One intriguing book to hit my desk in recent days comes from the Malvern Library Service (Malvern, Victoria, that is): one Talking Stories: Narratives by women in Malvern, an oral history project initiated and funded by the library. This beautifully produced book, edited by Lotte Waters, collects interviews with seventeen women of varying ages from the one suburb, talking mainly about their personal experiences of what it’s like to be female in the public sphere, what their sense is of the nature of community and their own place in it; there are high-quality, sometimes haunting portrait photographs of each subject which illuminate – and are illuminated by – what each has to say. The book’s genesis is explained at the outset: ‘Malvern Library Service held a photographic display of women to celebrate International Women’s Day in 1985. This display received such a positive response from the community that people started talking about the need for more documentation of women in the area. After discussions with many women in Malvern, an oral history project was planned with the intention of establishing an archive of tapes and eventually publishing a book.’

I can imagine using this book to great effect in schools, as a way of getting kids to think about a number of things: narrative, libraries, women, photography, history, local government, language, storytelling, memory. The interviewers (including the multi-talented Cheryl Gibson, who also took some of the photographs) and their questions have been effaced from the text and the uninterrupted words of the subjects indicate considerable skill on the part of both interviewers and editor – another thing that kids in schools might be interested in: how to pull down the scaffolding of a story once you’ve built it.

Small Country Blues Department: Melbourne poet Ron Simpson once wrote a very funny poem called ‘All Friends Together: A Survey of Present-Day Australian Poetry’, which begins

Charles and Bruce, Geoff and Ron and Nancy
May publish books this year: some hope they won’t.
Tom and Les, Robert, Nan and John –
We live our lives quietly using words
And write of dragons and birds: we are our critics.
 

Too right we are. When Simpson’s book Words For a Journey: Poems 1970–1985 came out in 1986, I asked seven or eight different people to review it. A couple of these were already reviewing it somewhere else; the rest said ‘Oh, I couldn’t, Ron’s a friend of mine.’ And so, since there were dozens of other books piling up and clamouring for attention, I gave up the search. Ron Simpson lectures in art and literature at the Chisholm Institute of Technology, was Poetry Editor of the Bulletin from 1963 to 1965, and has been Poetry Editor at the Age since 1969 – so the number of friends he has collected in the Australian literary world must be nothing short of awesome.

The ‘Readings at Mietta’s’ readings in Melbourne, jointly put on by Readings Bookshops and Mietta’s Restaurant, have been a ballooning success this year – if having to turn people away at the door can be described in such enthusiastic terms. Frank Moorhouse, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Rod Jones, Carmel Bird, Barry Hill, and Beverley Farmer among others have drawn large and attentive crowds to the exotic pampas-grass-and-marble surrounds of downstairs-at-Mietta’s on a series of Sunday afternoons this year. My own two favourite performances so far have been those by Rod Jones and Beverley Farmer, possibly because I’d seen neither of them read in public before – for Farmer, in fact, I think it was her first public reading, She has in the past been diffident about giving this kind of performance, but it’s hard to see why; she was terrific. She read ‘Melpo’, much of which is dialogue, and revealed herself as a natural performer with, among other things, perfect comic timing.

Such readings, in Melbourne at least, seem to be drawing bigger crowds all the time. Judy Brett, chairing a packed Scripsi-organised reading at Melbourne University’s Ormond College in June, pointed out that the nature of such occasions has altered, subtly but considerably, moving away from solemn highbrow ritual to a quite different status as public entertainment without in the least compromising the quality of the writers and their work. This was borne out by the performances of the three writers who read that night, and who between them provided two or three hours as exciting, and as emotionally draining, as a good performance of King Lear. (It was definitely a King Lear night as opposed to a midsummer night’s dream, enhanced by more or less sub-zero temperatures and a particularly picturesque night fog outside.) Kevin Hart, whose poems are more impersonal and avowedly cerebral than the fiction of either Helen Garner or Gerald Murnane, rather paradoxically came over – that night at least – as the warmest and most engaging presence. Garner and Murnane both write fiction like poets, and what linked all three writers was their preoccupation with rhythm; both fiction writers read in a way that emphasised this. Murnane has the kind of intense, metallic stage presence (and dramatic appearance: dark hair, carved face) that compels total attention. Helen Garner got up looking uncharacteristically remote and read a story like a fist closing round your heart, to a spellbound and breath-holding audience who put me in mind of something Don Anderson once said about Garner – that her readings bring tears to the eyes of grown men. (How sad that this should be such a high compliment, such a hard thing to do, even in these enlightened times – see Primordial Slime etc.)

Don Anderson seems to be getting quite an airing on this page, possibly because he has just written me a nice note in which I was thanked (and not ironically either, so far as I can make out) for my ruthless editorial carving-up of a piece of his prose. This rare, rare moment in the life of an editor brought tears to my eyes.