Ric Throssell (1922-1999) was the only child of Katherine Susannah Prichard and Hugo Throssell. He was a soldier in New Guinea in WWII, then a diplomat, which he remained until 1983 despite his career being held back, especially early on, by his mother (and some of his friends) being Communists. As a writer, he produced 30 or so plays; two works, one about each parent; and, from 1991-1998, four novels.
In a Wilderness of Mirrors (1992) is the story of a man my age, so a good generation younger than Throssell, Selwyn Joynton, starting with a flowery chapter describing him flying back to Melbourne, diagonally across Australia, as you do coming from Europe via SE Asia.
Below, through 35,000 feet of empty air, the Timor Sea stole probing fingers into the estuaries of Kings Sound and lost itself among the chasms of the Fitzroy River. The stain of summer smoke dulled the colours of the Kimberley to one worn ochre, blurring the sharp lines of tumbled barriers of rock and gorges carved by the millennial tides of time in the land.
He makes his way to his home, an old house in an overgrown apple orchard, in the outer eastern suburbs, at the foot of the Dandenongs. His son is long gone. His daughter, moved out while he’s away, comes back to welcome him home, cook him dinner. He thinks back to his student days, in the anti-Vietnam War movement, marrying their mother 8 months pregnant.
We proceed in fits and starts through the 1970s. Using his job as a reporter for ‘British News’, Joynton does jobs for the Foreign Office in Uganda (post Idi Amin), Vietnam (the withdrawal of Australian forces), Grenada (the overthrow of a socialist revolution). At home, his long absences and sexual inadequacy cause his marriage to fall apart. We are in Joynton’s head of course, but also the heads of random strangers overseas, his daughter, his wife, his Italian mother in law. It’s all very bitsy and the language overblown.
Flying in to the Seychelles (for the 1977 coup) –
The islands had been the legendary Limuria once. A drift of rock in the vast solitude of the Indian Ocean, as if the Titan fist of a banished god had broken from the sea to challenge the complacent deities of the land and sky. For aeons undiscovered by searching man, they had been left to age to quiet fulfilment, islands of peace and beauty, until the French discoverers …
It’s chapter and chapter about, home and away; home where his daughter loves him, his son loathes him and his wife doesn’t care; away, meddling ineffectually, errand boy for bureaucrats with dreams of empire.
He’s called home from London, from tidying up his mother’s affairs, to see to his wife who is ill, and the story peters out, with a brief Epilogue beginning: “It is time to clear the glass; to wipe away concealing mists of make-believe; fold back the wings of the mirror that make man many men.” He protests, as so many do, that even though this is fiction, that the events in it are true, he was there, or there soon after. Except Vietnam, though “I suppose it might have seemed like that to some of the soldiers coming home.” And except the anti-war movement, where I was and he wasn’t, which for a brief moment I thought he might expand upon, but which here at the end he says he wrote with the assistance of his daughter and her friend, Biff Ward.
This is a very short review, for an unsatisfactory book, surprisingly short given that I was home and writing it up as I read, a process which usually results in too many words rather than too few. I respect that Throssell wanted to provide a left wing perspective to events to which he had been a witness; but it seems being the son of a famous author was a burden he was unable in the end to support.
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Ric Throssell, In a Wilderness of Mirrors, Left Book Club Co-Operative, Sydney, 1992. 196pp
I watch very little television, no streaming, and go to the movies about once a year. I am so little up on popular culture that McLeod’s Daughters, now 20 years in the past, is the best I can do as an illustration of the ongoing influence of the Independent Woman. I know tv series need romance and weddings to keep the ratings up, but I think the producers of McLeod’s Daughters were true to the idea – of women running things without men – over a long period.
The Independent Woman, in Australia, was born of the frustration of clever women being forced to hand their lives over to men; to give themselves up to the control of others who, just by the law of averages, were likely to be less competent than themselves 50% of the time; and above all, to subject themselves to seemingly endless child-bearing and raising.
England’s New Woman movement of the 1890s seems to have been more focussed on the middle classes, on employment and suffrage (and the freedom to ride bicycles). I pushed ahead with Gen 0 Week because I needed to resolve in my own mind what was going on in the rest of the world that fed into what still seems to me to be a unique Australian point of view, and of course, I found that the New Woman must have been a large part of that.
Though, for all that I often regard the Bulletin as the enemy, I think that it also represented an Australian independence of political thought, an anti-colonial spirit and willingness to innovate that infused all our thinking, including feminism. [I acknowledge that white settlers, men and women, did not recognise nor even understand the nature of their own colonisation of the Australian continent and its people].
