Elizabeth Jolley’s personal and publishing history is well known. She migrated from the United Kingdom to Western Australia with her husband, Leonard, and their three children in 1959, when Leonard was appointed Librarian at the University of Western Australia. Although she had been writing from a young age and had brought a great deal of manuscript material with her, it was not until the late 1960s that she had stories published. Fremantle Press published her first book, Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976). More publications followed in rapid succession, and Miss Peabody’s Inheritance and Mr Scobie’s Riddle, Jolley’s third and fourth novels, both appeared in 1983.

Miss Peabody’s Inheritance begins abruptly with a mysterious statement, ‘The nights belonged to the novelist’, one which is repeated periodically and becomes a kind of leitmotif in the novel. This reference to the dark realm of the night suggests something hidden, something outside the ordinariness of daytime, a time of dreams, of imaginative licence, ‘a world of magic and enchantment’. It is followed by what seem to be notes for a story: ‘I have a Headmistress in mind, you know, a tremendously responsible sort of woman, the novelist’s large handwriting was black on large sheets of paper’, and Peabody’s doubled narrative mode – its metafictional structure – is established. A novel-in-progress is recounted in part in a series of letters from an Australian romance novelist, Diana Hopewell, to Miss Peabody. This narrative is embedded within the main story, concerning the unlikely but intimate relationship that develops, through their correspondence, between the novelist and Dorothy Peabody, an insignificant, middle-aged woman who lives with her invalid mother in London and works as a stenographer.

Miss Peabody's Inheritance (UQP, 1984)

Buy this bookJolley was herself an inveterate note-taker and letter writer; she valued epistolary friendships in her own life. Her correspondence with her father, for example, extended throughout his life from her schooldays. Jolley described her grief at his death as being in part a loss of that deep association, ‘a bereavement of not writing letters’. Putting the story of the headmistress, Arabella Thorne, into the letters of the imagined novelist, Diana Hopewell, gave Jolley the form she needed to develop a character like Miss Thorne in all of what she called her ‘awkwardness’. She discusses this in her essay, ‘A Scattered Catalogue of Consolation’, where she says: ‘Writing in letters allows a great deal of freedom – repetitions, poor but vivid phrases, purple passages of description, these are all excused in this rapid and personal method of communication.’

The energy of the novelist’s letters, their personal directness and the often ludicrous, sometimes outrageous, events and relationships they record contrast with the timid conventionality of Peabody’s life, mirrored in her letters. Peabody had written to Hopewell after reading her novel, Angels on Horseback. The story of ‘beautiful young schoolgirls and their strange and wild riding lessons’ brought ‘something exciting into my life’, she writes, while ‘the loneliness and the harshness of the Australian countryside fitted so exactly with my own feelings ...’ The novelist’s unexpected reply, asking about Peabody’s life, and beginning to tell the story of her new novel, excites Peabody. She imagines the novelist’s life, using the clichés of romance fiction that drew her to Angels on Horseback: ‘While reading the novelist’s first letter Dorothy seemed to see her, Diana, dismounting from her horse at sunset to open the gates leading to her property. The dry grass would be pink in the light of the setting sun, Dorothy thought, like in the novel ...’ Hopewell is linked in Peabody’s mind with ‘Diana, the Goddess of the Hunt [who] would be a tall woman graceful and shapely about the neck and breast’. At the same time, the novelist’s questions, ‘Are you in love? … What sort of dresses do you wear? Please tell me all about yourself!’ both startle Peabody and prompt her to re-imagine her own life, whose ‘routine[s] never varied’. She develops her own fictions: for example, a young lover killed in the war. Peabody’s life is gradually transformed by the letters, which she saves to read, re-read, and answer, always at night, while her responses, limited though they seem, encourage Hopewell to continue with her novel. Peabody, too, experiences a ‘sudden and strange bereavement’ when she learns that Hopewell has died, ‘one of not being able to think about and compose and write the letters’. Because of them, ‘Miss Peabody had known happiness’.

‘Jolley was herself an inveterate note-taker and letter writer’

The rapid movement among the narratives and the narrators of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance requires constant alertness from the reader. Much of the pleasure of this novel comes from following their intricate interweaving, as well as recognising and revelling in their differences, of tone and style, tense, and narrative perspective. Not only are we as readers active interpreters of the shifting narrative of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, we participate in the relationship established between the novelist and Miss Peabody, between writer and reader within the novel. It shifts as Peabody moves from being a naïve reader, bewildered by the gap between the events and relationships described in Hopewell’s novel and her own dreary life, which ‘not from her own fault at all, had become a series of clichés and platitudes’, to her final position as Hopewell’s successor. By the end, Peabody understands that there is indeed a ‘thin line between truth and fiction’. In the meantime, she blunders around London trying to find a pattern in the London sky to match the one that, according to Hopewell, marks the entrance to her Australian property. Later, she tries to find out where An Ideal Husband is playing; believing the fiction that Miss Thorne and her travelling companions will be there. However, we recognise that Peabody’s idea of the physical freedom and power of the Diana figure is far from the reality of the novelist’s actual situation, when an uncharacteristically typed page, relating a series of botched operations and their result, mysteriously appears in one of her letters.

Miss Peabody's Inheritance (Penguin, 1985)

Buy this bookHopewell’s most important role, though, is as Peabody’s guide. When Peabody struggles to make sense of the letters, with their plunging black writing criss-crossed with other colours, Hopewell explains: ‘The structure of my story, … is so complicated that, in my notes, I have to use different colours, you know, green ink to remind me of what Edgely is doing, red for Thorne and blue for Snowdon.’ Peabody adjusts to the lack of order: ‘Sometimes the letters were disjointed and the novelist sent only a fragment which Dorothy guessed would slip into place sooner or later, unless, of course, it was discarded. Writers did not always use everything they wrote, the novelist explained.’ And she is instructed on the correct response to the writing and her role as reader:

You will notice … that I am writing the story of Miss Thorne in the present tense. This makes it all very immediate ... If you feel disturbed and strange this is all perfectly natural … If you feel emotionally involved that is natural too. The writing is packed, it is dense writing, emotions on several levels packed in. It is, I hope, a novel of existence and feeling. A reader can be as involved as he wishes and some readers will fight off this involvement. Don’t worry. Read on.

Not only does Peabody read on: she writes, and Hopewell responds enthusiastically to her often stilted and clumsy letters: ‘And do you know I love your handwriting. It excites me.’ An emphasis on the physical presence and power of writing – later Peabody declares that she loves the novelist’s writing – suggests that through their correspondence Peabody and Hopewell experience an emotion as urgent and thrilling as any more conventional erotic adventure.

‘Not only are we as readers active interpreters of the shifting narrative of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, we participate in the relationship established between the novelist and Miss Peabody, between writer and reader within the novel’

This process of the education of the reader is part of the comedy of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance. It is one that finally enables Peabody’s physical migration from London to Western Australia, and her initiation into the novelist’s inheritance. Her journey, and others in the novel, both reflect and parody Jolley’s own migration to Australia. Peabody travels to meet her epistolary friend, only to find that Hopewell has died, and that far from being the active horsewoman, the mythic Diana of Peabody’s imagination, she has been an invalid in a nursing home. However, Peabody realises not only that, ‘There were enormous possibilities. She had only to look at her bulging handbag’ in which she has carried all the novelist’s letters, but also that she no longer needs to go to see Diana’s farm. She has been initiated into her inheritance.

Within the internal narrative, the idea of the initiation, particularly of innocence, is a major theme whose consequences are often unexpected. Thorne thinks of herself as creating a cultural centre at Pine Heights, initiating the schoolgirls into aspects of European culture. She plays the cello, reads Othello, and reveres Richard Wagner. She initiates Gwendaline Manners, one of her students, into travel and culture as Gwenda accompanies Thorne, her great friend Matron Snowdon, and her assistant, Miss Edgely, on their annual pilgrimage to Europe. Gwenda’s education becomes a sexual one when Thorne spends a night, one that is ‘idyllic, tender, hilarious and ludicrous’ with the girl. Yet none of this is straightforward. Thorne’s greatest interest in Othello is in planning the costumes for the school production; she is aware that Mr Minsk, the music teacher at Pine Heights, listens to her cello playing with barely concealed horror; the high point of the European tour is not the Wagner Festival in Munich but the annual Wine Festival at Grinzing. And while Thorne thinks of Gwenda in relation to the innocent girl in a poem by Goethe, she also realises that Gwenda’s ambition to marry and have four children is an understandable one.

Miss Peabody's Inheritance (UQP, 2014)

Buy this bookFrequent references to cultural texts are not simply part of the farcical level of the novel. Peabody has read the opening of Great Expectations to her mother, and Peabody’s life is turned upside down, as Pip’s is there, by her friendship with the novelist. Edgely’s jealousy of Thorne’s interest in Gwenda is amplified by several quotations from Othello. And the promise of romance fiction to fulfil unrealistic expectations is also radically reduced. Thorne realises she has mistaken Mr Frome’s interest in her and that she must give Gwenda up to him. After a long night of self-reflection, she is ready to return to the sanctuary of Pine Heights, recognising that though Edgely is completely incompetent in her work and intensely irritating to Thorne, they are essential to one another. Not only does Edgely have nowhere else to go, Thorne is also, without Edgely, alone. At the end of Hopewell’s final letter, she muses: ‘A great writer … once wrote something about continuing life at a lower level of expectation’, of which, she thinks, ‘something … will be apparent by the end of the book’, and indeed it is.

Miss Peabody’s Inheritance is a comedy of women’s lives and friendships, with its potentially serious recognition that sexuality is not confined to the young and that women share homoerotic lives and its comical treatment of aspects of those lives; the water fight between Snowdon and Thorne, the trail of broken beds the travellers leave across Europe, Peabody’s confused arousal as she reads of these things. Names of characters are both amusingly apt and often linked to more serious referents while characters and locations are connected across the narratives. Thorne and Hopewell are each goddesses to Edgely and Peabody, who are both small, incompetent, and stupid. Peabody works at Fortress Enterprises, and Pine Heights is a kind of protected pastoral for Thorne, while Flowermead, the small private hospital where Diana Hopewell has been confined, shares these qualities. Some scenes are pure slapstick; Thorne knocking a paper cup of hot tea into Edgely’s lap during their trip with Snowdon to the wheatbelt; Peabody feeling cheeky drinking brandy with the Fortress Enterprises staff at the local bar on a Friday afternoon. But as well as the often farcical comedy, and the word play Jolley delights in, there is also a level of understanding of both the courage and the pathos of these small lives.

The novel’s concerns – with the dynamic interaction between writing and reading, with the social constriction and limitations of women’s lives and the contrasting potential growth and freedom of their imaginative lives, with the pleasures and dangers of initiation, with the expression of female sexuality, and with issues to do with migration and loss – are complicated by its self-conscious level of what Paul Salzman calls ‘narrative entangling’. Notes Jolley made for a public reading from Miss Peabody’s Inheritance include the remarks: ‘The 1^st short piece is from the novelist’s letter … The second passage relates to Miss Peabody’s actions. I am not well enough up in literary theory to say who has written this.’ This demonstrates her awareness of the novel’s potential to attract complicating theoretical readings, treated as another comic area in the novel, and her own amusement at the innocent writerly position she constructs for herself here. An arch dissembler, a wise and witty and always surprising writer, Elizabeth Jolley is also a great entertainer, and Miss Peabody’s Inheritance offers multiple pleasures for its readers.

References     

Bird, Delys, ‘Now for the Real Thing: Elizabeth Jolley’s Manuscripts’, in Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays, eds Delys Bird and Brenda Walker, Collins Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1991, 168-179.
Dibble, Brian. Doing Life: A Biography of Elizabeth Jolley. UWA Press, 2008.
Jolley, Elizabeth. Miss Peabody’s Inheritance. UQP, 1983.
Jolley, Elizabeth, ‘A Scattered Catalogue of Consolation’, in Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley : Her Life and Work, ed. Caroline Lurie, Viking/Penguin, 2006.
Milech, Barbara H, ‘Becoming “Elizabeth Jolley”: The First Twenty Years in Australia’, in Australian Literature and the Public Sphere, eds Alison Bartlett, Robert Dixon and Christopher Lee, Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1998.
Salzman, Paul. Helplessly Tangled in Female Arms and Legs: Elizabeth Jolley’s Fictions. UQP, 1993.

Further Reading

Jolley, Elizabeth, ed. Caroline Lurie. Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself. Viking Penguin, 1992.

When Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, it was not the first time that he had won an international fiction prize; his third novel, Gould's Book of Fish (2001), won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002. Nor was it the first time that one of his novels had caused deep division among readers and critics; the influential Australian critic and reviewer Peter Craven had savaged Gould's Book of Fish in a review for The Age. But that novel had also been Flanagan's most successful until his Booker win, garnering two major national awards as well the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North scooped an even bigger pool of prizes, winning the Man Booker and several national prizes and being shortlisted for several more, including the fiction section of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. There, it initially lost out to Steven Carroll's novel A World of Other People, until the personal intervention of the then prime minister, Tony Abbott, who ruled that the two novels should share the fiction prize. As with Gould's Book of Fish, there were ructions within the Australian literary community; critics and prize judges were again deeply divided over the literary merit of Flanagan's work, their differences showing how broad a spectrum the term 'literary merit' can cover. The Narrow Road to the Deep North also attracted viciously negative reviews in two heavyweight British journals, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books – and yet, on the other side of the Atlantic, the literary editor of the Washington Post was saying 'Nothing since Cormac McCarthy's The Road has shaken me like this ... this is a classic work of war fiction from a world-class writer.'

Richard Flanagan was born into a large family in Tasmania in 1961, son of a World War II veteran and the fifth of six children. In his Man Booker Prize acceptance speech in London, he said: 'I do not come out of a literary tradition. I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate. And I never expected to stand here before you in this grand hall in London as a writer being so honoured.' Not only was he honoured by the award, he was also saved from the fate he had been contemplating: when asked what he would do with the prize money, he replied that he would use it to live on and support his family while he continued to write: 'A year-and-a-half ago when I finished this book, I was contemplating going to get what work I could in the mines in far northern Australia because things had come to such a pass with my writing. I had spent so long on this book.'

His father, Arch, was one of the Australian prisoners of war who were put to work by the Japanese Army on the infamous Burma–Thailand Railway or 'Death Railway', built in 1943 to supply Japan's campaign against the Allies in Burma. On the Australian War Memorial's website is a brief, stark summary account of the building of the railway, which caused the deaths of over 2,000 Australian POWs and many more Allied and Asian prisoners:

The railway was to run 420 kilometres through rugged jungle. It was to be built by a captive labour force of about 60,000 Allied prisoners of war and 200,000 romusha, or Asian labourers. They built the track with hand tools and muscle power, working through the monsoon ... Relentless labour on inadequate rations in a deadly tropical environment caused huge losses ... The railway camps produced many victims, but also heroes who helped others to endure, to survive, or to die with dignity.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Vintage 2014 issue)

Buy this book
These victims and heroes – many soldiers were both – and the building of the railway, lie at the centre of Flanagan's novel, both figuratively and literally: among the frequent chronological flashbacks that cover most of the twentieth century, its central section is a sustained and searing account of the camps and of the daily labour, abuse, injuries, and sickness that the prisoners endured. The main character, army doctor Dorrigo Evans, somewhat resembles the Australian war hero Edward 'Weary' Dunlop, who before the war had attained his degree in medicine and had played rugby for Australia: a man of extraordinary social, intellectual, and physical gifts. Dunlop was a lieutenant-colonel and became a legendary figure on the railway and afterwards; as a doctor and a natural leader, he was both an inspiration and a consolation to the Australian POWs he worked alongside. But The Narrow Road to the Deep North is fiction and Dorrigo Evans is a fictional character, not to be taken as a portrait of Dunlop. Flanagan gives his hero Evans some of Dunlop's abstract qualities and strengths, as well as his relationship with his fellow-prisoners and with the Japanese, but in other important respects the character is quite different.

On the other hand, the description of the railway itself and the conditions under which the prisoners worked is closely based on factual firsthand accounts, most of all on the stories that Flanagan grew up listening to his father tell. The question of the relationship between history and fiction is a rich and difficult one, often erupting into complex disagreements; a novelist who tackles a period of history must toggle constantly between accuracy in matters of historical fact and feats of imagination in the creation of individual characters and their personalities and fates. Flanagan's brother Martin, himself a journalist of great integrity and emotional intelligence, has said

... what we are talking about here today is a novel. A work of fiction. What that means to me is that it must have a life independent of any external events ... Richard's book succeeds in doing this and that is its triumph. This book teems with stories I've heard before but it is not those stories, partly because he has dismantled them and redeployed their various parts ...

The book's central section is framed by a broader story that encompasses Evans's whole life, and by the love story that transcends or exists on a different plane both from the horrors of the jungle and, after the war, from the realities of his daily life: a dull and fundamentally dishonest marriage, and a career that looks glittering from the outside but to him seems hollow, and is not without its disasters. But great love stories, says Flanagan, 'seek to demonstrate the great truth about love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after'. His lover is called Amy, an allegorical name that makes her the very personification of love.

The fact that Amy is his uncle's young wife gives the story a faint whiff of the incestuous: it feels like a forbidden love not only because they are both formally committed to other people, but because it crosses generational and familial boundaries. It exists outside family structures, outside the bonds of marriage, outside the war, outside of death itself: having long believed Amy to be dead, Dorrigo lives the rest of his life as a sexual and emotional vagabond and cheat, floundering in the shadow of his loss. The scene in which, many years later, the two come face to face while crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge may seem a Dickensian contrivance beyond the limits of realism, but in fact, like so much else about this book, it is an imaginative reworking of a true story once told to Flanagan by his father.

Flanagan's treatment of the question of race is among the most impressive things, and among the most important things, about this novel. In a war novel focusing on citizens of one country, the other side is unavoidably simplified and demonised as 'the enemy', especially if that enemy is of another race, but Flanagan goes to great lengths to illuminate the behaviour of the Japanese officers and guards and to explore what lies behind it. He defuses the problem of representing 'the enemy' in racist terms partly by presenting the Japanese officers and guards as individual characters with varying motivations and sensibilities (one of them is actually Korean). He also suffuses his novel, and the mind not only of his main character but also those of more than one Japanese officer and guard, with the poetry of both cultures; the book's title itself comes from a Japanese classic, as Flanagan has explained:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature. Written in 1689 by Matsuo Basho, arguably the greatest of all haiku poets, it takes the form of ... a nature journey made by the poet ... If Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the high points of Japanese culture, the experience of my father and his mates is one of its low points.

Flanagan's account of the building of the railway and the kind of life led by the prisoners who built it is detailed and unflinching; at its meaty, beating heart is an account of the savage punishment and subsequent death of Dorrigo's mate and fellow-prisoner, Frank 'Darky' Gardiner. This is clearly some sort of touchstone for Dorrigo; we meet Gardiner very early in the book, when Dorrigo, now in his late seventies, is brooding on his wartime past: 'Darky Gardiner died and there was no point to it at all.'

By the time Gardiner is hauled up in front of a Japanese officer to take a murderous beating for something he didn't do, we know him quite well: mercurial, fatalistic, dry-humoured, good-hearted, 'a man who pitied wet monkeys', someone who sings to stay sane, and steals and swaps to survive. While the nickname is an obvious clue and his other nickname, the Black Prince, might be another (even though he acquires it through his skills in the black market of the camps), no direct allusion to his ethnicity is made until well into the book. The person who eventually mentions it is the open racist and Hitler-admirer Rooster MacNeice: 'Rooster MacNeice hated bolshies but on balance he hated Darky Gardiner more. He was a common and dirty man, and like most half-castes not to be trusted.'

But who is Darky Gardiner really? One of the most frequently quoted pieces of advice to writers about structuring a narrative comes from the Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, who said 'If in Act 1 you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.' Flanagan's pistol on the wall appears in the opening pages, in two paired vignettes of adult intensity as seen through the eyes of the uncomprehending Dorrigo, who is still only a little boy:

Jackie Maguire was sitting in the Evanses' small dark kitchen, crying ... Jackie Maguire was an old man, maybe forty, perhaps older ...He heard Jackie Maguire say –

             She's vanished off the face of the earth, Mrs Evans....

And Dorrigo didn't say to [his brother] Tom what he had seen a week before Mrs Jackie Maguire vanished: his brother with his hand reaching up inside her skirt, as she – a small, intense woman of exotic darkness – leaned up against the chicken shed behind the coaching house. Tom's face was turned in on her neck.

This small and momentary mystery is left hanging until near the end of the book, when the pistol is fired in a devastating fashion. In a conversation between the Evans brothers, now both old men, it is revealed that Darky Gardiner was the illegitimate, secret son of Tom and Mrs Jackie Maguire – 'His wife was a blackfella, you know?' – and was therefore Dorrigo's own nephew. 'A family called Gardiner was bringing the kid up ... After the last war I ran into a Hobart bloke who knew the family. They called the boy Frank, apparently. He died during the war. My only son, and I never even met him.'

Although Darky Gardiner shares his name with one of Australia's more mysterious bushrangers (this may be a coincidence, though the original Frank Gardiner – a Scot – had a horse called 'Darkie', so perhaps not), it would not be too much of a stretch to read this character as a kind of allegory or personification of the history of Australian race relations: he is treated brutally by the authoritarian race in charge, and he then dies an ugly, abject, tragic death. He also personifies the rejection of 'black and white' as a clear opposition or dichotomy: the story of Australia, going centuries back, is a story of a population many of whom who have both indigenous and Caucasian relatives and family, acknowledged or otherwise, by marriage, birth, or adoption. In the way he writes the character of Gardiner, Flanagan is unobtrusively dissolving the boundaries in the way we think about racial difference. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a novel about a grim episode in wartime Australian – and Japanese – history, but it is also a landmark in our literary representations of indigenous Australians, in war and in peace.

References

1. Australian War Memorial website, 'Biographical Note: Sir (Ernest) Edward "Weary" Dunlop'.

2. Australian War Memorial website, 'The Burma-Thailand Railway'.

3. Charles, Ron. 'Review: The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan'. The Washington Post, 19 August 2014.

4. Flanagan, Martin. 'Richard Flanagan: The Long Road to Great Success'. The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 October 2014.

5. Flanagan, Richard. 'Freeing My Father'. The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 2013.

6. Flanagan, Richard. 'Acceptance Speech'. Man Booker Prize website, 15 October 2014. 

7. Hofmann, Michael. 'Is his name Alwyn?' The London Review of Books, 18 December 2014, pp 17-18

8. Lever, Susan. 'Heroes, Certainly'. The Sydney Review of Books, 26 November 2013.

9. Raine, Craig. 'He might be falling'. The Times Literary Supplement, 17 September 2014.

10. Singh, Anita. 'Richard Flanagan: 'I had so little money after writing Man Booker Prize winner I nearly worked down mine'

11. Sullivan, Jane. 'Applause or Catcalls? You Be the Judge'

Jessica Anderson (25 September 1916 – 9 July 2010) was an Australian novelist and short story writer. Anderson’s first novel, An Ordinary Lunacy was published in 1963. Since then she has received many awards for her work including winning the prestigious Miles Franklin award, twice (for Tirra Lirra By the River in 1978 and for The Impersonators in 1980).

Jessica Anderson 1986 (photograph by Alec Bolton National Library of Australia)

Reading Australia

Kerryn Goldsworthy has written about Tirra Lirra by the River (1978) as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read her essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resource: Tirra Lirra by the River (1978)

Susan Sheridan's essay 'Tirra Lirra and Beyond - Jessica Anderson’s truthful fictions', published in the September 2010 issue of ABR.

Claire Corbett's essay ‘Jessica Anderson's Tirra Lirra by the River ’ published in Overland.

Jane Gleeson-White’s ‘Farewell Jessica Anderson (1916–2010) – and thanks’ published in Overland.

Professor Kim Scott (1957-) is an award-winning indigenous author. His books include True Country (1993), Benang (1999), Kayang and Me (with Hazel Brown, 2005), and That Deadman Dance (2010). He has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice (for Benang and That Deadman Dance) and has also been awarded the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal (2011). Kim is the founder and chair of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Story Project which has resulted in the publication of four English/Noongar language picture books through UWA Publishing: Mamang (2011), Noongar Mambara Bakitj (2011), Dwoort Baal Kaat (2014), and Yira Boornak Nyininy (2014).Kim is currently Professor of Writing at Curtin University.Kim Scott (Pan Macmillan)

Reading Australia

Patrick Allington, author, lecturer and ABR Patrons Fellow, has written on That Deadman Dance (2010) for ABR as part of  the Reading Australia project. Click here to read his essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resources: That Deadman Dance (2010)

Carol Birch reviews ‘That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott – review’ for The Guardian, 8 December 2012

Review by Morag Fraser ‘That Deadman Dance’ in the Sydney Morning Herald, 13 January 2011

‘Kim Scott wins prestigious Miles Franklin’, ABC News, 22 June 2011

‘The Case for Kim Scott’s “That Deadman Dance"’ by Tony Hughes-D’Aeth published by The Conversation, 19 February 2014

Patrick Allington reviews That Deadman Dance for the October 2010 issue of Australian Book Review

Rebekah Clarkson reviews The Best Australian Stories 2013, edited by Kim Scott, in the Febraruy 2014 issue of Australian Book Review.

Christine Nicholls reviews Mamang (2011) and Noongar Mambara Bakitj (2011)

Christine Nicholls reviews Dwoort Baal Kaat (2014) and Yira Boornak Nyininy (2014) in the December 2014 issue of Australian Book Review.

Kate Grenville (1950–) is an award-winning Australia author of fiction, memoir and non-fiction, Kate’s first publication was the short story collection Bearded Ladies (1984). She has gone on to publish a total of thirteen books in the last thirty years including her most recent one, One Life (2015). Several of Kate’s works have been adapted for stage and screen, including Lilian’s Story (1996) starring Toni Collette She won the Commonwealth Prize for Literature in 2006 for The Secret River (2005) which was also shortlisted for both the Man Booker and Miles Franklin awards. The Secret River was adapted as a play by Andrew Bovell in 2012 and a television mini-series will be released in 2015.

Kate Grenville (photograph by Darren James)

Reading Australia

Australian literary critic Peter Craven has written about Lilian’s Story (1996) for Australian Book Review as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read his essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resources: Lilian’s Story (1996)

An article about the inspiration behind the Lilian:  'Eccentric City: Bea Miles' by Bruce Elder, SMH, 13 Jan 2012

'Lilian’s Story:Readers Notes' published by Kate Grenville on her website

A Wheeler Centre recording of Kate Grenville and Ramona Koval discussing Lilian's Story at an event in 2012. 

Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Bea Miles by Judith Allen.

Open Page with Kate Grenville from the April 2015 issue of Australian Book Review.

Bernadette Brennan reviews One Life by Kate Grenville in the April 2015 issue of Australian Book Review.

Sophie Cunningham reviews Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville in the October 2011.

Marcus Clarke (1846–1881) was an Australian journalist, novelist, and poet, best known for the novel For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) which was originally serialised as His Natural Life in the Australasian Journal.

Marcus Clarke, 1866

Reading Australia

Brian Matthews has written on For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) for ABR as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read his essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resources: For the Term of His Natural Life (1874)

Materials including an app, mini-series and further readings are included on the website For The Term of His Natural Life.

Details on the restoration of the 1927 film can be found in an article on the National Film and Sound Archive website.

ABC Radio National's The Book Show program on Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (Broadcast on Monday 218 December 2009)

Penguin Australia’s Author Page for Marcus Clarke

Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Marcus Clarke by Brian Elliott

Thomas Keneally (1935–) is an award-winning Australian novelist and historian.. Keneally won the 1982 Booker Prize for Schindler’s Ark, which would go on to win Oscars as the 1993 film Schindler’s List. Keneally has won the Miles Franklin Award twice for Bring Larks and Heroes in 1967 and Three Cheers for the Paraclete in 1968. Keneally wrote The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith in 1972.

Thomas Keneally (Random House)

Reading Australia

Academic and author Tony Birch has written on The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) for ABR as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read his essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resources: The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972)

An ABC Radio recording of an interview with Phillip Adams and Thomas Keneally ‘Should “the Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” have been written?’ (broadcast 28 May 2001)

The transcripts of an interview by the Screen Australia Digital Learning website for the Australian Biography Project. Robin Hughes interviews Thomas Keneally, 9-11 September 2002 http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/keneally/interview1.html

Luke Buckmaster rewatches the film for The Guardian 'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith re-watched - beautiful but savage' 12 September 2014

The Australian Screen Organisation archives website notes on the film

Open Page with Tom Keneally from the October 2010 issue of Australian Book Review

Luke Slattery reviews Australians Volume 3 by Thomas Keneally in the March 2015 issue of Australian Book Review

Alex O'Brien reviews A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally for the March 2014 issue of Australian Book Review.

Phil Brown reviews The Daughters Of Mars by Tom Keneally for the June 2012 issue of Australian Book Review

Thea Astley (25 August 1925–17 August 2004) was an Australian novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958. She was a prolific and multi-award-winning writer who published fifteen novels and two short story collections and won the Miles Franklin award four times (for The Well Dressed Explorer in 1962, for The Slow Natives in 1965, for The Acolyte in 1972, and then for her last novel, Drylands, in 2000). Other awards she received include: The Patrick White Award in 1989, The Age Book of the Year Award for A Kindness Cup in 1975, the 1980 James Cook Foundation of Australian Literature Studies Award for Hunting the Wild Pineapple, the 1986 ALS Gold Medal for Beachmasters, the 1988 Steele Rudd Award for It's Raining in Mango, the 1990 NSW Premier's Prize for Reaching Tin River, and the 1996 Age Book of the Year Award and the FAW Australian Unity Award for The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow.

Reading Australia

Susan Sheridan has written about It’s Raining in Mango (1987) as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read her essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resource: It's Raining in Mango (1987)

Susan Wyndham’s ‘Literary World Mourns Thea Astley’ published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 18 August 2004.

Valerie Miner’s review of It’s Raining in Mango ‘Four Generations Down Under’ published in the LA Times, 22 November 1987.

Helen Garner (1942–) is an Australian novelist and non-fiction writer. Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip, was published in 1977 and was adapted for film in 1981. Since then she has written many works of fiction, including The Children’s Bach (1984), Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), and The Spare Room (2008), as well as non-fiction, including The First Stone (1995), Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004), and most recently The House of Grief (2014). She has won numerous literary awards and in 2006 she won the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature.

Helen Garner

Reading Australia

Bernadette Brennan has written about The Children's Bach (1984) as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read her essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resource: The Children's Bach (1984)

Peter Rose reviews Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004) in the September 2004 issue of ABR

Peter Rose reviews The Spare Room (2008) in the May 2008 issue of ABR

Felicity Plunkett reviews This House of Grief (2014) in the September 2014 issue of ABR

Jennifer Byrne interviews Helen Garner for The Book Club (aired 23/09/2014)

'Helen Garner visits the dark side of humanity'. Interview with Jennifer Byrne for ABC's Big Ideas (published 8/3/2010)

'A Pleasant Discord'. Kathryn Kramer reviews The Children's Bach and Postcards from Surfers in the New York Times, 7 December, 1986

Elizabeth Jolley (photograph by Tanya Young)Elizabeth Jolley AO (4 June 1923–13 February 2007) was an English-born writer who moved to Western Australia in 1959 with her husband Leonard Jolley and their three children. She was fifty-three when her first book, Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976), was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels (including an autobiographical trilogy), four short story collections and three non-fiction books. She won The Age Book of the Year Award three times (for Mr Scobie's Riddle (1983), My Father's Moon (1989)and The Georges' Wife(1993)) and she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Well (1986). She was recognised in Australia with an AO for services to literature and was awarded Honorary Doctorates from Curtin University (1986); Macquarie (1995), Queensland (1997) and The University of New South Wales (2000).

Reading Australia

Delys Bird wrote about Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1980) as part of Copyright Agency's Reading Australia project. Click here to read her essay.

