Elizabeth Jolley has been around as a writer for some time. Her work dates back to the late 1950s (she came to Australia from England in 1959) and her stories began appearing in anthologies and journals in the mid­1960s, but it was not until 1976 that her first collection, Five Acre Virgin and other stories, was published by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Since then, her rate of publication has been phenomenal, and it is perhaps no accident that it coincided with the rise of an indigenous Western Australian Press: three of her first four books were published by the FACP, which, in its few years of existence, has been responsible for the discovery of a remarkable amount of talent.

Jolley has now published seven books (including three this year), with another one in press. From being an obscure writer who had won the admiration of the few readers in Australia who regularly keep pace with journals, one who had steadily accumulated prizes, Jolley has suddenly become recognisable as one of Australia’s leading contemporary writers of fiction.

Five Acre Virgin and other stories

Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1976, 91 pp, 0909144052The stories in Five Acre Virgin were written mostly in the sixteen years prior to the publication of that book; they show her peculiar combination of unsentimental realism and original humour. The title suggests the preoccupation in Elizabeth Jolley’s work that has been most noted by reviewers. ‘There’s nothing like having a piece of land,’ the central character in several of the stories says. ‘It makes a man feel better to clear the scrub and have a good burning off.’

‘Having a piece of land’ is crucial to the characters in these books. Many of them are dispossessed or migrants, or both. They have come from Vienna, where the author’s mother grew up, or the Black Country of England where she herself lived, or Holland, from which the recurring figure of Uncle Bernard migrated. They struggle all their lives to buy the talismanic five acres, only to find out that they can’t live off them. They lie and blackmail in order to stay on other people’s land. Adam, in ‘Adam’s Wife’, one of the most powerful and sombre stories that Jolley has written, even marries a retarded woman in order to gain possession of her miserable shack and few acres. In an interview in The National Times (13–19 March 1983), Jolley spoke with feeling about the quality of the West Australian landscape: ‘You cannot imagine how wonderful it felt to me to go round without shoes all the time, to feel the leaves and grass underfoot. A brand new sensation – quite remarkable. You could never experience it in England, too cold there to go barefoot.’

Brilliant Creatures is not so much a novel – a first novel, as the title page coyly points out – as it is a presentation pack. The text itself is bookended by an introduction at the front, and a set of extensive, very boring notes and index at the back. A set of notes and an index for a novel, a first novel? Yep. Clive James has heard of Nabokov and Pale Fire. He has also, as the four-page introduction makes clear, heard of his ‘illustrious ancestor Henry’: of Gide, Montaigne, Sterne, Peacock, Firbank, Trollope, Joyce, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche.

The title of Ken Inglis’s book is a poignant irony, reflecting the transience of history itself. For its publication coincided exactly with the death of the Commission, and the birth of the Corporation, and with hindsight one can say that it should have been called That was the ABC, thus creating a pleasant symmetry with That Was the Week That Was. But Inglis did his best to defeat time by bringing the history up to the federal election of 5 March 1983, edging his way as near as possible to the date he would like to have reached.

Christina Stead was born in Sydney on 17 July 1902 and died there on 31 March 1983. She spent the greater part of her life, including her most creative years, abroad – in England, Europe, and America. She left Australia for the first time in 1928, returning only once for a few months in 1969 before she decided in 1974 to spend her last years here. Although her novels were written away from Australia and most do not have Australian settings, she never ceased to think of herself as an Australian. Nationalism simply wasn’t an issue for her: she didn’t regard herself as an expatriate, she didn’t reject her homeland, but neither did she feel any compulsion to assert an Australian identity. She was perhaps the first Australian writer to be truly cosmopolitan.

The fact that she was identified with no country and with no literary group may have contributed to the extraordinary neglect she suffered in her middle years. Twenty years ago, Ron Geering could describe her accurately as a ‘gifted Australian writer whose books are out of print and whose work has never been published in the land of her birth’. That was in a special issue of Southerly (No. 4 of 1962), edited by Walter Stone, one of the few Australians who knew her work and recognised her stature. The somewhat meagre issue of the magazine devoted to this unread and unappreciated writer must have seemed a quixotic gesture by a man best known as a book collector and an authority on the Bulletin, but he was soon vindicated. As a result of the reissue in 1965 of The Man Who Loved Children, with an enthusiastic preface by the American poet and critic Randall Jarrell, Christina Stead was rediscovered throughout the English-speaking world and eagerly claimed by her fellow-Australians as one of them.