By serendipity – I’m too rushed to be able to claim I planned it – AWW Gen 0 Week here coincides with the beginning of my year-long project on Australian Women Writers.com to document and illustrate my arguments for the recognition of the Independent Woman as an – maybe the most – important Australian archetype. Read on …
I’ve read a few Jolleys in the past few years, and have a few to go. The Sugar Mother (1988) I found most similar to An Accommodating Spouse (1999). The same, slightly vague literature professor husband, the same cheerful, competent wife. In An Accommodating Spouse the professor and his wife (and her twin sister) are holding a 21st birthday party for their triplet daughters. The professor is romantically, but platonically, attached to his (female) assistant at the university.
In The Sugar Mother the wife, Cecilia, a professor of medicine, departs to spend a year overseas attending conferences. The professor, Edwin, has living nearby Cecilia’s spinster sister, Daphne. But to make sure he doesn’t get lonely, Cecilia has organized a series of dinners with their circle of friends whom they met decades ago on the ship out from England.
So, they are clearly in Australia, and probably in Perth, though the city is, as usual it seems, not named. However, their house is on the edge of a large pine plantation, as is Perth’s Curtin Uni (formerly WA Institute of Technology) where for many years Jolley taught creative writing. Interestingly Jolley’s husband, Leonard, was Chief Librarian at UWA, across the river from Curtin, and that seems to be the journey Edwin makes each day to work (rather than walking to Curtin).
I imagine that people who knew Jolley and her husband would see aspects of them in Cecilia and Leonard, and probably some teasing, but I can’t imagine this is an autobiographical fiction. And for the record, the Jolley’s lived in Claremont, near Leonard’s work, rather than south of the river near hers.
I’m never very happy reviewing books, providing an outline and a judgement to entice people to read them (or not). I would much rather write a book report and discuss the book through to the end; no doubt one of the benefits of book groups – after of course meeting with friends and having supper. However, I will do my best today to say just enough and no more, but Jolley, like many authors, sets up little surprises throughout, and so inevitably the earlier ones must be revealed.
Leonard, hears a noise in the night, and on investigation discovers that his new next-door neighbours, a woman and her 18-20 ish looking daughter, have locked themselves out. He gives them the spare room for the night and waits for them to use the bathroom.
He thought the water had stopped… he wished he had never invited them, this Leila and her mother… He saw Leila coming out of the bathroom. He was too far along the hall to turn back. He saw that her blouse was unbuttoned. She gave a shy half-smile and slid by him sideways; her full youthful breasts, pinkly innocent, moved slightly in the opening of her garment …
Edwin, deeply moved by the sight, the glimpse of the girlish pink body, unseen, he thought, by anyone except herself and her mother, and, now, him, stopped at the door of the bathroom. Voluminous undergarments hung dripping from the shower curtain rail. He turned abruptly and fled …
A locksmith lets Leila and her mother back into their house, but work needs to be done; Edwin says stay a while longer, gives Leila’s mother money to do some shopping; she takes over the cooking, the housework. Daphne, always dropping by while walking her dog, disapproves. Somehow, for all their frequent and lengthy phone calls, Cecilia is not told.
The shipboard friends turn up for dinner, all bearing plates. Edwin has forgotten. Leila and her mother hastily take themselves outside, or to a play. At the end of a noisy, friendly night keys, as is customary, are tossed in a bowl. Edwin picks one up, but then backs out; the husband of the refused wife is enraged at the insult.
Otherwise, things progress as you might expect, sort of. A surprise is planned for Cecilia’s homecoming; her plane is diverted, she’s in Egypt.
And if you’re wondering, here’s the explanation for the title, from an exchange during their first meeting about there being “no kiddies”: ‘”Sugared mothers …” “Ah! … Not sugared”, he said, “surrogate”. “Yes”, Leila’s mother said, “that’s the word. With no family” – she pronounced it “farmily” – “a woman can be very lonesome.”‘
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Elizabeth Jolley, The Sugar Mother, first pub. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1988. My copy Penguin, 1989. 210pp.
This is my third Eugen Bacon in the months since I first heard of her when Lisa reviewedSerengotti in June. One collection, Languages of Water; one co-write SF, Secondhand Daylight; and now, not quite a straight novel, but a straight story told in creative ways, with as it happens, a not straight protagonist, Ch’anzu.
Serengotti (2023) appears to be Bacon’s fourth novel, but looking at her website, she has also written a lot of stories and non-fiction work over the past decade.
Ch’anzu, a thirtyish woman computer programmer is, when the novel begins, in the process of losing her job: “A pitiful economy. The Pandemic. Sorry, Ch’anzu.” It’s just the beginning of a bad day. She lands back at her St Kilda Rd apartment – Park Lane on the Melbourne Monopoly board – to a message from her deadbeat brother, Tex: “Maya’s gone. Bitch wanted to get married. Shit happened … Just one thing. Lend me some dosh?” Scarlet, her wife, is not home so she goes out, gets drunk, rolls in again around midnight. ‘What you see is lust, tits and balls. What you see is catastrophe.’ The guy goes. Scarlet goes.