Further reading and Links

 Reading Australia teaching resources: Miss Peabody's Inheritance (1980)

Francesca Rendle-Short's review of The House of Fiction by Susan Swingler published in the May 2012 issue of ABR.

'The Jolley Deception' by Susan Wyndham, published in The Age 28 April 2012

'Fiction and lies: what we learn from Elizabeth Jolley’s love letters' by Elizabeth Webby, published in The Conversation 29 October 2013

Raimond Gaita

Raimond Gaita was born in Germany in 1946. He is Emeritus Professor of moral philosophy at Kings College London and a Professorial fellow at the Melbourne Law School and the faculty of Arts of the University of Melbourne.

His books have been published in many translations. They include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (1991), Romulus, My Father (1998), A Common Humanity, The Philosopher’s Dog (2002) and After Romulus (2011). A feature film of Romulus, My Father was released in 2007, and won the AFI award for Best Film, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Young Actor.

Reading Australia

Kári Gíslason has written about Romulus, My Father (1998) as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read his essay.

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: Romulus, My Father (1998)

Paul Morgan reviews After Romulus by Raimond Gaita for the October 2011 issue of Australian Book Review

Jean Curthoys reviews A Sense for Humanity: The Ethical Thought of Raimond Gaita edited by Craig Taylor with Melinda Graeffe for the October 2014 issue of Australian Book Review

Craig Taylor reviews The Antipodean Philosopher, Volume 2: Interviews with Australian and New Zealand Philosophers edited by Graham Oppy and N.N. Trakakis for the December 2012 - January 2013 issue of Australian Book Review

'From Frogmore, Victoria: Understanding Raimond Gaita' by Helen Garner, published in The Monthly, May 2007

Maria Tumarkin reviews After Romulus by Raimond Gaita for the Australian, 10September 2011

'The ethical thought of Raimond Gaita' an interview on Radio National, 5 August 2014

'Raimond Gaita speaks about After Romulus' an interview on Radio National, 29 August 2011

 'Truth, writing and national belonging in Romulus, My Father' by Brigitta Olubas, published in Australian Humanities Review, Issue 43, December 2007

Tim Flannery is an internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer, and conservationist. He has written over a dozen books, including Here On Earth; the award winning bestsellers The Future Eaters, The Eternal Frontier and The Weather Makers, and accounts of his travels in Papua New Guinea and Australia, Throwim Way Leg, Country and Among the Islands. In 2007 he was named Australian of the Year and from 2011-13 he served as Head of the Australian Climate Commission.

Tim Flannery (photograph by Richard McLaren)

Reading Australia

Danielle Clode has written about Here on Earth (2010) as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read her essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resources: Here on Earth (2010)

Timothy Roberts reviews Here on Earth in the February 2011 issue of ABR

Fiona Gruber reviews 'The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish' by Dido Butterworth (Tim Flannery) in the March 2015 issue of ABR

'Who Made This Mess of Planet Earth?', Andrew C. Revkin reviews Here on Earth in the New York Times, July 15, 2011

Australian of the Year 2007 announcement

Tim Flannery's Keynote address from the Alfred Deakin Lecture series ‘Innovation in Changing Climate’ (video)

Tim Flannery's profile at the Monthly, including links to many of his articles

‘The Guru Who Gets it Wrong’, Herald Sun, February 26, 2014

Alex Miller (1936–), is an Australian novelist. His first novel, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain was published in 1988. Since then, he has won many awards for his fiction. He has twice won the Miles Franklin award, for The Ancestor Game (1993) and for Journey to the Stone Country (2003), and also twice won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, for Conditions of Faith (2001) and Lovesong (2011).

Reading Australia

Alex Miller (photograph by John Tsiavis)

Morag Fraser has written about Journey to the Stone Country (2002) as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read her essay.

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: Journey to the Stone Country (2002)

Brenda Walker reviews Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time (2014) in the December 2014 issue of ABR

Jane Goodall reviews The Novels of Alex Miller: An Introduction (2012) in the June 2012 issue of ABR

Brian Matthews reviews Coal Creek (2013) in the October 2013 issue of ABR

Morag Fraser reviews Autumn Laign (2011) in the October 2011 issue of ABR

Open Page with Alex Miller in the October 2009 issue of ABR

Alex Miller's website featuring photographs of the people who inspired Journey to the Stone Country

Jane Sullivan, Interview: Alex Miller, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 October 2013

Andrea Streeton reviews Journey to the Stone Country, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 November 2002

‘Miles author hits out at ‘‘dud’’ Rudd’, Jason Steger, The Age, 22 April 2010

Isobelle Carmody (1958- ) is an Australian writer of science fiction, fantasy, children's literature, and young adult literature. She began the first book in the Obernewtyn Chronicles when she was fourteen and continued to work on the series while completing a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in literature and philosophy. While she is perhaps best known for the Obernewtyn Chronicles (now comprising six volumes), her novel The Gathering was joint winner of the 1993 Children's Literature Peace Prize and the 1994 CBC Book of the Year Award and her first book in a new series for younger readers, Kingdom of the Lost: The Red Wind was winner of the CBC 2011 – Younger Readers Award. 

Isobelle Carmody (photograph by Cat Sparks)

Reading Australia

Ruth Starke has written about The Gathering (1993) as part of the Reading Australia Initiative.
Click here to read her essay.

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resource: The Gathering (1993)

Benjamin Chandler reviews The Wilful Eye (2011) in the May 2011 issue of ABR

Isobelle Carmody's website

Young readers review The Gathering on the Penguin Books website

Isobelle Carmody fan website

‘Isobelle Carmody's fantasy world’. Interview with Isobelle Carmody on RN's Books and Arts (23/5/2012)

Penguin Presents - Isobelle Carmody. A documentary about Isobelle Carmody made by Penguin Australia

The Gathering. A review of The Gathering on Kirkus Reviews

Kenneth Slessor (1901–1971) was an Australian poet, war correspondent and journalist. Born in Orange NSW, he began writing poetry as a child with his first publication appearing in the Bulletin. He began his career as a journalist at The Sun in 1920 before later becoming a war correspondent to the Commonwealth in 1940. He was highly critical of poets such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson, preferring the styles of city-dwelling writers such as Hugh McCrae and Jack Lindsay over ‘bush poetry’. He received the O.B.E for services to literature in 1959. The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry has been created in his honour with the most recent recipient being Fiona Hile for Novelties in 2014.

Kenneth Slessor

Reading Australia

Peter Kirkpatrick has written about One Hundred Poems: 1919–1939 (1944) by Kenneth Slessor as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read his essay.

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: Selected Poems (1944)

‘Slessor, Kenneth Adolf’. Dennis Haskell, Australian Dictionary of Biography Entry: Volume 16

 ‘Kenneth Slessor’s Importance’. Clive James, via clivejames.com (April, 1976)

‘Kenneth Adolf Slessor’. Biography on the Australian War Memorial website

‘Kenneth Slessor’. Bibliography on the Poetry Foundation website

John Romeril (1945–) is a contemporary Australian playwright. He was born in Melbourne and attended Monash University, during which time he wrote his first plays, I Don't Know Who To Feel Sorry For (1969) and Chicago, Chicago (1970). He went on to become a founding member of the Australian Performing Group and he has written over forty works, including scripts for film and television. He has won numerous awards, including the Canada-Australia Literary Award in 1976, the Victorian Government Drama Fellowship in 1988 and the Asialink Playwrighting Competition in 2004. In 2008 he won the Patrick White Award for creative services to Australian literature.

John Romeril (photograph by Jessie Boylan)

Reading Australia

Susan Lever has written about The Floating World (1975) as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read her essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resources: The Floating World (1975)

James Waites reviews Hamlet and The Floating World in the November 2013 issue of ABR

Pram factory interview with Bruce Spence who played Les Harding in the 1974 production of The Floating World

Griffin Theatre Company's 2013 production of The Floating World

YouTube videos made for Griffin Theatre Company's 2013 production

‘Humour Cannot Hide Horror of an Old World’. Steven Dow, Sydney Morning Herald, September 16, 2013 

‘The Floating World’. Simon Blnns, Time Out Sydney, October 4, 2013

‘Review: The Floating World, Griffin Theatre, Sydney’. Regina Botros, Crikey, October 17, 2013

Margaret Throsby interviews John Romeril, Radio National, October 14, 2013

Germaine Greer (1939–), is an Australian academic, author and theorist. She was born in Melbourne, completed an arts degree at Melbourne University in 1959 and a Masters degree at Sydney University in 1962, before going as a Commonwealth Scholar to Newnham College, Cambridge, where in 1967 she wrote her doctorate on Shakespeare's early comedies. In 1970 the publication of The Female Eunuch (1970) made her a public figure in the United States, Australia, Britain, and Europe (where it was widely translated). Since then she has published many books, including the memoir Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989), The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause (1991), Shakespeare's Wife (2007), and White Beech (2014).

Germaine Greer

Reading Australia

Miriam Cosic has written about The Female Eunuch (1970) by Germaine Greer as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read her essay.

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: The Female Eunuch (1970)

John Thompson reviews White Beech (2014) in the February 2014 issue of ABR

‘Germaine Greer stirs the pot again on Q and A with Julie Bishop question’. Josephine Tovey, The Age, 10 March, 2015

‘The Female Eunuch 40 years on’. Laurie Penny, The Guardian, 27 October, 2010 

‘The Better Self? Germaine Greer and the Female Eunuch’. Louis Nowra, The Monthly, March, 2010

‘80 Days That Changed Our Lives – Publication of Germaine Greer’s the Female Eunuch’ ABC TV, March, 2015

‘Germaine Greer & The Female Eunuch’. State Library of Victoria, ERGO, 2015

Christos Tsiolkas (1965–) is a Melbourne author, playwright, and screen writer. His début novel Loaded (1995) was made into the film Head-On (1998). Since then he has written five novels, including Dead Europe (2005), which won the Age Book of the Year fiction award, The Slap (2008), which won the 2009 Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and Barracuda (2013). The Slap was made into a mini-series by the ABC in 2011 and re-made by NBC in the United States in 2015.

Reading Australia

Kerryn Goldsworthy has written about The Slap (2008) as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read her essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resources: The Slap (2008)

Susan Lever reviews Merciless Gods (2014) in the January-February 2015 issue of ABR

Rosemary Sorensen reviews Barracuda (2013) in the November 2013 issue of ABR

Philipa Hawker reviews ABC TV's adaptation of The Slap (2011) in the October 2011 issue of ABR

Transcript from the First Tuesday Book Club review of The Slap. Jennifer Byrne, Jason Stegar, Marieke Hardy, John Collee, and Christine Wallace, 5 May, 2009

‘Freakazoid’. Melissa Denes reviews The Slap in The London Review of Books, Vol. 32, No 16, 19 August, 2010

‘The Slap, a novel that is bringing out the worst in middle class’. William Skidelsky reviews The Slap in The Guardian, 22 August, 2010

‘The Slap beats hot fields at book industry awards’. Susan Wyndham, The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 June, 2009

‘The Slap: whose side are you on?’. Leigh Dale, The Conversation, 24 November, 2011

‘Christos Tsiolkas: “I learnt to feel Australian by travelling to Europe.”’ Dennis Altman interviews Christos Tsiolkas, The Guardian, 12 November, 2013

Watch the ABC series adaptation of The Slap on iview

Christos Tsiolkas’s website

David Williamson (1942–) is one of Australia's most decorated playwrights. Writer of award-winning theatre, film and television, David's works have remained consistently relevant, with new seasons performed yearly. He has won awards in both film and theatre, with The Removalists (1971) earning him the George Devine Award as well as the prestige of being the first foreigner to win the award. The Removalists was the first of Williamson's plays to head abroad, being performed in London in the early 1970's. Later being adapted for the screen by Williamson, staring Jacki Weaver and Peter Cummins, the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, receiving critical praise. Williamson continues to produce works for stage and screen with his recent successes including Balibo (2009) and Rupert (2013).

David Williamson

Reading Australia

James McNamara has written about The Removalists as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read his essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resources: The Removalists (1971)

'40 years on, The Removalists is still asking big questions', Natalie Bochenski, The Brisbane Times, 12 August 2014

'Still facing the brutal reality', Elissa Blake, Sydney Morning Herald, May 24, 2013

David Williamson's website

Video interview with David Williamson for Brisbane Powerhouses' 2013 season performance of The Removalists

In a critical moment of reflection and pause, Romulus, My Father offers the reader a key to its interpretation. The author – philosopher Raimond Gaita – tells us that ‘Plato said that those who love and seek wisdom are clinging in recollection to things they once saw’. This reference to the Greek philosopher’s work Phaedrus occurs when the boy Raimond is about eight years old. He seems already to understand much about his father, in particular his father’s goodness, which he finds expressed in his workmanship, his honesty, and his commitment to friends. And yet, as Plato forewarns us, a search for the ultimate wisdom of such things must come later – several decades on, when Gaita is faced with the task of writing his father’s eulogy. It is then that a sense of his father’s character is joined to his own search for wisdom, a combination of biography and reflection that marks the memoir form at its best, and shapes the ultimate impact of Romulus, My Father.

Memoirs are by nature inductive, for most of the content is specific to the person writing. And yet the task of a memoir is more than mere individual recollection. One of the origin points of the form lies with a Christian tradition of recording a pilgrim’s journey, so that others may benefit from the knowledge that the pilgrim acquired along the way. Many memoirs aim to make sense of the past in a way that may be useful to others, and to offer their accounts in a way that is true not just to what the author remembers, but also how he or she remembers. As in life more generally, memoirists may be prompted to return to the past by an event in the present, and this prompting – a kind of task sheet for the memoir – will naturally influence how they remember and write.

The connection between what and how we remember is especially important in the case of Romulus, My Father, a relationship between form and content that we might look at more closely in three aspects of its composition history. The first is the book’s genesis as a eulogy, the second its expression of Gaita’s return, both physically and imaginatively, to the central Victorian countryside of his youth. The third, and perhaps most distinctive, is the narrator’s unusual position as a philosopher writing about his father in a way that reveals his father’s influence on his beliefs and ways of thinking.

Romulus, My Father (Text Publishing, 1999)

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As Gaita mentions in an acknowledgments section at the start of the book, Romulus, My Father first developed from his eulogy at his father’s funeral in 1996. He showed this speech to Robert Manne, a friend he’d known since their university days in Melbourne. Manne had become editor of the prominent magazine Quadrant, and in this capacity had commissioned articles from Gaita. Manne now encouraged his friend to expand the eulogy into an article, one that subsequently developed into a book-length memoir.

There are many moments when the book displays the character of its first form: it has a eulogy’s loving and familiar tone, its gentleness and at times quiet formality, but also the often frank way that eulogies evaluate a life and its contributions, complications, and humanity. Crucial to the performance of a eulogy is a conviction that understanding the life of an individual helps to illuminate common human experiences and feelings. Thus, the first step in understanding this work is to listen for the voice of a man who is farewelling his father, and in that sense the voice of a child who is articulating, for others, what he has lost.

‘The book displays the character of its first form: it has a eulogy’s loving and familiar tone, its gentleness and at times quiet formality’

Romulus Gaita was a Yugoslav-born blacksmith who, under trying circumstances, left his home for Germany, and there met and married Christine Dörr, a local woman from a middle-class background. In 1946 they had a child, Raimond, and in 1950 the family migrated on an assisted passage to Australia and settled in central Victoria. After first being housed separately, they eventually made a home together at ‘Frogmore’, a modest farmhouse six kilometres from Baringhup, a village of some ten houses, a school and church, and a hotel.

This experience of upheaval and change forms the opening context of the memoir, and portrays a first encounter with Australia that was shared by thousands of postwar migrants. Having the chance to leave a difficult life in Europe did not altogether make up for the remote and at times desolate one they found waiting for them in rural Australia. Like Romulus, many viewed the landscape as hostile; over the next forty years he ‘could not become reconciled to it’. Nor could he ever quite discover in Australia the feeling of an intensely involved community life that he had experienced as a boy and young man living in Europe, defined in the main through conversation with friends and neighbours.

‘Raimond finds a community in a place where his parents find neither happiness together nor a sense of belonging’

Raimond, though, loves their new home, and in the early chapters of the book we get to know the author in his own right through his affection for the central Victorian landscape, for neighbours, and for the many animals inhabiting the bush and even the farmhouse itself. Raimond finds a community in a place where his parents find neither happiness together nor a sense of belonging. As the story progresses, his openness becomes a touching counterpoint to his mother Christine’s depression and the distances that come with it. She finds life at the farmhouse terribly alienating: ‘A dead red gum stood only a hundred metres from the house and became for my mother a symbol of her desolation.’

Romulus, My Father is not principally a migration story, but the family’s move to Australia and the reaction to the landscape are important for both the events that follow and Gaita’s subsequent memories of them. As a student, Gaita went to the University of Leeds, where he undertook his doctorate in philosophy. He then worked in England for many years. As he explains in After Romulus (2011), a book of essays about the memoir, during those years in England he became accustomed to the more ‘humanised landscapes’ of Europe, and indeed came close to understand how his mother had once seen Australia. Writing Romulus, My Father, he says, allowed his return to a childhood love of the country. The first draft was completed very quickly, in three weeks in a house close to where he lived as a boy. He had discovered again the ‘delicate beauty’ of central Victoria, and the ways in which his father and those close to him were illuminated by it: ‘I hoped that the events and the characters of the story I told would be bathed in the light and colours of that landscape.’

The result is that Gaita’s memory of the landscape forms part of the memoir’s structure and themes, and helps to shape the often troubling connections that are formed between beauty, madness, and suffering. Gaita has referred to Romulus, My Father as a ‘tragic poem’. Here, he is referring to the classical Greek idea of tragedy: that is, a portrayal of how good people are seen to suffer at the hands of fate or unmovable circumstance. Another aspect of the tragic mode lies with its objective point of view – its seemingly unaffected way of relating events. As Helen Garner has described it, Gaita’s narrative voice is ‘wonderfully serious, and terrified of being sentimental’. Like a tragic poem, the voice seems to accept that the human condition is, as Gaita puts it, ‘defined by our vulnerability to misfortune’.

‘Gaita’s memory of the landscape forms part of the memoir’s structure and themes, and helps to shape the often troubling connections that are formed between beauty, madness, and suffering’

Gaita’s term for this outlook is ‘compassionate fatalism’, an ethical perspective that he attributes to his father and that he subsequently absorbs as his own, both as a son and as a moral philosopher. As J.M. Coetzee puts it in his comments about the book, Romulus ‘comes to serve as a lifelong moral compass to his son and, via his son, to us as readers’. Thus, while Gaita tries as much as possible to leave himself out of the story, the ethical perspective that he shares with his father remains as a guiding hand as to how he remembers the past. In fact, Gaita the philosopher looks for and remembers his father in something very like the way that his father was able to accept the people in his life.

Crucially, Romulus’s attitude towards others expresses his love for them rather than his view of how they behave at a given moment. For instance, it is his ability to love while suffering that also enables him to endure injuries without becoming bitter. We sometimes see Romulus very angry. At one point in the story he is so jealous and bewildered that he is almost driven to violence. But Romulus is not judgemental or moralistic. While, as Coetzee writes, he and his friend Hora seem in some ways like ‘virtuous pagans’, they are not, unlike the heroes in pagan literature, overly concerned with their rights or sense of personal honour. This means that Romulus can continue to help those who have hurt him: Christine after she has left him for Mitru, and Lydia after her betrayal.

By the time he returned to central Victoria to write Romulus, My Father, Gaita was established as a scholar, philosopher, and public figure. As an academic, he has published extensively in the field of moral philosophy, while also often writing for a broader audience. The great success of Romulus, My Father added a very personal element to his public life. He has also contributed influential works on topics as diverse as torture, multiculturalism, collective responsibility, and higher education. When he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp, it was with the recognition of his ‘exceptional contribution to contemporary moral philosophy and for his singular contribution to the role of the intellectual in today’s academic world’.

Thus, while Romulus, My Father is not in any sense a theoretical book of moral philosophy, it does state its aims and points of analysis more openly than many memoirs. Today, family memoirs such as this one are typically approached as works of creative non-fiction: that is, as being literary as much as documentary in nature. But viewing Romulus, My Father in this way wouldn’t be quite right, for clearly the aim is to give the reader Romulus the man, not Romulus the character. Thus, while the book does stand apart from Gaita’s philosophical writing, Romulus, My Father is engaged in questions about goodness, love, and ethics as perhaps only someone like Gaita could pose them.

This book shows us what the memoir form is capable of, but also stands apart from other memoirs dealing with similar histories. As well as being unsentimental, Romulus, My Father is distinctive for the author’s insistence on writing only what he remembers. Consequently, the book has relatively little dialogue and relies less on scene-building than other works. A film version of the book, released in 2007, did not take the same approach – there is no voice-over or other framing device to show how Gaita returns to the memories of his youth. In fact, comparing the book and film highlights just how much the book relies on Gaita’s voice. A remarkable feature of Romulus, My Father is that, although it avoids many literary devices and often pauses in order to analyse events at some length, it still remains entirely gripping as a story.

Ultimately, it does this by adopting a voice that is true to the relationship that existed between Gaita and his father – true to their bond and to how it is remembered. Romulus, My Father is a study of goodness, of the hardships of life, but most crucially a witness to how a father and son can come together again at the moment they are parted – through the light on the landscape, through their love for those around them, and through their presence in one another’s stories.

Literature has long provided a powerful outlet for the expression of our hopes and fears for an environmentally challenged future. In recent years, fictional depictions of the future have become increasingly dystopian, disturbed, and pessimistic – from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy to Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book.

If our fiction writers are burdened by a sense of impending doom, one might expect non-fiction writers to be even more negative, weighed down by the exponentially expanding evidence for environmental devastation with little prospect of timely intervention. In truth, there is much to be fearful about. And yet Tim Flannery, Australia’s foremost environmental writer, reverses the trend with Here on Earth, offering what he terms ‘an argument for hope’.

Flannery is uniquely positioned to write – and write well – on long-term environmental changes. Raised in Melbourne, he spent his childhood exploring Port Phillip Bay and finding inspiration in the fossilised bones of whales and fish from an ancient sea. After completing a degree in English Literature at La Trobe University, he studied palaeontology at Monash before completing his doctorate in 1985 at the University of New South Wales on the evolution of kangaroos.

As a principal research scientist at the Australian Museum, Flannery specialised in the little studied mammal fauna of Papua New Guinea; he remains the authority in this field. In 1994 he published his first, and bestselling, book, The Future Eaters, an urgent and provocative examination of our use of Australia’s limited ecological resources, which responded to the extraordinary levels of human-induced environmental change, globally and in Australia: past, present, and future.

‘he has become one of Australia’s leading voices in environment and climate change’

Since then Flannery has published fifteen more books, including definitive biological texts, personal narratives of his own exploratory work, and popular accounts of environmental and climate-change science. He has also edited the works of his favourite explorers and adventurers, and recently branched into fiction. Along the way he has directed the South Australian Museum, been a visiting fellow at Harvard, a professor at Macquarie University, and, briefly, Australia’s Chief Climate Change Commissioner. He currently chairs the Copenhagen Climate Council. In short, he has become one of Australia’s leading voices in environment and climate change– largely as a public spokesperson, but also as one of our finest science writers.

Here on Earth exemplifies both Flannery’s literary skill and conceptual breadth. This sweeping narrative explores, not so much what we have done to the planet, but how we think about and understand ourselves and our place in the world, and the implications this thinking has for our ability to change our future. In particular, Flannery is interested in how modes of thought have shaped the way we interpret our own behaviour. Rather than looking to politicians, economists, or activists for the answers, Flannery looks to his own heritage. Science often seems to have all the evidence for climate change, but has it also, in some way, contributed to the problem? As the dominant mode of knowledge production in our modern society, science offers us a very particular way of thinking that, Flannery suggests, might sometimes impede our ability to solve the big problems.

Here on Earth (Text Publishing first edition, 2010)

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In an interview on Radio National’s Breakfast program on 24 September 2010, Flannery explained: ‘I’ve begun to think I’ve misunderstood the scientific process. The reductionist science that I’ve practised all of my life is very good for answering small questions but I learnt as we looked at the climate problem that we can’t use reductionist science to examine that system, we have to create a model world, a virtual world.’

Rather than breaking the study of life down into its smallest reducible components, the study of Earth-, climate- and eco-systems requires a holistic approach. These systems are complex and interactive. Understanding their component parts does not necessarily help us to predict the outcomes of their interactions. Understanding the chemical composition of a wheel does not predict or explain anything about the quality of ‘rolling’ or the profound and far-ranging implications this unique structure has had for human technological development. Similarly, reductionist science risks missing big picture interconnections and the emergent properties of complex systems, which cannot be predicted from molecular, genetic, or chemical details.

There is little risk of Flannery taking too narrow a view of his subject matter in this book. He ranges widely through our history and prehistory, across our planet and universe, in search of answers. He draws together threads from ancient Rome and Lord of the Flies, from Francis Bacon to Milutin Milankovitch, from hobbits to fire-ants, population and pollution, evolution and extinction, war and peace, trade and energy, competition and co-operation. He draws on the great thinkers of our age, not so much the mainstream and middle-of-the-road, but those unafraid to walk the line between genius and notoriety, to challenge norms, explore the unspeakable or explain the unknowable. Flannery’s favourites, perhaps not surprisingly, are the scientists and academics who are also great writers and visionaries – the communicators of their disciplines willing to speak outside the ivory tower to the world beyond: E.O. Wilson, Rachel Carson, Alfred Wallace, Carl Sagan, Bill Hamilton, James Lovelock, Jared Diamond, and Charles Darwin.

The risk of taking a cross-disciplinary approach, and writing for a non-specialist audience, is that some small details may be inaccurate, imperfectly represented, or inadequately qualified. In our modern information age, it is not possible to be expert in everything. Scientists are trained to focus on, and criticise, the tiniest errors in detail. It is not surprising that, in a book this broad, there are likely to be many such minor anomalies for the specialist to spot. Anthropologists, evolutionary ecologists, and toxicologists are all likely to have issues with the way Flannery addresses aspects of their area of expertise. But this is not to say that the broad concept underpinning the book is wrong.

‘Anthropologists, evolutionary ecologists, and toxicologists are all likely to have issues with the way Flannery addresses aspects of their area of expertise’

Scientific study, by its nature, becomes increasingly myopic with age. The older the discipline, the finer the level of resolution becomes, the more detail at which researchers operate, and the narrower the articles they produce at ever reducing levels of investigation. The principle of the gradual accumulation of detail through the publication of peer-reviewed journal articles is, however, only one side of the process of knowledge generation. At the other end – at the beginning of new disciplines, new modes of thought or new approaches – a different and broader method is required, with a very different style of writing. At the origin of scientific revolutions, as Thomas Kuhn put it, creative scientists address their books to ‘anyone who might be interested’. Like his heroes, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, Flannery knows that his audience is not the scientific specialist, but society at large. Revolutions, even scientific ones, are not bred in laboratories, but fuelled by everyday conversations and beliefs. Flannery’s books, like many of those he cites, are not books to give us answers, but books to make us question the easy answers we all too often accept without thinking.

Much of the power of Flannery’s writing derives from his mastery of literary non-fiction techniques. Factual writing often suffers from the heavy burden of the complex information that its sentences must carry. It is hard for a fully laden B-Double semi-trailer to be as elegant and speedy as a Lamborghini. Factual writing needs power as well as style.

‘Scientific study, by its nature, becomes increasingly myopic with age’

Flannery’s writing is neither overloaded nor overly simplistic: a triumph of style and substance. His paragraphs are reliably coherent and clear. They are a model for the effective use of topic sentences, not just to provide a navigational tool to locate information within the text, but also as a guide to ease the reader through material that may be new, confronting, or unexpected. He uses the ‘given-new’ principle beloved of good science writers to move readers from their own personal comfort zone into new territory so seamlessly that they barely realise they have left their armchairs.

Here on Earth (Atlantic Monthly Press edition, 2011)

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Thus Flannery takes us from the evolution of our own bodies to the evolution of the Earth’s crust, shifting us through rapidly changing perspectives of ourselves and our world. The very elements of our bodies, he reminds us – carbon, phosphorus, calcium, iron, and others – are formed over successive generations of stars. As Carl Sagan put it, we are quite literally star dust. In reverse, Flannery argues, the Earth’s crust is also constructed, shaped, and influenced by the activities of life. As someone who has spent his career studying the fossilised remains of life converted back into geological features, it is perhaps not so difficult for Flannery to imagine life as being a physically integral part of the outer layer of the Earth’s crust. For the rest of us, the integration of life and rocks is perhaps a more challenging notion. But the influence of living systems on the Earth’s crust is apparent through the cycling of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, into plants, to wood and coal, and now released back into the atmosphere in unprecedented quantities.

Over the years, Flannery has become a skilled practitioner in the use of figurative language. He juxtaposes the vision of his childhood as an era of optimism ‘physically expressed in the baby boom’ with the resulting ‘least cost landscape of grim functionality’. He uses rhythm and repetition to build tension in his arguments before releasing his readers into the calm waters of well-reasoned conclusions. His arguments appeal to the authority of science as well as to ethics and emotion. He draws on the great metaphors of other science communicators (most notably James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’) but also builds his own. The three great organs of the Earth, comprise the crust, ‘a huge holdfast, like the lower shell of an oyster, which life has formed to anchor itself’, the gossamer thin wrapping of atmosphere, ‘constantly repaired and made whole by life itself’ which protects the third organ, ‘the liquid circulatory system’ comparable to the ‘fluids as salty as the ancient oceans [that] flow through our veins’.

‘Much of the power of Flannery’s writing derives from his mastery of literary non-fiction techniques’

Flannery’s primary aim is to shift our perspective of ourselves away from being inheritors of the earth, or the ultimate product of some illusory evolutionary progression. He argues that this anthropocentric view is not the inevitable outcome of either our religious heritage or Darwinian competition. A Judeo-Christian heritage, for example, actively promotes sustainability (destroying the destroyers of the earth), ecological integration (dust to dust) and stewardship (thou shalt not steal). Nor can evolution be used to justify an inherently selfish, competitive, dog-eat-dog world. Flannery argues that there is little evidence to support the view that life is driven by relentless self-reproduction, competitive over-exploitation of resources, before collapsing to extinction in a depleted environment. Rather, he claims that life tends to find a natural balance. Our mutual dependence on other factors in the system more often leads to comfortable coexistence, perhaps even something that might seem to resemble co-operation. Evolution is driven equally by costs and benefits. A virus that rapidly kills its host is not a very successful virus. One that only causes mild irritation, while exploiting the resources it needs to reproduce and redistribute itself, will colonise the world. If it confers some kind of adaptive advantage to its host, so much the better. The benefits of the much derided group selection theories of the past have re-emerged, perhaps not so much as a mechanism for change themselves, but as an emergent property of complex systems.

Here on Earth (Penguin edition, 2012)

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Rather than seeing ourselves as individuals, or even clusters of selfish genes, Flannery argues for a broader interpretation, not only as a species, but as a cultural superorganism capable of transformative revolutions in life, beyond the usual biological evolutionary processes. In essence, Flannery argues that the sooner we see ourselves as being an integral part of the Earth or Gaia, its fate intertwined with our own, the sooner we will be able to initiate action to prevent or reverse some of the wholesale environmental destruction we have wrought. We are not some new plague on the Earth, but a newly evolved intelligence system – Gaia’s brain. Brains are costly to run, but they offer profound advantages as our own evolutionary history demonstrates. We need to ensure that our costs do not outweigh our benefits.

Flannery argues that the choice is not between greedy human nature, and nature itself. Rather, he argues, we actively chose to go against our own nature in continuing to destroy our planet and environment. Our natural preference, like that of all natural systems, is to restore some kind of balance for our own perpetuation and stability. All we need to do is stop fighting our own nature.

If, in the end, Flannery’s hope for the future is misplaced, it will not be because nature is red in tooth and claw, but due to our own wilful bloody-mindedness.

