Dreamhouse, written before the wonderful Lilian’s Story (1984 Vogel winner), was the Vogel runner-up in 1983. Kate Grenville’s writing in this novel is clear-headed, strong, both witty and humorous, and above all lifts the imagination high. Dreamhouse wins my ‘Chortle, Gasp’ Prize for black comedy incorporating a design award for ‘best romantic fiction parody’ (it could have been called A Summer in Tuscany). It’s a darkly delightful book to read. Subversion of romantic expectations is immediate, ingenious, and horribly funny. Louise Dufrey is one half of an unlovely couple whose marriage looks perfect but is actually defunct. As narrator, Louise gets straight to the point:

My husband was a vain man with a thick orange moustache who loved to look at his beautiful wife, slim like a model and striking on the streets ... As for myself. I was a woman full of greed: my husband, whose name was Reynold, was soon to be a professor with an income and a position, while I could never be anything wealthier than a striking secretary with lovely legs and little future.

Melbourne, which has somehow appropriated for itself the reputation of being the first Australian city of ‘thought’, has become the last major city in this country to host a large-scale writer’s week. Well, we now have one and it’s called the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, and it is currently being staged.

The Festival’s major attractions have been concentrated into a three-day read-in and talk-in. from October 3rd–5th, at the grand old theatrical premises of The Athenaeum in Collins Street. It’s a wonderful spot, complete with an old-style library (one with books) and the modest splendour of an earlier time, which somehow suits the aura of an event such as a writers’ festival.

How it came about that Melbourne was the last capital to stage a writers’ week is a myth lost in the veils of time, as we writers refer to badly documented historical areas. Certainly, when the Spoleto Festival began to crystallise as an event, the notion of a writers’ event began to take shape.

Initially, the idea was to approach a couple of noted overseas writers to appear as guests of Spoleto. I guess that before this idea of a writer’s festival was probably booted around by various groups; I know that within the Melbourne City Council there hid also been ideas floated, as they say in Yes, Minister land, about a festival along the lines of Writers’ Week at the Adelaide Festival of Arts. Cliff Smythe, the Writer in the Community for the Council, had written a letter to John Pinder, Chairman of the MCC Cultural Advisory Board, about the ways in which the MCC could assist with the idea of a writer’s week.

We all had a conference when it was realised that many groups were now thinking along the same lines: Mark Rubbo convened an initial meeting, at the Victorian Ministry for the Arts, of such interested people as Mary Lord from the National Book Council, Helen Garner from the Literature Board, Jennifer Ellison from the Ministry for the Arts, literary agent Caroline Lurie, Scripsi editors Peter Craven and Michael Heyward; and Spoleto management.

That meeting realised that if the Festival was, to occur, Spoleto time would be the only appropriate moment this year. A committee was formed, an official sub-committee of the Victorian Branch of the National Book Council, with Mark Rubbo as chairperson. We realised that what we were terribly short of, as regards a writers’ festival was

• Money
• Writers
• A venue
• Everything Else

Time was running out, as they say in the best and the worst novels. Quickly we prepared a budget, secured the Athenaeum Theatre complex as a venue, began compiling lists of writers local and overseas, and applied for funds to the Literature Board the MCC, and the Victorian Ministry for the Arts. The bad news was that it was May, towards the end of the fiscal year, and everybody was out of money; also, it was May, and we had to get money for, and agreement from, overseas guests in time for them to arrive by late September. The good news was that everyone was keen to see Melbourne have a writers’ festival.

The Premier’s Literary Awards were being held in the month of Spoleto, and it was obvious that the awards should be a central part of the festivities. A problem appeared when it was discovered that our festival, if timed around the Premier’s Awards would be in direct competition with the Warana Writers’ Week in Brisbane. We debated all sorts of things, like intersatellite hook-ups with Brisbane (well, l debated that). So we agreed to put it off for a week, into mid-Spoleto … when it just so happened that the VFL grand final was on, and we all knew of so many writers who would be unable to tear themselves away from the fortunes of the football as it was hurled about the MCG on that one day in September that we had to move the festival on another week, if the Premier’s Awards people would agree to delaying. And they did.

