Tag Archives: Australian literature

Underclass Meets Metaworld: Review of ‘A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists’

24 Sunday Aug 2014

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A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists / Jane Rawson (Transit Lounge, 2013)

Wrong Turn is set on the streets of a semi-post-apocalyptic Melbourne in 2030. Climate change has displaced many and made life difficult for those eking out an existence under the glare of the sun in a world with little water and many ways to die. The main character is Caddy, a thirty-three year old aspiring writer who does what she can (including casual prostitution) to eat and drink. The early chapters of her wheeling and dealing in errands and squabbles over five dollars as she sits in a hot bar sparring with the bartender reminded me of the feel of Thomas Disch’s 334 and some of Philip K. Dick’s work (besides the mindbending which everyone focuses on, PKD was a chronicler of the little person surviving the future). Rawson has brought to life the underclass of the near future, with its mix of boredom and menace.

To do this as successfully as she has would have been plenty enough to accomplish in a novel, but Rawson attempts much, much more. Without losing its tethering in this ruined Melbourne, the focus begins to turn to the characters Caddy is writing about, two orphaned teenagers attempting to travel through every twenty-five foot square of the USA, a task that will take them ninety years at their current pace. (I love a quixotic project like this; there is a whole other novel worthy of Paul Auster or George Perec here.) Without giving away too many of the twists, the novel shifts into the territory of writer-meets-characters and the Gap, a meta-realm which could have come from a Stephen King novel. For my taste, it’s territory which has already been overexplored, but Rawson’s take on it is quite fresh.

Wrong Turn is a distinctly Australian novel, compelling as a portrait of life as climate change hits and of the petty concerns, dreams, losses and consolations that make up the fabric of existence, as through the eyes of Caddy, a winsome character. The author blogs here; you can read her reflections on the writing life, including her work-in-progress, a non-fiction guide to surviving climate change.

Louisa: the limits of biography

17 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by in biographies of writers, artists and musicians, book review, role of the biographer within the biography

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Brian Matthews, Louisa (Melbourne: McPhee, 1987)

Louisa is both an anguished reflection on biography and its problems and the story of the life of Louisa Lawson, mother of the more famous Henry, but a significant Australian literary figure herself, as editor of a woman’s journal, Dawn, and as poet and suffragette.

Frustrated not only by the gaps in the record but also by the inherent limits of biography as a genre, Matthews interrupts what is often a conventional (but good) biographical narrative with an alternative text, the reflections of ‘Owen Stevens’, Matthews’ alternative self:

Owen Stevens, the biographer’s untrammelled self, will say, do, essay and gainsay all those things that formal scholarship cannot condone and which life, unrounded by a style-sheet, uncompleted and unexplained by footnotes, is teeming.

The ‘alternative text’ also contains experiments in form, such as a short story imagining a woman from the 1970s returning to Louisa’s past, and a music-hall drama to convey Louisa in ways conventional biography would not allow.

I have no doubt Matthews expected or even courted controversy, and he did get it. The book sits as the new far end of a spectrum. It has not been taken up as the new way of writing biography, nor was it expected to. But it does demand fruitful reflection from biographers, scholars and readers on just what is permissible and what is desirable in biography.

In a sense, it is a book which wears its postmodernism loudly and, although it has aged well, it still feels to belong to the milieu when the postmodern was still shiny, exciting and the way forward. Today, nearly thirty years on, my feeling is that the biographer is able to wear the influence of postmodern more quietly. Some of the question and objections ‘Owen Stevens’ raises, some of his speculations, could be integrated with the primary narrative – they don’t need to be exiled and, by extension, highlighted.

The relegation of consideration of sources to some brief notes at the end is a strange move. Surely the whole point of the alternative text is to draw some attention to the scaffolding, to the process of arriving at the settled narrative of a biography. Footnotes are a good place to provide the reader with some awareness of the process.

In How to do Biography (Harvard University Press, 2008), Nigel Hamilton argues that it is only when there is an authoritative biography of a subject already published that a biographer is free to be experimental. Louisa Lawson did not have such a biography in 1987, as far as I know, and no doubt this added to some of the criticism Matthews received. On the other hand, the biography was praised as well, and for good reasons.