There is no recommended apprenticeship for writers. Nor are there any prescribed personal or professional qualifications. Hermits, obsessives, insurance clerks, customs officers, women who embroider, men who write letters, public servants, soldiers, drunks, provincial doctors and gulag inmates have all become great writers. How? A mystery. But avidity – about the world and the people in it – helps. So does a sharp eye, a tuned ear, and hands acquainted with work.

When seventeen-year-old Alex Miller migrated alone from his native England to make a life for himself in Australia, he already knew how to shoe a horse, muck out a stable, hunt stag, and survive – even thrive – in an English west-country world where class and ingrained social distinctions might have defined – or confined – him.

Half a century later, in 2003, the one-time Somerset farm labourer won Australia’s highest literary accolade, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for his novel Journey to the Stone Country. He had won the Miles Franklin once before, in 1993, for The Ancestor Game, his searching Chinese/Australian novel about homeland and exile. And in all of the years before and between, Alex Miller had been taking note of the world around him. As a child in England, as a stockman in Queensland, horse-breaker in New Zealand, storyteller, university graduate in English and History, teacher of writing, drama entrepreneur (he co-founded the Anthill Theatre and was involved in the Melbourne Writers’ Theatre), he had been absorbing detail, salting it away. ‘There is a sacredness about detail,’ he says. ‘For example – and the examples are what matter – at a certain time of the morning, when the dew is still about, if you kick the earth there will be a particular smell.’

Miller’s novels honour that ‘sacredness about detail’. Their smells are specific and linked to memory; their landscapes gleam with angles of light that have ‘heft’, as poet Emily Dickinson, put it. Their texture is both physical and psychological, as here, in a lyrical passage from Journey to the Stone Country:

They ascended the incline of the ridge through a tract of country where prehistoric grasstrees and cycads stood in isolation among bloodwoods and stunted hickory, petrified sentinels from the age before man, their shaggy topknots and skirts trembling in the mountain breeze as if they would flee at the sight of the oncoming vehicles.

Journey to the Stone Country (Allen & Unwin first edition, 2002)

Buy this bookThe two principal characters of Journey to the Stone Country, Bo Rennie and Annabelle Beck, are driving into the Queensland hinterland as if into an initiation, a discovery, or perhaps a recovery. (Officially they are engaged in a survey of cultural artefacts in country slated for mining or flooding). The land registers their approach: it shivers with apprehension. Miller says (in his publisher Allen & Unwin’s website notes) that there are in fact three main characters in the book: Bo, Annabelle, and Landscape.

‘Description’ is not the apt term for what Miller is doing in the Stone Country passage, or indeed in any of his eleven novels. His landscapes are always freighted with meaning. Indelible, they fix visual impressions for the reader and at the same time prompt questions, much in the way the great Quattrocento painter Masaccio fixes his unforgettable faces in an Italian landscape but all the while spurs you to ask about human motivation, human emotion. Who are we? Where are we? Why do we humans do what we do? What makes us tick? Renaissance questions. Universal questions. Questions Alex Miller explores, habitually and instinctively, in all his fiction.

Sometimes Miller’s landscapes are interior. In The Ancestor Game, his narrator, puzzling over distinctions between self-sufficiency and isolation, reveals the following:

Since my earliest childhood recollections I’d believed that if I could only reach deeply enough inside myself, one day I’d come upon extensive and complex landscapes rich with meaning and mystery, waiting for me to explore them.

It is not by chance that the cover to the 1992 edition of The Ancestor Game carries an urban landscape by Australian artist (and Miller’s friend) Rick Amor, master of the haunted scene, the metaphysical enquiry. In the painting a man – small, seemingly incidental – is climbing up a ladder into a dark, rectangular opening, his face obscured. What will he find? Will his world open out or be blocked? Is he escaping or questing? It is the kind of conundrum Miller’s novels confront.

‘Who are we? Where are we? Why do we humans do what we do? What makes us tick? Renaissance questions. Universal questions’

So, if landscape is the third main character in Journey to the Stone Country (and in all his novels), it has external and internal dimensions. It has evocative power – you can see every blade of buffel grass, smell the drought-breaking rain coming – and centripetal force: it draws you deep into the world of Miller’s imagining, to his creative centre, the place where his ideas foment and questions germinate. Questions that probe every aspect of our shared humanity, questions that transcend race, nationality, and tribe.

Stone Country was written over eighteen months, and in three drafts – a relaxed pace for Miller, who has sometimes spent years (seven for The Ancestor Game) on a novel, and at other times has finished one in a few hectic weeks. Autumn Laing (2011) was written under intense pressure (ten hours a day for five months). Coal Creek, his most recent novel (2013), written over ten weeks, ‘just flowed out’, Miller says. He had the voice, the lingo of Bobby Blue, the novel’s focal character ‘in his head’. It was language he had spoken himself as a lad, its rhythms and syntax easy on his tongue.

Journey to the Stone Country (Sceptre UK edition, 2002)

Buy this bookMiller, whose mature baritone reflects his Scots-Irish parentage as well as a traveller’s lifetime of experience, listening, and study – in outback Australia, in France, Tunisia, Germany, China, in cities and country – has a mimic’s gift. He can do voices. Some of them have been his own. For Stone Country, with its blend of city talk and the dialectical inflections of stockmen and country people, indigenous and whitefella, his linguistic knack is crucial to the novel’s – and its characters’ – authenticity. He allows his people their full expressive range without patronising, without a hint of satire. Remember when English regional voices were considered uncouth? Now a Yorkshire or Geordie inflection has international cultural cachet. Miller’s characters don’t need fashion or trends: they speak authoritatively in a language that is their own, a language inviting to the ear.

Novelists are often coy about their sources, about the ‘real-life’ models for the characters in their books. Alex Miller is the opposite. He frankly acknowledges that he always draws from life – and then transfigures what he knows through the alchemy of fiction, so it becomes something else. Another order of truth. Journey to the Stone Country is dedicated to his wife, Stephanie, and also to his two friends, ‘the real Bo and Annabelle, whose story this is’.

‘The real Bo’ (you can easily find biographical details via Google if you think you need them) recognised a natural storyteller when he met one, and was too canny to let an opportunity slip. In the 1990s he told his mate Alex that one day he (Alex) would write a book about Bo’s Jangga country and its ‘Old People’. A few years later he invited Miller to come with him and his partner (‘the real Annabelle’) on a journey south from Townsville into the Bowen Basin and then further inland to the ranges, into his territory, the country of his Jangga ancestors.

Alex Miller says stories are gifted to him like this. It is as though they drop from the skies. But if they drop, it is into fertile ground. Autumn Laing’s story swooped on Miller in London’s Holland Park, where he’d been sitting on a bench, thinking about writing out the debt he owed to Sidney Nolan, whose photographs of Australia’s north had galvanised his migration to Australia. The novel’s seedbed is Miller’s felt obligation to Nolan and his familiarity with members of Melbourne’s Heide circle, including the place’s chatelaine, Sunday Reed, who was the model for Autumn. But the story, and its mercurial heroine, rapidly outgrew their sources and assumed a vivid, independent life.

For Stone Country, Miller took ‘the real’ Bo and Annabelle’s story, and crafted it into a fiction about friendship, historical violence, family, love, loyalty, massacre, and vengeance, set in a landscape he already knew in his bones, having ridden it for years as an itinerant stockman, but which he would go on discovering the more he travelled with his friends, and the more he wrote. Characteristically, his completed tale ripples outwards from its poignant centre. The delicately erotic love story of Bo Rennie, Jangga man and ‘Queensland ringer’, and Annabelle Beck, the academic historian long distanced from her Queensland homeland and white colonial past, is the focus, the significant example (‘the examples are what matter’), the resonant detail in a larger Australian history of differences between blackfella and whitefella. Are those differences irreconcilable? The novel is subtle and complex, asking the question and embodying answers in its characters, some of them, like the vehement and implacable old Jangga woman, Panya, intent on prosecuting a race war ‘for another thousand years’. Others, like Bo and Annabelle, are drawn together by a force that seems to transcend history and suggests possibilities, once unimagined.

Journey to the Stone Country (Allen & Unwin edition, 2003)

Buy this bookBo and Annabelle both have forebears who murdered out of fear, racial malice, or in lethal payback. They also have family members who crossed racial divides, confounding cultural norms and expectations. Bo’s Scottish grandfather, Iain Rennie (after whom Bo is formally named), fell in love with a traditional Jangga woman, sought her mother’s permission, and married – in a reciprocated love match. Grandma Rennie, as Bo calls her, was a woman of powerful character and an invincible sense of her own and her family’s dignity. After Iain Rennie’s premature death (he is killed in a fall from his horse), she lives on as the undisputed mistress of her station property. When it is taken from her, late in her life, the dispossession is done by fraud, not by law. The task of its repossession falls to her grandson, Iain Ban Rennie – renamed Bo by this formidable woman.

The novel is as much about the way power is used – so often ruthlessly – by dominant individuals and groups as it is about racial difference. Its epigraph, from the Austrian modernist writer, Robert Musil is an intriguing choice: ‘A ruling caste always remains slightly barbaric.’ (Musil’s own novels were banned by the Nazis, and he died in 1942, in Switzerland, in exile with his Jewish wife). Miller is too morally intelligent, too tactful to draw facile comparisons between the Holocaust and Aboriginal dispossession, but the guilts that attach to past atrocities are part of the fabric of his work, notably in Landscape of Farewell (2007), which reintroduces the character of Dougald Gnapun, Bo’s companion from his wild stock-mustering days. Dougald also looms authoritatively over Stone Country – a bridge figure between the Old People and the next generation, the new life. It is his children, the beautiful Trace and her quiet, watchful brother Arner (the novel’s ‘silent witness’), who accompany Bo and Annabelle part way on their journey, like premonitions of the future.

Who is ‘the ruling caste’ in Journey to the Stone Country? Who are the barbarians? The power imbalance is implicit – whites dominated, at least in the recent past. Miller doesn’t write his indigenous characters as victims. Nor is he blind to the physical and social havoc caused by white presumptions of mastery and the alienation of Aboriginal lands. But his novel is also a register of change, and of the human and political complexities and ironies of twenty-first-century circumstances. When Bo, Annabelle, Trace, and Arner come to a temporary rest in the edenic Ranna valley, with its great derelict station homestead (the house where Bo’s grandmother was taken as a child to live with the white Bigges family), they enjoy some sunlit days of pastoral calm. But the Ranna valley is scheduled to be flooded, its splendour obliterated. The ‘real-life Ranna’ is also threatened. (Miller, who says he ‘loves to bring people and places out of the silence’, makes a rueful comparison between Tasmania’s famous Franklin and this little-known, botanically rich, and equally beautiful Queensland treasure.) But threatened by whom? In the novel, the Ranna dam scheme is promoted as vigorously by the Jangga entrepreneur Les Marra as by his whitefella colleagues and backers. Marra breaks the travellers’ peace when he descends into the valley like a malevolent mosquito, whirring down in a helicopter and asserting his presence ‘as if he were the chevalier of a masterful order visiting his presence upon an outlying fiefdom of his domain’. Details, examples again. If Stone Country is a political novel, its politics are inscribed in the particulars, in the lives and actions of its protagonists.

‘The power imbalance is implicit – whites dominated, at least in the recent past’

Stone Country also has an Odyssean aspect: for Bo, Annabelle and for Miller himself, it is a return journey – and we know how different, even unsettling familiar things can be when we meet them again with fresh eyes. Annabelle, raw, and in retreat from a failed marriage to a Melbourne English scholar, is rediscovering her country, but she is also learning that her analytical habits, her Western yen to seek explanations for everything, will not serve her new circumstances. Nor will they help her fathom what is happening to her, or understand the man with whom she is falling in love, a man who is articulate yet who rations speech, and who has been taught by his magisterial grandmother to leave some mysteries intact.

Miller writes women with uncanny insight. Detail again. ‘How can he know that?’ I often wonder. He must watch. With Bo (and Dougald Gnapun), he writes out of long experience and a personal understanding of solitariness. He is fluent in Bo’s gestural language, ‘his hand sweeping the country before them like a radar beacon’. Miller is at ease with silence and can read it. He tells a story of his audience with the Queen: at a certain point, without prompting, he stood up and departed, with decorum. ‘How on earth did you know when to leave’ asked the equerry. ‘There was a little pause, and I read it as a sign.’

‘If Stone Country is a political novel, its politics are inscribed in the particulars, in the lives and actions of its protagonists’

Miller says that we are ‘an image species’. It’ is an odd claim from an unashamed wordsmith, but life, especially a working life spent amongst Aboriginal friends – ‘most of the time we didn’t say much, but we communicated all the time’ – has honed his senses to razor sharpness, and given him an extraordinary expressive repertoire, a perceptiveness and instinct that comprehends silence and doesn’t fret or flail in the face of mystery. Creative humility, you might call it, plus a craftsman’s savvy, all in the one writer.

Journey to the Stone Country, like Landscape of Farewell, is a novel that comes out of a specific Queensland landscape, one peopled by characters who are marked by their country and culture – details again, the examples that matter. But there is nothing regional or confined about Miller’s imaginative or intellectual reach. His sixth novel, like the five that preceded and the five that follow it, takes on the world as he finds it in a particular place, and gives it back to us with such penetration, such creative zest. ‘Write what you love’, a wise friend once counselled him. So Miller does, in lyrical and incisive ways, creating a world we can wonder at, as Annabelle does here:

In the blue haze of distance to the northwest the valley of the Bowen River spread out below them, a broad pastureland where herds of white Brahman cattle grazed the sweet natural grasses of the uplands and fertile riverflats. To their northwest another country, intimidating and vast, the folded ranges of Salitros and the Massey Gorge, a forested wilderness without dwellings or roads, no smoke or sign of habitation across the wide and undulating landscape of iridescent hills that lay glittering in the morning sun below them. Bo’s indicating hand going out. ‘Ranna’s way over there.’

She looked and wondered at the beauty and mystery of her own country.

References

Dixon, Robert, ed. The Novels of Alex Miller: An Introduction, Allen & Unwin, 2012.
Dixon, Robert. Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time, Sydney University Press, 2014.
Walker, Brenda. ‘Alex Miller: The Ruin of Time', Australian Book Review, December 2014.
Stretton, Andrea. 'Journey to the Stone Country', Sydney Morning Herald, 16 November 2002.
Fraser, Morag. 'Lovesong', Sydney Morning Herald, December 2009.
Fraser, Morag. 'Alex Miller's indispensable new novel', Australian Book Review, October 2011.
Author conversation with Alex Miller, 14 April 2015. All quotations from Miller, unless otherwise acknowledged, are from this conversation.

The shortlist for the 2011 Miles Franklin Literary Award, which included Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, was controversial because it consisted of only three novels, all written by men. The exclusion of women writers for that year itself was noteworthy: for example, Fiona McGregor’s fine novel of Sydney, Indelible Ink (Scribe), did not even appear on the longlist. The 2011 shortlist served also to emphasise the historical male dominance of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Nonetheless, Scott’s That Deadman Dance, a novel about early contact between indigenous and non-indigenous people in Western Australia, was a worthy and widely anticipated winner. And as Scott noted, indigenous writers are also under-represented in the history of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Apart with Scott himself, whose earlier novel Benang shared the 2000 award with Thea Astley’s Drylands, Alexis Wright won in 2007 for Carpentaria.

An academic as well as a writer, Scott’s publishing history demonstrates a singular and thoughtful approach to discussions about indigenous culture, including language reclamation. Apart from fiction, his published works include Kayang & Me (2005), a memoir co-written with his elder Hazel Brown, in which Brown’s stories and Scott’s probing discussion commingle. He has also co-authored books for children as part of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project. The reflective care that Scott brings to these tasks is also evident in the way he describes himself. For example, his biography on the Miles Franklin Literary Award website reads, ‘Kim Scott’s ancestral Noongar country is the south-east coast of Western Australia between Gairdner River and Cape Arid. His cultural Elders use the term Wirlomin to refer to their clan, and the Norman Tindale nomenclature identifies people of this area as Wudjari/Koreng.’ On the website of Curtin University, where Scott works, he is, ‘A descendant of people living along the south coast of Western Australia prior to colonisation and proud to be one among those who call themselves Noongar.’In engaging so carefully with questions of identity, language, and culture, Scott challenges the rest of us to take these matters seriously. It is symptomatic of his writing, which is open-armed but precise and challenging.

Issues around the damage, protection, and evolution of culture, as well as the importance of language in acts of colonisation and resistance, form the foundation of That Deadman Dance. In the novel, Scott imagines a contact history between Noongar people and non-indigenous people (both British settlers and American whalers) in an imagined landscape closely inspired by his hometown, Albany, and the surrounding area on the south-east coast of Western Australia. As Scott notes, some historians have called this area ‘the friendly frontier’. Scott takes this landscape, together with historical accounts and testimonies of indigenous and non-indigenous people as well as the work of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, to imagine a place in which the term ‘the friendly frontier’ makes sense but is also disquieting. The resultant story runs from 1826 to 1844, although not chronologically. Jumps in time, forward and back, give the story a charged feel by showing how European settlement builds sturdy foundations, something that seems unlikely in the earliest uncertain moments of occupation.

‘In engaging so carefully with questions of identity, language, and culture, Scott challenges the rest of us to take these matters seriously.’

At first, in That Deadman Dance, the colonisers depend on the Noongar, but after less than two decades the settlement is well established and the non-indigenous inhabitants of this new community are so troublesome that ‘steps must be taken’. Scott adds another stage to this story of cross-cultural contact by briefly moving forward decades to observe the main character, Bobby Wabalanginy, in old age putting on a clownish command performance for tourists, winking, dancing, singing, telling tales, and launching boomerangs: ‘Sometimes he would throw off his policeman’s jacket and heavy boots and drape a kangaroo skin over his shoulders and – since they wanted a real old-time Aborigine, but not completely – wear the red underpants.’ The narrator’s observation that Bobby ‘offered himself as a fine image of the passing of time’ reverberates all the way to the twenty-first century.

That Deadman Dance (Pan Macmillan)

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Scott’s earlier novel, Benang: From the Heart (1999), tackles a later stage of Western Australian settlement, the early decades of the twentieth century. Australia is now a nation in which, for example, a policeman can say, ‘You need licenses for possums, if you’re selling. Oh, kills as many as you want for food, for yourself. It used to be your country.’ A dense and sardonic tale about assimilation, eugenics and cultural survival, Benang is one of the more startling and original novels yet published in Australia. It also serves as an unsettling sibling book to That Deadman Dance. While neither novel relies on the other, there are considerable rewards to be had from mulling over the elongated story they combine to tell.

In a mixed review in The Guardian, Carol Birch called That Deadman Dance ‘an exercise in lush impressionism’. But while the novel is lyrical and richly observed, its most distinctive quality is its hard-edged restraint. The complexity of early contact between indigenous and non-indigenous people drives the story, especially the very different ways of understanding the land, moving through the land and using the land (and sea). Accommodation and conflict, human strength and weakness, purposefulness and vacillation, take place upon the land that the new arrivals start naming and trying to dominate. In this context, ‘lush impressionism’ does not come close to capturing the complexity of Scott’s storytelling.

At the centre of the story is Bobby, whom readers get to know as a boy and a man. In his prime, he strides between worlds and, importantly for Scott, between languages; he is a leader, thinker, innovator, diplomat, and observer. Bobby and Christine, the daughter of settlers, resemble childhood sweethearts. They brush against each other playing hide-and-seek; he sings her songs and teaches her Noongar words, including the word for ‘kiss’: ‘They sang the song together, faces close, lips reaching out.’ But their connection – symptomatic of many others – is partial and finite. Years later, when Bobby carries Christine from a rowboat to the shore, her father Geordie says, ‘Damn you, Bobby. You are not children anymore.’

Around Bobby, Scott offers complex and humane portraits of indigenous and non-indigenous people. As Morag Fraser notes, ‘it is the characters – flawed, credible human beings, embodying their history but never mere ciphers – who stay with you’. Perhaps most absorbing is Dr Cross, a sickly man with high ambitions for the colony and his place in it who lacks the physical energy to achieve those ambitions. Cross seems genuinely respectful of the Noongar people, but he also knows that he needs their support and goodwill if he and other settlers are to have any chance of taming the land. His affection for the Noongar, then, is both real and practical: ‘They do not yet need us’ (emphasis added). In turn, the Noongar people cannot help but understand the seriousness of the conundrum: ‘So many of Menak’s people were dying and, although Cross was a friend, Menak did not think they needed more of his people here.’

Cross forms a special and abiding friendship with Wunyeran, Bobby’s uncle; one time, in a stunning scene, they sing to each other, finding a way to extend their communication. Upon Wunyeran’s death, Cross is sufficiently overcome with grief as to pray to God to admit Wunyeran into heaven, ‘despite the many – not knowing him – who would say heathen and insist he was but an uncultivated savage’. On the one hand, this seems a moving and generous act – and yes, an act that suggests something approaching equality. On the other hand, it imposes a presumptuous world view. When Cross’s assistant mishandles Wunyeran’s body according to Noongar customs, there is an excruciating tenderness about Cross’s efforts to make amends. But while his desire to right a wrong resonates, so too – ultimately more so – does the futility of the effort.

Eventually, Wunyeran and Cross share a grave. Again, it is open to readers to interpret this outcome as an affirmation of cross-cultural friendship – or to view it as a gesture that belies the forcefulness of non-indigenous intrusion. Indeed, the moment is both beautiful and beautifully delusionary. The joint grave, and the subsequent contrasting fates of the two men’s remains, is a key example of a tone that typifies That Deadman Dance: in a story with so much potential for overblown symbolism, Scott mostly – and this is quite a feat – avoids transparent or simplified parables on reconciliation and race relations.

‘Issues around the damage, protection, and evolution of culture form the foundation of That Deadman Dance’

Bobby is an expert of the Dead Man Dance, a potent symbol of first contact. The dance is not actually about the dead men but about white-skinned people appearing from across the ocean. But in Bobby’s inventive version of the dance, he becomes the settlers: ‘quick striding Soldier Killam, with that twist to his torso and the bad arm; the hulking Convict Skelly; Dr Cross (oh, poor thing, remember him?); Chain, bouncing up and down on his toes, throwing commands with his arms.’ Bobby’s dance – his detailed mimicry, and especially his comic timing – re-imagines the changes wrought upon his world by ambitious colonisers such as Geordie Chaine, whose every breath seems to be a pursuit of progress and development.

Scott’s novel serves a similar purpose to Bobby’s dance. Against a backdrop of agriculture and whales, Scott offers a subtle portrayal of cross-cultural contact, incorporating reliance, collaboration, all manner of miscommunication and, especially, distinct and often incompatible interpretations of events, behaviour, and outcomes. In time, Bobby comes to understand that the settlers do not consider the Noongar people as equals. For example, he watches, shocked, as Chaine treats the elder Menak with rough contempt. Bobby’s downward spiral is swift. But even as he strikes out, as if floundering in rough seas, he finds a way to resist. He makes an impassioned public plea, by way of a public performance. It is ingenious, courageous, and hilarious – but futile.

That Deadman Dance (Picador, 2012 edition)

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In Scott’s hands, this climax – this solution that is no solution at all – becomes a riveting, vibrant synthesis of the novel’s themes. Not least, it reinforces that culture and resistance endures and adapts, but also that acts of dispossession and appropriation occurred – and occur – slowly, not in some fantastic moment of first contact. And yet there are moments that go beyond exchange for mutual need, or expediency, and that are genuinely affectionate – times when the expression ‘the friendly frontier’ seems to make some sense. Ultimately, though, this complexity makes the bigger story even hard to bear.

So soon after its publication, it is premature to state a case for That Deadman Dance as an Australian classic, especially in an era in which the term ‘classic’ is used so indiscriminantly. But – as with Benang – it has all the qualities of a book that will remain urgent. That Deadman Dance is restrained, but restraint should not be mistaken for limpness. Scott’s voice is forceful, at times angry, at times indignant, but only rarely do the characters seem burdened by didactic political templates or agendas.

‘Scott offers a subtle portrayal of cross-cultural contact’

That Deadman Dance speaks urgently to modern Australia, but not in a way that imposes twenty-first-century debates and sensibilities upon early colonisation. It is mindful of the possibilities, limitations, and dangers of reconciliation. Scott himself has called the novel optimistic, and it certainly points to shared, if imperfect, ways forward. And yet there are many moments – especially the magnificently written final scene – that are shocking and deeply challenging. As Scott has said, ‘There is a lot of reconciling – particularly reconciling ourselves to our shared history – that is yet to happen.’

The richness of Scott’s vision, the sense of generosity of spirit that imbues the novel, does not compromise the sense of profound disruption and dislocation – and the enduring capacities for resistance and new, more meaningful collaborations. The fact that Bobby straddles two cultures does not, in Scott’s hand, become a neat lesson: therein lies the potency and the furious challenge of That Deadman Dance. This fine novel is beautifully and calmly told, rich but measured in its imagery, populated by subtle and flawed characters, propelled forward by a historically familiar but subtle plot. It is a story that captures the messiness of indigenous–non-indigenous relations in Australia, but also one that does not allow readers to get away with imagining that taking stock of all that messiness – merely acknowledging it – can itself be a comforting or cleansing act.

References

Birch, Carol. ‘That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott – review’, The Guardian, 8 December 2012

Fraser, Morag. ‘That Deadman Dance’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 January 2011

‘Kim Scott wins prestigious Miles Franklin’, ABC News, 22 June 2011

Scott, Kim. Benang: from the heart, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999.

Scott, Kim. That Deadman Dance, Picador, 2010.

Scott, Kim, and Hazel Brown. Kayang & Me. Fremantle Press, 2013, 2^nd edn.

Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story is one of the great Australian novels of the last thirty years. When it was first published in 1985, it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. The original cover carried a recommendation by Patrick White, Nobel laureate and the greatest writer of any kind Australia has produced. White said that in Lilian’s Story Kate Grenville had ‘transformed an Australian myth into a dazzling fiction of universal appeal’, and hailed her as a true novelist.

Transforming a myth was something White himself was famously good at, and here it is important to recall that a myth is not necessarily untrue (a point the great biblical scholars emphasised). In his most famous novel Voss (1957), Patrick White adapted the story of Ludwig Leichhardt, the German explorer who led an expedition of exploration into the centre of Australia and perished in the attempt to penetrate the interior. White doesn’t give us a history of Leichardt’s exploration, but he takes the outline of it (and the explorer’s nationality) as a structural idea for his own novel which is a story, in some ways a tragic one, about the quest for identity. In the work of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (whose Poetics is one of the foundations of literary criticism), the word ‘mythos’, from which we get myth, is also the word for plot.

The Australian myth that underlies Lilian’s Story is the life story of Bea Miles (1902–73), the famous Sydney eccentric and ‘madwoman’ who was a familiar figure in the city streets, quoting Shakespeare and hopping into other people’s taxis. For decades – into the 1960s – she was a legend. She was also (to use another idiom that can have a literary shading) ‘a character’. In the book that made her famous (Lilian’s Story, her first book, had already won the 1984 Vogel Literary Award), Kate Grenville created what is still the greatest character in her fiction by giving dramatic form to this extraordinary woman, Lilian Singer, and she did so in a book that is full of colour and energy and feeling.

‘The first thing to notice about Lilian’s Story is the richness of the language’

The first thing to notice about Lilian’s Story is the richness of the language. And it’s worth noting, in the light of Patrick White’s commendation, that the rhetorical, highly coloured language – both the writing looked at as the style of the novel and the richness of the first-person narrative that declares itself as Lilian’s voice, as this super bright, superior, weird character telling her own story – is rich and poetical (some people would say to the point of being ‘purple’) in a way that shows White’s influence.

Lilians Story (Viking, 1986)

Buy this bookListen to the uncanny, mesmerising quality of the opening of Lilian’s Story; how it plays on our sense of the fantastic to create a sense of Lilian’s very coming into being as a kind of apparition.

It was a wild night in the year of Federation that the birth took place. Horses kicked down the stables. Pigs flew, figs grew thorns. The infant mewled and started and the doctor assured the mother that a caul was a lucky sign. A girl? the father exclaimed, outside in the waiting room, tiled as if for horrible emergencies. This was a contingency he was not prepared for, but he rallied within a day and announced, Lilian. She will be called Lilian Una.

This is a world where pigs fly and language soars and a fat girl tells it how it is in a diction that is intensely imaginative and at the same time earthly and intimate. One way of talking about this style, which does have a family resemblance to White’s, is to describe it as Australian Gothic: it is decorative, it reaches for the sky like a cathedral spire and it also has a highly sensuous quality, a suggestion of devils and gargoyles and other scary objects hidden away among the overarching beauty.

Here is Lilian’s father Albion giving her a belting:

He brought the belt down on my pinafore with a muffled sound. No bloody good, he said crossly, and pushed the pinafore up, pulled my bloomers down. When the belt came down again it cracked against skin. The top of his boot creased at each stroke as his weight came forward, and a deep wrinkle appeared in the leather. It is only skin, I told myself and heard a yelping from somewhere that made me want to laugh. Mother spoke from the doorway, but Father was in his stride now and did not stop to answer her. I was laughing to feel the belt singe my skin.

And here is a moment towards the climax of the second part of Lilian’s Story when something awful is suggested about the relationship between Lilian and her father.

But Father could not let me achieve that, and filled the doorway before I could break apart and fly free of my body. All sound was drawn away into the tiles and past the windows. I watched as everything else fled and Father and I were left with each other. The brown buttons of the cardigan that Mother had given him made a small tinny noise like rats’ feet as he took it off and let it drop to the floor.

In every room of the house, the air that I had stilled fled, and was replaced by trembling and fearful vibrations. I could hear my voice, a thin reedy cry like something choking and not being rescued. Father said nothing at all, but his breathing was like a thundering machine in the silence. All around us the house stood shocked, repelling the sounds we made. My cries carried no further than the carpet of the stairway. The silent rooms would take no part in my struggle, but swallowed the sounds indifferently. No! I heard myself cry with a feeble piping sound. No! No! The house gave back only silence, and the panting of the desperate machine that was Father.

It is striking that there is a devil-may-care sensual quality to the description of the belting, but there is something cloaked and smothered about the description of whatever terrible scene between daughter and father which is half glimpsed but disturbingly sensed near the conclusion of the second part of Lilian’s Story. It marks the end of the continuous story of Lilian’s girlhood and young womanhood, but also – and this is one of the most striking things about the novel and gives it such richness and complexity – the end of Lilian’s sanity, though not of the qualities that make her sympathetic and attractive.

‘One way of talking about this style, which does have a family resemblance to White’s, is to describe it as Australian Gothic’

Lilian’s Story is one of the most remarkable pieces of late-twentieth-century Australian fiction not only because of its richness of orchestration and the originality of its vision, but because it starts as an archetypal account of childhood, progresses into the splendours and miseries of Lilian as a young woman, and then presents her as a deranged old derelict, though a colourful and well-known one.

It is this last vision of Lilian as the spectacularly vivid woman making a spectacle of herself that is the starting point of the myth, the outline of a narrative that makes Lilian’s Story identifiable as a fictionalisation of Miles’s life, as well as an imagining of how this educated and uproarious woman might have come to such a pass that she was living on the streets and sleeping in storm drains. But it is the first two sections of the book, especially the lilting and lyrical account of Lilian’s tomboy childhood, that makes Lilian’s Story one of the most cherished, as well as one of the most distinguished, books in recent Australian literary history.

Lilian's Story (Allen & Unwin, 1991)

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Kate Grenville, one of Australia’s most highly regarded contemporary novelists, has had remarkable success with her settler and Indigenous Australian novels, The Secret River (2005) and its successors, The Lieutenant (2008) and Sarah Thornhill (2011). The Secret River was made into a successful stage show directed by Neil Armfield, and is now being filmed. These novels have become a focal point for the deep feeling Australians have about the wrongs done to indigenous people. It is part of the subtlety of Grenville’s fictionalisation of this history that she creates a believable story inhabited by lifelike human beings, showing how the crimes could be perpetrated by white settlers not a million miles in the way they think and feel from you and me.