Now it was down to the talent. We drew up lists of Victorian, interstate, and overseas writers; from this copious grab bag we constructed a form of short list on which various compromises were reached, influenced by such constraints as finance; the number of people on the committee who had either (a) heard of, (b) liked or (c) would tolerate the writer’s work and the accessibility of the writer’s work – that is to say, not too accessible, for that would constitute cheap penny thrillers and light romance (the sort of thing I write); and not too avantgarde, because no-one would like it or understand it (the sort of thing I write). The people we finally chose are, we think, representative of writing in Australia now. The overseas guests are English poet Christopher Logue and New York poet John Ashbery.

The committee then spent hours and hours proposing particular writers for particular topics, and Kate Ahearne from the National Book Council spent hours and hours confirming the matter with writers around Australia. And the Writers’ Festival program was the result. As well as the highlight of the Premier’s Literary Awards dinner, at which the winners will be announced the program includes readings at Mietta’s, in trams, and at the Athenaeum; a Writers’ Festival of Films at the State Film Centre; the launchings of new books by Elizabeth Jolley and Janine Burke; and panel discussions including ‘Why I Write What I Write’, ‘Political Perspectives’, and ‘What’s the Point of Critics?’ Apart from those already mentioned, writers taking part in these events include Helen Gamer, Frank Moorhouse, Angelo Loukakis, Jim Davidson, Don Watson, Christopher Koch, Georgia Savage, Peter Mathers, Kevin Hart, and many others.

And yes, we got our money. The Literature Board allocated $6,000, the Victorian Ministry for the Arts $9,000 (and for our sins we were so desperate for funds we petitioned Race Matthews, the minister, directly for assistance) and the Melbourne City Council gave us a grant of $6,350. The Spoleto Festival, with which we have a kind of non-Orwellian Big Brother relationship, allocated about $10,000, to cover the costs of freighting the two OS poets and accommodating them in pleasant Melbourne surrounds. The Melbourne Writers’ Festival had also decided to seek assistance from Australian printers, publishers and booksellers, and we sent a sort of begging letter asking for help. The response was big; with replies and cheques amounting to several thousand dollars. The thoughtful groups who donated money to the Festival are Angus and Robertson, Hill of Content, Greenhouse Publications, Heinemann Australia, Melbourne University Press, Pan Books, Macmillan, Readings Bookshops, Schwartz Publishing, Anne O’Donovan Pty Ltd, D.W. Thorpe, McPhee Gribble, The Five Mile Press, Gordon and Gotch, Penguin Books Australia, J.M. Dent, Robert Anderson and Associates, Ian Templeman, Methuen, University of Queensland Press, Oxford University Press, Transworld (Corgi-Bantam) and Griffin Press. This great contribution has made it possible for the Festival to be properly organised, for the writers and their readers.

More help came from Piccolo Spoleto, the local multicultural arm of Spoleto, who gave us assistance – as did Australia Airlines (whom I still call TAA sometimes) who donated the airfares – to bring down from Sydney two writers not as Anglo-Celtic as most, Angelo Loukakis and Rosa Cappiello. This highlighted another dilemma. We wanted the festival, particularly since it was amidst the Spoleto Festival of Three Worlds, to be multi-cultural. Endlessly the committee ranted on to itself about multiculturalism and how to do it. We wanted it, but the committee and the writers themselves thought it inappropriate to have an ‘ethnic section’. Shouldn’t we just make sure we had a balance of various cultures and writing forms. rather than ‘ghettoise’ any of the writing’? We agreed to forget the heading and go with the concept; to have writing first, and background after.

Of course, the committee had to pay mind to the numbers of boy writers and girl writers being invited, and poets versus novelists, and scriptwriters versus prose writers and so on. But generally, you’ll find all the poets reading together, so some sacred boundaries are yet to be broken as we tear down the walls of difference around town.