Passion and timber: a review of KSP’s Working Bullocks

06 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in book review, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings

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Working Bullocks (1926) was Katharine Susannah Prichard’s fourth published novel, and her first set in Western Australia, where she’d been living since 1919. Set in the karri forests of the south-west, it uses the fictional towns of Karri Creek and Marritown as stand-ins for places around Pemberton as she tells of romance, struggle and strike in the lives of timber workers.

It take some time to establish itself. The first third is concerned with detailed descriptions of the work of the bullock teams carting logs, and of the protagonist, Red, catching a wild brumby. Prichard is determined to achieve verismilitude (as she did with her observations of opal miners in her previous novel, Black Opal), but perhaps it comes at the expense of readability. Of course, the same passages which bogged me down would have probably been met with delight by contemporaneous readers looking for an experience of the bush.

We know from the start that her hero, Red, is a fascinating character, and he begins to hit his stride about Chapter XI. He is a tormented loner, a man of principles fighting against setbacks; his brothers thought him dead in the war and sold off his fine team of bullocks to the butchers (7). (Strangely, Prichard never returns to Red’s time in the war, a glaring omission in her characterisation.) After his best friend, Chris, dies in a timber accident, Red goes bush for a year, only to return to civilisation when he captures the finest brumby, Boss. He loses Tessa, the girl he had been seeing, but falls passionately for Chris’s sister, the far more suitable and down-to-earth Deb. Deb’s mother challenges him to regain a bullock team to prove he has the means to keep a wife. Having earlier referenced Jacob from Genesis, who worked seven years to earn his wife (48), it seemed to me that the novel had settled into a natural plotline: the trials of Red as he overcomes the odds to rebuild his bullock team. Yet what follows instead is a series of sharp twists in the plot.

There is to be a race between Red’s brumby Boss, and the horse of Tessa’s successful suitor, Leslie Gaze. Yet Tessa comes to him as the race is starting and says he must let Leslie win, because only then will he marry her, and if he does not marry her, she will ‘die’, bringing down both Leslie and Red with her. Red is pushed to his  moral limits, facing a dilemma without a solution, but its terms are not clear enough, at least to this reader; could it be the censor, or at least Prichard’s concern for the censor? It seems Tessa is pregnant and will claim Red to be the father if he will not co-operate. Red throws the race, admits guilt, and walks away from his hope of marrying Deb, having covered himself in shame. He hits the bottle and turns into a harsh leader for the rest of the bullock team.

Soon after this, in chapter XXI, Mark Smith enters the narrative, in an interesting but somewhat unintegrated subplot. He works as Red’s offsider and becomes the closest he has to a friend. But most significantly, he is a communist, an agitator and he channels the workers’ anger at conditions into a strike after Deb’s other brother, Billy, is killed in the sawmill. Prichard paints the picture of a strike well, and it’s fascinating to watch Deb’s mother become a conscientious comrade to the cause during the strike. Yet the subplot is not anticipated; the workers’ conditions have not been foreshadowed as a problem, and the connection to the central plot is not well made.

The strike dies down and Red leaves town after he and Deb fall half in love. The rest of the novel settles into a romantic musical chairs, as Deb and Red must find their way back to each other through the obstacles of Niel the log chopper and the freshly widowed Tessa, back to snare Deb. (In one of the more innovative chapters, XXXI, Deb and Tessa are sharing a room and the narrative point of view switches back and forth between them.)

The sections of the novel told through Deb’s point of view are a highlight of the novel, and none more so than those describing her mystical communion with trees; ‘she had always gone to the trees when she was in trouble’ (273):

The trees were like people she knew who suddenly had become beautiful beyond anything earthly. Their stand and poise, long arms outflung, bodies tall and straight, crooked or gnomish, living flesh with the glamour of ivory, sloughing their bark, dark shapes wrapped in fibre. Deb swung to them in a fury of worship and admiration. The invocation, passion and lamentation of the trees swayed her. (275)

Deb and Red embody a simplicity and purity of life, two characters connected to their environment, work and appetites.

We should be grateful for Working Bullocks. It captures everyday working life in the Western Australian timber industry ninety years ago, yet balances that with a passionate, romantic sensibility. It was the novel which made her reputation on publication, and is usually regarded as one of her seminal works, yet while five or six of her other novels are in print today, I do not think Working Bullocks has been reprinted since 1991.