Christina Stead (photograph via Text Publishing/National Library of Australia)

The pity of it is that through ignorance of her work Australian writers were deprived of a valuable stimulus for so long. And Christina Stead herself was deprived of the stimulus to creation that come from intelligent critical appreciation. Between 1934 and 1952 she published nine volumes of fiction: they include such memorable works as House of all Nations, The Man Who Loved Children, and The People with the Dogs. Taken together, they constitute an impressive and sustained achievement. After The People with the Dogs in 1952 there was a long silence, broken at last by Cotter’s England in 1966. The books that followed were well received, but they lack the vigour, the sheer imaginative exuberance of the earlier work. The People with the Dogs, which was reprinted for the first time a mere two years ago, is only now starting to receive the critical recognition that it deserves. The most poised and most carefully crafted of all her novels, it belongs with The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone as a study of the struggle of the individual towards self-realisation and freedom – the master-theme of all her fiction.

All her powers were most satisfyingly displayed in The Man Who Loved Children, in which with very great skill she translated experience of her Australian childhood before World War I into the America of the mid-1930s. Her portrayal of Louisa Pollitt – an acknowledged self-portrait – is triumphantly ‘real’. In For Love Alone, again autobiographical, she writes of the passionate hunger of youth for fulfilling experience - and. incidentally, recreates the Sydney she knew as a young woman with a vividness none of her Australian contemporaries has matched. ‘I was born into the ocean of story, or on its shores,’ she once wrote. At a time when twentieth-century novelists were inclined to regard narrative as the lowest common denominator of fiction, she relished the traditional role of the tale-teller. Her first book was a collection of tales, quite dazzling in its range and versatility; and all her novels are crammed with stories. House of All Nations, which is a kind of treasure-house of stories – Christina Stead’s own Arabian Nights – is perhaps the work in which she gave herself freest rein. It suffers from overwriting and needed pruning (as she afterwards acknowledged), but in its abundance it contains one of the most brilliant pieces of narrative to be found anywhere – the appallingly funny account of a dinner party which turns into an ordeal by eating, entitled ‘A Stuffed Carp’.

Stead observed and celebrated human life. The fullness and intensity with which she represented the feelings of her heroines, and the depth of her understanding of women, have attracted feminist critics. Her keen awareness of how the conditions of society impinge upon the individual has attracted Marxist critics. But she was not an ideological writer; she had no theory of society to air – indeed, she had no theory of the novel. ‘I write what I see’ was her answer to questions about her art. The daughter of a distinguished naturalist, she thought of herself as a naturalist, accepting and describing what she knew of life. Nothing living was alien to her.

Christina Stead died knowing that she had the affection and admiration of her fellow-Australians. She had lived long enough to see a generation born well after she began to write accept her vision. She needs no memorial. Her books live on.

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity
or love or dread, that object he became …
(‘There was a child went forth every day’, Walt Whitman)

When I was seventeen, I sold my doll and all her little frocks and coloured, knitted things. At the time I thought I ought to sell her, it seemed important to have some extra money. She was advertised for £1. It was near Christmas – a good time for selling.

A woman came and I saw her alone with the doll in the front room where my mother had made a fire, as she did only on Christmas Day and other holidays.

The parting with the doll made an unexpected dark space all around me. I never admitted to anyone that I gave the doll to the woman whose sharp, unfriendly eyes intimidated me, and whose tale of a little girl who had never had a doll filled me with shame.

My mother and sister were waiting in the early dusk of the winter afternoon: ‘Where is the money?’ my sister said to my empty heart. ‘In my purse of course,’ I lied.

During the 1970s, when Nation Review was a newspaper and the Labor Party was fair dinkum, this country spawned cartoonists like mushrooms in a paddock where cows have been defecating in a grand manner. The Vietnam war was on, but that didn’t stop the Melbourne Cup or the Grand Final, and it didn’t improve the economy as expected either.

We found lovely ways to get rid of some frightening chemical wastes, i.e., we tipped them on Asian forests: all the better to see you with.