What else to say? I have been employed as a co-ordinator, and in tandem with the Spoleto gang of Mark Worner, Rosie Hinde, Wendy Forster, and Kate Deling, along with the NBC’s Kate, Mary and Enid, and the great contribution of the volunteer committee already enumerated, we have managed to stumble to this point.

The work yet to come will be the festival itself; for it is the talent, the writing, which is what it’s all about. That, and that the people who come to taste the offerings have a good time. Some writers are giving up work time, some are coming from a long way away for not much pay.

This raises a good point. The committee, splendidly I thought, decided that all writers would be paid the same performance fee. Whether world-famous mega-novelist or unknown street poet, whether critic or writer of the TV soap, all would get $50 a spot – maybe more if the budget stretches. It’s not a lot, so you will appreciate the commitment these writers have to writing and readers. We made most of the readings free, to reward the reader for having bought the book, so to speak.

I could write about the content of the Festival, what the writers will read or talk about; but I feel they are eminently qualified to do that, better than I. And writers’ festivals happen so that the reader can attend firsthand, break through the word on the printed page, burst through that trompe of the eye, past my callow praise, and straight into the foyer of the Athenaeum itself, to put a face and voice to the words.

Reading Frank Moorhouse is a bit like learning to cook silver beet in some newfangled way and discovering that for years you’ve been chucking the best bits out.

Most of us, even at this distance from Einstein, are still wanting there to be An Answer, a firm Truth, no matter how complex or ambivalent, to set up against all those other ‘truths’ held just as firmly by everybody else. Moorhouse seems to have known from the start, known it in his bones, that there isn‘t – or at least that if there is, it needs to include all those other truths, to acknowledge that truth is relative, not just from story to story and from character to character, but from moment to moment, from one end of the sentence to the other.

Moorhouse is a long way from your classic patriarchal-style hierarchical thinker, which is what you really need to be if you want to pull one perspective out of the pile, mount it at the top and call it King of the Castle. If anything, his thinking is more like the approach taken by the more palatable of the feminist thinkers, who tend to take the more inclusive, lateral approach where either/or propositions make very little sense.

Reading Kevin Child’s book, Men on Women, creates the irresistible temptation to answer on behalf of the women. I can imagine them offering the following kind of replies to their sons and lovers:

Mrs. Lurie: Morris was one of those babies who go rigid every time you pick them up for a cuddle. I felt inadequate so I scrubbed the floors. Unconditional love he wants! Who doesn’t?

Sonia McMahon, Margaret Whitlam and Tamie Fraser: We’ll charge you royalties, Phillip Adams, if you tell that story again.

Professor Hassall’s study of Randolph Stow is indeed a strange country. A text which sets out to establish Stow as ‘a more important writer than is generally recognized’ and to show that his ‘best work bears comparison with Patrick White’s’ promises an intellectual engagement with either critics or the text or both which would lead to reassessment of Stow’s work. It appears that these are Aunt Sally’s – although Professor Leonie Kramer, who is presented as one of Stow’s ‘sterner “realist” critics’, can hardly be seen as such an aunt. Hassall puts her up but barely touches her, leaving the counterargument to Dorothy Green. Perhaps he’s being gentlemanly. However, to quote a paragraph from Green which asserts that ‘One of the greatest weaknesses of Australian criticism has always been its refusal to take religious ideas seriously’ is to take advantage of the lady. Hassall needs to fight his own battle against Leonie Kramer’s judgement of Stow’s work as being ‘quasi-religious’ and misguidedly experimental.

Imagine me, myself, ten years on, a survivor of what is amusingly called ‘retirement’, though it will have been a matter of movement into rather than out of work. Let me, in short, give the four-day forecast; no weatherman will venture on the fifth, even to enforce the kind of superstition I am practising in these lines. Let us say the verbal magic works, and I reach seventy. What can I say now by way of analysing the character which I now confront in the time scale of then, across the years of future toil? Let me speak to that self in tones of restrained intimacy; restrained, because he frightens me a little.

