This pair of formative encounters – with Bourgeois in Melbourne and Farmer in Rome – are only two of many potent moments of recognition described in this essay, but I have come to regard them as pivot points that brilliantly illuminate the whole of this remarkable book.

Beverley Farmer (Giramondo)

On Beverley Farmer is the eighth in Black Inc.’s Writers on Writers series, in which acclaimed authors ‘reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them’. Rowe’s choice of Farmer – many of whose works are currently out of print – may seem unexpected (previous essays in the series have considered more celebrated authors such as Patrick White, J.M. Coetzee, David Malouf, and Shirley Hazzard), but she preferred to focus on a neglected Australian woman author. It is to be hoped that alongside Giramondo’s reissue of Farmer’s A Body of Water (1990, 2020), On Beverley Farmer signals a turn in the tide of interest in her work.

Rowe notes that there is something to be said here about women writers and institutionalised neglect, but she is disinclined to make the argument herself:

As to whether a male writer might have enjoyed more recognition for the same kind of innovatory feat [that distinguishes Beverley Farmer’s work], there’s a relevant case to be made, but I’m tired just thinking about it. Chalk me up as a yes, and let us move on.

I want to use these pages to speak to the work itself.

Rowe has so much, and such interesting things, to say: about ‘the quixotic business of transposing [an act of] witness into language’, which is at the root of Farmer’s (and Rowe’s own) writing; about loneliness and solitude and the networks (too often invisible) that connect one writer or artist or reader to another over distances of time and place; about generic classifications that seek to flatten – or dismiss as ‘difficult’ – Farmer’s often fragmentary, nonlinear, and formally eccentric narratives; about Farmer’s ‘sense memory’ and the ways she writes ‘place from within it’, ‘drawing the immediate surrounds into language’, ‘alive to element’ and to ‘what [the Bellarine Peninsula] is: an evolving and eroding ecosystem, as susceptible to human influence as it is a determining force on the lives of those who [like Farmer] inhabit it’. Like much of Farmer’s own writing, On Beverley Farmer occupies ‘the gauzy territory’ between ‘observations and desires, memories and dreams’. It concentrates the reader’s attention on that singular source of light: ‘the act and the art of looking’. Rowe’s encounter with Farmer at once captures the writer in place, pinhole-fashion, and expands that focus well beyond the human engaged in looking at the immediate surrounds, towards the properly ecological.

The wide-open, non-anthropocentric approach Rowe adopts here (as well as in her own fiction) beautifully captures the way that Farmer paid attention to the world around her ‘on a longer and larger scale than most of us have the lens [or the patience] for’. But it also positions Farmer and her work within a new network of writers and artists who are similarly concerned with formal innovation and the art of looking not so much at as from within a biodiverse world. Annie Dillard, who shares with Farmer ‘a capacity for exactitude drawn at an emotional remove’, is a recurring touchstone, as are Virginia Woolf, John Berger, and Anne Carson. Reading The Bone House, the meaning of which accrues ‘largely through proximity and pause’, Rowe recalls the work of Eliot Weinberger. Alice Munro is there, as are Agnes Martin, Janet Frame, W.G. Sebald, Marguerite Duras, and Tomas Tranströmer. Rowe’s reading of Farmer runs as deep as Farmer’s own reading of Woolf and Berger and Frame, among others. It is a gift to any attentive reader; especially readers who, like me, are of an associative turn of mind, who seek out those deep-thinking pauses, those illuminating instances of meaningful proximity.

Remembering her visit to Heide, Rowe cites Louise Erdrich: in a moment of powerful recognition, we understand that ‘coincidences aren’t coincidences’. Was it coincidence that Rowe followed Farmer to Rome, and that she began reading The Bone House almost at the moment when Farmer died? It makes perfect (associative) sense that Farmer and Rowe – both preoccupied with memory and the vicissitudes of time and place – would be attracted to an ancient city like Rome, as it does that an ecologically minded reader like Rowe would be fascinated by the way Farmer paid attention to and sought to translate the experience of being in the world around her. Whatever the cause of the encounter between Farmer and Rowe, the effect is a ‘moment of recognition you understand will sound out across your life, and will build to greater resonance, greater significance, down the years’.

This is true for Rowe. But it is also true for a reader of Rowe’s On Beverley Farmer.