She has also written novels of ordinary life such as The Idea of Perfection (1999), where the focus is closer than the settler/Aboriginal novels, and her second novel, Dreamhouse (1986, though written before Lilian’s Story), is a psychological thriller which tingles with sexual tension. There is also a sort of historical cavalcade, Joan Makes History (1988), which has her heroine flitting from one big moment in Australian history to another (the First Fleet, Ned Kelly, you name it). This book contains a number of interludes in a sharp, attractive style during which some of the characters from the second – young womanhood – section of Lilian’s Story recur. Of course, the big reappearance is in Dark Places (1994), in which Lilian’s dreadful father, Albion, is the central figure.

This book poses a problem for the readers of Lilian’s Story. When the original novel was published, people argued over what had occurred between Lilian and her father. It was clearly an abomination of a relationship (because of him), but had there actually been sexual abuse? By the time Grenville wrote Dark Places, she had made up her mind about this question. She told me, however, that at the time of Lilian’s Story she hadn’t and that the reader should feel free to interpret the first novel on its own terms.

It is a remarkable book. Grenville has a style for Lilian that allows her to sing through her sorrows and her squalors. The first movement of the book is like a revelation because Australian childhood – which can so often be a clichéd subject – is presented with such cumulative intimacy that the reader suddenly finds herself with a thousand memories she didn’t know she had about the daily life and rituals, the weird smells and privacies and insights that go along with that strange, mad experience of being a child.

Lilian’s encounter with Miss Gash, the supposed witch lady with her tabby cat – the woman she is utterly attracted to and ultimately betrays – is just one of a hundred sparkling epiphanies in the first rapturous movement of Lilian’s Story.

The story carries absolute conviction because it is articulated with the power of poetry. Through the sensuous detail and apprehensions of this world of being fat and energised and awkward and rushing into situations with tough, spunky boys and pretty, sly girls are so wonderfully observed, the reader comes to know Lilian’s reality like the back of her own hand, even though the prose has the dreamlike clarity of an Arabian Nights bazaar.

How appropriate that Patrick White should have hailed Lilian’s Story, for the natural response to this book is one of exhilaration, like one’s experience of reading Patrick White’s own novels. Yes, we say, Australia is like this and Australian childhood is like this. Who would have dreamt it? The dreaming is Grenville’s and the accuracy is in the power of the dreaming. This is Kate Grenville’s God-given book. You can tell that this is the moment, right at the outset, where she paints her masterpiece.

The fact that Lilian’s early childhood (she is born in 1901) has an Edwardian setting (the period of Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady, of the first series of Downton Abbey) the period before World War I that can seem sunlit and optimistic, is a brilliant touch because it makes the memories themselves seem brilliant and utterly old at the same time. And so we have Lilian raging around, her short-sighted loyal brother, John, her timid, limited mother, and her nightmare of a father collecting his facts, having his breakdown, belting Lilian, screaming at her, deriding her.

‘Yes, we say, Australia is like this and Australian childhood is like this. Who would have dreamt it?’

It is a kind of dream story. Not only in ‘A Girl’, but also in the second section of the novel (‘A Young Lady’), we get, not quite so lyrically but still with a lot of lilt and colour, the sense of the possibilities that might unfold for Lilian. Will she marry her great ‘mate’ Duncan, the slow-talking farm boy, or will she be impelled to spend her days with the poor, wan, brilliant boy F.J. Stroud – as intellectually brilliant as she is, self-conscious about his poor background, with a wounded anger and pride. All of this section captures the dreamlike aspect of a young life, but we know there are shadows on the horizon. The intense enemies of Lilian’s girlhood, like the young stud, Rick, and his love, Ursula, are kind to her now, but we know somehow – or suspect – that Lilian, in her grand way, is not destined for the horse and carriage of conventional love and marriage of the 1930s variety.

The greatest of the shadows, looming and lowering, is her dreadful father. At one stage he throws away her collected Shakespeare. He drowns her book, a famous phrase from Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest, which is quoted more than once in this soaring, life-affirming story of love and pain and identity, this great tragicomic work. Another quote from The Tempest is ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’.

Lilian's Story (Canongate UK, 2007)

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In the last section of the book, ‘A Woman’, we see Lilian mad, on the skids, with all the hells and heavens, all the angels and devils, romping through her mind. It is a remarkable vision, sweet with wisdom as well as lunacy and loneliness and dereliction. Lilian wanders as a ‘character’ with people who might or might not be figures from her former life. Her soul, we feel, we in fact know, is intact through it all. And when her no-good father dies, she cries with great racking sobs from somewhere she perceives as deeper than her heart. Her brother John, who knows things she doesn’t know but not what she does, tells her that her father didn’t hate her: he just didn’t think she mattered.

The relationship between Lilian and her father is what we call psychosexual – deep and murky as life itself. The perspective from which this novel is written – Kate Grenville published it when she was thirty-five – is very compatible with the world view of Grenville’s 1960s, Vietnam generation: that your mum – and especially your dad if you were a girl – could, in Philip Larkin’s famous phrase, ‘fuck you up’ in a stupendous way, but the ‘fucking’ didn’t have to be literal: it could all take place in the dreamscape of the mind. Remember, too, that Lilian’s Story is also partly a period novel and that attitudes to everything from corporal punishment to nervous breakdown to marriage as a woman’s primary destiny have changed a lot, not only from one hundred years ago but from fifty, when baby boomers like Grenville were growing up.

Another contemporary notion that Lilian’s Story reflects is one that was fashionable in the 1960s and early 1970s and made famous through the work of anti-psychiatrists like R.D. Laing that madness can be a deeper truth. Wasn’t LSD (which was designed to reveal latent psychosis) used to open the doors of perception? In the later poems of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, there is a figure called Crazy Jane who says, ‘nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent’. The French thinker Michel Foucault wrote a book called Madness and Civilisation that highlights the tragicomic wisdom of works like King Lear. He also argued that mental illness as a medical condition was a comparatively recent invention. But all this is just grist to the mill and a matter of influences. The real power of Lilian’s Story derives from the grandeur of its vision, the way the novel transfigures all of its influences and presents us with an image of life – full of pain and desecration and the shadow of rape and madness – to which we can only assent. It is a luminous and encompassing vision to which we can only say yes.

Yeats’s Crazy Jane says with great and desolated beauty:

I lay stretched out in the dirt
And I cried tears down 

To face the reality of that and turn it into art as Kate Grenville does in Lilian’s Story is a triumph.

In his essay ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’ (1856), Frederick Sinnett conducts an inquiry ‘into the feasibility of writing Australian novels; or, to use other words, into the suitability of Australian life and scenery for the novel writers’ purpose and, secondly, into the right manner of their treatment’.The problem, as Sinnett identifies it – and he was not the first and certainly not the last to conjure with it – was that Australia had no lore, no tradition, no myths and legends, in short, no rich past for a writer to call upon. Apart from what he terms ‘the Aboriginal market’ and its ‘associations’, which he passes quickly over, there is ‘to be obtained in Australia not a single local reference [that is even] a century old’. With tongue firmly in cheek, Sinnett nails down the case.

No storied windows, richly dight, cast a dim, religious light over any Australian premises. There are no ruins for that rare old plant, the ivy green, to creep over and make his meal of. No Australian author can hope to extricate his hero or heroine, however pressing the emergency may be, by means of a spring panel and a subterranean passage, or such like relics of feudal barons …

Marcus Clarke was well aware of, if less catastrophic about, the lacunae in Australia’s past. In his second ‘Country Leisure’ essay (4 September 1875), which was centrally concerned with the possibility of a school of Australian poetry, Clarke gives his own version of the ‘No storied windows’ problem:

In historic Europe, where every rood of ground is hallowed in legend and in song, the least imaginative can find food for sad and sweet reflection. When strolling at noon down an English country lane, looking at sunset by some ruined chapel on the margin of an Irish lake, or watching the mists of morning unveil Ben Lomond, we feel all the charm which springs from association with the past. Soothed, saddened, and cheered by turns, we partake the varied moods which belong not so much to ourselves as to the dead men who in old days sung, suffered, or conquered in the scenes which we survey. But this our native or adopted land has no past, no story. No poet speaks to us. Do we need a poet to interpret Nature’s teachings, we must look into our own hearts, if perchance we may find a poet there.

It is in this same essay that he asks and famously answers, ‘What is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry. Weird Melancholy.’

Perhaps Sinnett was more taken with his own ingenuity than with the logic of his imagery because the poem by Milton, ‘Il Penseroso’, from which the ‘richly dight’ quotation is adapted, is actually a salute to Melancholy – ‘But hail thou goddess, sage and holy / Hail divinest Melancholy’ – and the landscape which Clarke encountered when he visited Port Arthur might have seemed to lack long history, but it had melancholy in abundance. From his approaching boat he saw the settlement ‘beneath a leaden and sullen sky’ and ‘beheld barring our passage to the prison the low grey hummocks of the Isle of the Dead’. The dreary prospect convinced him ‘that there was a grim propriety in the melancholy of nature ... Everybody ... begged that the loathly corpse of this dead wickedness called Transportation might be comfortably buried away and ignored of men and journalists.’

For The Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke

Buy this bookBut transportation, the ‘Convict System’, had ended ten years before Clarke’s arrival in the colony in 1863 and the ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ of his novel had been officially ‘Tasmania’ since 1854. What was left – sombre shattered stone; dark, stained and empty buildings; the last few living convicts; an atmosphere of ruined and painful gloom – might not have been ‘richly dight’, but it was richly and powerfully melancholic. It was the grim past, the underpinning of story. For the Term of His Natural Life was written not to inveigh against a wrong already righted – what would have been the point? – but as a work of the imagination on crime and punishment, the vagaries of fate, the power of love and guilt, the depths of inhumanity and, as Michael Wilding has pointed out, the antipodean reversal of English social order. What Sinnett had seen as a fictional terra nullius, what Clarke himself saw as a land with ‘no past, no story’, became for him, through recognition of the profound melancholia of convict life and destiny, a terra plena. From this intricate human, geographical and spiritual plenitude he made what Brian Elliott justly described as ‘the one work of fiction produced in the whole first century of Australia’s history to justify description as monumental’.

‘What Sinnett had seen as a fictional terra nullius, what Clarke himself saw as a land with ‘no past, no story’, became for him, through recognition of the profound melancholia of convict life and destiny, a terra plena’

Clarke was, however, a long time coming to this meeting with his imaginative destiny. Born in Kensington, London in 1846, Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke seemed assured of a congenial if rather dilettantish life until his father, William Hislop Clarke, suffered a mental, physical, and financial collapse. The ramifications for the family were severe and after the young Clarke, ‘spoilt, conceited and aimless’, had unsuccessfully tried his hand at several occupations, ‘he chose to go to Australia’, though it was probably less a matter of choice than of some stern persuasion by ‘relations who could see no solution for him in England’. He arrived in Melbourne on 6 June 1863 and for a while seemed likely to continue the feckless existence he had pursued in London. He proved inadequate and uninterested on the staff of a bank and, when he ‘went bush’, was involved in a doomed land venture in drought-stricken western New South Wales, an expedition misguidedly undertaken within two years of the Burke and Wills disaster which Victoria had so wholeheartedly supported. Back on more familiar ground in Melbourne, he joined the staff of the Argus newspaper and at last found his métier.

Clarke came to fiction through journalism. In the Dickensian manner, his first novel, Long Odds, was serialised in the Colonial Monthly, a journal of which Clarke was founder and editor. But Long Odds, with its one Australian character and English setting, was not the kind of fiction Clarke was most interested in, as his unconvincingly argued preface to that novel suggests:

In now presenting [Long Odds] to the public in a complete form, I will take the opportunity of saying a few prefatory words.

In reviewing ‘Long Odds’ from time to time … the press has frequently blamed the author for laying the scene in England instead of in Australia. It seems, at first sight, natural to expect that a story written by a person living in Australia, published in an Australian periodical, and offered to an Australian public, should contain description of nothing that was not purely Australian.

The best Australian novel that has been, and probably will be written, is [Henry Kingsley’s ‘The Recollections of] Geoffrey Hamlyn’, and any attempt to paint the ordinary squatting life of the colonies could not fail to challenge unfavourable comparison with that admirable story. But I have often thought, and I daresay other Australian readers have thought also – How would Sam Buckley [the hero of Geoffrey Hamlyn] get on in England?

My excuse, therefore, in offering to the Australian public a novel in which the plot, the sympathies, the interest, the moral, are all English, must be that I have endeavoured to depict, with such skill as is permitted me, the fortunes of a young Australian in that country which young Australians still call ‘Home’.

For The Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke

Buy this bookThere is a certain routine quality to this salute to Geoffrey Hamlyn, as if Clarke is dutifully genuflecting to popular and overwhelming opinion. The writer who detected ‘the dominant note of Australian scenery’ as ‘weird melancholy’ must have been as exasperated as were Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy years later with Kingsley’s countryside of ‘glens’, ‘woods’, ‘downs’, ‘boskey uplands’, ‘not untuneful birds’, and other northern hemisphere literary landscape paraphernalia, even if he was unwilling to say so explicitly. Like Lawson and Furphy, Clarke needed a new vocabulary, different imagery, a muscular, strenuous mode to capture both the psychological and physical realities by which his antipodean protagonist Rufus Dawes would be continually tested. For all his admiration of Dickensian realism, Clarke was committed by the very nature of his subject – its oppressive, threatening locales and its enactment of horrific trials and suffering in a dark if relatively recent past – to a version of gothic romance, a story of love and human endurance beset and doomed by circumstance, malign fate, and evil.

His Natural Life, a vast and sprawling work, was serialised in the Australian Journal from 1870 to 1872. For the Term of His Natural Life – a revised, tighter and shorter version of Rufus Dawes’s story which, in this iteration, becomes a tragic one – was published in book form in 1874. A dense prologue sets the labyrinthine plot moving: the innocent Richard Devine, ‘enmeshed’ in ‘a web of circumstantial evidence’, becomes Rufus Dawes, and his ‘new life’ begins.

It is a life of nearly insupportable pain and hardship dogged by ominous coincidence, identity theft and confusion, ‘shape changing’ – as Sylvia, for example, metamorphoses from precocious child to young woman adrift in a fugue of memory loss – moral cowardice and savage, serial demonstrations of the emptiness of religious consolation. But above all there is pain, mental and physical:

Rufus Dawes took five-and-twenty lashes without a murmur, and then Gabbett ‘crossed the cuts’ … At the hundredth lash, the giant paused …

For twenty lashes more Dawes was mute, and then the agony forced from his labouring breast a hideous cry … He cursed all soldiers for tyrants, all parsons for hypocrites. He blasphemed his God and his Saviour. With a frightful outpouring of obscenity and blasphemy, he called on the earth to gape and swallow his persecutors, for heaven to open and rain fire upon them, for hell to yawn and engulf them … He seemed to have abandoned his humanity.

In the strange connection between his main characters – the grim, often silenced Rufus Dawes and the extroverted, manipulative John Rex – Clarke picks up the doppelgänger thread in nineteenth-century fiction, evocatively reminiscent of Pip and Orlick in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) and Dostoevsky’s Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin in The Double (1846), and anticipates aspects of both Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). But Clarke ramifies the relationship between the hero and John Rex, his ‘double’, with the figure of Maurice Frere, whose surname is, of course, the French word for ‘brother’ but which, as Michael Wilding has noted, was pronounced ‘freer’, the variant pronunciation suggesting another kind of double – Frere as ‘the free alternative to the captive Dawes’. Far from being imprisoned by the complexities of his plot and its turmoil of identities, Clarke brilliantly exploits and remains in assured control of the tangle of relationships, chance encounters, moments of good and bad luck, and the eerie fictional possibilities of the doppelgänger.

Like a classical tragedy, For the Term of His Natural Life begins in an atmosphere of deceptive calm – ‘In the breathless stillness of a tropical afternoon, when the air was hot and heavy, and the sky brazen and cloudless, the shadow of the Malabar lay solitary on the surface of the glittering sea’ – and concludes with tranquillity restored after the destructive storm of circumstance, but only at the expense of extreme human suffering and hideous ordeals that have radically altered individuals and changed or ended lives:

At day-dawn on the morning after the storm, the rays of the rising sun fell upon an object which floated on the surface of the water not far from where the schooner had foundered.

This object was a portion of the mainmast head of the Lady Franklin, and entangled in the rigging were two corpses – a man and a woman. The arms of the man were clasped round the body of the woman, and her head lay on his breast.

… The tempest was over. As the sun rose higher, the air grew balmy, the ocean placid; and golden in the rays of the new risen morning, the wreck and its burden drifted out to sea.

References:

The text used throughout is Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, Penguin Books, 2009.

Cecil Hadgraft (edited with introduction), Frederick Sinnett, The Fiction Fields of Australia, Angus and Robertson 1966.

Michael Wilding, ‘Marcus Clarke: His Natural Life’, in W. S. Ramson (ed.), The Australian Experience: Critical Essays on Australian Novels, ANU Press 1974.

Michael Wilding (edited with introduction.), Marcus Clarke, Portable Australian Authors, 1977

Brian Elliot, ‘Marcus Clarke’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 3, (MUP), 1969

L. L. Robson, ‘The Historical Basis of For the Term of His Natural Life’, Australian Literary Studies, Volume 1, 1963.

In his ‘Marcus Clarke, Gothic, Romance’ in Stephanie Trigg (ed.), Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, MUP 2006, David Matthews discusses inter alia Frederick Sinnett’s The Fiction Fields of Australia and proposes the terra nullius/terra plena idea which I have referred to here.

My postgraduate student frowned. ‘The Gathering? Isn’t that the one where someone sets a dog on fire?’ Spoiler alert: indeed it is. It is the book’s most memorable scene; it is certainly the most horrific. My postgrad had read Isobelle Carmody’s 1993 novel in high school and that was the first memory of it which surfaced. The scene shocked readers and alienated many: ‘I re-read the novel recently but I skipped that chapter’ wrote one online reviewer.

The Gathering wasn’t the first of Carmody’s fantasy novels. Something of a writing prodigy, she began The Obernewtyn Chronicles, perhaps the best known of her fantasy series, while still in high school, and continued to work on the first volume, Obernewtyn, while completing a BA in literature and working as a cadet journalist. It was published in 1987, when she was still in her twenties. The seventh and final volume in the series, The Red Queen, will be published at the end of this year.

As most titles in the genre do, the novels explore the forces of darkness and light and the battle between good and evil, with the hero’s soul at stake. The Gathering is no different, but was the first of Carmody’s novels to use a real-life setting, and one that teenage readers can readily relate to: a suburban high school, albeit one where bullying is rife and seemingly condoned, even encouraged, by the sadistic vice principal Mr Karle. The school is called Three North and to new student Nathanial Delaney it looks like a concentration camp, a ‘square, slab-grey complex set on an asphalt island’. Here the battles take place on playing fields or in the gym, or between deserted classroom blocks at night, while packs of feral dogs growl in the darkness. The story has fantastical elements but at heart it is a study of fascism, in which a whole community or ‘district’ is controlled by a power-mad dictator with the help of gangs of thugs and militant youth groups.

The narrator, Nathanial, senses ‘something wrong and unnatural, something dead’ when he first glimpses Three North and this only increases his feelings of resentment towards his mother who has relocated them to an unattractive district called Cheshunt where ‘the skyline bristled with pipes belching smoke into the sky’ and an abattoir overlooks the school. But despite its bleakness, Cheshunt has a reputation as a ‘good safe neighborhood’, unlike the surrounding districts where teenage crime is prevalent, and Nathanial’s mother seems to value that security above all. A single mother who works a lot of night shifts in a nursing home and is rarely home to supervise her son, she particularly approves of the town curfew: nobody allowed out on the streets after ten at night without a specific reason, or after nine for those under eighteen.

The Gathering (Puffin first edition, 1993)

Buy this bookNathanial’s father has just died but his parents have been long divorced and Nathanial has few memories of him, apart from troublesome nightmares about being chased by a monster with his father’s face. He doesn’t understand why his mother has moved them to Cheshunt, but it is the last in a long series of relocations, one result of which is that Nathanial doesn’t make friends easily, or at all. It is no different at Three North where he seems to be the only one bothered by the stink from the abattoir and where, when he declines Mr Karle’s ‘invitation’ to join the school youth group known as The Gathering, he is victimised and bullied.

He does, however, find himself mysteriously drawn to a small group of four other misfits in the school who seem governed by a prophetic wraith called Lallie. They tell Nathanial that they have been drawn together by the ‘forces of light’ to fight an inherent and deep-seated evil in Cheshunt. Nathanial is the fifth and final link in the ‘Chain’, and now the fight against the dark, and the healing, can begin.

Initially sceptical, Nathanial begins to find evidence of this darkness in the town’s troubled past when he embarks on an oral history project and interviews former students about the early days of the school. He also learns that each member of the Chain – Nissa Jerome, Indian Mahoney, Danny Odin and Seth Paul – has inner demons as insistent as his own. This is reflected in the various objects or symbols each of them feels compelled to acquire: Danny has been the victim of police brutality, and he carries a replica of the Olympic torch (the torch of justice); Indian, a pacifist tormented with guilt over his younger sister’s death, has a stone bowl stolen from the maritime museum (the bowl of healing); smart, self-reliant but inwardly damaged Nissa’s symbol is a rusty sword taken from a cemetery angel (the sword of strength); Seth, an emotionally weak alcoholic, son of the police chief, contributes an antique telescope (the eye that sees). Nathanial has felt compelled to steal a flat metal disc from a sculpture on the desk of Mr Karle, and this is the circle of time.  

What do all these symbols mean, and what possible antidote can they be to the institutionalised evil that operates in the heart of Cheshunt? This is where the novel enters fantasy territory, but before it does it introduces the chief villain who, chillingly, is the vice principal of Three North. (If there is a principal, he or she is never mentioned.)

Mr Karle, nicknamed the Kraken, is short and bald, his head ‘brown and shiny like polished wood’ but there is an ‘aura of physical strength about him’. Disconcertingly, he has a habitual smile, even when his eyes – ‘the indefinite shade of the sea before a storm’ – are cold and induce in Nathanial a ‘strange falling sensation’. Nathanial doesn’t trust that smile: ‘I thought a maniac who killed people for fun might smile like that.’ This is, of course, prophetic. At the climax of the story, Mr Karle, like some ‘hellish director’, is smiling with a ‘bright, corrupt glee in his eyes’ as he orders the destruction of the members of the Chain during the epic battle between Darkness and Light.

The Gathering (Puffin, 1996 edition)

Buy this bookComparisons with Hitler spring readily to mind. The packs of feral dogs that roam the borders of Three North – which, we remember, has all the concrete unloveliness of a concentration camp – are killers and are there to instil fear in the townspeople and to actively discourage explorers and curfew breakers. The students are kept in check by a brutish patrol under Mr Karle’s orders called ‘fixers’, and his disciples, the youth group known as The Gathering, have all the fervour of Hitler Youth; within their ranks are murderers and sadists, their actions condoned and approved of by their leader. The town’s police force are also disciples (‘Young people need to be kept in order’) and are intent on maintaining a ‘good neighborhood’, even if it means loss of personal and civic freedoms. Early in the story Nathanial, enraged that his mother has called the police because he wasn’t at home one night when she returns from work, tells her ‘they acted like Nazis’ in their interrogation of him. His mother is shocked at the comparison but later in the story, when the two have mended some of their differences and are on the path to reconciliation, her views have modified. Nathanial asks her if she thinks a policeman could be evil, and she replies:

‘I think it’s easier to be evil when you have power, when you’re strong.’ ... She was smiling but I saw deep unease in her eyes. ‘But I don’t suppose they set out to be evil. It’s just that the power they have to control ends up making them want to control everything. I think wanting to control things is where evil begins.’

The corruption of power and its consequences is the central theme of the novel, and Nathanial’s utterly convincing voice helps readers to identify with him and the other teenage characters who find themselves victims of abuse, whether it be domestic violence, bullying, police brutality or injustice. In the end there is only one way to defeat evil, as Lallie explains: ‘You have to believe in justice to make it happen. You have to believe in the light, or you live in darkness. Believing is the magic.’

With a skilful but evil intent, Carmody has made the most admirable character the one who will suffer most: Nathanial’s long-haired Chihuahua named The Tod, given to him as a puppy by his grandmother over the objections of his mother because she thought the boy ‘needed something’ of his own. From the opening pages he is set up as Nathanial’s most frequent and best-loved companion. Whenever things get tense at home, as they do more frequently as his mother struggles to understand her son’s seemingly rebellious behaviour, boy and dog take off together, exploring on foot or by bicycle, The Tod in the front basket; at night, home alone, the two curl up together, watching television. At one point, The Tod saves Seth from walking into the path of a pack of feral dogs. Nathanial keeps him inside the house when he is in school, fearful that his chief tormentor, Buddha, and his gang of bullies might use the little dog to wreak revenge on him for refusing to join The Gathering – as, inevitably, they do. Carmody pulls no punches in describing this gruesome scene, which occupies almost four pages. As far as I know, it is unique in Australian children’s literature. Would any writer for young people include a comparable scene today? If they did, the deed would be committed off-stage, not described in detail and witnessed first-hand by the distraught teenage narrator:

I screamed in utter horror, helpless. The match landed in his tail and flames swept forward up over him. Devoured him.
He arched and coiled, yelping in pain and fright, and then he screamed, a long inhuman howl of agony and terror. For one terrible second, his eyes looked at me from out of the flames, bulging and pleading.

The Gathering (Puffin latest edition)

Buy this bookEven just typing the words, my insides are knotted in anguish. John Marsden, who knows a thing or two about writing bleak fiction for young readers, killed a family pet called Checkers in the final pages of his 1996 novel of the same name, but the bloody deed is described in three lines and it is unwitnessed by Checker’s young owner. It is sad, but in no way evokes the degree of pain of Carmody’s scene.

Is it necessary? The killing is Mr Karle’s retribution for Nathanial’s refusal to join The Gathering, and in its horror and inhumanity it brings to mind the way that Hitler’s Nazi bullies treated Jews in pre-war Germany. It is meant to shock. It also echoes another significant episode in the town’s history, when the school caretaker was set alight, allegedly by a student, thus setting off a chain of events which have resonated down the years.

Judith Ridge, an early reviewer of the novel, called it ‘complex and stunning’ and thought that it ‘throws up fascinating details on each new reading’ (Viewpoint, Vol.1 No.3, 1993). Young readers today will recognise references to Tolkien and David Gemmell, and names such as Astaroth, Odin, Elderew, Tron and the Kraken will resonate with dedicated fantasy readers. Nathanial and his grandfather are both named after the author Nathaniel Hawthorn; a pity they (and Carmody) couldn’t get the spelling right.

The Gathering won the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year, Older Readers, in 1994 and was joint winner of the Children’s Peace Literature Award. Since its first publication it has sold almost 135,000 copies in Australia and been reprinted thirty-five times. It has also been a best-seller in the USA, Britain, Germany and Holland. The novel wears its age well, and has not lost its power to shock: susceptible readers should heed the words of reviewer Pam Macintyre, who wrote in The Age that The Gathering was a ‘great page-turner that is probably best read in daylight and in good company’.

People who go in for the arts are often advised Don’t give up your day job. But what’s a suitable day job for a poet? A century ago many Australian poets made a meagre living as freelance writers for newspapers and magazines. Some even took up journalism full-time, writing their verses on the side. The old Bulletin, one of the wellsprings of Australian literature, was populated by them. But, as most newspapers ceased publishing poems, by the 1930s the careers of poet and journalist began increasingly to seem like strange bedfellows. The combination was no more strange or contradictory than in the case of Kenneth Slessor (1901–1971).

Late in 2013, the Griffin Theatre in Sydney revived John Romeril’s The Floating World as its annual production of an Australian classic. The play is now forty years old, and unfamiliar to contemporary audiences who would have been lucky to see its first performances in the tiny Pram Factory in 1974 or any of the handful of intervening performances of the play. By all accounts, that first production was an extraordinary experience with the audience seated on deckchairs inside a chicken wire compound shaped like a ship. That audience would have been familiar with the Australian Performing Group’s experiments and, no doubt, expected to see a play that unsettled them a little, while making a political point.

In Griffin’s even tinier Stables Theatre there was no room for chicken wire and deckchairs, nor much in the way of stage props for this play set on the 1974 Women’s Weekly Cherry Blossom Cruise to Japan. The audience sat close to the stage, almost touching the performers. We were not quite able to imagine ourselves as fellow-passengers on the cruise ship, but we were close enough to share the emotional charge of the performers as the play progressed. Romeril’s work was unfamiliar to most of the audience and the shock of Les Harding’s shift from xenophobic buffoon to a suffering war victim was palpable. Many people wondered out loud how such a powerful play could have lain unperformed for so long. The production won the Sydney Theatre Awards for best direction (Sam Strong) and actor (Peter Kowitz) of 2013, though only a few thousand people could have squeezed into the Stables or the Riverside Theatre at Parramatta to see it.

Romeril was one of the most politically committed members of the Australian Performing Group, and his plays always make some kind of political point, both through subject matter and performance style. He is still committed to a ‘democratic’ theatre ideal where the production team are collaborators with the writer. Denise Varney notes that the director of the original production, Lindzee Smith, and the designer, Peter Corrigan, had worked with radical theatre groups in New York and San Francisco. Their production adopted some of Brecht’s alienation techniques to undermine audience identification with the characters in the play, by putting young actors into middle-aged parts and a woman in the waiter parts, and by shifting from realist moments to scenes of artificial theatrical excess, including songs and poetry. The theory is that this ‘anti-naturalism’ prevents the audience sympathising or identifying too much with any individual character, ensuring that they never lose sight of the fact that they are watching a performance.

Valerie Bader and Peter Kowitz as Irene and Les Harding in Griffin Theatre Company's production of The Floating World, 2013 (photograph by Brett Boardman)

In the Stables production, the audience was so close to the actors that no amount of role-sharing or caricature or vaudeville japes could distance us from the awareness that human individuals were in front of us. On the page, Irene and Les Harding may seem like cut-out stereotypes of suburban Australian vulgarity but in the Stables theatre they appeared to be people, played convincingly by Valerie Bader and Peter Kowitz. Unlike the actors in the original production – Bruce Spence, who played Les, was only twenty-nine at the time – these two were about the age of the characters, striking down one of the barriers to naturalist ‘identification’. In 1974 Irene’s malapropisms may have made her a derisive figure of fun, but they have now become associated with the broad comedy of ‘Kath and Kim’, much-loved on Australian television. Les’s obscene jokes wander close to those of Les Patterson, who was invented by Barry Humphries in the year of the play’s first production. There can be no claims of mutual influence – these writers and comics were exaggerating a phenomenon that Australian audiences continue to recognise and enjoy. All of them were also working in the popular traditions of the Australian vaudeville stage; the jokes are as old as the hills (as Romeril makes clear in the play). Nevertheless, it seemed as if the 2013 audiences’ familiarity with Kath & Kim, and Les Patterson, predisposed them to like Les and Irene and to enjoy their humour.

‘By all accounts, that first production was an extraordinary experience with the audience seated on deckchairs inside a chicken wire compound shaped like a ship’

Reading the script, though, you are likely to find the exchanges between Les and Irene sexist and a little brutal. Some of the critical responses to the play see a failed marriage, counting Irene’s obtuseness as reprehensible as Les’s drunken sexism. In performance, it can be seen as the affectionate bickering of a long marriage between an ignorant but kind woman, and a more experienced and vigorous man who knows that he has missed out on the privileges given to others, such as the Englishman Robinson. We (with Irene) also discover that he has endured unspeakable suffering as a slave on the Thai–Burma railroad. As Les moves further into his war memories, his exchanges with Irene become more aggressive, moving from teasing comments to references to Irene’s ‘horrible-looking face’ or Irene’s retaliation that Les is ‘slumped over your grog like some metho drinker at the Methodist Mission’.