You’re still timid, I see, watching the neighbours, liking to know who everyone is, always knowing something (though not enough) of who is related to whom, sharpening yourself up a couple of times a week with a bit of gossip – How about that! To use gossip as a setting-up exercise for your spiritual regimen. Pretending to be cautious, but saying whatever comes up first – a quick tongue, the curse of all Celts – so that people think you are malicious, and occasionally praise you for it. And you and I both know you’d never do an ounce of harm to any of the bastards.

‘There are not many Australian academics whose conversation shows awareness of the main intellectual dilemmas of the age. (These are nobody’s specialty.)’ So wrote Donald Horne in The Lucky Country, yet Horne, variously academic, editor, journalist, writer, administrator, and Chair of the Australia Council, in his writing himself might be seen as a happy exception to his rule. His latest book, The Public Culture: The triumph of industrialism, continues in the tradition he established previously not only of demonstrating an awareness of intellectual and political dilemmas, but of making these the chief focus of his scholarship.

A phrase like ‘And God so loved the world, she …’ has a radical impact on that most deeply ingrained convention; the contract underlying and validating much of Western culture that the logos is masculine and the power behind the logos is designated, generically, as ‘he’. Our culture is patriarchal; patriarchal power derives from God and that power is symbolically inscribed in language.

The Force of the Feminine presents a critique of these assumptions, through a series of essays generated from a different power base, using a different force, the force of the feminine. As a publication, it’s a typically attractive Allen & Unwin production, manageable, clearly printed, with a comprehensive introduction, notes on contributors, an index and a terrific cover. It shows a female deity, clad in a deep red robe (invitingly ovular and labial), both feet on a vanquished green snake, against a blue background, head surrounded by a golden globe and holding a motif that unites woman and Christianity. An upturned version of the sign for woman, it’s also a cross, topping a red-centred sphere. A working bibliography on the subject of women and Christianity, and/or feminism and theology, would I feel have been a useful addition to this volume.

Peter Cowan’s new novel The Color of the Sky is an elliptical, even enigmatic, narrative. Although specifically labelled a ‘novel’, it is a novella in its concision pf narrative explanation; as well as in its length. The layers of event and reminiscence are multifarious enough to fill out a hefty tome but are compressed in such a way that they become almost cryptic messages requiring considerable deciphering on the part of the reader.

If I produced the kind of summary often trotted out in reviews, it would provide a very misleading picture of what the novel is like when read. The narrator, Leon, is summoned back from a year in England to Australia, to the country house of his few remaining relatives. There he is drawn into a world that hints at drug running, at smuggling, through a woman, Annette, whose exact relationship to the household is vague. Intercut with Leon’s narrative are snatches of the life of an exploring nineteenth-century forebear, Tom. But the story is not the aim of the exercise; the snippets of information are presented in a way that suggests a puzzle, but they cannot be put together as easily as the reader, at first, imagines.

In one of the more matter-of-fact paragraphs of that rare and sentient book, Celebration of the Senses, Eric Rolls reflects on how ‘until the nineteen-fifties eating was seldom an adventure in Australia’. The Greek community had taken over the country town cafes and ‘by serving food that was a parody of the worst Australian food they prospered astoundingly. Slabs of steak fried ten minutes too long came to the table with one or two eggs on top, and surrounded by potato chips, mashed potato, mashed pumpkin, sliced lettuce, tomato, canned carrots, pickled beetroot …

Sometimes I watched Greek proprietors sit down to their own meals at a back table. A waitress came from the kitchen with chunks of dark bread, blocks of white fetta or creamy broccio, black olives, grapes, broken lettuce leaves tossed in a garlicky oil. Not eating much garlic then, I could smell it from several tables away. Now I am as seasoned as they were.’