KSP’s Black Opal: a saint and a singer in a utopia under threat

13 Thursday Mar 2014

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Katharine Susannah Prichard’s third published novel, Black Opal (1921), is set in the opal mining settlement of Fallen Star Ridge. It has two significant plot strands: the Ridge’s pure, beautiful Sophie coming into womanhood and torn between three men; and the attempt of an American to buy out the individual miners and commercialise operations.

Perhaps the truer title would be Fallen Star Ridge, as the novel is focused on the opal mining community itself as an ideal. Between the publication of her first novel, The Pioneers, and this one, KSP had committed to communism, and the influence is evident. In chapter VIII of part I, the narrative stops and KSP paints a picture of the workers’ utopia the settlement represents.

Ridge miners find happiness in the sense of being free men. They are satisfied in their own minds that it is not good for a man to work all day at any mechanical toil; to use himself, or allow anyone else to use him, like a working bullock. A man must have to time to think, leisure to enjoy being alive, they say.  (64-5)

To a man, Ridge miners have decided against allowing any wealthy man, or body of wealthy men forming themselves into a company, to buy up the mines, put the men on a weekly wage, and work them, as the opal blocks at Chalk Cliffs had been worked. (65)

The utopia is threatened first by missing opals (who stole from their brother?) and then an attempt by the American, John Armitage, to buy up the mines. As a kind of utopia, it is rendered convincingly, a plausible depiction of how people might have led a  co-operative existence a century ago in rural Australia.

Central to the utopia is Michael, a saintly autodidact who looks after the needy in the community and quietly dispenses wisdom. I can’t help wondering if KSP imagined a similar role for herself, if she was to ever find herself living within a workers’ community; she must have often wondered how to reconcile her bookishness with her commitment to the working class. The workers of the Ridge are not the anti-intellectuals one might assume:

Ridge folk were proud of Michael’s books, and strangers who saw his miscellaneous collection – mostly of cheap editions, old school books, and shilling, sixpenny, and penny publications of literary masterpieces, poetry, and works on industrial and religious subjects – did not wonder that it impressed Ridge folk; or that Michael’s knowledge of the world and affairs was so extensive. He had tracts, leaflets, and small books on almost every subject under the sun. (9)

At the beginning of the novel, Michael makes a promise to Sophie’s dying mother that he will make sure she does not leave the safety of the Ridge for the evils of the world beyond it. Trying to keep this promise is nearly his undoing; it is to no avail – Sophie leaves, which is nearly her undoing.

Spoilers Ahead Continue reading →

KSP’s The Wild Oats of Han

16 Sunday Feb 2014

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I’m trying to read the fiction of Katharine Susannah Prichard at least roughly in order, but of course that’s never as straightforward as it sounds. The Wild Oats of Han wasn’t published until 1928, but it was actually written in 1908, meaning that perhaps I should have it read it first; I’m reading it second.

Its genre is complicated, too. It’s presented as a children’s novel, but (my 1968 edition at least) is introduced with a note from KSP saying it ‘is truly, really story’, an idiosyncratic way to say it really happened. It is perhaps a memoir of childhood written in the form of fiction. Regardless, it is beautiful.

In this book, KSP’s prose is lyrical and captures the mind of a child incredibly well. Han is a dreamy, rebellious girl, a fascinating character, a girl who ‘scarcely knew the world of the real from the world of the unreal: both were blended in the crystal of her mind.’ (16) A mentor figure, Sam the woodcutter, tells her that ‘wild oats is a crop most people sow when they live like children’. (56) (The meaning has surely narrowed over the years.) Han determinedly sows her oats, skipping school to glory in the beauty of the bush; enchanted by the circus; battling her nemesis, Miss Whittler; in love with the family and friends around her. It is episodic, each short chapter almost self-contained, with only a loose progression of the overall narrative. Things change in the last few chapters, as the circumstances of her parents (absent characters for most of the novel) impede on her idyllic life, and she must go ‘down into the great mysterious world they had talked so much of, to take her part in the joy and the labour and the sorrow of it.’ (160)