If Les’s jokes and jingles are mainly obscene, they do, at least, express something of his energy and suppressed anger at the postwar status quo, in which men who suffered during the war watch powerless as Australian business opportunism makes their bloody struggle with the Japanese something best forgotten. Like Sir Les Patterson, Les has a vitality that expresses a raucous refusal of authority and a resistance to respectability that he invites the audience to share. There may be a little snobbishness in our laughter at Irene’s misunderstandings, but we probably enjoy Les’s affronts to politeness.

Shingo Usami, Peter Kowitz and Justin Stewart Cotta in Griffin Theatre Company's production of The Floating Word (photograph by Brett Boardman)

Our discomfort comes with his apparent racism. Yet Les hardly says a racist word – it is Irene who mouths all the standard prejudices against Pakistani doctors or ‘Muslins’. Though he grumbles about travelling to Japan, he defends himself to the imaginary McLeod who accuses him of scabbing on his dead mates: ‘It’s dead and buried, all that. I mean it’s a different world we live in today.’ He makes no direct comment on the Japanese until after one of his delusional moments, when the waiter plays one of the Japanese guards of his imagination. When he calls the waiter ‘a yellow-bellied dwarf’ and a ‘dirty mongrel dingo bastard’, even Robinson understands that he is suffering some kind of breakdown.

The audience picks up early that they are experiencing the cruise through the distorted imagination of Les. We share his ‘dream’ of McLeod and hear his memories of the war, though the moment when he counts off the numbers in Japanese during the emergency drill brings a shocked realisation that he has lost the division between reality and memory. From then on, we are experiencing both Les’s interior world and the external world of the cruise ship. In the Talent Night scene both worlds come together in confusion as McLeod appears as the back half of the camel. From then on, Les’s nightmare overwhelms reality as the play moves towards his almost unbearable final monologue.

With his shifts of mood from boisterous anti-authoritarianism to drunken loutishness to quivering psychosis, Les must be one of the most difficult parts for an actor to play. But the role of the Comic is almost as difficult, as he must hold together our sense of being on a ship and participate in Les’s fantasies as the play progresses. The Comic’s jokes are wince-inducing, sinking to a bathetic level of crudity. None of them are funny, as he bullies the passengers (and the audience) with increasing belligerence. Somehow the actor must deliver his cheesy lines too fast for an audience to fully comprehend how dismal they are. He must have something of the razzmatazz of the old time vaudevillean while bringing cruelty to bear, as he is transformed into one of Les’s tormentors. He is crucial to the pace and mood of the play.

‘Like Sir Les Patterson, Les has a vitality that expresses a raucous refusal of authority and a resistance to respectability that he invites the audience to share’

From Les’s first vomit over the side of the ship all of the humour in the play seems to reference bodily functions. Early in the play Les matches Robinson’s ‘Arab piece in Cairo’ with ‘I slipped a geisha what was left of my length and she said shagging me was like making love to a bird cage’, setting the play’s uncomfortable balance between obscene wit and horror. The limericks and rhymes about penises and livers, the stage business with the pissing camel – all insist on the fallibility of the human body. On the page, it may seem relentless and unfunny but in the hands of talented actors the audience is likely to find itself laughing against its better judgement. We are being set up, though, for the barrage of images of physical collapse that make up Les’s memories of his time in the camps. Any comic aspects of bodily incontinence are overturned in a litany of disease, savagery and disgust. The audience must listen in horror as Les details the deaths and destruction of the young men who were his companions:

Beriberi. Slows you down. Swells you up. My toes stuck out like purple teats on a goat’s udder. Slosh slosh. When they saw me coming, the Nip guards’d draw a cross on the ground. You’ll be dead tomorrow. Ashita mati mati. Up your arses, you lumps of lard. The beriberi fluids sloshing round my chest cavity. Legs like purple balloons. Chest like a milk-can rattling on the back of a truck. They’d mime a man drowning. Up your arses, you lumps of lard.

Romeril delivers us a lesson in Australian history in a vernacular poetry that is rhythmic and relentless.

The Currency edition of the script presents the play in the context of Australian xenophobia, with essays on Australian nationalism, attitudes to the ‘Yellow Peril’ and the history of the Thai–Burma railway, and Katharine Brisbane’s introduction to the play as ‘a study of xenophobia’. In the 1970s, some commentators saw the play itself as xenophobic in its airing of common Australian prejudices about the generalised ‘Asian’ and its reminder of the horrors inflicted by Japanese jailers on their prisoners of war. Romeril felt the need to write an afterword protesting his liking for the Japanese, and he has reiterated this defence in his blogs for the Griffin production, noting the influence of Japanese Noh theatre on the ghost scene, and citing the play’s brief reference to the way Japanese guards were also victims of a brutal hierarchy.

Forty years on and a few financial crises later, the Japanese are no longer the focus of our economic fears and they are clearly our allies in most world affairs. Romeril visits Japan regularly, and in 1995 there was a Japanese production of the play in Japanese which toured to Melbourne. The Griffin production included the Japanese actor, Shingo Usami, playing the waiter and the Japanese guard, another step towards ‘naturalising’ the production. This had an unexpected and disturbing effect because, in the scene where the waiter becomes the Japanese tormenter, it was difficult not to wonder what Usami thought of the play.

Les and dippy bird (photograph by Brett Boardman)

Discussions of the 2013 production focused on its representation of post-traumatic stress disorder, marvelling at the accuracy of its portrayal of Les’s symptoms. That perspective, too, can reduce it to an easily accepted ‘message’. It is so much more than a study of Australian xenophobia or an individual’s psychiatric condition. It is an exhilarating theatrical experience, in which audiences’ sympathies and expectations are undermined as they are forced to endure, with Les Harding, his memories of dreadful suffering. We have to question our prejudices as Les Harding shows us that a man can be an objectionable and ridiculous old fart and still deserve our sympathy as the victim of inhuman torture.

The play puts complex questions about the past in front of us – how should we remember the wrongs of history, how much of it should we forget in the interests of the future? It also reminds us that war does not only exist in its moment, but leaves a lengthy trail of destruction behind it. There is no comfort in the play’s ending, no scenes of Irene lovingly ministering to her sick husband, or of other characters acknowledging his distress. Harry’s commentary tells us that Les will be consigned to Larundel, the mental asylum in Melbourne.

We are likely to leave the theatre emotionally shaken, disturbed by the shifts in our sympathies and, if we still have personal memories of World War II veterans, a little chastened. The play doesn’t resolve its various parts for us: the war and the camps happened, Australians can be vulgar morons towards foreigners, especially Asians, and a mentally ill man can be packed away out of sight.

The director of the Griffin production, Sam Strong, commented in an interview that the play was ‘way too big’ for the Stables theatre. It certainly deserves a bigger space and greater audiences, and many more productions with energetic actors, young and old, of whatever race and gender. I’d like to see it in one of the Carriageworks theatres in Sydney, where the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch worked so well a few years ago. But it should also find a place in the repertoire of the state theatre companies who produce Beckett so regularly. Romeril is our Beckett – just as poetic and tough-minded. I wonder whether he would let a production scrap the dippy birds, cut Harry’s introduction and commentary in the last scene, and maybe let Les wear a fancy dress costume that merely suggested the Second AIF – these elements of the play seem unnecessarily directive for contemporary audiences. But no one would want to lose the essential quality of this ‘unruly masterpiece’, its energy, its mix of elements, its humour and humanity, and the sheer excess of its ideas.

References:

Hutchinson, Garrie. ‘The Floating World: Unruly Masterpiece’ (1975), in Contemporary Australian Drama: Perspectives since 1955 edited by Peter Holloway, Currency Press, 1981.
Romeril, John. The Floating World. Revised edition, Currency Press, 1982.
Romeril, John. ‘Wrong Way Go Back’, Griffin Theatre Company blog.
Varney, Denise. ‘Political Lessons of the New Wave: Romeril’s The Floating World.’ Double Dialogues, 11, 2009.
‘Inside The Floating World’, ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in The Floating World’ and ‘The Floating World with Sam Strong’. Three video interviews about the Griffin Theatre Company's production of The Floating World.

The slap that I wanted to deliver with that book was to a culture in Australia that had literally made me sick, sick to the stomach. A middle class culture that struck me as incredibly selfish and ungenerous … I wanted to try and write a book ... that represented that culture. And to do that, honestly, I had to put myself in the middle of it. I also had to put my Greekness in the middle of that book. Because I didn’t feel separate from the things that were disgusting me.

Christos Tsiolkas, Journal of Intercultural Studies 2013

 Born in Australia in 1965 to parents who had emigrated from Greece, Christos Tsiolkas grew up in suburban, working-class Melbourne. His name first became familiar to Australian readers during the ‘grunge lit’ period of the 1990s. His first novel Loaded (1995) was often cited as one of grunge lit’s key texts, along with Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia (1995) and Andrew McGahan’s Praise (1992): novels written in blunt language about the lives of disaffected people, more or less young and more or less angry, whose lives revolve around sex and drugs and who seem to have no legitimate – or legitimised – place in a society they mostly despise and reject.

Loaded, published when Tsiolkas was only thirty, was generally regarded as semi-autobiographical and deals with a young gay Greek man in flight from the values and constraints of his society and his family. Since then Tsiolkas has cemented his reputation as a novelist of uncompromising political and moral seriousness, a ruthless examiner of the effects of middle-class values and capitalist society on individual lives. The Slap (2008) is his fourth novel; since then he has published a fifth, Barracuda (2013), and a collection of short stories, Merciless Gods (2015). He is also an essayist and screenwriter, and has worked collaboratively with directors, photographers, and other writers.

Most of Tsiolkas’s books to date have been longlisted or shortlisted for multiple prizes and Loaded was adapted as a feature film, Head On, in 1998. But The Slap was a breakout success, establishing his international reputation: in Australia it was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and won the Australian Literary Society’s Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Australian Booksellers Association Book of the Year award; internationally it was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Man Booker Prize, and winner in the Overall Best Book category of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In an appreciative and prescient review of the novel when it was first published near the end of 2008, writer and critic Gerard Windsor foresaw the television adaptation: ‘The Slap cries out to be made into an eight-part mini-series.’ And it was, very successfully, in 2011.

‘The Slap was a breakout success, establishing his international reputation’

Written as an exploratory snapshot of suburban Australian society during the Howard years, The Slap features eight main characters who are interconnected in the strange molecule-like way of so many urban and suburban tribes, a combination of social, familial, and workplace groups. While the mode of this novel is uncomplicated and unrelenting realism, and while all the characters more or less fit under the large umbrella of the category ‘middle class’, the cast of major and minor characters seems deliberately and schematically multicultural and multi-ethnic: Anglo-Celtic Australians or ‘skips’ (short for Skippy, as in Skippy the Bush Kangaroo) are in a small minority, while the ethnic and religious identities of other characters include Greek, Indian, Serb, Aboriginal, Jewish, and Muslim. One implication of this is that Australian society has now progressed beyond self-conscious multiculturalism, and that multi-ethnicity, with all its complications, is now the norm and a true cosmopolitanism the ideal.

Hector, the character more or less at the centre of the group, is a Greek-Australian man whose birthday party provides the occasion from which the plot unfurls. His wife Aisha is a beautiful, tough-minded vet, one of a trio of female friends who go much further back in her life than her marriage: she has been friends with Rosie and Anouk since they were teenagers back home in Perth. Hector’s cousin Harry is a brash, sometimes brutish, businessman who owns and runs a chain of auto repair shops, and Hector’s father Manolis is an elderly Greek man who emigrated to Australia when young and who finds contemporary Australian society bewildering in its superficiality and selfishness. Connie is an orphaned schoolgirl who works on weekends at Aisha’s surgery and fancies herself in love with Hector, whose reciprocal sexual interest in her is established on the first page; and Richie, son of Aisha’s vet nurse, is a shy gay teenager and Connie’s best friend.

The Slap (Allen & Unwin hardback edition, 2008)

Buy this book

All of these people, plus assorted spouses, partners and children, are present at Hector’s birthday backyard barbecue. Hugo, the spoiled three-year-old son of Rosie and her husband Gary, has been annoying the other children all afternoon and eventually throws a massive tantrum when declared out in a game of backyard cricket. He is about to hit Harry’s son Rocco with his bat when Harry sees him and descends on him, lifting him into the air. Hugo kicks out viciously, and Harry, who is given to easy rage and not very interested in controlling it, gives Hugo a resounding slap.

And from this moment, each of these eight main characters proceeds to some sort of internal crisis, as the fallout from the slap continues to destabilise their lives. Rosie, whose excessive outrage hints from the outset at some history of instability or guilt, dubs Harry ‘the monster’, refers to the slap as ‘bashing’, calls the police, refuses to accept the belated apology that Harry is eventually persuaded to offer, and in general appears increasingly unhinged. Aisha, repelled by Harry’s violence to a small child and stubbornly loyal to Rosie, is nonetheless torn by her loyalty to Hector and his family, a response that is complicated by her own sexual adventures elsewhere. Anouk, accidentally pregnant at forty-three to a boyfriend little more than half her age, is already ambivalent about the pregnancy and is further put off the whole idea of having children by the protracted trouble over the slap and its aftermath. Everyone is affected: loyalties are divided, friendships stretched to breaking point, and values called into question.

The Slap was inspired by a real-life incident that Tsiolkas calls ‘a gift’:

I attended a barbecue at my parents’ house … A friend’s young son was playing at my mother’s feet as she was rushing around her small kitchen. She kept telling him to stop [but] at one point he opened up a cupboard and upset pots and saucepans all over the kitchen floor. My mother, exasperated, turned around, lifted the boy and gave him the most gentle of smacks on his bum … he placed his hands on his hips, looked up at my mother and said, ‘Don’t! No one has the right to touch my body without my permission.’

Tsiolkas is at pains to point out that his mother’s admonitory tap on the bottom had nothing in it of the violence and rage that animates Harry in the novel when he strikes the shocked Hugo, and that the real child’s mother, like everyone else present, had found the incident funny. But he identifies that moment as the beginning of the writing process:

all I could think of was the look of incomprehension on my mother’s face and the boy’s face when they were staring at each other. The adult … was raised in a Balkan village where women were denied education … The young boy was being raised in a world where gender, sexuality, childhood and adulthood were in a constant state of change. How to make sense of both of these experiences of Australia … of what was now middle-class life, of what was suburbia? I had the beginning of my novel … I had been handed a gift.

The novel is divided into eight sections, one for each of the main characters, and the switches from one character’s point of view to the next keep the plot motoring along. This structural insistence on individual consciousness and point of view, keeping one character at a time before the reader’s eyes, may seem an unexpected technique for a writer so concerned with the tides and currents of society; but his exploration of individual behaviours and beliefs is a way of showing how certain social values come to prevail, and how individual failures – of generosity, of loyalty, of patience, or simply of nerve – can rip holes in the social fabric.

The Slap (Allen & Unwin, 2010)

Buy this bookA common assumption about this novel is that the colloquial, easy-to-read, and often rough and clichéd prose style is simply a weakness in Tsiolkas’s writing. But there is something more complex going on: Tsiolkas makes extensive use of the narrative technique called free indirect discourse, a style that mimics the voice of a character without actually using first-person narration or the mode of direct speech. In her review of Tsiolkas’s 2015 short story collection Merciless Gods, Susan Lever offers an incisive critique of this mode of narration and its limitations:

[Tsiolkas] holds to a discipline of sympathy with his characters, no matter how repellent they may be, and restricts his own verbal range to the limits of their vocabularies. It is a serious inhibition for a writer to accept, as it reduces so much of his fiction to the platitudes and obscenities of shallow characters.

The platitudes and obscenities are nonetheless there for serious aesthetic and ideological reasons: the comparisons that come to mind here are with the Scottish writers James Kelman and Irvine Welsh and Ireland’s Roddy Doyle.

But Lever’s comments also point to an internal contradiction in this kind of writing: the technique of writing from within the characters’ own verbal limitations invariably limits what can be made explicit in prose – especially in prose whose primary purpose is to communicate complex ideas. And this is not the only internal contradiction in the book: Tsiolkas sets conflicting ideas and values against each other all through the story. This technique is at its most obvious in the pivotal moment when Harry slaps Hugo: the reactions of the novel’s characters, as indeed of its readers, are evenly distributed along a spectrum whose extremes are ‘The man is a monster’ and ‘The brat had it coming.’ The urgency and energy of The Slap comes largely from such sites of conflict and rupture, and the critic James Ley has pointed out one of them in a long review of the novel:

Much of the energy of [Tsiolkas’s] writing is generated by the friction between a frustrated idealism of the left, which sets itself against inequality and exploitation and prejudice, and a tough-minded realism that wants to insist upon the regressive impulses that perpetuate these social evils.

Other such tensions include the opposition set up in the novel between the critique of individualism and the emphasis on identity politics – of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class. But the most problematic of these, and perhaps the least deliberate, is the dilemma posed by this novel for female readers and feminist critics. Many female readers find the female characters unconvincing, especially when it comes to their sexual behaviour and responses. But this is an admittedly subjective view and there is no way of proving or disproving it. And Aisha, Rosie, Connie and Anouk, different as they are, all escape many of the fates that have traditionally befallen female characters in fiction written by men. They have social and sexual autonomy and agency; they are given equal air time; and they are not represented either as projections of male fantasies about women, or as relative and secondary characters whose function in the story is subordinate to that of the boys and men.

The Slap (Atlantic UK edition, 2011)

Buy this bookBut a more troublesome aspect of The Slap for feminist critics is that while it sets its face against inequality of all kinds, and while Tsiolkas is clearly sympathetic to feminism in a general way, the only two characters in whom any sort of moral authority resides are both traditional patriarchs. Manolis is an old Greek man with an old Greek man’s values, and Bilal is an Aboriginal convert to Islam and clearly the formal head of his family. Tsiolkas has said that Manolis is his favourite character – ‘the one character that I am really glad that I wrote is Manolis, the old man in The Slap, because that’s what I’m trying to say’ – and that it is Bilal who ‘delivers the real slap in the book’. The real slap, says Tsiolkas, and it is for him ‘the centre of the book’, is contained in Bilal’s words to Rosie: ‘You’re no good. Your people, your world is no good. I don’t want you to have anything to do with my family. I don’t want you to have anything to do with my life.’

The common failing in these characters is the selfishness that propels so much of their behaviour. It comes in different forms: material, sexual, familial, and social, manifesting in such things as Harry’s snobbery about suburbs and pride in expensive household goods, or Rosie’s maternal self-indulgence at the expense of everyone else including the child in question, or the indifference to the plight of the world’s poor and marginalised that is shown by most of the characters. When Geraldine Doogue asked Tsiolkas in 2011 on ABC TV’s Compass what an ideal Australia would look like for his generation, he replied:

It would certainly be an Australia that would be much more thankful. … I would say, ‘Stop bloody whinging. Stop complaining. Stop wanting more. Stop thinking it’s all about the frigging plasma screen and stop thinking that a few thousand boat people [are] going to do anything to change what you have.’ I will say that’s what I would want for Australia.

References:

Compass. ‘Christos Tsiolkas: Man Behind The Slap’. ABC TV, 9 October 2011.
Lever, Susan. ‘Christos Tsiolkas’s Severely Confined Art’. Australian Book Review no. 368 (2015)
Ley, James. ‘A Furious Moralist’. Australian Book Review no. 306 (2008)
Papastergiadis, Nikos. ‘Hospitality, Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism: A Conversation Between Christos Tsiolkas and Nikos Papastergiadis’. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 34:4, (2013)
Tsiolkas, Christos. ‘Guardian Book Club: Christos Tsiolkas on how he wrote The Slap’. The Guardian, 17 January 2014
Windsor, Gerard. ‘When the Smoke Clears’. The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 November 2008

Jack Hibberd (1940–) is a Melbourne playwright and doctor. He graduated from the University of Melbourne with a degree in medicine and went on to become a co-founder of the Australian Performing Group (APG). He has written over forty plays, including A Stretch of the Imagination, A Toast to Melba, Slam Dunk, and Legacy, and penned his most famous play, Dimboola, in 1968. Dimboola holds the record for longest running Australian play, with one of its seasons lasting for two and a half years. He was on the Literature Board of the Australia Council for Arts from 2005–2008.

Reading Australia

Judith Rodriguez is a widely acclaimed Australian poet. She has written about Dimboola (1968) for Australian Book Review's Reading Australia project. Click here to read her essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resources: Dimboola (1968)

'Spotlight on Jack Hibberd' by David Spicer, Stage Whispers, 2013

'Too close to home', The Australian, 22 March 2008

'Counting the Rafts' Melanie Tate, Poetica, Radio National, 6 September 2014

Jack Hibberd's website

 Richard Flanagan (photograph by Ulf Andersen)

Richard Flanagan is an award-winning Australian writer, whose novels have been published in forty-two countries, and have garnered numerous honours, most notably the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Gould's Book of Fish (2001) and the 2014 Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. As a journalist, he has written for various Australian publications, and international ones, including Le Monde, The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. He wrote and directed the 1998 film The Sound of One Hand Clapping, which was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival of the same year. He lives in Hobart, Tasmania.

Reading Australia

Kerryn Goldsworthy has written about The Narrow Road to the Deep North as part of the Reading Australia initiative. Click here to read her essay.

Further reading and links

Reading Australia teaching resources: The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014)

'The cinematic effects of Richard Flanagan' James Ley reviews The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan in the October 2013 issue of Australian Book Review

Richard Flanagan's acceptance speech for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, 15 October 2014.

Ron Charles reviews The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan for The Washington Post, 19 August 2014.

'Richard Flanagan: The Long Road to Great Success' by Martin Flanagan published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 October 2014.

'Freeing My Father' by Richard Flanagan published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 2013.

Richard Flanagan's website

Richard Flanagan's Random House author page

Dimboola's title is a great start to the play that was first performed in 1969. It belongs nowhere but in Australia. At the same time, not many people can claim to have lived there or to know someone from Dimboola. Indigenous? Maybe. And where is Dimboola? You drive through it on your way to somewhere else. It's in Victoria, out where all the roads are signposted 'so many km to Melbourne'.

There is a comic sound to it. It takes an effort to imagine King Lear in Dimboola.

So – make-believe territory. What have we on our plate, our stage, this evening? A marriage has taken place. An ordinary young man marries an ordinary young woman. Not make-believe. People continue to get married and give their children in marriage and attend the weddings, despite breakaways from convention. What could possibly be remarkable about a small-town marriage, attended by both pairs of parents, the priest, best man, bridesmaid and flower girl, an uncle and aunt and cousin of the bride, a couple of local characters, and two musos?

Many of the characters think that this should be a special day for the bride and bridegroom: an orderly ceremony should be followed by a wedding banquet held in an atmosphere of goodwill. But people have different ideas – religious, convivial – of what is proper. They nurture opinions, obsessions, likings, and resentments that are usually concealed or expressed only as confidences.

There is a contradiction at the heart of this. Personality is one concept of the individual. An individual may be angry, tired, vain, delighted, interested in various ways in those round about. But personality, at a ceremony, is set aside and none of these feelings is expressed. At a coronation the actual characters of the monarch, the celebrants, and the front-row witnesses are not on display. They are lay figures deployed in a program, speaking set texts, performing symbolic acts, obeying the prescribed order in processional approaches to, and departures from, the site of the ceremony. It is the crowd outside who are free to ooh and ah, scream, laugh, cry, dig one another in the ribs, point, throw flowers. To push forward. To give up and go home.

Dimboola movie poster, 1979, The AgeSo where are we – at a ceremony or in the crowd? The contradiction is right there in the play: we have moved from the formal and religious moments to the aftermath, and the spirit of the community can assert itself. We see many of the performers become witnesses, commentators. They still have set roles, but is that all? Temptation is strong – opportunities for display, the urge to respond to provocations.

Let's think about Dimboola as narrative. One storyline is provided by the banquet: greetings at the door, with guests (some uninvited) arriving and then the bridal couple. Some guests enter late. Toasts, dinner courses and speeches should follow in set order, and performances – a song, dances. The waiters circulate with food and dishes. Much of this movement depends on the resources. Does the director have sufficient numbers for such a large cast (sixteen named characters), let alone the band and catering staff?

Seated at tables, moving dishes, sampling food, emptying glasses, the named cast offer their speeches and actions to a seated audience, who may or may not think of themselves as extra guests. This play's action might well move into the audience; indeed, when Bayonet and Mutton 'appropriate to themselves a small table in among the body of guests', are these the paying guests, the audience, or additional 'guests' on stage? We can guess at another closing of the gap between acting company and audience: extras might be recruited from the town that is the site of performance.

It is obvious that all the turmoil of table service, with increasingly disorderly behaviour by the bridal party, does not form a single strong storyline. As we look at the relationships and ideas explored in this play, we must keep asking ourselves: what, besides a wedding banquet, is it all about?

Things start ominously, with a sexual crack at the bride by the best man and her own father. Before everyone is seated, we become aware that the bridegroom, whether dim-witted, nervous, or drunk, is unable to utter more than a repeated, uninspired phrase every few minutes. The presence of Bayonet and Mutton upsets the mothers, who know what to expect from these old mates of Knocka and Darkie. Along with best man, Dangles, and even, it turns out later, Father O'Shea, their main interest is the drinks.

The next revelation is the reciprocated antagonism of unmarried Aggie towards the two gatecrashers. By the time Horrie arrives, drunk and swaying on his feet, the talk is combative and largely pro-drink, anti-authority, shushed in vain by the women. Horrie, despite his perfunctory apology to his wife, Mavis, for belching, takes a seat with the two reprobates. The two mothers and the bridesmaid attempt to return to sweetness and light, congratulating the bride ('You'll never be happier than this, love') – a preface to flower girl Astrid's song and tap dance. The audience can anticipate stormy moments ahead.

In the following conversation, bridegroom Morrie, encouraged by the older men to be masterful but also to treat marriage as a mistake, changes his signature phrase ('No worries'), and Horrie enters his natural mode, performance. Anticipating the arrival of respected Dr Silverside (the drunks call him 'Porterhouse' and 'Liverwurst') and reflecting that 'It's no funeral' is the best solace the women can find as the dogfight escalates between Aggie and the gatecrashers. Even the bride's attempt to see things going well is succeeded by suggestions that the best man should seduce the bridesmaid. Meanwhile 'Slow Boat to China' is followed by 'Red River Valley', no doubt Horrie's usual contributions. By this time, the text gives evidence of divergent interests:

Florence: We're terribly sorry, Father.
Father O'Shea: They're not worrying me.
Astrid: Mummy, I want to have a wee.
Mavis: Shhh! Don't tell the world.
Mutton: A toast to the Queen!
Bayonet: I wish to pay my respects to the Colonel.
Florence: Father O'Shea is the Master of Ceremonies. Let him run things.
Mutton: May she have many more!

Upon Father O'Shea's entry with the astonishing word 'Dickies', religious rifts open up. Aggie's preference, the protestant Reverend Potts of St Basil's, is straightaway labelled an abuser of choir boys, culminating in Bayonet's limerick where the subject is avoided by labelling the 'uncontrollable fire' arson. O'Shea's comments ('a purple-pissing Protestant', 'a parsimonious Pom') call forth the Scots in Horrie and Angus's suggestion that the reverend should apologise. O'Shea's three words of Latin, 'ite missa est' ('it/he was sent forth', i.e. 'I've said my piece') are rightly treated as suspect, whereupon the fathers-in-law, protestant McAdam and catholic Delaney, start a fight, only to be escorted out by Dangles, to encouragements from Bayonet and Mutton and Horrie's rendition of 'South of the Border'.

'We have moved from the formal and religious moments to the aftermath, and the spirit of the community can assert itself'

At this moment of maximum indecorum – Maureen (crying): 'It's awful, what a wedding' – let's pause to ask, why the double-naming (given and nicknames)? Without actors to clarify, it's almost as puzzling as names in a Russian novel. But we should look further. 'Bayonet' and possibly 'Mutton' might come from war-service (note mention of 'the Colonel'). Morrie, Reen, Florrie, Horrie, and the McAdam women have stayed close to their given names. Darcy's 'Darkie' may well be just imitative, or it may hint at the unspeakable 'touch of the tar' of which Mutton is accused. 'Knocka' is ready for a fight; 'Dangles's' sexual prowess, or the reverse, has already been canvassed. Perhaps the men's mateship rituals have sent them in pursuit of apt names.

Father O'Shea, 'Master of Ceremonies', scores a fine moment, stepping out to pee just as Horrie promotes him to 'your grace'. Horrie as compère manages a welcome, but arguments continue, Dangles making suggestions to Shirl, the drunks catching Aggie out with a sherry bottle ('non-alcoholic'), and the women still hoping for Dr Silverside's arrival – he with a 'mind like a box Brownie – speaks Italian, Spanial, Cretin, Greek and Aboriginal'. This list fixes the historical moment of massive 1960s Greek and Italian immigration as well as a vestige of not-respectful interest in indigenes. After which, the main course and the Bridal Waltz mark a kind of first act interval.

Dimboola, Penguin edition, 1974

Buy this book

The remainder of the play is a progression through celebrations of sex and marriage, and the speeches. Horrie takes the floor to praise the band-leader, and tries to maintain a disc-jockey presence against increasing disapproval. This even wins him a moment of wifely support from Mavis. His attempts are swamped first by the priest's increasing drunkennness and the exposure of his interest in sex, highlighted in the song 'In Ireland, old Ireland'. Next, Mutton and Bayonet dominate the scene, mingling tales of their lives with two seven-line 'husband and wife' plays, and songs. It is interesting that the centrepiece of the play is performed by supposedly its least responsible and thoughtful characters.

An interruption! Here is Leonardo Radish, reporter, just arrived from Mildura to cover the event. Radish is introduced to various members of the wedding party. With many of them rushing off to obey the demands of nature, Radish delivers a tirade of disgust, denouncing at length the drunkenness and vulgarity he is witnessing. The result? Both the ladies and their menfolk turn on him. He is forcibly turfed out by Dangles, the unofficial bouncer. End of Act Two! And 'Danny Boy' is Horrie's salute to the occasion – back on track.

By now we have surely recognised the method in this play: it is episodic. The short exchanges, each engaging in its own way, using anything from two to half a dozen of the cast, are interspersed with 'entertainments'. Nonetheless there is a larger structure built from these glimpses of local manners. Initial disagreements end in a fight. Comments on sex and marriage end when a denouncer, a guardian of manners – if you like, a media exorcist – is defrocked and evicted. Whatever this wedding is, it will be conducted as its participants decide.

'Temptation is strong – opportunities for display, the urge to respond to provocations'

The speeches follow a prescribed course. The priest may be drunk, he may have forgotten the names of the married couple ('Daphne', 'Boris'), he may at moments forget what kind of gathering he is addressing, but he finally recovers a sense of occasion and utters sentiments that resemble what's fitting. After interference from the outside world – the unfortunate Radish – the company's jeering has given way to loyal support. The inarticulate bridegroom is coaxed through a few words of appreciation, followed by 'Why was he born so beautiful'. The best man predictably turns out to be eloquent on the subject of his poor mate, ensnared by woman's wiles. Both fathers-in-law deliver suitable short speeches (the circus is winding down). As the party breaks up, Aggie falls into Bayonet's embrace, Mutton guys the bride, and the mates go off together. Finally, to the tune of 'The Sheik of Araby', stuffy spinster Aggie takes what's left – Father O'Shea.

Scandal and respectability, dumbfoundedness and eloquence, hilarity and disgust are inextricably tangled in Dimboola. This play is pre-eminently an entertainment, offering plenty of opportunity for audience participation and emotional response. Like many of the best 1970s plays associated with Melbourne's La Mama theatre and the Pram Factory, it displays manners which are utterly Australian and often less than dignified. You can track its relatives back to 1890s Lawson, Goodge and Ogilvie, and forward to current stage and television social comedy. Behind the near-caricatures of a drunken occasion and its challenging clash of beliefs and manners, we can see the characters as they would be in controlled, less partisan moments, as pillars of society or its less-regulated elements. There is absolutely no disputing their reality.

If the town Dimboola had no other tribute, it should appreciate this carnival celebration of Australian humanity.