I think it’s time for Robin Klein to slow down, though my ten-year-old daughter Finley wouldn’t thank me for saying so. She almost shivered with excitement last year as she told me that her teacher was reading a chapter of Hating Alison Ashley to the class each day. ‘I just can’t wait for the next bit,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want it to end.’

So it’s the adult rather than the child in me who says that Klein’s new picture book, The Princess Who Hated It, is a mistake. With Althea as the princess and Peggy Plum as the pauper, it’s a version of the old changing places story, which only departs from convention in its implication that the change is permanent.

Although there is some pluralist gesturing in the acknowledgment that some girls may actually like to wear pretty dresses and sit at needlework or eat snow pudding, the emphasis of both the written text and the illustrations is on an early feminist rejection of all that. Girls would clearly rather be swimming across the moat in their underwear, with the frogs.

So one aspect of my disappointment with The Princess Who Hated It is that it seems to have come at least ten years too late. Of course, to a child who wasn’t even alive at the time, let alone who knows nothing of the development of feminist thought, such a complaint is completely irrelevant, and the book will still work for her. But I think it may help to explain why there is less of Klein’s exuberance in this book than in others.

Another reason is that Klein draws so much inspiration from her observation of Australian society, and here in the vaguely French world of silk thread escape ladders and glass coaches, she is simply not on home ground. There’s some unconscious Australian mischief in the unfortunate title already commented on by one reviewer (‘It’ is being-a-princess); and the bored princess prising loose the pearls from her bracelet so she can play marbles with them belongs to a working class Australian Dream. But such moments are rare: there are too few particulars here for Klein to get her satirical teeth into.

Compare this with a single sentence from the second paragraph of her new novel, Boss of the Pool. Shelley doesn’t want to go out with her mother. She says indignantly, ‘Petra Van Rees stays home by herself two whole nights a week when her mum goes to aerobics.’ In just a few words we have the middle class of Australian society in the 1980s: the pretensions of its naming (with a nod at the suburbia of Barry Humphries and David Williamson), its multicultural composition, its single parent families and latchkey children, its cult of narcissism.

For readers who enjoy the outrageous comedy of Klein’s best-known books, Penny Pollard’s Diary and Hating Alison Ashley, Boss of the Pool may be too sombre; but for some readers there will be strong appeal in this sensitive story of a girl who overcomes her fear of a disabled boy and teaches him to swim.

Like Patricia Wrightson’s I Own the Racecourse (the title Boss of the Pool invites interesting comparisons) and Eleanor Spence’s The October Child, Klein’s novel is less about the outsider himself than about the effect he has on the rest of the group who are without his disability. Indeed, by setting the novel in a hostel for handicapped children, Klein reverses the usual role of outsider, since Shelley the ‘normal’ child appears in a sense handicapped by her inability to cope.

Primary school children usually like to read about characters one or two years older than they themselves are, but because we’re not told exactly how old Ben and Shelley are, and because the profusion of unremarkable illustrations suggests a reluctant reader or a reader much younger than I think is intended, it’s difficult to say how old the likely reader of Boss of the Pool might be. I would think anyone from a good nine year old on.

I’m slightly disturbed, therefore, by the assumption made in Boss of the Pool that a child of this age would regard the disabled child as a ‘thing’. Shelley sees the paraplegic Tania ‘disfigured by a huge dark birthmark, and there was her mother, calmly helping that person, that thing, to cordial and biscuits!’ I suspect that Shelley’s horror is an older, or adult, response imposed on the child here. It’s a small point, but it’s an aspect of Klein’s writing that I stumble on now and then.

Ten year olds do not, in my experience, hate old people. And I remember with pleasure Margaret Mead’s quip that grandparents and children are potentially very close because they have a common enemy. So I worry when the clear expectation of Penny Pollard’s Diary is of an antagonism of the young towards the old. (Simone’s wimpish enthusiasm for senior citizens hardly counters Penny’s vitriol.)