Jack Beasley comments that the novel ‘is more a story about children for adults, than for children themselves’ (A Gallop of Fire, 31), and I agree with him. Its achievement lies in its evocation of the enchanted world of a child’s mind, which is not necessarily something a child can appreciate – only adults in retrospect; it reminds me in this respect of Randolph Stow’s Merry Go Round in the Sea. Early in Wild Oats, Han comes across a cave which amazes her:

Han went to school the next day. But the smell of the hills was in her nose: it was like a taste in her mouth. Memory of the cave haunted her. She had a mind-picture of the great underground room, so vast and deep that, leaning over the edge, she could not see how far it went, only the bones glimmering on the floor in the darkness. (31)

A children’s novel would require that there really be a human skeleton to discover at the bottom of the cave, or at least that some great adventure occur there. Yet Wild Oats evokes the gap between our childhood expectations of adventure gained from stories, and the reality that adventure is more a state of mind.

Echoes of Genesis: Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Pioneers

06 Thursday Feb 2014

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In some ways KSP’s first published novel, The Pioneers (1915), resembles the Book of Genesis. It begins with a couple – Donald and Mary Cameron (initially ‘the woman’) – coming to the end of an arduous journey and establishing a homestead in the bush, a homestead which is the foundation for what will become a town over the course of the novel. They are not so much Adam and Eve as Abraham and Sarah – the ambitious, inflexible patriarch and his resourceful wife working cunningly yet virtuously behind the scenes, including when it comes to matching their only son with a wife. A cleansing fire strikes the town early on, perhaps echoing the flood in Genesis. The characters feel, to an extent, archetypal.

Yet we shouldn’t push the comparison too far – I doubt it’s a conscious framework for KSP, and the novel resembles the work of Thomas Hardy as much as anything else, with the familiar plot of a struggle between suitors for the hand of the village’s most beautiful young woman, Deirdre, the novel’s second heroine. Furthermore, the novel changes tone, and the long middle is an involved, heavily plotted cattle-muster caper, not resembling Genesis at all. It is only in the final chapters, as Deirdre, resolves the long tussle between three suitors, that the novel recaptures the poignancy of its beginning. Mary’s final words in the novel reveal its vision:

“Oh God,” she whispered breathlessly, “we broke the earth, we sowed the seed. Let theirs be the harvest – the joy of life and the fullness thereof.” (316)

For a writer who was to be known for her sympathetic engagement with Aborigines, it is interesting to note that this early novel shows no evidence of what is to come. The minor Aboriginal character who accompanies the stockmen is not given a name, referred to instead as ‘the black boy.’

KSP was also to become a Communist; there is a degree of class consciousness in this novel, but only a degree. It centres mainly on the injustice of prejudice against former convicts, one of whom, the Schoolmaster, is an educated Irishman imprisoned for political reasons. In the epilogue, set fifteen years later, Dan, grandson of Mary, remembers her charge to him as he visits her grave:

“Then she told me about prisons here in the early days, mother, and terrible stories of how people lived in the old country. ‘They may talk about your birthstain by and by, Dan,’ she said, ‘but that will not trouble you, because it was not this country made the stain. This country has been the redeemer and blotted out all those old stains.'” (320)

It is an interesting, fast-moving story, still remarkably readable today, 99 years later, even if it feels a little sentimental and melodramatic. KSP’s prose is beautiful in places, and you can sense her determinedly evoking an Australia of a couple of generations earlier.

The book has been reprinted in recent years, but can also be found as an ebook through Project Gutenberg. I read it in PDF format on my tablet, so that the typesetting was exactly the same as the first edition, and even the pages were appropriately yellowed.

Book review – Andrew McGahan: Last Drinks

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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Ten years after the Fitzgerald Inquiry, corrupt journalist George is in exile in a small country town; but then his ex-best friend Charlie turns up dead in the town. George goes to Brisbane to cremate Charlie and tries to find out what happened. The story emerges in big chunks of flashback whenever George meets someone from his past. This feels clumsy to me; it’s not integrated, it’s a stop the story and go back to the past. The novel is soaked in alcohol; every character is an alcoholic. George has gone sober for the last ten years, but when he finally uncorks a bottle toward the end, it’s like a sex scene we’ve been working up to all novel.