David Williamson is our most distinguished dramatist. His plays have been performed to acclaim in Australia and internationally. His screenplays, notably Gallipoli (1981), define a certain Australian mythos. Williamson is considered an establishment playwright, depicting middle-class fears and foibles in major theatres. But he came to prominence in a different forum, with a play anything but mainstream. The Removalists, first performed in 1971, is violent, funny, and disturbing. It centres on two policemen, Ross and Simmonds. After receiving a domestic violence complaint from Fiona, they help her to move out and end up beating her husband Kenny to death.

With its brash depiction of Australian ocker culture, realist vernacular, physical brutality, and frequent profanity, The Removalists was a radical play for its time. Until the cusp of the 1970s, Australia's theatre was conservative and overwhelmingly English. As Williamson has stated, state theatre companies 'were in the hands of Englishmen who ... took their main brief to be one of educating and uplifting the beer-swilling natives'. Young playwrights like Williamson, then a lecturer in thermodynamics and social psychology, were frustrated by the focus on European plays: 'we felt there was no way we could get a representation of the life around us into our theatres.' Partly, this was due to an obdurate 'cultural cringe' that disdained Australia as vulgar. The 'New Wave' playwrights resisted this attitude, dramatising Australian life and characters – notably the foul-mouthed ocker male. This was a substantial shift, not least because swearing on-stage had been, until recently, illegal.

The new drama was facilitated by an alternative theatre scene, with Sydney's Nimrod and Melbourne's Pram Factory and La Mama as the crux. These theatres reflected a wider counter-cultural movement of hippies, Vietnam War protests, and sexual liberation. Founded by Betty Burstall, who was inspired by the experimentalism of New York's 'off-off-Broadway', La Mama was a former shirt-factory (and possible brothel) repurposed as a performance space for professional, but experimental, Australian theatre. It was starkly different to major state theatres: La Mama's audience wore jeans and sat on mismatched chairs. The Removalists was first performed there, before commercial runs in Melbourne, Sydney, London, and New York, and a 1975 filmic adaptation directed by Tom Jeffrey. It has, understandably, been called an anti-police play. Williamson has denied that the play is so simplistic (even writing an introduction and placing a note in the script). He is right.

The Removalists film poster, 1975 (Umbrella Entertainment)The Removalists is a study of social conditioning: the way 1970s Australia pushed people into 'primitive', inflexible roles, notably through authoritarianism. Through the interpersonal conflict between Ross, Simmonds, and Kenny, the play shows how the clashes between these conditioned roles leads to the perpetration and tolerance of violence. Via the male characters' treatment of Fiona and Kate, The Removalists also skewers the chauvinism, misogyny, and domestic violence (physical and verbal) of the era's ocker culture. Williamson's sophisticated structure augments the play's critique of violence. The Removalists, like many Williamson plays, inhabits the 'borderlines' between satire and realism. It prompts the audience to relax into a comedy, then shocks us with horrific beatings. This uneasy tension between humour and savagery unsettles the audience, making us complicit in the violence and prompting us to question our own tolerance of it in society.

The Removalists begins with Constable Ross's first day. Sergeant Simmonds swiftly establishes his authority through belittlement and patronising advice. His bullying is often conveyed in crude one-liners ('If you want to go on staggering through life like a blind man in a brothel, then that's your business'). They establish the latent aggression beneath the play's comedy. This aggression is manifested when Ross defies Simmonds by refusing to reveal his father's occupation. Simmonds angrily asserts his power until Ross submits: 'Look, Ross, I'm in authority here and I'll decide what's my business ...You don't know a bloody thing.' We see that Simmonds, like any fascist, views himself, and not the law, as the source of power: 'Stuff the rule book up your arse.' Simmonds only takes cases he finds 'interesting'.

'The Removalists is a study of social conditioning'

Such a case arises when Fiona, an ingénue, and her domineering elder sister, Kate, report Kenny's domestic abuse. Kate's treatment of Fiona mirrors Simmonds's bullying of Ross, suggesting that authoritarianism pervades society, not just the police force. Kate editorialises when Fiona makes her statement; she depicts Fiona as imprudent, financially weak, and lacking sexual self-control. The first flare of authoritarian violence occurs when Simmonds abuses his power to unnecessarily inspect Fiona's bruises, 'prodding her flesh slowly and lasciviously'. Kate collaborates: Simmonds 'looks across at Kate, establishing something of a carnal conspiracy between them. Kate is gaining sensual pleasure from Simmonds' lechery.' Indeed, Kate encourages Fiona to go further – to roll up her skirt. Ross becomes a 'smug and eager' accomplice, photographing Fiona's nude flesh to prove himself to Simmonds.

Fiona's ordeal introduces the play's critique of authoritarian violence, presaging the way the characters respond to Kenny's beating: stronger characters exert power and the weaker collaborate or fail to intervene. The ordeal also shows how the female body is appropriated and objectified by the chauvinist male, something augmented by the deal agreed, sub-textually, by Simmonds and Kate: the police will help Fiona secretly move out of her abusive home, but only for sexual favours.

'Fiona's ordeal introduces the play's critique of authoritarian violence'

When Act Two begins, Fiona is packing. But Kenny comes home unexpectedly. Then the Removalist arrives. Then the police. Simmonds establishes himself as a 'big man' – a cop who 'won't tolerate ... a man with no respect for womanhood' – and beats the handcuffed Kenny when he insults Kate or Fiona. Kenny, as Williamson says, sees himself as 'a great fucker and a great fighter', intent on proving 'he's tough'. Humiliated and disempowered, Kenny retaliates verbally. He continues to insult the women and criticises Simmonds's lack of authority to beat him for rudeness: 'That badge don't allow you to do anything you like.' Having set the consequences for defiance, Simmonds beats Kenny more savagely. At first, the audience is prompted to enjoy Kenny getting a kicking for his vile, yet comic, insults: 'If roots were hamburgers,' he tells Kate, 'you could feed a bloody army.' We 'all have sadistic and aggressive impulses,' Williamson says, 'We can all empathise, to some extent, with the Sergeant beating Kenny up in the early stages, but what the play is finally saying is, "Beware of the beast within".'

That 'beast' grows stronger and violence escalates as Simmonds and Kenny continue to assert themselves as authoritarian and ocker tough guys. The conflict peaks when Kenny probes Simmonds's masculine insecurity: sexual potency. Kenny accuses Fiona of contemplating infidelity: 'Sounds like you were all set up to pay off your obligations tonight. Which one was yours? The old fossil here? ... Looks like he couldn't raise the bus fare to Balwyn.' Having emasculated Simmonds, Kenny seeks to regain Fiona with his own virility, bragging that Fiona 'came five times in the one grapple'. Simmonds 'goes berserk. It is as if Kenny's words have found the trigger to switch him from controlled to uncontrolled violence.' Badly beaten, Kenny persists: 'tell the Sergeant ... you squeal like a stuck pig for me.' Simmonds, whose wife is unable to have sex after a difficult pregnancy, is enraged by Kenny's criticism of his masculinity.

'Simmonds ... is enraged by Kenny's criticism of his masculinity'

Kenny pleads with the Removalist, Fiona, and Kate for help, but Kate countermands Fiona's weak appeals to Simmonds, and the Removalist 'can't afford to get involved, mate': he is more concerned about his expensive truck than Kenny's life. This ambivalence exemplifies the moral cowardice in society that sustains violence. After the women and Removalist leave, no one backs down and Kenny's beatings get worse. When Simmonds tries to de-escalate the situation ('He's not worth the effort'), Kenny keeps prodding: 'Piss off to your police station and crawl back into the woodwork.' Kenny now focuses on Ross: 'I've seen some cowardly fuckwits hiding behind their uniforms in my time but without doubt you're the bottom of the bloody barrel.' Ross, who wants to be seen as competent, has been ridiculed throughout the play. Like Simmonds, Ross snaps when his insecurity is targeted, beating Kenny so savagely off-stage that Ross believes him dead.

Poster for the Stooged Theatre production, 2013As the panicked police strategise, Kenny drags himself back in. Simmonds cuts a deal: prostitutes in exchange for Kenny staying silent and not seeking damning medical treatment. As Simmonds and Kenny reconcile over a beer, Kenny dies. Now we see Simmonds's core: 'Not a vile sadistic beast,' Williamson says, 'but a puffed up toad who is a pathetic frightened little man inside.' Ross takes charge and they plan to cover up the death by faking a wild attack by Kenny. The Removalists ends with Ross and Simmonds beating each other savagely, the logical conclusion to the play's escalating violence. This 'nightmare' 'could have been avoided,' Williamson says, 'had any of the three principal characters ... been a little less constrained by their conditioning.'

Authoritarianism is not the only social conditioning that prompts violence. Kenny exemplifies the 'ocker lad' who is conditioned to believe that 'it is the woman's place to empty the kitchen tidy, and if she doesn't she deserves a thumping'. Kenny enters in Act Two wanting sex and a steak. 'I can't,' Fiona protests tellingly, 'I'm ironing.' Angry, Kenny asserts authority: 'Get out into the kitchen, open the fridge, get out a piece of sliced cow and put it under the griller, you lazy bitch.' Later, we learn the 'cause' of Fiona's domestic abuse: 'I'd been warning you about that kitchen tidy for two days.' Like his verbal abuse of Fiona for refusing to cook, Kenny believes it reasonable to beat his wife for neglecting a domestic 'duty'. This is reinforced by his appeal to Simmonds: 'Christ, I only gave her a shove ... How would you like a kitchen full of stinking rubbish?' Kenny's chauvinism is clear throughout. Women are sex objects with carnal obligations to their husbands, but female sexuality, expressed any other way, is considered abhorrent. Kenny describes Kate's unfaithfulness to her husband as: 'Moral ain't the right word for you, you bloody trollop ... Bangs like a buggered tappet.' This misogyny – expressed in profane Australian vernacular – is central to the ocker culture portrayed in The Removalists, and other 'New Wave' plays.

Currency Press edition, 2010

Buy this bookHad The Removalists simply criticised police brutality with ocker male characters who swore and punched each other, it would remain an important Australian play, exemplifying the 'New Wave' shift from European to Australian stories on-stage. But its wider critique of violence – authoritarian and sexist – triggered by social conditioning, together with a sophisticated structure that leaves its audience uncomfortably tugged between realism and satire, grant it distinction. We are repeatedly prompted to laugh in proximity to violence; indeed, the play's most violent characters, Simmonds and Kenny, are its most amusing. There are moments of physical comedy and farce, exemplified by Kenny's 'second death'. As Ross and Simmonds scream at each other for killing Kenny, he drags himself back in and lights a cigarette: 'Did you two pricks think you did me?' The play's most violent moment is also its funniest. The Removalists is structured into a 'series of emotional peaks [violence], releases [comedy]' that never allow the audience to rest in one genre. During the play's first run, Brian Kiernan writes, the 'audience would be laughing one minute and stunned by Sergeant Simmonds' violence the next, some even crying. One night ... a young man rose from the audience, approached the stage and pleaded with [Simmonds] to stop beating' Kenny.

This interplay of comedy and realism produces a highly accomplished satire: the play speaks directly to its viewers by portraying recognisable Australian characters; it reveals aberrant social behaviour requiring correction; it makes us laugh, yet sickens us by drawing us into their violence; and it has wider application than the era of its creation. Both 'a celebration and criticism of Australian society', The Removalists is far more complex than a play about 1970s police brutality. It digs at the heart of our human relationship with violence. It reveals 'the beast within'.

References

Casey, Maryrose. 'Australian Drama Since 1970', A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 (2007), edited by Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer.
Fitzpatrick, Peter. Williamson: Australian Drama Series (1987).
Kennedy, Dennis (ed). The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance (2010).
Kiernan, Brian. David Williamson: A Writer's Career (1996).
Sammut, Elvira. 'Sugared Placebos'? The Effects of Satire and Farce in the Plays of David Williamson, PhD Thesis, Victoria University (2008).
Tobin, Meryl. 'David Williamson: Playwright – A Profile', Westerly no. 20:2 (June 1975).
Wilde, William H., Hooton, Joy, and Andrews, Barry (eds). The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1994, online 2005).
Williamson, David. Collected Plays: Volume 1 (1986).
Williamson, David. 'The Removalists: A Conjunction of Limitations', Meanjin Quarterly no. 33:4, (December 1974).
Zuber-Skerritt, Ortrun (ed). Australian Playwrights: David Williamson (1988).

David Unaipon (Wikimedia Commons)David Unaipon (1872–1967) was an Indigenous-Australian preacher, author, and inventor, whose contributions to science and literature helped overturn many of the prevailing negative stereotypes about Indigenous peoples in Australian society. In 1909 he developed a sheep-shearing device which was to be the basis for modern mechanical shears, and spent much of his life attempting to create a perpetual motion machine, among other inventions. He was the first Indigenous author to be published in English, for Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals (1930), but was uncredited for his work. In 2001, the book was republished under the author's name as Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. His varied interests encompassed science and engineering, myths and legends, philosophy, theology, poetry, and Indigenous affairs. David Unaipon was born in South Australia at the Point McLeay Mission on the shore of Lake Alexandrina, into which the Murray River empties. The Mission is now known as the township of Raukkan. Unaipon is buried in its cemetery.

Reading Australia

Billy Griffiths, author and historian, has written on Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (1930) for ABR as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read his essay.

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (1930)

'Unaipon, David (1872–1967)' by Philip Jones, Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Unaipon, D. (2006) Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (originally published in 1930 as Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals), Melbourne University Press (Miegunyah Press).

Unaipon, D. (2001) Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, Melbourne University Press (Miegunyah Press).

'The man on our $50, David Unaipon, was born on this day', Australian Geographic, 28 September, 2014

'On the Shore of a Strange Land: The story of David Unaipon' Radio National's Hindsight podcast, 11 July 2010

'The Australian Da Vinci: How David Unaipon (almost) changed our nation', Gizmodo, 18 March 2014

'An Aboriginal Intellectual', The Observer, 10 October 1925 (accessed via National Library of Australia's Trove)

David Unaipon's patent for an 'Improved mechanical motion device', lodged in 1910 with the Department of Patents, Commonwealth of Australia.

Daily Telegraph, 'Aboriginals: Their Traditions and Customs' by David Unaipon, 2 August 1924.

Gale, M. (2006) 'Giving Credit Where Credit is Due: The Writings of David Unaipon', in Gus Worby and Lester-Irabinna Rigney, eds., Sharing Spaces: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights, Perth, API Network, pp 49-68.

Jenkin, G. (1979) Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri: The story of the Lower Murray lakes tribes, Adelaide, Rigby.

Jones, P. (1990), 'Unaipon, David (1872–1967)', Australian Dictionary of Biography 12, Melbourne, Melbourne University Publishing, pp 303-305.

Muecke, S. and Shoemaker, A. (2001) 'Introduction: Repatriating the Story', in David Unaipon, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, pp xi-xlvi.

Unaipon, D. (1954) My Life Story, Adelaide: Aborigines Friends Association.

David Unaipon's Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines is part of the classical culture of Australia. The collection is as varied in subject as it is ambitious in scope, ranging from ethnographic essays on sport, hunting, fishing and witchcraft to the legends of ancestral beings who transformed the landscape in the Dreaming. The stories are unified by the voice of Unaipon, Australia's first Indigenous author, whose familiar face now adorns the fifty dollar note.

Unaipon led an exceptional life, spanning ninety-five years, working between cultures and across boundaries as an inventor, scientist, preacher, activist and author. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines reveals as much about Unaipon, and the context in which he lived, as it does about the myths and legends of Aboriginal Australia. It is one of the great tragedies of Australian literature that the book was not published under Unaipon's name until 2001, three-quarters of a century after it was written.

David Unaipon was born of the Ngarrindjeri people in the Coorong region of South Australia on 28 September 1872, at Point McLeay Mission. At seven his parents, James and Nymbulda Ngunaitponi (later anglicised to Unaipon), sent him to mission school. At thirteen he was taken to Adelaide to work as a servant for C.B. Young, a prominent member of the Aborigines' Friends' Association. 'I only wish the majority of white boys were as bright, intelligent, well-instructed and well-mannered, as the little fellow I am now taking charge of,' Young wrote of Unaipon in 1887 (Jenkin, 1979: p. 185).

In every way, he confounded contemporary stereotypes of Indigenous Australia. With the encouragement of Young, Unaipon had the freedom and resources to pursue his wide-ranging interests. He read widely, studied theology, mechanics and physics, educated himself in languages and oratory, and played Bach on the organ. In his 1954 pamphlet 'My Life Story', he described himself as a 'product of missionary work' and believed that he embodied the potential for 'Aboriginal advancement'. He often declared in his lectures for the Anglican Church: 'Look at me and you will see what the Bible can do' (Jones, 1990: p. 303). But he was also proud of his culture, and remained connected to Ngarrindjeri traditions and philosophies.

David Unaipon (Wikimedia Commons)

On 2 August 1924, Unaipon published an article in the Daily Telegraph titled 'Aboriginals: Their Traditions and Customs'; soon afterwards he signed a contract with Angus & Robertson to make a book of the myths and legends of his people. The stories in Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines were collected over 1924–25 on a tour of southern and central Australia with an Indigenous translator. Most of the stories come from his own Ngarrindjeri people in South Australia, but he also recorded others from Victoria, Central Australia and Queensland. He recognised the diversity in Indigenous language and customs across Australia, but he also saw 'a great common understanding running through us all': 'Our legends and traditions are all the same tales, or myths, told slightly differently, with local colouring, etc' (p. 7). He infused the stories he collected with his own personal philosophy, and wrote them up in the formal, ornate literary style of the era, overlaid with biblical references and classical tropes.

Unaipon's publisher, George Robertson, seemed quite prepared to acknowledge the Indigenous authorship of the collection, paying him the standard writing rate of £2/2/ per 1,000 words and describing the work as 'his book'. Yet in August 1925 communications between Unaipon and Angus & Robertson broke down. Unaipon continued to collect stories, but his telegrams seeking payment went unanswered. For several weeks his publisher went quiet while they weighed up how many stories to purchase. On 3 October 1925 Angus & Robertson offered to accept the remaining stories and move forward with publication, but, for some inexplicable reason, Unaipon never received this crucial letter. What happened next, as Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker (2001: p. xxvi) explore in their Introduction to Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, 'had all the elements of the great dramas of literary history where reputations, envy, pride (and prejudice) are in play'.

After more than a year of silence, the amateur anthropologist and principal medical officer of South Australia, William Ramsay Smith, stepped in and purchased Unaipon's complete manuscript from Angus & Robertson to 'edit' and 'prepare' it for publication. In 1930, Smith published the collection under his own name and with a new title: Myths & Legends of the Australian Aboriginals. He made no acknowledgment of David Unaipon's role in collecting and writing the stories, although there is one oblique reference to an unnamed 'narrator'. Smith also included twenty-one other legends in the new publication, which some scholars, such as Mary-Anne Gale (2006), suggest were also written by Unaipon.

In appropriating the book, Smith not only denied Unaipon's authorship, he also systematically removed his interpretations and narrative voice from the text. Smith's plagiarism and selective editing speaks volumes for the way Indigenous people were marginalised and oppressed in the early twentieth century. In 'Fishing', for example, Unaipon celebrated the expertise of his people:

This way of fishing requires a great deal of knowledge, or to be more correct, mathematical knowledge. I am not attempting to claim that my race are mathematicians from the civilised standpoint. But let us review them standing in their canoes ... the speed at which it is travelling and the depth at which it is swimming has to be allowed for, and also the speed and depth of the fish at a distance of fifteen yards away, and the spear is thrown unerringly and strikes the fish (pp. 23-24).

In Smith's 1930 edition of the story, this lengthy passage on Indigenous 'mathematical knowledge' was edited down to a single, banal sentence: 'This manner of fishing requires a great deal of knowledge, founded on observation and practice' (Smith, 1930: p. 236). In another example, Unaipon described the complex 'art of tracking' in Indigenous society: 'There is a whole science in footprints. Footprints are the same evidence to a bush native as finger-prints are in a court of law' (p. 7). Smith simply removed this last sentence from his publication: one of many instances in which he refused to accommodate Unaipon's parallels between cultures. It was not until 2001, with the support of Unaipon's descendants, that Muecke and Shoemaker retrieved the original manuscript from the State Library of New South Wales and finally published it under Unaipon's name.

Melbourne University Press (Miegunyah Press) 2001 edition

Buy this bookAlthough Unaipon did not achieve fame as an author within his lifetime, he was widely celebrated as a scientist and inventor. He took out provisional patents for nineteen separate inventions, including a centrifugal motor, a multi-radial wheel and a mechanical propulsion device. He was particularly attuned to the benefits of Indigenous knowledge, and in 1914 he designed something akin to a modern helicopter by studying the aerodynamic properties of the boomerang. But his most successful invention was his modified design for a sheep-shearing comb, which converted curvilineal motion into straight-line movement. It was introduced in 1909 and remains the basis for modern handheld shears, although, as with much of his writing, Unaipon never received any financial credit.

In Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, Unaipon wrote at once from an Indigenous and a European viewpoint. He identified freely with 'my race', but he also made derogatory remarks about the 'primitive mind' of his people and 'our little brain capacity'. Such words reveal much about the way Unaipon engaged with colonialism. It reflects his struggle to meet the demands of two cultures, which were often pulling him in different directions. As an Indigenous South Australian, he faced restrictions on what he could own, what he could eat and drink, and where he could go. In 'Gool Lun Naga (Green Frog)', we get a glimpse of how he might have felt about such institutional control:

the Bubble Spirit sat and watched the little fishes sporting and swimming, darting here and there in the clear waters of the pool. It would watch some strange tiny objects wiggling in the water, then burst forth and take wing and fly out over the water and away to the reeds and rushes and then among the flowers that grew upon the bank. Oh, what a wonderful life to live, to go where you will and come back in your own approved time (p. 54, emphasis added).

Indeed, Muecke and Shoemaker (2001) suggest that the very act of collecting and writing the legends allowed Unaipon to escape the constraints of missionary and state authorities and gain a taste of the freedom of that 'wonderful life'.

Melbourne University Press (Miegunyah Press) 2006 edition

Buy this bookIn an era of legislated racial hierarchies, Unaipon used Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines to appeal to a common humanity. He hoped his readers would see that 'Human nature is the same in the Australian Aboriginal as it is in the white, brown or yellow man, irrespective of nationality, language and religion' (p. 134). He drew upon his theological knowledge to reconcile the different cultures he moved between and he framed local legends in ways that would be familiar to his European audience. The ancestral being, Narroondarie, emerges in the stories as an Aboriginal 'Budha, Mahomet and Christ' who 'was sent by God with a message and teaching' (p. 134); the evil serpent of the Bible is personified as the Mischievous Crow; and 'Nhyanhund or Byamee, Our Father of All' filled the role of a God or 'Great Spirit' who 'is in all things and speaks through every form of Nature' (pp. 120, 151). These literary devices served to validate the Aboriginal legends in the eyes of his European readers and to build bridges between the cultures. 'The Australian Aborigines,' he asserted, 'have a greater and deeper sense of morality and religion than is generally known' (p. 150).

Even with the strong religious and classical overtones in Unaipon's writing, it is the Indigenous creation stories that remain the heart of the book. Unaipon tells the legends of the faraway islands where all animals, birds, reptiles and insects lived 'at the beginning of day'; how the great philosopher, explorer and astronomer, the Koala, discovered Australia and led a large fleet of canoes to the new country; and why, on arrival in Shoalhaven, the Koala lost his adventurous spirit, and with it, his tail. He evokes the image of 'strange beings', such as the mythical Bunyip, 'who lived a long while ago, many, many years, before Captain Cook found a landing at Kurnell' (p. 217), and he recounts the travels of ancestral beings, such as Narroondarie's wives, who were transformed into stones off the coast near Kangaroo Island.

Although Unaipon wrote that '[s]ince coming to Australia thousands of years ago, there has been probably little or no change in the habits and the customs of my people' (p. 5), the legends – and the narrator – tell of a much more dynamic culture. The ancestral spiritual leader, Nebalee, for example, lives at the nineteenth-century mission at Point McLeay, while Narroondarie's legendary wives sleep 'near the estate of the late T.R. Bowman' (p. 125). These supernatural forces are not relegated to a distant past: they continue to interact with the modern world. European society has been absorbed into the existing cultural landscape. Like Unaipon himself, the legends move between cultures and across boundaries.

'Perhaps some day,' Unaipon reflected, 'Australian writers will use Aboriginal myths and weave literature from them, the same as other writers have done with the Roman, Greek, Norse, and Arthurian legends' (p. 4). In a sense, this is what Unaipon has achieved with Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. By embedding the stories in the language and frameworks of classical and religious texts, Unaipon was making the case for the tribal laws and customs of his people to be recognised as part of the same literary canon. His book is a masterful celebration of Indigenous life and culture, and it gives us a fascinating insight into the mind of a great Australian.

Referenced works

Daily Telegraph, 'Aboriginals: Their Traditions and Customs' by David Unaipon, 2 August 1924.

Gale, M. (2006) 'Giving Credit Where Credit is Due: The Writings of David Unaipon', in Gus Worby and Lester-Irabinna Rigney, eds., Sharing Spaces: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Rights, Perth, API Network, pp 49-68.

Jenkin, G. (1979) Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri: The story of the Lower Murray lakes tribes, Adelaide, Rigby.

Jones, P. (1990), 'Unaipon, David (1872–1967)', Australian Dictionary of Biography 12, Melbourne, Melbourne University Publishing, pp 303-305.

Muecke, S. and Shoemaker, A. (2001) 'Introduction: Repatriating the Story', in David Unaipon, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, pp xi-xlvi.

Smith, W. R. (1930) Myths & Legends of the Australian Aboriginals, London, George G. Harrap.

Unaipon, D. (1954) My Life Story, Adelaide: Aborigines Friends Association.

Unaipon, D. (2001) Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press.

Robert Dessaix is a writer, broadcaster, essayist, and memoirist. His best-known books are the autobiography A Mother's Disgrace (1994), the novels Night Letters (1996) and Corfu (2001), and the travel memoirs Twilight of Love (2004) and Arabesques (2008). He taught Russian Language and Literature at the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales from 1972–84. From 1985–1995, he presented Books and Writing, a weekly program on ABC Radio National. He has also presented a radio series on Australian public intellectuals and great travellers in history, as well as regular programs on language. He now lives in Hobart, Tasmania.

Reading Australia

Kerryn Goldsworthy has written on A Mother's Disgrace (1994) for ABR as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read her essay.

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: A Mother's Disgrace (1994) 

Robert Dessaix's website

'Robert Dessaix' AustLit entry

Delia Falconer reviews What Days Are For by Robert Dessaix, Australian Book Review, no. 367, December 2014

'Open Page with Robert Dessaix', Australian Book Review, no. 367, December 2014

'Pushing against the dark: Writing about the hidden self' by Robert Dessaix, Australian Book Review, no. 340, April 2012

Jane Goodall reviews As I Was Saying: A collection of musings by Robert Dessaix, Australian Book Review, no. 339, March 2012

'Searching for mother: The deep troubled legacy we bequeath', Sara Dowse reviews A Mother's Disgrace by Robert Dessaix, The Canberra Times, 8 March, 1994

'Discourse with Dessaix makes for dizziness: Peter Davis talks to Robert Dessaix about his book, A Mother's Disgrace, language and the fluidity of memory', Canberra Times, 16 July 1994

'Confessions of a double visionary' by Evelyn Juers, Southerly (1994), 54 (3), 180-184.

'Robert Dessaix's journey into French' by Ninette Boothroyd and Michelle Royer, Southerly (2003), 63 (1), 95-101

'As Robert was saying: in conversation with Robert Dessaix', by Gail Bell, The Monthly, March 2012

Interview with Robert Dessaix, Creativenonfiction.org, issue 46, Fall 2012

'Robert Dessaix on Life, Love and Humbug', interviewed by Caroline Baum, YouTube, published 18 December 2014 by Booktopia TV

'Robert Dessaix: What days are for', interviewed by Ramona Koval, YouTube, published 7 December 2014 by Wheeler Centre

On the day that Robert Dessaix first came face to face with his birth mother, he was already in his mid-forties. Adopted as a newborn baby in 1944 by a couple who loved and cared for him through his childhood and adolescence, he had grown up in Sydney, had invented his own imaginary land with its own language, had been married for twelve years, divorced, negotiated a reorientation of his sexuality, and eventually met and made a life with his partner Peter. He was a seasoned, experienced traveller and a speaker of several languages. He had made his way through two successful careers, first as an academic scholar, teacher, and translator of Russian literature, and then as a well-known broadcaster on the ABC's flagship literary program 'Books and Writing', to which, in the days before podcasts and digital radio, thousands of thoughtful people all over the country would listen every Sunday night.

By the time he met his biological mother, at the end of the 1980s, he had a settled life, a wealth of experience, a vivid and dramatic physical presence, and a strong reputation as a warm, witty, erudite voice on the radio. He was, in Australian literary and intellectual circles, a name to conjure with.

The phrase 'a self-made man' is commonly used to describe someone who has achieved success in the world through no accident or advantage of birth or inheritance, but rather through his own efforts in life. You might use it to describe Robert Dessaix. But he is also a different and more interesting kind of self-made man, someone who in his early childhood began the process of inventing himself and his ideas and beliefs. In an interview with Lee Gutkind in 2012, he said:

When you're adopted and an only child, you just do not feel any obligation, from the moment you are conscious, to be anything you don't want to be. You don't have to be like your parents or Uncle Harry or anyone else in the family because no one knows exactly who you are. You can reinvent yourself ... I don't really feel I was born. I feel I was invented.

In the previous year, Dessaix had delivered the 2011 Seymour Biography Lecture, later published in an edited version as 'Pushing Against the Dark' in Australian Book Review, in which he reflected at length on this process of self-invention and on his long-standing conviction that he had made himself up. The notion of self-invention and self-reinvention is central to A Mother's Disgrace (1994) and it is an idea to which Dessaix keeps returning, in interviews and later in books, essays, and talks.

As the unplanned, 'disgraceful' offspring of a teenage single mother in the 1940s, he was almost literally rubbed out by his mother's family, spirited away for adoption and ignored as though he had never existed, except in Yvonne's own mind and memory: 'every year on my birthday she would try to spend the day alone, unencumbered, if possible, by any distracting duties, and think about me' (Chapter 4). With his existence subjected to this kind of erasure, it's not surprising that he felt he needed to invent a self to take the place of that absent baby:

So from the day I was born, in February 1944, until the day in 1990 Yvonne told her mother she had met me, my embarrassing existence was never referred to. For forty-six years the subject of my existence was never once raised. (Chapter 3)

With the writing of A Mother's Disgrace, full of revelations and self-revelations, the act of writing itself has become another stage of self-reinvention, as had the active search for his mother: 'while knowing nothing of this silence, I began to plot ways to break into it' (Chapter 3).

A Mother's Disgrace by Robert Dessaix

Buy this bookIt can be difficult for anyone born after about 1960 to imagine what life was like for single women and girls in Australia in 1943. To have sex before marriage was regarded as a shame and a disgrace. There was no formal sex education and nothing that we would now think of as reliable contraception, and even if that had existed, unmarried women would not have had access to it. There was no single-parent pension and nowhere for a pregnant girl to go except home to her parents, and if her parents threw her out, as they often did, she might well end up on the street.