Although in Boss of the Pool as elsewhere Klein confirms this suspicion with the occasional authorial analysis imposed on the child’s actions or thoughts – ‘She should be able to see that I’m too annoyed to chat, too annoyed to do anything except huddle in the middle of my rage, she thought’ – (where are the editors?) it is clear by the end of the book that Shelley’s hatred of disabled children is a defence against her fear of them, and a jealous response to her mother’s caring for them. So to some extent the objection is met and as a whole Boss of the Pool comes off as a book for its younger as well as its older readers.

The hottest Australian writer for children in the 1980s reminds me of no one as much as our hottest writer for adults, Elizabeth Jolley.

Now a full-time writer, Robin Klein has worked at various jobs: tea lady, telephonist (she got the sack for cutting people off at the switchboard), bookshop assistant (got into trouble for reading the books instead of selling them), library assistant, nurse, potter and copper enameller, and photography teacher.

Sound familiar? Compare this publisher’s blurb with the biodata on any Elizabeth Jolley book. Both are being marketed as ‘good blokes’.

Both are writers with a great sense of humour, formally playful, perhaps too prolific, and therefore missing out on prizes; both, though not hard-line, are feminists; both celebrate the marginal and the underdog who rebels against convention, with a refusal to take him or her too seriously and a tussle between sentimentality and irony that is characteristic of Australian writers since Lawson. Despite Jolley’s upbringing in the Midlands and Klein’s occasional choice of un-Australian subject matter, the concerns of both writers can be folded back into several persistent Australian myths. So they are clearly writers of their place. Their sales tell us that they are writers of their time.

The books are reading us again …

Gabrielle Lord’s novels – Fortress, Tooth and Claw and now, Jumbo, are all topical, readable, and (I expect) highly marketable. Lord is a scriptwriter as well as a novelist and each of these books seems like a transit point between a great idea and the kind of film which makes you lean forward in your seat and temporarily abandon regular breathing. There is, however, much to be said for them, as novels. They are thrillers, but they are not merely escapist. The plots dislocate everyday events in a way which questions the validity of what passes as socially acceptable. On the other hand, pace, suspense, and social critique seem to substitute for the subtlety and detail which would transform these books into something more than temporarily exciting and even instructive reading experiences. For all the immediacy and significance of Lord’s novels, the vibrancy of her work often seems to me to lie in its potential, rather than in the text at hand. In this respect Jumbo, the most recent novel, does not surpass its predecessors.

Jumbo begins on an explicitly enigmatic note:

For the rest of her life, Verity would suffer remorse. Not only because of the old guilt that, unresolved, had undermined her life for so long, but because of that particular Christmas. In time, the earliest torment would ease, but bitter ambushes of conscience and imagination would continue to attack her. A child in despair and a good man dead – if only, she’d think, if only I’d read the first letter properly.

Dear Editor,

That twice but incompletely published review of mine of recent architectural books continues to cause trouble for all concerned. Noting the letter (ABR, August) from the Townsville City Council, I’m delighted to learn of their concern for the preservation of old buildings, and fully understand their distress at being misrepresented by me. As they have magnanimously conceded, I was merely working with ‘facts’ found in the books under review. I therefore gladly volunteer my apologies to the Townsville City Council.

Generally, Dimitris Tsaloumas’s publications in Australia have been discussed in terms of translation, translation from Greek into English which made most reviewers long for an understanding of the original. Tsaloumas’s ‘otherness’, the difference in his poetry, has been connected with, on the one level, its bilingual presentation, its obvious physical difference. This difference is obvious again in this latest publication, the Queensland University Press’s anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry. On first glance it too tells you that it is different; it has an excess, the Greek, for the Australian reader – not however, for the Greek. Ironically, for her this functions the other way around; the English is excess, it is strange marks on a page. Published in Greece by Nea Poreia Press in 1985, its aim was, in the words of its compiler, ‘to give some idea of the variety and wealth of the poetic production of this distant but very young and vigorous world of the antipodes’. The means through which it achieves this end are the familiar ones of translation.