you will not want to know.

To illustrate this, and that the term vegetable crisper

is an oxymoron, I gently lever up a liquid zucchini,

fizzing slightly yellow, photograph it and post this on the door. (51)

 So yes, not all the poems are about science. Many are about childhood and growing up, sex, romance and women, one whom ‘throws herself/ – perfect body, less one breast – /off the cliff onto the rocks’ (How Much, p. 40) – and all of them, whether muted or bold – carry sensory detail that pulls the reader into another moment, then releases them.

I found only one poem to be clunky – ‘Kulin Seasons’ – a braiding of descriptions of the seasons described by the Kulin people and a series of events throughout the year advertising sales in stores. While some of the descriptions are delicate and gorgeous – witness ‘In kangaroo-apple season/you can watch small bats/harvesting insects from twilight’ – the author’s intent was too obvious, and it unsettled me.

And my favourite? Too hard to pick, but I loved these few lines from ‘Disorders of Belief’: ‘She wanted to believe in bone, muscle, blood,/skin and pheromones but ran into the anaesthetic/of romance, the predisposition to delusional/sexually receptive states’ (11), for what is romance but the swish of chemicals? And what are clouds, but symbols of inexpressibility, viz.:

I am photographing clouds, they are so hard

to talk to, carrying in an elegiac mass all the words

I didn’t say that were perfect for when we weren’t

lying together on a paisley cotton quilt, that

your great aunt, who bred silkworms, didn’t make. (‘Fifteen Tangents, p. 69).

Are clouds all that isn’t there? At any rate they are good metaphors for poems – we study their shapes and try to decode their meaning.

All this year I’ve been buying poetry books to compel myself to start writing poetry again, but I’ve been so busy & tired that I haven’t had time to do anything except get to the end of my nonfiction book, Hearing Maud. However, 2017 awaits, and Carol is such a marvelous writer that she has persuaded me, when gaps of time open, to plug them with poetry.

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

A Blogging Birthday

Ten years ago, on October 15th 2016, I wrote my first blog post on Blogger. I sat in the kitchen of my housing commission apartment in East London with my flatmate, who’d suggested to me, ‘Perhaps you should think about starting a blog.’

‘Why?’

‘If you’re a writer, it’s a good way to express your thoughts and create a presence.’

‘Okay.’

She showed me how to put together a template, then I had a look at her blog, & poked around on the internet, and slowly, hesitantly, I began to write.

Mostly, it seems, I wrote a litany of complaints about London, where I was constantly unhappy. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t complained so much and that I'd appreciated my time there more – a lecture with Donna Harraway & Rosi Braidotti, after all, is amazing – I use them both in my research now. But there were mitigating circumstances: a broken heart, debilitating homesickness, the constant craving for sunlight.

I wrote lightly about books, and not with the intent that I do now; these were more musings, whereas now I write reviews so that I can contemplate the craft and structure of a work. And for the past five years while I’ve worked with the Australian Women Writers Challenge, I’ve reviewed books by Australian women. It’s given me a good feel for the market and for the issues which women writers face, but I’ve been so pressed for time this year I’m not sure if I can commit toreviewing next year. I also want to broaden my consumption; I miss my 19th century literature and I want to read more globally.

I wrote about my travels around Britain with H, and when I returned to Australia I stopped complaining and wrote about the gorgeousness of running and swimming again. I made an effort to learn about and become part of the Brisbane literary community, which was difficult at first, but I got there in the end. Thank god for Avid Reader’s literary salons; that bookshop was my intellectual home for a long time.

These past few years my posts have thinned out, due to my incessant busyness, and have alternated between reviews, politics and descriptions of my trips (which are handy for working out where I was & when!). However, my book on Rosa & Maud Praed is largely done, and now that my weekends and evenings are my own again I’d like to return to my earlier style, with whimsical descriptions of things that I notice, rather than banging on about politics all the time, though that is important too. I also want to review books for pleasure; I have pushed myself with the Australian Women Writers Challenge, & that can make it a chore, at least this year when I've been flattened by work.

When I began blogging, I leapt into an online community, largely care of a friend, Heidi, who now blogs for Strictly Come Dancing and The Great British Bake Off in England. I found it strange, negotiating the manners of an online world, but it was also lovely to chat to random folk & quietly find out about them. I didn’t sustain it though, & I’ve noticedI’m not very good with commenting in general on other people’s blogs, or even with interacting on Twitter; I remain insular in that regard. It used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore; I love writing for the heck of it, & am not particularly interested in using my blog for any other reason. It’s mostly a place of brain dumps.

I began with a red room & finish with a red building: the exterior of the Powerhouse, lit up by red lights on the night I gave a reading from my story published in the sport edition of Griffith Review. It’s a nice way of showing continuity: I remained captivated by ideas & am drawn to the institutions that deliver them, even as I remain ambivalent about that. And of course, there’s writing itself – still so hard but so satisfying, even despite poor pecuniary returns & the government’s abhorrence of the literary arts. With a pen, a pad of blank paper, a café with good coffee on the corner and the jacarandas blazing along the river, the next ten years promise much.

On Swimming and Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of Comfort Food

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

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

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

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

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

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

The planet

is built for sea-living

but we do not pay

these creatures due respect

the porpoises

            are merely pig fish

the reef

            is a public art gallery

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

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

sometimes you stare

at the sky

and wish to be

what you were:

a meteor

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

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