Dessaix's book seems at first glance to be about his own life, but in fact it has more than one main subject. This book is about someone called Robert but it is also, and almost equally, about someone called Yvonne. The most poignant moment in the entire story is the one that looks directly at the moment of Robert's conception, a moment at which it seems that Yvonne has no idea what she's doing or what might come of it:

She tells me that as a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl from a good background, she had no sexual knowledge, or sense of lack of knowledge, at all ... Falling pregnant, as Yvonne might put it, came as a shock to her. From what I can gather, she really does not seem to have made a strong connection between what had happened with Harry and pregnancy. (Chapter 4)

There is no quicker or better way to get a sense of how women and girls fared in wartime Sydney than to read Dymphna Cusack and Florence James's novel Come In Spinner (1951). This novel charts the lives of a group of Sydney women over one week in 1944, and the unabridged edition of 1987 would make ideal background reading for a broader understanding of A Mother's Disgrace. Another useful book in this respect is Nadia Wheatley's The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2001). Clift was an Australian writer and an almost exact contemporary of Yvonne's, who also survived the disgrace of a wartime Sydney teenage pregnancy, gave birth in the same hospital over the same summer, endured the same pressures from her family, and lost her newborn baby to its adoptive parents. The whole episode was surrounded by the same terrible silence that Yvonne experienced, and Clift agonised over it, privately, for the rest of her short life.

In 'Pushing Against the Dark', written almost twenty years after A Mother's Disgrace, Dessaix ponders on why he chose to write in an autobiographical mode. The book is not a traditional or mainstream autobiography. It is a highly selective account of his life in which much of the detail is sketchy and events are not recounted in chronological order. Dessaix himself explicitly questions the label 'autobiography': A Mother's Disgrace, he says, 'is fragmented, a curling necklace of arresting moments, far from all-encompassing, opinionated, intimate and at least dotted, if not peppered, with scandalous disclosures'. Much of it, indeed most of it, is about the inner life: the life of the mind, the heart, and the soul, none of which are constrained by the calendar or operate in any logical progression, and all of which are inclined to swoop and circle around the high points and the low points in the story of a life. The bare facts of his life – 'birth, adoption, school, university, marriage, divorce, realignment' – were, he says, 'hardly worth chronicling for their own sake'.

HarperCollins 2002

Buy this bookWhile the facts of having been adopted at birth and of then meeting his natural mother almost half a century later make for an interesting human story, the best way to read this book is to think about it on two levels. At a superficial level it can be read purely for the actual events it describes and recounts, but its real meaning lies in the thoughts and ideas and abstractions to which those events give rise: about selfhood, writing, family history, social history, sexuality, motherhood – and, not least, about love. A good autobiography takes the reader from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract, and explores the feelings and ideas that connect us and make us human. As Dessaix says in 'Pushing Against the Dark', 'Almost nobody is interested in what I have encountered on my journey through life, but almost everybody is interested in mothers, questions of blood, and in how selves are fashioned, particularly their own.'

The connection that Dessaix has with his readers is one that most writers would envy: when he makes public appearances at literary events, his readers always flock to talk to him afterwards. They will come up to him shyly and tell him how much his writing has meant to them, and they will tell him little stories about their own lives. Many of his readers write to him and do much the same thing in their letters, and he makes the point that the reinvention of the self can sometimes be achieved not only by writing a book but also by reading one:

Virtually every letter I have received from readers of my books begins: 'Thank you for this book' and then switches to retelling the reader's life – sometimes at great length – taking pleasure in ... the fresh perspectives on mothers or adoption or Russia or religion or some other element in my story, in the restyling of the self that a good book offers, rather than in information. ('Pushing Against the Dark')

One of the many ideas explored in A Mother's Disgrace is the question of what is actually important when it comes to identity and self-knowledge. Is it your parentage? Or is it nationality? Or gender? Dessaix is an Australian man, but he feels, and appears, neither quintessentially male nor quintessentially Australian. 'As you can see,' he says near the end of chapter two, 'the self I packed off to Russia to confront the reality ... was not an archetypally Australian male self, if there is such a thing.' When asked by interviewer Lee Gutkind whether he thinks of himself as an outsider, Dessaix enlarges on the idea of not fitting the stereotype of the Australian man. He rejects the label 'outsider' but says he sees himself as 'swimming against the current': 'I don't know one end of a football from the other. I don't know one end of a cricket bat from the other ... I don't drink ... I'm not heterosexual ... I'm not tall, the way you're supposed to be.' He could have added his lifelong fascination with foreign languages and foreign travel, things formally defined – for an Australian – by their non-Australianness. He says in 'Pushing Against the Dark' that he harbours 'a growing suspicion that being "Australian" ... means less to many Australians than barracking for the Pies does, say, or being an architect or a Christian.'

HarperCollins 2013

Buy this bookThat a religious affiliation might be an important marker of identity is a more uncommon idea in the Australia of today than it would have been fifty years ago, but Dessaix has maintained an interest in spiritual matters from the days of his earliest fascination with Russian literature and philosophy. One of the most intriguing passages in A Mother's Disgrace occurs near the end, where he recalls his meeting with the novelist Fazil Iskander and the conversation prompts him to think about belief and non-belief in a new way: 'I thought seriously for the first time of letting the believer inside myself talk to the non-believer, letting the knowing part converse in good humour with the mystified and the credulous with the sceptical (Chapter 6).'

Dessaix's most recent book, What Days Are For (2014), returns to the subjects of spirituality and organised religion again and again, scornful of the latter, but open, in a self-questioning and sometimes self-mocking kind of way, to the former. As with A Mother's Disgrace, the writing of What Days Are For was precipitated by a near-death experience; in each case, the immediate possibility of death seems to have jolted him into a kind of autobiographical and spiritual stocktake.

For a man so conscious of the practice and potential of deliberate self-fashioning, of 'making himself up', Dessaix has an unusually individual presence. His voice – whether it's heard on the radio or read on the page – is immediately recognisable. His sense of having been invented or made up seems to have produced, paradoxically, a unique kind of personal authenticity and integrity, something that comes across in the narrative voice of A Mother's Disgrace. It also comes through clearly in Gail Bell's 'As Robert Was Saying', where she quotes Dessaix's fellow writer and old friend Drusilla Modjeska: 'he is so utterly himself, so unlike anyone else'.

Referenced works:

Bell, Gail, 'As Robert Was Saying: in conversation with Robert Dessaix', The Monthly, March 2012.

Cusack, Dymphna, and Florence James, Come In Spinner (1951, 1987)

Dessaix, Robert, 'Pushing Against the Dark: writing about the hidden self'. Australian Book Review, April 2012 (no. 340).

Dessaix, Robert What Days Are For (2014)

Gutkind, Lee, 'Robert Dessaix', Creative Nonfiction, no. 46 (Fall 2012)

Wheatley, Nadia, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2001)

Written and illustrated by Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing (2000) prompts readers to ask: ‘Who is this book for and what does it mean?’ Tan, in a personal email to the author, himself confesses that the work is a fable ‘about all sorts of social concerns with a rather ambiguous ending’, while the unnamed narrator of the story nonchalantly confesses: ‘don’t ask me what the moral is’. For these reasons, the reader may be forgiven for believing that the first-person narrator of The Lost Thing, represented in the illustrations as an ‘eraser headed’ young man, is possibly the author himself. But who knows, given that Shaun has declared of his work, ‘Just don’t ask the creator.’

The essential plot of The Lost Thing is based upon the rescue of a bright red ‘thing’ (a huge red teapot with legs? a hybridised marine crustacean with the body of a pot-bellied stove?) that the narrator has spotted sitting alone on a beach. Moved by compassion, he plays with it for hours before realising that it must be lost. The narrator takes the thing home to meet his family, lets it bunk down in a shed, and discovers that it loves consuming Christmas decorations. Next morning, having checked the ‘lost and found’ advertisements in the newspaper, to no avail, the narrator takes the thing to the ‘Department of Odds and Ends’ (whose enigmatic motto is ‘sweepus underum carpetae’) where, having filled in the obligatory forms while the thing makes a ‘small, sad, noise’, the narrator is mysteriously presented with an equally mysterious business card enigmatically embellished with an even more mysterious wavy line. With the thing in tow, the narrator sets out to search the cold and careless city for a place that might relate to the curious wavy line on the business card with which he has been presented. Having found such a place, he discovers it to be full of other seemingly contented ‘lost things’, and the big red lost thing ‘makes ‘an approving sort of noise’. Once the thing is farewelled and has settled to mingle with his other ‘no longer lost’ peers, the narrator goes home, philosophically observing, ‘I see that sort of thing less and less these days. Or maybe I’ve just stopped noticing. Too busy doing other stuff, I guess.’

Given the apparent nonchalance of the narrator, and the reader’s inability to gather any overt moral to the story, The Lost Thing asks more questions than it answers. That is the secret to much of Tan’s work. He openly confesses that in his illustrated books, very often two stories, visual and verbal, only ever run side by side as evidence of some other narrative that can’t actually be seen, read, or even talked about in ordinary waking life. (Possibly in the language of dreams? Who knows? Just don’t ask the creator!) This idea of word and image running ‘side by side’ is supported by Perry Nodelman in Words About Pictures: The narrative art of children’s picture books (1988). Nodelman argues that ‘words and pictures are quite separate from each other but ... placing them into a relationship with each other inevitably changes the meaning of both, so that good picture books as a whole are a richer experience than just the simple sum of the parts’.

The truth of the matter is that the real significance of the story lies in the space that the individual reader creates between the interrelation of the visual (illustrations) and verbal (printed words), which together form the ‘holistic text’ of the book. As Nigel Krauth says in Creative Writing and the Radical: Teaching and learning the fiction of the future (2016):

This type of book, which looks like a children’s book, grapples with adult themes in a complex and sophisticated manner, and represents a space for multimodal reading which is shared by children and adults. The emotional and intellectual depth of these books argues strongly against the old-fashioned idea that reading the pictures is not for the adult literary reader.

Maurice Sendak, internationally acclaimed creator of the illustrated book Where the Wild Things Are (1963), claims that ‘the invention of the picture book’ began in the art of Randolph Caldecott (1836–86) when he developed a ‘juxtaposition of word and picture, a counterpoint ... Words are left out and the picture says it. Pictures are left out and a word says it.’ Sendak states adamantly:

You must never illustrate exactly what is written. You must find a space in the text so that pictures can do the work. Then you must let the words take over where the words do it best. It’s a funny kind of juggling act, which takes a lot of technique and experience to keep the rhythm going ... You have worked out a text so supple that it stops and goes, stops and goes, with pictures interspersed. The pictures too, become so supple that there’s an interchangeability between them and the words; they each tell two stories at the same time.

In order to fully appreciate the ‘multimodal reading’ embedded in Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing, the reader must search for meaning in the creative gaps between words and pictures, and pictures and words; to create as it were, a ‘third’ or individualistic interpretation of the book. That interpretation, unique to each reader as it will be, no doubt carries the genuine significance of both narrative and moral – if, as the narrator suggests, such a moral exists.

The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan (Lothian Books/Hachette, 2000)

Buy this book
The cover of The Lost Thing reveals an image of the thing and its gormless minder standing lost and alone at the entry to a typical soulless inner-city underpass. An immediate visual allusion to Jeffrey Smart’s famous painting Cahill Expressway (1962), it depicts a similarly dislocated male in a business suit standing in much the same dislocated position. Tan’s message in alluding to the painting is immediate and undeniable: city dwellers are lost, immersed in an anonymous and careless landscape of monumental concrete, towering over and reducing them. Tan drives his cover message home with an easily missed line in fine print beneath the title: ‘A tale for those who have more important things to pay attention to’. The narrator’s compassion for the lost thing denies this in the telling, although he does admit, when the thing is safely home at the end, ‘Maybe there aren’t many lost things anymore. Or maybe I’ve just stopped noticing. Too busy doing other stuff I guess.’ He goes home to what the reader is led to believe is the more urgent business of classifying his ‘bottle-top collection’.

Why is the reader unconvinced? What message is Tan actually relaying to his (no doubt) perplexed reader?

The works of other important visual artists alluded to in The Lost Thing should be mentioned to elucidate this mystery. In a cryptic, upside down, small-print reference relegated to the top of the last page of the book, Tan apologises to three major visual artists: Jeffrey Smart, Edward Hopper, and John Brack. Each of these artists has focused, at some point in his career, upon the dislocative elements of contemporary society, particularly in relation to city life and its ability to foster careless anonymity of the individual, albeit in a crowd. The allusion to Jeffrey Smart on the cover has been addressed, but John Brack’s Collins St, 5pm (1955) is clearly referenced by Tan when the lost thing is taken to the city on a tram. Weird looking though it is, not a head is turned. The stark, monumentally dispassionate cityscapes of Edward Hopper pervade Tan’s work, particularly visual allusions to Hopper’s stark Rooms by the Sea (1951) and the clinically dehumanised Office at Night (1946).

By recognising the existence of these adult visual allusions, we come a step closer to appreciating the depth and significance of Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing. This is no picture books for a child’s bedtime reading, nor is it some reading primer of what Krauth refers to as ‘the “Dick and Jane” series 1927–1970’ which were ‘illustrated in the sense that the image is merely a replication of the text’. Considering the sophistication of the artists alluded to, one wonders who the intended readership of The Lost Thing really is: possibly any reader, irrespective of age, who has the emotional and creatively intellectual skills to negotiate the significance of the complex interplay between print and visual text – for all its initially apparent simplicity.

The Lost Thing DVD (distributed by Madman Entertainment)By ‘print text’ the reader would be gravely misled if he or she read only the narrator’s words. It is the words that comprise the seemingly random confusion of nonsensical scientific and mathematical bricolage that surround the main images and narratorial text that really carry the full significance of the story. These nonsensical quotes (Have you any perpetual motion ideas?), meaningless formulae, and definitions (A perfect vacuum would be an absolute empty space) litter every page of the book. In fact, the main images and narratorial text appear to be pasted over them as if the narrator–creator is over-pasting a textbook he wishes to hide. Tan admits that ‘the nonsense formulae referred to are taken from his father’s physics and maths text books when he was an Engineering student and intended to give of the dry and industrial world presented in the paintings, a sort of meaningless functionality – pointless and amusing also’.

In combining and interpreting all of these messages, whether in print text or visual image or allusion, the creative reader forms an individual sense of the meaning(s) of The Lost Thing.

For all of his apparent nonchalance and carelessness, the narrator does have family and friends. This doubtless encourages him to sympathise with the lost thing’s alienation, and leads him to befriend it. This in itself is a statement of selfless courage. Given the hideous appearance of the thing (if the book bore an olfactory element, I suspect the thing would exude an offensive odour akin to ‘prawns that had gawn orf’), the narrator takes a grave risk in sitting beside it at the beach and engaging in play. But he does. He also takes it home, feeds it, and finds it companionable accommodation with others of its kind. The subtext here is: ‘Hey, I’m a bit weird. I collect bottle tops. My folks are weird too. Check out their house. And my friend Pete is not exactly ordinary. We meet on his roof ...’ Given that this subliminal extraordinariness pervades the life of the narrator, it is easier for him to be non-judgemental and to reach out empathetically for others who are lost.

And what an environment to be lost in. I have read this book thousands of times and I cannot find a tree, leaf, flower, or garden. Yes, there is a beach, but its waters are acidic blue, overshadowed by monumental concrete walls seeping toxins. If the reader really looks, she will spot the word ‘MORE’ engraved in the concrete, meaning ‘MORE WHAT?’ The options are terrifying.

The agencies which are purportedly there to offer help (such as the cynically named ‘Department of Odds and Ends’) evidently achieve the reverse. The building itself dwarfs any prospective person (or thing?) seeking solace, reducing them to little more than spittle on the sidewalk. Indeed, even the disembodied voice advising the narrator suggests, ‘If you really care about that thing, you shouldn’t leave it here ...’

Whatever the intended audience of The Lost Thing, and whatever its moral or meaning, there can be little doubt that the book will provoke the conscience of its reader to be more aware of the human sympathies aroused for those among us who simply ‘don’t belong’.

Referenced works:

Crew, G. Strange Objects: 25 Anniversary Edition, with a foreword by Shaun Tan (2015)

Krauth, N. Creative Writing and the Radical. Teaching and Learning the Fiction of the Future in Multilingual Matters (2016)

Lanes, S. The Art of Maurice Sendak (1984)

Nodelman, P. Words About Pictures: The narrative art of children’s picture books (1988)

Shaun Tan is an author and illustrator, originally from Perth, Western Australia. He studied Fine Arts and Literature at the University of Shaun Tan (photograph by Stefan Tell)Western Australia, and graduated with joint honours in 1995. His illustrated books deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal dream-like imagery. He has received numerous awards, including the CBCA (Children’s Book Council of Australia) Picture Book of the Year Award for The Rabbits (1998); two Hugo Awards for Best Professional Artist (2010 and 2011); and an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for The Lost Thing (2010). He has also worked as a theatre designer, and as a concept artist for such films as Horton Hears a Who (2008) and Pixar’s Wall-E (2008).

He currently lives in Melbourne and works as a freelance artist and author.

Reading Australia

Gary Crew has written on The Lost Thing (2000) for ABR as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read his essay.

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: The Lost Thing (2000)

Shaun Tan’s website and blog

Watch the The Lost Thing (directed by Andrew Ruhemann & Shaun Tan) online

Michael Halliwell reviews The Rabbits (Opera Australia/Barking Gecko Theatre Company) in the November 2015 Arts issue of ABR

Margaret Robson Kett reviews The Singing Bones by Shaun Tan in the January-Febraury 2016 issue of ABR

'How Shaun Tan transformed children's literature' by Lorien Kite, Financial Times 19 August 2016

'Bloodbaths and bad dreams: Shaun Tan's fairytale sculptures' by Sian Cain, The Guardian 25 August 2016

Steven Herrick is a poet and author. He has published twenty-two books for adults, young adults, and children, and is widely considered to be a pioneer of verse novels for children and young adults.

He left school in Year 10, before returning some years later as an adult, and then going on to study poetry at the University of Queensland, where he gained his B.A. in 1982.

In 2000 he was awarded the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature for The Spangled Drongo (1999), and in 2005 he was awarded the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature for By the River at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

He lives in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales.

Reading Australia

Felicity Plunkett has written on by the river (2005) for ABR as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read her essay

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: by the river (2005)

Steven Herrick’s website

A biography of Steven Herrick, Poetry Foundation

Mike Shuttleworth reviews 'Slice' by Steven Herrick in the December 2010-January 2011 issue of ABR

'Another Night in Mullet Town review: Steven Herrick's verse novel for boys' by Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald 20 August 2016

Buy this book
by the river evokes the textures of a small Australian town in 1962 through lean episodic poems that drift along gently until moments of intensity break their banks. Through a leisurely accumulation of detail – houses on stilts, fruit bats, a blotchy carpet of mango pulp, wisteria, cricket, bags of lollies – the town comes into focus, along with the lives of its people, especially protagonist Harry Hodby and his family.

by the river is one of Steven Herrick’s many award-winning verse novels for young adults and the recipient of several prizes, including a 2005 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award (Ethel Turner Prize for Books for Young Adults). As a verse novel, it combines narrative bones with poetry’s compression, as well as its sonic and lyrical qualities. Image by image, glimpse by glimpse, by the river collects its narrative fragments and vivid impressionistic slivers as ‘the big river’ that ‘rolls past our town’ collects and influences the stories of the people it circles and observes. If, as psychologist and philosopher William James sees it, human thinking proceeds like a stream of consciousness, by the river exemplifies its dynamic flux – its mobile and shifting nature, its snags, shifts, and flow, and the ways the currents and undercurrents of memory, hope, and thinking entwine and wind.

Harry’s voice and perspective tie these strands of narrative and imagery together. Harry’s ‘I’ is laconic and self-effacing. He is an unlikely hero, wounded, unambitious, and boyish, stationed in the liminal space where childhood pleasures and adult possibilities converge, trapped within the confines of a town he is outgrowing. The verse novel traces its roots back to epic poems such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s The Odyssey, each of which centres on a heroic protagonist. Unlike Aeneas and Odysseus, Harry’s name does not give the work its title, and, in his adolescent uncertainty, he has little in common with the elevated heroes of the traditional epic. Aeneas, for instance, is repeatedly referred to by Virgil as ‘pius’, which connotes a worthy, dutiful, strong hero, reverent towards the gods, full of drive and vision. Instead, Harry – fourteen, awkward, fed up with the compression of small-town life but lacking ambition and direction – fits into a lineage of coming-of-age texts centring on Anglo-Celtic heterosexual Australian masculinities, such as George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964) and films including Gallipoli (directed by Peter Weir, 1981) and The Year My Voice Broke (directed by John Duigan, 1987).

Harry’s portrait finds energy in its expression of his ordinariness, recalling the brilliantly evoked, flawed characters of Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (2000), a best-selling verse novel which inspired Herrick’s own. The Monkey’s Mask and Porter’s other verse novels experiment with jump-cutting, editing, and sharp, lean lines to achieve a cinematic aesthetic, as well as freshness and vitality. As Porter said: ‘I’m just longing for poetry with verve and nerve ... I’m longing for poetry that just smacks me across the head.’^[1]Porter once commented that ‘far too much Australian poetry is a dramatic cure for insomnia’. Writing ‘good’ for Porter, at one stage of her career, involved ‘strictures I placed on myself ... i.e. nothing that would offend the children’s lit gatekeepers’^[2]. Herrick, too, whose first published poem (written at the age of eighteen) was called ‘Love is like a gobstopper’, depicts the identifiable, the awkward, and the ordinary, rather than some kind of (perhaps illusory) idea of aloof and inoffensive poetry. The results in Herrick’s work are fresh, accessible, and engaging, closer in tone and mood to the wit, play, and hijinks of Roald Dahl and Andy Griffiths than the ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ associated with William Wordsworth.

Both these works avoid a certain kind of poetry, but each affirms the importance of another version of poetry as full of vitality, and, in Porter’s case, dangerously seductive. Jill, the detective protagonist of The Monkey’s Mask, asks the ghost of the murdered woman whose case she is investigating:

Tell me, Mickey,
you knew

tell me

does a poem start

with a hook in the throat?^[3]

Harry addresses the ghost of his childhood friend Linda Mahony, asking:

Tell me, Linda?
What happened here?
Were you swimming?
Or surfing the flood,
like they say?

 

...
Tell me, Linda?
Were you alone?

The mysterious circumstances of Linda’s death form one of several questions Harry faces. In ‘It wasn’t God’ he tells himself it wasn’t God who ‘watched the bubbles rising / and fists knocking / against a jammed window’. It wasn’t God who ‘dragged Mum / quietly away’, cataloguing the unfathomable cruelties he has observed before eddying towards the poem’s last stark question: ‘Was it?’ This ending exemplifies the poems’ tendency to swerve and kick at their endings. Another question concerns how people leave the town, which relates to the larger issue of what kind of future he might be able to hope for. In his plain-spoken words and his directness, as in Jill’s, there is vitality and emotional honesty. In his smaller moments, too, it is the simple that delights Harry.

He finds joy in small pockets of rituals – eating chunks of watermelon ‘bigger than my face’, ‘spitting the pits / at the chickens’ and ‘laughing at the pink juice /dribbling down onto the grass’ – and consolation in the patterns of family life, including visits from Aunt Alice, who sets the table, boils the kettle, and produces lamingtons and other cakes for her nephews, and in Sunday trips to the graveyard where they tend their mother’s grave and witness the wounds of their father’s bereavement:

...I sit
watching my dad –
his gentle hands
tracing this special day
through his other life,
through his memory.

Harry is often depicted as an observer, and it is the life around Harry that brings him into focus, rather than its being a backdrop to his activities. Just as Harry’s centrality to the narrative is displaced by the energies of the surrounding natural and social worlds, his voice is hesitant and reserved. More important to the narrative than the first-person singular, though, is the first-person plural – a ‘we’ made up of Harry and his brother Keith. Harry is named after magician and stunt artist and escapologist Harry Houdini:

who could escape
from boxes locked with chains,
under water,
and who went over waterfalls
in wooden barrels
and walked away.

Harry hopes one day to be another kind of ‘escape artist’, but for now tends to escape from the story, focusing instead on others’ lives. The first mention of ‘my brother Keith and me’ in an early poem ‘The scrapheap’ prefigures a refrain of ‘Keith and me’, and the brothers’ development is yoked together through their sharing of key experiences.

The story of the boys’ lives is revealed gradually, even obliquely. Harry remembers key shaping incidents through the poems. His narrative, a kind of retrospective internal monologue, drifts along quietly until the sharp flinch of lines that reveal in honed fragments the painful events of his life, especially the death of his mother when he was seven and Keith six. The poems work the way memory does, or rivers do, meandering, slowing down, speeding up, occasionally flooding. The line movement follows this pattern, proceeding phrase by phrase, line by line, until lines overflow, spilling into the next in enjambment that expresses emotional experience not easily contained.

The first reference to Harry’s and Keith’s mother’s death comes in the first poem, ‘The colour of my town’, which frames the work and evokes the town and its characters in terms of colours:

Red
was Johnny Barlow
with his lightning fists
that drew blood in a blur.

For Harry, green:

was my dad’s handkerchief,
ironed,
pressed into the pocket
above his heart;
a box of handkerchiefs
Mum gave him on his birthday
two weeks before she died.

This glancing reference to her death exemplifies the way details are embedded in the poems and brought into focus fleetingly, as though Harry’s memory touches on, then shies away from, the pain. The poem’s rainbow ends with ‘white’:

was Mum’s nightgown,
the chalk Miss Carter used
to write my name,
hospital sheets,
and the colour of Linda’s cross.

(Boyds Mills Press, 2006)The mundane image of classroom chalk is framed by references to the two formative tragic events of Harry’s childhood: his mother’s death and that of Linda, who drowns at thirteen when the river floods. In primary school, Linda’s friendship offers Harry the possibility of consolation and creativity. When he is mocked for the dull exterior of his family home, brushed brown with sump oil rather than painted, Linda comes to school the next day ‘with my favourite orange cake – / two slices’. She also brings a story she has written about a house painted dull brown, and the storm that washes away its modest exterior ‘to reveal a house / coated in gold, / glistening / like a palace’.

Earlier, the seven-year-old Linda has knocked quietly on the front door, bringing the same cake and a card depicting ‘my mum / in heaven, with God, / and the angels, / all in pink and blue crayon’. Every night for a week, the young Harry eats two slices of cake, which take him away from his mother:

gone a week,
and Dad,
alone in the kitchen,
stirring his tea
until it was cold in the cup;
stirring, around and around

Linda demonstrates the courage of reaching out, and expressing affection and connection, as well as the transformative power of narrative. Later, Harry visits the white cross planted by the river where Linda was discovered, rising ‘in a ghost of bubbles’ from ‘under a jam of logs’. While others avoid the place, Harry finds consolation in remembering Linda and continuing their conversation, articulating a nascent transformative narrative:

Linda,
I want to learn enough
to find the quickest way out,
and I promise
when I leave
I won’t come back,
not for a long time.

Harry only knows traumatic departures, though – his mother’s, Linda’s, and that of Miss Spencer, the school’s eighteen-year-old secretary, with whom Harry is infatuated, and whose pregnancy forces her to leave town. When twenty-two-year-old neighbour Wayne Barlow brings home a stream of young women, Keith and Harry hide and look through the window, learning ‘the weight of a breast, / the curve of a hip, / the weird rhythms and sounds / naked bodies make’.

This creepy voyeurism collapses when Wayne brings home Eve Spencer. Suddenly, a woman might be more than a weighed breast and moving hip. Seeing one of Wayne’s conquests as a subject, rather than an object to be ogled, Harry glimpses the unfair treatment of women in the patriarchal culture he has previously never questioned.

Before Wayne, Harry’s images of love have been of his father’s ceaseless vigil and, before that, Friday nights when his parents’ excitement and delight as the working week ended and Friday evening danced ‘gently into view’. When a storm arrives and ‘gutters overflow / and yards become pools, /streets becomes rivers’ and everyone ‘watches the banks / of the big river / with nervous eyes, / remembering’. Next day, Harry enacts his own vigil, visiting Linda’s riverside white cross:

I wander around
amongst the flattened weeds,
ragged willows,
and the stinking mud.
I find dead fish,
empty bottles,
and somebody’s lawn mower.

Harry cries, his moment of emotional flooding apt in the damaged and abject landscape, but the image of the lawn mower twists the scene away from pathos. While Harry’s father’s devotion is seen by his sons as exemplary, Harry’s own embodies a kind of stasis.

How to leave the small town, and what to become, are questions Harry revisits with Claire Honey, a girl who swims in the river and shares her chocolate ice cream with him, celebrating the pouring rain as ‘like God starting again’, adding: ‘It’s good to start again. / Don’t you think, Harry?’ With Claire, eventually, Harry is prepared to dive into the future:

I take off my shirt,
walk along the bank
to where the rope is tied
to the old rivergum.
I grab the rope tightly,
take a running jump,
and let go.

The early poems in by the river function like expository chapters in a novel, establishing voice, characters, and key narrative scaffolding. After the development of the story through episodic poetic slices as sensual as Hodby watermelon, the narrative arcs back, like the river, to wrap things up. As Harry recognises the ‘part inside; / the good part’ of himself that has been formed by his father’s example, he begins to take steps that will lead to his departure, observing, once more, the ritual of dividing the watermelon in three, savouring at last, the textures and vitality of this shared moment ‘one deliberate bite at a time’.

Referenced works:

1. Vicars, James and Louis Yve, 'Poetry as Bull-Leaping', New England Review, no.4, Spring 1996, 10.

2. Porter, Dorothy, 'It's too hard to write good – I'd rather write bad', Australian Humanities Review

3. Porter, Dorothy, The Monkey's Mask, Pan Macmillan (2004)

Garry Disher is an author of crime fiction and children’s literature.

He graduated with a Masters degree in Australian History at Monash University, and was awarded a creative writing fellowship to Stanford University in California. On his return to Melbourne, he taught creative writing. He has published over fifty books including novels, crime thrillers, fiction for children and young adults, creative writing handbooks, and Australian History textbooks. He was the winner of the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature at the NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 1999 for The Divine Wind (1999). He also won the German Crime Prize twice, and two Ned Kelly Best Crime novel awards for Chain of Evidence (2007) and Wyatt (2010).

He currently lives on the Mornington Peninsula, south-east of Melbourne.

Reading Australia

Alice Pung has written on The Divine Wind (1999) for ABR as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read her essay

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: The Divine Wind (1999)

Open Page with Garry Disher – ABR December 2013– January 2014, issue no. 357

Ray Casin reviews 'Bitter Wash Road' by Garry Disher – ABR December 2013– January 2014, issue no. 357

‘A divine tale of love, loyalty, and betrayal’ The Age, 19 June 2002

A generation living in peacetime is inclined to devalue the identity and place of soldiers. In Australia, active soldiers have been maligned as meddlesome interlopers in foreign affairs (if they are our soldiers) or combatant terrorists (if they are not). In his book Secret Men’s Business (1998), John Marsden wrote that going to war used to be seen as a marker of adulthood. We forget that war was once how individual personality and collective character was formed. We forget that many of our compatriots came here because of war, that there are former child soldiers living in Australia, and that literature and the armed forces didn’t always occupy such opposing worlds.

The Divine Wind is a war story and an adventure story, but it is told by a protagonist who stays put, right at the centre of a metaphorical and literal cyclone. With his bad leg, all Hart Penrose can do is rotate in circles towards the action, striving for but never quite effecting any of the grandiose deeds he believes will make him a man. His dad is a pearler, his sister a nurse, his friend a soldier. Not only is he stationary in a world swirling with purposeful human activity; but he is also in love with the ‘enemy’ of the time, a woman named Mitsy Sennosuke.

Before readers dismiss our narrator as a swooning Keats relocated to the sweltering antipodes, they need to know he is also a reluctant writer. Such characters make the best literary narrators. They do not have an arsenal of words or know how to be clever with them. They linger over facts and descriptions of places, clutching at emotions, while unintentionally revealing raw truths. Hart’s disability has made him a circumstantial philosopher: he watches and waits, thinks and writes.

Geographically, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, white people felt profoundly isolated and vulnerable in Broome. Their high status was scant consolation when they were vastly outnumbered by coloured people: the Japanese, ‘Malays, Manilamen and Koepangers’, all simmering in a cultural melting pot of increasingly hot days and imminent war. In the 1920s, Broome had around 5,000 inhabitants, only 900 of them white. Broome had segregated cinemas, a Register of Aliens, and a clear but unofficial racial hierarchy. Yet it was also a mythologised place in the literature of the time, which Hart reads with wry scepticism:

According to these stories, no-one knew the sacrifices we made, as we hung on up there, in Unknown Australia, in the Never Never, in the Great Unfenced, before the age of hurry-up. We were the true Australians, in a country going begging, ruled by governments, cities and absentee landlords who knew nothing and cared less about resource development, soil erosion and the teeming threat of Asia, which sat right on our back doorstep, waiting, waiting ...

The Divine Wind by Garry Disher (1998, Hodder Headline)

Buy this bookThe characters in The Divine Wind are first and foremost real frontiersmen: from Zeke the pearl diver, with his ascetic face and tough, scarred body, to Derby Boxer, the black stockman; from Mike Penrose with his pearling fleet to Alice Penrose and Mitsy, two young women who venture into cyclones and war zones. Arnold Zable uses the term ‘feral vitality’ to describe survivors of horrors beyond their control, and the reader gets the sense that this hotchpotch of races and cultures was united by their battle against the enemy and the elements. In Broome, the land, sea, and sky can suddenly become sites of death and destruction, especially during wartime.

However, the one group that is treated as if they have no sense of self-agency is the indigenous Australians. Disher spares no sensitivities in recounting the indignities of the past and the cruelty of station owners towards the local indigenous population: ‘Carl didn’t force his recalcitrant black stockmen to dress in women’s clothes and do women’s work. If the blacks got “cheeky” he might dock their wages but never chain them down on a corrugated iron roof ... He didn’t lay on black velvet in the visitor’s quarters, something that some managers did for company men visiting from London.’ But Carl Venning is just as awful in his neglect of the black stockmen.

In 1930s Broome, certain races cooperated to achieve livelihood goals – pearling and farming – in clearly-defined employer–employee relationships. Sometimes, these relationships caused tension when power imbalances were openly acknowledged instead of remaining hidden in servile gratitude. When Alice tells Mitsy to go back to Japan, Mitsy retorts: ‘I would if your father paid my father more.’ Hart observes: ‘That’s what happens between friends, you rub too closely sometimes and the friction ignites the hidden grievances.’ On the whole, the friends remain a close trio; that is, until the Japanese bomb Broome.

From this point on, the novel could have descended into a didactic tale of learning to tolerate difference, of not betraying your friends, of remembering past good deeds – Mitsy’s father once saved Hart’s life after all. But what elevates The Divine Wind from a good yarn to a masterpiece of character development is that Disher doesn’t do this. The poet Robert Cording wrote this about poetry, which could easily be transposed to fiction:

The poem has to feel ... as if there is a real person struggling with real experiences that will not yield some handy lesson, but nevertheless are not entirely without meaning. The voice that convinces will always be the voice of the individual, not as a spokesperson for this or that idea.

Many Young Adult writers get it wrong because of the tyranny of good intentions. In representing refugees or war, they err on the side of righteousness, portraying people of colour as admirable victims, investing them, grudgingly, with as few flaws as possible. With bolder authors like Disher, Marsden, Libby Hathorn, Robin Klein, and James Maloney – and more recently, Clare Atkins – the character comes first. As a prerequisite they have done their extensive research; they are not bumbling around with stereotypes. They also trust their adolescent readers to have a more nuanced understanding of character development than the ‘heroes and villains’ mentality that informs much Young Adult literature. I remember reading Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993) and recognising the character Lee – not because he was Asian, but because he did not ‘do’ Asian-ness. He did survival, as did all of his friends.

Mitsy’s feelings are a mystery to Hart. He doesn’t even know why he loves her. She is not physically beautiful, and she can be bull-headed and unforgiving, a young Asian nurse without the endearing bedside manner usually associated with such caricatures. While washing Hart, she even laughs at his manhood. Yet he still loves her. For long periods she sequesters herself away from Hart, as well as from her best friend, Hart’s sister Alice. When she tells Hart that she must give up nursing because her mother needs her, you get the strong sense that she exists as a separate character outside his own pinings and imaginings.

The Divine Wind by Garry Disher (2002, Hachette Childrens Books)

Buy this bookDisher writes that teenage girls initially hate Mitsy because she is ‘cold’ and stony towards the protagonist. He asks them to ‘step outside of [their] skin and into hers, and consider the pressure she’s under’. This important self-interrogation does not happen if minority characters are two-dimensionally easy to love. Mitsy’s Japanese-ness does not define her, but nor does her Australian-ness: ‘Mitsy represented a new generation. Born and educated in Broome.’ Mitsy is described as ‘sly’, but a few pages later Hart also describes his sister Alice as ‘sly.’ Slyness in this case is not synonymous with Orientalism but with commendable survival skills, the formation of the frontier character. Mitsy suffers but is never pitiable. She is defensive, never cruel.

Hart realises that in his powerlessness against circumstance he can be both self-pitying and mean-spirited. Yet his redeeming quality is his acute awareness of his fallibilities: his lack of action, his faltering ways, even his petty resentment of his able-bodied friend, Jamie Kilian: ‘I envied him, I was jealous, I pitied myself. Perhaps that’s why I decided not to go out to the aerodrome with Alice to say goodbye. I didn’t want to witness the bounce in his step.’

It is Jamie, who represents the continuity of the Anzac legend, goes to war, courts Mitsy, and becomes the object of Hart’s envy. When drafting The Divine Wind, Disher came across an account of an Australian army surgeon whose best friend was looking for a way to get them both to safety, but in the end left without telling him. The surgeon ended up as a Japanese prisoner of war. ‘I’d never been impressed by Australians’ fond notions of the national character,’ Disher states, ‘We like to think we’re brave, resourceful, loyal to our mates, democratic, egalitarian ... and here was a betrayal of mateship ... It was a powerful betrayal.’

As racial tensions escalate in Broome, so do Hart’s feelings towards Mitsy:

How can you love and hate someone at the same time? How can you continue to want them, and yet despise them? It has happened to all of us, yet when it first happens there is nothing more hurtful and confusing ... we are ... the worst of ourselves, the side we’re scarcely aware of.

With deceptively simple sentences replete with feeling, Hart reflects that even when Derby Boxer tells Hart and his father that they were good people, ‘I didn’t feel that there was much goodness in me.’ This is the mark of a character who understands morality beyond the simple accumulation of good or bad deeds, a young man with a deep understanding of how powerless the individual can be against circumstance.

Perhaps Hart’s feelings are conflicted because he is also struggling with an underlying and unacknowledged resentment of Mitsy’s defiance in the face of adversity. When the police and soldiers come, she refuses to let them look in her house, even though she has nothing to hide. When the Japanese bomb Broome, she declares: ‘We need to get down to the harbour. There’ll be people in the water, people dying.’ She ventures onto the beach to put her nursing training to good use, despite racist hostility and impending internment. Like her friend Alice, she does what is right, not what is easy.

The Divine Wind by Garry Disher (2004, Scholastic Paperbacks)

Buy this bookYet Hart’s admiration of Mitsy is clear, as he joins her in the search and rescue in the most powerful chapter of the book, ‘The Divine Wind’. Hart comes to a reckoning of all that he is and what he will become. He defines Mitsy for all of us, once and for all, when he grabs and yells at the harbour master who is denying her the medical kit to save lives: ‘Don’t be so stupid. She’s a nurse. She’s lived here all her life, you useless bastard.’

Nonetheless, our narrator is not a straightforward hero. He may have saved lives, but in a pivotal scene he briefly reveals a decision he might have made that would have had no consequences for anyone other than the victim, himself, and his own conscience. For once, Hart does not do what comes easily. He does what is right. In the end, Hart learns to abandon his self-absorption and to accept patience. He thinks about his mother and realises that ‘she understood what it is to wait for something to change, just as I’m waiting now, waiting for Mitsy to come back to me’.

Garry Disher writes that he is proud of the powerful opening lines of his book, but for me the ending remains more resonant, almost two decades later. It is not a neat conclusion; some publishers today might ask him to change such a final sentence, to make it less depressing. Yet the reality is that war is depressing, self-abnegating, and destructive. People don’t just turn into their better selves because of adversity. It is a choice, and sometimes suffering does not make a person stronger. The concluding paragraph was a culmination of Hart’s character and resilience; and I feel vindicated by Disher’s own explanation of his ending:

He’s not going to back away. It’s not a dramatic or heroic reversal, but quietly hopeful. He says, ‘We may not make it,’ meaning he knows the terrible pressures he faces now, in post-war Australia, but is willing to give it a go.

Referenced works:

Secret Men's Business, Manhood: The big gig (1998) by John Marsden, Pan Macmillan

Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993) by John Marsden, Pan Macmillan

A.J. Betts is a Perth-based author, teacher, and public speaker. Her published works include ShutterSpeed (2008), Wavelength (2010), and Zac and Mia (2013) which won the Text Prize for young Adult and Children’s Writing in 2012 and the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature at the NSW Premier Literary Awards in 2014.

Reading Australia

Agnes Nieuwenhuizen has written on Zac and Mia (2013) for ABR as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read her essay

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: Zac and Mia (2013)

A.J. Betts’s website: www.ajbetts.com

'Interview with A.J. Betts' – Hypable, 2 September 2014

Maya Linden reviews Zac and Mia by A.J.Betts – ABR, November 2013, issue no.356

'Zac and Mia by A.J. Betts - review' – The Guardian, 8 November 2014

Markus Zusak is an Australian writer of German and Austrian descent. He is the author of six books including a number of international best-sellers.

He pursued a teaching degree at the University of Sydney before becoming a professional author. His first three books The Underdog (1999), Fighting Reuben Wolfe (2000), and When Dogs Cry (2001) formed a trilogy centred on two brothers of the working-class Wofle family. The latter two novels received the CBCA Children’s Book of the Year Awards in 2001 and 2002 respectively.

The Messenger followed in 2002, and won the 2003 Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. His most successful novel to date is The Book Thief (2005), which won the Kathleen Mitchell Award in 2006 and the Michael L. Printz Honor in 2007. It has been published in more than thirty languages and has been adapted into a film starring Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson (2013).

Markus Zusak lives in Sydney, Australia.

Reading Australia

Felicity Castagna has written on The Messenger (2002) for ABR as part of the Reading Australia project. Click here to read her essay

Further Reading and Links

Reading Australia teaching resources: The Messenger (2002)

Markus Zusak on Twitter: @Markus_Zusak

Markus Zusak’s blog

In the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s there was a flurry of what were called ‘single issue’ or ‘problem’ novels for teenagers. The books focused on problems or issues that frequently confronted teenagers, such as bullying, anorexia, child abuse, depression, suicide, unplanned pregnancies, struggles over friendships, puberty, divorce, and more. These were indeed matters faced by young people, and the rationale was that by reading about others in similar situations, teenagers would feel less alone and might also find ways of coping. ‘Reading novels dealing with social and personal problems is a safe way to bring these issues into focus and give adolescents a chance to talk about their own experiences or relate their own lives to what others have gone through’ (Diana Hodge, The Conversation, 13 June 2014). There is a whiff of bibliotherapy (books and reading as therapy) in this view which seems to undermine the notion of reading and evaluating books for their literary merit.

This subgenre was most widespread in the United States, with Judy Blume probably the most prolific and popular proponent. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) features a young girl asking for help from a higher being about pressing issues such as buying her first bra and having her first period. Like many of Blume’s books, it was criticised for tackling taboo topics and for being too frank. Her most frequently banned book, for somewhat older readers, was Forever (1975), a mildly explicit exploration of a first sexual encounter and, most contentiously, of the use of contraception by the girl.

Judy Blume sold some eighty-two million books, was widely translated, and was also hugely popular in Australia. Blume was clearly speaking directly to a large and receptive audience of young people aged twelve and up – perhaps even younger, as the books were very easy to read. However, while she was frequently challenged for her outspokenness and determination to explore issues, her often simplistic approach to her themes and characters, and her general lack of depth or sophistication were rarely called in to question. The focus was largely on the issue rather than on characters or character development. Should buying a first bra be a matter of such careful and painful consideration? Few of her characters were allowed to think beyond themselves and their immediate concerns. Identity and solving an apparently significant problem in a socially acceptable way were central.

During this period, several Australian, European, and US writers produced books on contentious topics. One early translation from Swedish was Gunnel Beckman’s Mia Alone (1978), about a young teenager who realises that only she can make the difficult decision about whether to have an abortion or not. Most of these books were devoured by girls, though teachers and librarians knew that boys read many of them secretly. Some confessed that the books gave them much needed insights into the mysteries of how girls thought and felt.

John Marsden surged on to the Australian scene in 1987 with his multi-award winning So Much to Tell You. He followed this with stories showing young people battling violence, authority, and loveless, isolated lives in books such as Letters from the Inside, Checkers, and Dear Miffy, the latter probably his most confronting and disturbing book. With these books Marsden was at times lumped in with the writers of problem novels. However, his books focused on society and how it viewed and treated young people and how in turn those teenagers observed their world and dealt with what they faced. The focus was not simply on the ‘issue’ or a specific problem. Furthermore, the language and scenarios were much more complex and nuanced.

Zac and Mia (2013, Text Publishing)

Buy this bookIt is into this much-changed, more open, and far more sophisticated reading environment that A.J. Betts and others have stepped. It is important to locate Betts amongst some other fine Australian writers of realistic fiction like David Metzenthen, Maureen McCarthy, Jaclyn Moriarty, J.C. Burke, Cath Crowley, Will Kostakis, Scot Gardner, Sonya Hartnett, Melina Marchetta, Lili Wilkinson, Simone Howell, Julia Lawrinson, Vikki Wakefield, Fiona Wood, and Clare Zorn. These contemporary writers create works that are varied, challenging, stimulating, and complex.

On a cursory look, Zac & Mia (2013) could be mistaken for an ‘issues’ book; one about teenagers with cancer. However, to view the book in those terms would be reductive and do a disservice to Betts and her book. Betts has written: ‘When I began to work on Zac & Mia, I hadn’t chosen to write about cancer ... I was toying with two separate ideas: love and isolation’ (Viewpoint). Zac is in isolation following a bone marrow transplant after chemotherapy failed to cure his leukaemia. Mia has just been admitted to the room next door in the adult oncology ward, with osteosarcoma (a cancerous growth) on her ankle. The teenagers make their first tentative contact by tapping on the wall of their adjoining rooms. Betts has said the image of two hands meeting on either side of a hospital wall was what sparked this story, which took her some four years to write and refine. Betts is interested in how her two main characters view and deal with their situations; how they see themselves and their future; how they cope with adversity; how they see their place in the world and amongst their peers; how they view their bodies at different stages of treatment; how their very different families and family circumstances affect their lives; how they behave and cope – or don’t; and how from this situation an unlikely friendship and even love might develop.

How characters change and perhaps mature is an important feature of Young Adult – and adult – fiction. Betts uses a three-part structure in Zac & Mia to highlight the significant, subtle, and often unexpected shifts in her two protagonists’ situations, states of mind, attitudes, and moods. Perhaps the most notable and sophisticated achievement of the book is how deftly Betts manages these shifts. The middle part of the book gives us the alternating voices of Zac and Mia, while the third part is told from Mia’s point of view. However, as the novel is bookended by Zac’s voice he may be seen as the more important character. Betts’s ability to capture and sustain the voices of these two fragile teenagers is remarkable as is her facility with snappy, authentic, convincing dialogue.

In the first section, we get Zac’s perspective but also his view of Mia, as far as he can glean despite their minimal contact. The mother and daughter (Zac assumes it is a mother and daughter) seem at odds, angry. Zac appears calm, articulate, smart, level-headed, with a good understanding of his current state of health and prognosis for the future. His tone is often wry and self-deprecating. He copes partly by tracking through ‘the maze of blogs and forums’ on cancer and arming himself with statistics about the stages and outcomes of his and other types of cancer. He tends to do all this at around 3 a.m., when his ever-present mother is dozing, but he is unable to sleep.

Google tells me there are over 742 million sites on cancer. Almost 8 million are about leukaemia; 6 million on acute myeloid leukaemia. If I google ‘cancer survival rate’ there are over 18 million sites offering me numbers, odds and percentages. I don’t need to read them: I know most of the stats by heart.

On YouTube, the word ‘cancer’ leads to 4.6 million videos. Of these, 20,000 are from bone marrow transplant patients like me, stuck in isolation ... The world is turning and thousands of people are awake, updating their posts on the bookmarked sites I trawl through. I’ve come to know these people better than my mates. I can understand their feelings better than my own ... I track their treatment, their side effects and successes. And I keep a tally of the losses ...

Then I hear the flush of the toilet next door.

The new girl and I have one thing in common at least.

This section reveals much about the ways Betts builds her characters and her narrative, but also how she packs in extensive research and information without interrupting the flow with blocks of author-imparted facts. We come to understand not only what Zac is facing but how he does this. He clearly has a supportive family. Through his obsession with statistics and with Emma Watson, a star of the Harry Potter films, Betts injects some much-needed lightness and humour. The reader lives through Zac’s day-to-day experiences with him – and those of his mother, the hospital staff and others, including Cam, an adult patient who does not survive. From the other side of the wall and later via texts, Mia’s initial ignorance and lack of understanding or empathy align us with Zac, though her honesty, irritability, and bluntness prove to be an acerbic counterpoint to Zac’s apparently unfailing equanimity. Zac appears to have a much wider knowledge of the world. We begin to get to know Mia through this contrast:

Mia: What happens to someones facebook when they die?
Zac: I don’t know
Mia: Where do the profiles of dead people go?
Zac: U’ll have to ask Zuckerberg.
Mia: Who?

Towards the end of the book, Zac wonders:

Why do I like Mia?

I like that she’s tough on me, knowing I can handle it. She doesn’t tiptoe around the bad stuff or hide what’s going on in her head. If she feels something she says so, she shows it. She says and does all the things others hold back. She’s not predictable or safe. She doesn’t talk bullshit, the way most other girls do. She’s alive, despite everything, kicking and screaming and swearing. Fighting still.

Perhaps what is most worth exploring in Zac & Mia is the nature and extent of Mia’s transformation and how, as she grows stronger physically and mentally and learns to accept her situation, she is in turn able to help Zac face his parlous future. However, does Mia change too quickly and drastically? And does her much-improved relationship with her mother happen too rapidly? Is all this a little too easy? Is it convincing?

Zac and Mia (2014, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Buy this bookAnd how does A.J. Betts know so much about cancer, various treatment regimes, and the details of life in cancer hospitals? Betts has written: ‘Since 2004, I’ve been working as an English teacher with Hospital School Services in Perth. I’ve met hundreds of amazing teenagers, particularly on the adolescent oncology ward’ (Viewpoint). To this insider knowledge Betts has added prodigious amounts of research, though this never overwhelms her story.

In the third section of the book, Mia is back in hospital. She has had a wild and gruelling time after she fled after the amputation of her lower limb. Here, Betts confronts a very difficult ethical and moral question. Should Mia have been asked to agree to the amputation?

But I didn’t get that choice. My mother signed the form while I was on the operating table, the tumour holding tight to the artery it had wrapped itself around. ‘We had to act immediately,’ surgeons told me later.’An excision and bone graft were no longer practicable.’ Consent was needed. They didn’t wake me up; they handed my mother a pen. She signed her name and ruined my life.

Melodramatic? Perhaps. But she is understandably furious and distraught, and her sense of self has taken a battering. She was (still is) a pretty girl who relied on her looks for attention from boys and girls. Her deb dress is hanging at home ready. ‘Without my looks, what’s left? I’m not smart, or kind, or talented, or creative, or funny, or brave. I’m nothing.’ Betts leaves it to the reader (and to Zac and his family, and eventually to Mia’s mother) to test these assumptions. Now neither her mother nor her boyfriend nor her best friend seem able to understand, accept, or cope. Her mother had said: ‘Sort it out or leave.’ Mia needs more treatment; her wound becomes infected, but all she wants to do is escape. With her blonde wig, temporary ill-fitting prosthetic, crutches, and fragile physical and mental states, she steals, lies, and acts increasingly irrationally until she runs out of money and options and inevitably ends up at Zac’s home, The Good Olive! Olive Oil and Petting Farm. This is a country haven and the home of a loving, extended family. The contrast with Mia’s circumstances is stark. Zac tries to help, but he is out of his depth and it his older, very pregnant sister, Bec, who takes Mia in to her home next door and provides her with the space and time to come to her senses, regain some equilibrium, and eventually accept the treatment she needs. Zac/Betts sum up Mia’s initial situation beautifully: ‘Whatever’s happened to Mia, it’s emptied her. It’s left behind a girl with fake hair, fake plans, and nowhere in the world she actually wants to be.’

The story draws to its quiet and uncertain conclusion as Zac reluctantly prepares for another bone marrow transplant after lying and hiding via an ingenious ruse. Now it is Mia who drags Zac out of his depression and becomes the voice of hope and reason. Betts has written: ‘As the characters developed I became obsessed with three questions: What is courage? What is beauty? What is love?’ (Viewpoint). So we have a story of friendship and love and understanding that evolved from the plight of two initially very different young people whose lives have affected and changed others too.

Betts’s first novel, Shutterspeed (2008), a fast-paced story featuring photography and motorbikes, was aimed at teenage boys. It is about a boy who is bored, lost, and whose single father is distant. Wavelength (2010) presents Oliver, stressed about his forthcoming Year Twelve exams. When sent to stay with his father, he finds himself, much to his annoyance, in close proximity to residents in an aged care home who then, unexpectedly, offer him the gift of many new ways of seeing life. All three books derive their power and interest from innovative structures, strong characterisation, tight plotting, considerable authorial insight, and vivid settings – all in Western Australia. Zac & Mia, Betts’s third book, takes her writng to new heights. It was the winner of the Text Prize for an unpublished manuscript and this win gained her publication with Text Publishing, a major Australian independent publisher.

There have been inevitable comparisons with John Green’s best-selling The Fault in Our Stars (2012), also about two young people dealing with cancer. Zac could tell us how statistically probable two (only two?) such publications would be. Both are well worth reading. Zac & Mia has been translated into about a dozen languages and has found admiring audiences all over the world. The influential US Kirkus Reviews concluded its appraisal of Zac & Mia: ‘It’s the healing powers of friendship, love and family that make this funny-yet-philosophical tale of brutal teen illness stand out.’ It is a deeply affecting (but never sentimental), dramatic and sparklingly told story, with universal interest and appeal.

Referenced works:

Beckman, Gunnell (1973) Mia Alone, translated by Joan Tate (1978), Bantam Doubleday

Blume, Judy (1970) Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Bradbury Press

Blume, Judy (1975) Forever, Bradbury Press

'Contemporary Cool in Young Adult Fiction' by Joy Lawn, The Australian, 29 March 2014

Marsden, John (1987) So Much to Tell You, Joy Street Books

Marsden, John (1992) Letters from the Inside, Pan Macmillan

Marsden, John (1996) Checkers, Houghton Mifflin

Marsden, John (1997) Dear Miffy, Pan Macmillan

On books for young adults, Viewpoint, vol. 21, no 4, Summer 2014

'Young adult fiction’s dark themes give the hope to cope' by Diana Hodge, The Conversation, 13 June 2014

Zac and Mia by A.J. Betts, Kirkus Reviews, August 1 2014

The underlying theme in Marcus Zusak’s novels is ordinariness. Whether he is writing from the perspective of two working class-brothers struggling to get noticed for their boxing abilities in Fighting Ruben Wolfe (2000), or from that of Ed in The Messenger (2002) – ‘the epitome of ordinariness’ – the theme looms in complex ways over his writings. Even a character such as Death in his best-known work, The Book Thief (2005), is depicted as facing the same mundane issues as most human beings: he is easily distracted, he can’t make up his mind, he feels overwhelmed by his demanding work.

This focus is also what makes Zusak’s work so fundamentally Australian, even when set overseas. Ordinariness encompasses so many prominent cultural tropes in Australian art and literature: the underdog, the loser, the anti-hero, the working-class hero, the woman maligned and forgotten in a harsh landscape. All of these figures function in a multiplicity of ways in The Messenger, against a suburban backdrop, which comes with its own cultural connotations of inertia, entrapment, and conformity. From here the reader is taken on a journey with Ed, who discovers that the smallest things are the most significant and that the most ordinary people are the most extraordinary.

At the beginning of The Messenger, Ed declares himself to be a failure at most things, including sex, friendship, and being a dutiful son: ‘I’d been taking stock of my life ... No real career. No respect in the community. Nothing.’ Being average, for Ed, does not seem to lie in comparison with others so much as in a refusal to participate in elaborate interpretations of his own life. To pass as average is to avoid the need for abstract explanations of what one is or does. Ed’s representation of himself as typical, average, and boring typifies the way his life is not to be taken as representative of large social structures or processes, but to be understood at a more immediate level, simply for what it is. The way Ed narrates his story as the reader gets to know him helps Zusak to establish him as an uncomplicated character. For example, this is how Ed describes himself:

I cook.

I eat.
I wash but I rarely iron.
I live in the past and believe that Cindy Crawford is by far the best supermodel.
That’s my life.

The prose consists of simple sentences, largely unadorned by adverbs or adjectives. The repetition of the personal pronoun ‘I’ with no reference to how that ‘I’ interacts with the objects or people in its life reinforces an image of a simple, unintrospective life. This is reinforced by Zusak’s lineation, primarily composed of one sentence per line. This creates a border of blank space on each page, reinforcing what Ed’s life is about – not much.

The Messenger by Markus Zusak (2002, Pan MacMillan Australia)

Buy this bookAs the story unfolds, Ed accidentally foils a bank robbery and the local newspapers exaggerate his heroism. Shortly after, he begins to receive playing cards from an unknown source. On them are cryptic messages which lead him to the people he has been sent to help. The Ace of Diamonds appears first in his mailbox. On the card someone has written three times and addresses. When Ed visits each of them he finds someone in need: a woman who is raped nightly by her husband; a lonely, senile woman; and a young girl who needs to be reminded of the joy she takes in running. Thus begins Ed’s reluctant journey into an elevated consciousness in which he is forced to consider what others require to live more meaningful and fulfilled lives and thus to consider how he can do the same.

The Messenger is a deeply moral work which provokes the reader to consider the judgments they make about strangers, and to contemplate the small acts of kindness that can have profound effects on their lives. Zusak seems to suggest that we must learn to observe the ‘small things that are big’, a phrase Ed uses towards the end of the book. Whenever Ed is sent out to help someone new, he spends time watching people. He is learning to observe, and this makes him a better human being. He realises that Angie Carusso, a single mother with three children, needs an ice cream of her own to remind herself of life’s small pleasures, and that a struggling family that has recently moved into town needs someone like Ed to remind them that they are not alone.

This message is enforced by the language of the text which, in its stripped-back simplicity, paradoxically forces the reader to consider the complexity of the images being presented. When Ed visits Father Riley’s battered church, he sits in a pew trying to determine why the latest playing card he received has directed him there. The scene is described through a simple accumulation of images, all of which represent silence and inaction:

When ten o’clock strikes, the bells of the church take possession of the congregation, and now, everyone – the kids, the powdered ladies with handbags, the drunks, the teenagers and the same people who are there week-in week-out – all fall down in silence.

The father.
Walks out.
He walks out and everyone waits, for the words
[...]
There are no other words yet.
No prayers.

The Messenger by Markus Zusak (2005, Knopf books for young readers)

Buy this bookA space with ‘no words’ is a reoccurring motif in the book. Here, Zusak draws our attention to the things that are often overlooked because of the human tendency to seek meaning in speech and action. These frequent pauses create an intense atmosphere in the scene. It opens with a long sentence which employs the dash to force us to concentrate on the images of the type of people we often fail to observe (‘drunks’, ‘powdered ladies’, etc.). The longer pauses created through the one-sentence paragraphs (‘The Father.’ ‘Walks out’) places the reader in the position of Father Riley’s motley crew of parishioners, whose strong ties to their priest are evident in the way they allow him to inhabit the space of his church by paying him more attention than they devote to their own neglected lives. Ed’s burgeoning awareness of his surroundings is also represented through his narration, which, over the course of the novel, increases in its level of detail and its complex layering of multiple images.

The rhythm and pace echo the reality of the quiet suburban lives depicted in this book. The Messenger bears many of the hallmarks of the crime and thriller genre; there is the mystery of who is leaving the playing cards for Ed and why they want him to intervene in so many lives, as well as the constant threat of criminal thugs who show up uninvited at his house to make sure he is carrying out his job, as well as the many false climaxes and clues which lead the reader towards false conclusions. But the text also works against these conventions. The criminals aren’t so threatening; they bring him meat pies and sit on his couch cracking jokes. When Ed takes a gun to shoot the abusive husband, he ends up firing into the air instead; he is no hard-boiled criminal either. Unlike traditional thrillers, which gain pace towards the end, The Messenger slows down, becomes more contemplative and joyful in tone, so that when Ed and Marv daub graffiti in order to advertise the fact that there will be free beer at Father Riley’s next service, their escape from the scene of the crime reads:

Our footsteps run and I don’t want them to end. I want to run and laugh and feel like this forever. I want to avoid any awkward moment when the realness of reality sticks its fork into our flesh, leaving us standing there together. I want to stay here in this moment and never go other places, where we don’t know what to say or do.

The irony here is that this is the first time in the book when Ed knows precisely what to say and do. He says nothing and does not try to make sense of the moment, but rather revels in the joy of the incredible here and now. His ‘footsteps run’; they are not a part of his awkward physical self which he dislikes so much. He doesn’t need to ‘go to other places’, like his siblings and friends who have sought social and economic advancement by leaving a dying suburb on the edges of town. The reality of leading a life so painful that it is represented through the metaphor of sticking ‘a fork into flesh’ dissolves into a blissful moment.

Towards the end of the book, the playing cards lead Ed away from intersections with the lives of people he does not know, towards the lives of his friends and family, and ultimately himself. When he takes the time to observe and question the lives of his friends Marv, Richie, and Audrey, he discovers that each of them is emotionally vulnerable, with a complex interior life he has failed to notice before, as they all appeared so tough, confident, and incapable of self-introspection. This realisation that the people he thought himself closest to have been presenting false exteriors paves the way for his growing understanding of the fact that his family, who have done so much to determine his negative ideas, have entrapped him in a false image of himself and his potential.

The Messenger by Markus Zusak (2013, PanMacMillan)

Buy this bookOne of the final playing cards leads Ed to a restaurant where he observes his mother on a date with a man with whom she may or may not have been having an affair before his alcoholic, loving father died. ‘There’s my ma, fifty-odd years old, high-tailing around town with some guy- while I sit here, in the prime of my youth, completely and utterly alone. I shake my head. At myself.’ Ed’s observations of his mother here are typical of his reactions to her constant demeaning of him throughout the book. His judgements of her poor behaviour are directly reflected back at himself. The fact that she is self-obsessed and living a fulfilled life is juxtaposed to his own isolation. Her actions highlight his own inaction. Shortly after, on Christmas Day, his mother berates him beyond endurance. ‘I want so much to verbally abuse this woman standing there in the kitchen, sucking in smoke, and pouring it out from her lungs. Instead, I look right at her ... “The smoking makes you ugly,” I say, and walk out, leaving her stranded among the haze.’ This is when Ed decides to stop seeing himself through the distorted lens of others; to regard himself in a new light. His use of impersonal and generic terms to describe his own mother (‘this woman’, ‘you’) emphasise the internal distance he has travelled towards defining his sense of self in his own terms.

The final pages of The Messenger lead the reader through a series of images and people we have already met before but are now being asked to regard with greater significance. The bank robber from the start of the text gets into Ed’s cab and asks him to drive to all the houses of the people he has helped and then finally back to his own home. It is both a literal and metaphorical journey for Ed. He realises that he was never the one delivering the messages – he was the message. In helping others he has ultimately helped himself. The robber hands him a lesson he has already learned, ‘If a guy like you can stand up and do what you did for all those people, well, maybe everyone can. Maybe everyone can live beyond what they’re capable of.’

The ultimate message is that even the most ordinary people can be remarkable too.

Referenced works

Zusak, Markus (2002) The Messenger, Pan Macmillan