A day or two later a job opportunity crops up, Wagga Wagga (map), coding a community health app. Ch’anzu emails a CV. A woman calls back, Valarie:
“What do you know about black people? … “ “I’m black. Afrocentric.” “Great, job’s yours…” “Do I get a company car?” “You don’t need one in Serengotti.” “Zie/hir,” you say. “I beg yours.” “My pronouns are zie/hir.” “You can take whatever pronouns you like dear, as long as you can code.”
Ch’anzu and Tex have been brought up by their Aunt Maé, who now stages an intervention. Ch’anzu stays with her a while before flying up to Wagga (say it twice).
Bacon was born in Tanzania, did a computer science degree in England, began writing; moved again, to Australia, to Melbourne; did a masters and PhD here in Literature and now teaches creative writing (at Swinburne or RMIT, I’m not sure). She seems fascinated by Australian speech patterns and by Australian football – hard not to be in Melbourne, of course, but it’s not something you see often in Australian Lit.
Her taxi driver in Wagga tells her about his daughters: “One’s on a farm, married a fahmer. The other’s shacked with a builder. Four-bed with build-ins and a veggie patch. No tomatoes yet – put them in late.”
He’s got no right to inflict you with his family when yours is broken.
And so we arrive at Serengotti, a small community for African refugees, managed by Valarie. A resort really, with restaurant, ice cream parlour, hut of natural remedies, serviced thatched cottages, a swimming pool. Ch’anzu is a swimmer – with swimmers’ shoulders – throughout the novel zie is bothered by a contretemps with an old woman in a pool back in Melbourne (Fitzroy, but not the famous Fitzroy pool). Was the incident with the old woman enough to bring on a curse? Maybe.
I wonder if this is written in second person to avoid the pronouns. Though, at intervals throughout we get Tex’s POV for a page or two, and he is meticulous in using them –
Memories are bursts of colour. Everything in clarity, as though it were days, hours, seconds ago. Death enthrals Ch’anzu. The day we danced in bubbles and made merry music in the tub, the day we were teens but toddlers at heart, how we drowned each other with half-hearted yelps – that was the day zie almost killed me The intensity in hir eye, hands on my face. Holding me down ..
I wrote in a recent review that Alexis Wright might have written the first great abstract novel. Right now I am reading William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch for which I will put up a review in a couple of weeks, and where I will try and give his experiments with abstract writing an historical context. It is easy to think of Burroughs as a one-off, but Bacon’s writing here reflects how his experiments have carried on through the postmodern period. Words and phrases, seemingly random, but carrying the story forward by generating impressions.
Your dreams plunge you forward in pits full of numbers in pi times diameters. Now they’re letters of the alphabet. C is a menace. Y plunges ahead. M is full of revolt. P is reconsidering options with too much scrutiny …
What I have also written about before is the rhythms of African writing, and Bacon has that too, which is interesting to read in an Australian work. And the rhythms of African life. Serengotti is an African island, and we don’t really see it contrasted against Wagga, a rural city surrounded by gum tree lined paddocks, between the Great Divide and the Riverina plains.
Ch’anzu is only slowly accepted into the community. There’s a handsome policeman/security guard. And a pretty, unspeaking, girl across the way. Scarlet invites Ch’anzu to Sydney, attempts reconciliation. Tex is in trouble, arrives, bringing it with him. Someone goes missing. Someone is murdered.
There’s plenty going on, some of it resolved. Bacon is a good writer, well worth keeping track of.
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Eugen Bacon, Serengotti, Transit Lounge, Melbourne, 2023. 264pp.
Drusilla Modjeska (1946- ) is an English born Australian writer and literary academic. Her three novels, and it is a crying shame there are only three, are – Poppy (1990) – my review The Orchard (1994) The Mountain (2012) – my review
Poppy started out as a biography of her mother, and became along the way autofiction; The Mountain is more conventional fiction, but reflects Modjeska’s time in Port Moresby as a young university wife and student.
The Orchard, and it is interesting to read it right on top of Fay Weldon’s Mantrapped, is an interweaving of stories, fictional memoir and reflections on women artists and writers no doubt drawing on the work Modjeska was doing for the later (non-fiction) Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999), “a rich and engrossing book about the lives of two Australian women artists, Stella Bowen (1893-1947) and Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984)” about which one reviewer wrote, “as she progresses she allows more and more of herself into their story, until Smith and Bowen seem in danger of becoming mere foils for what becomes a tiresome self-reference” (Kirkus Review 15 September 2000).
Modjeska obviously does not think or write about topics without thinking and writing about their relevance to herself.
The ‘I’ in this book is a women in her 40s – Modjeska was 48 when it came out – who suffers a problem, hopefully temporary, with her sight and who draws from the experience that out of solitude comes growth.
It seems to be, and I’ve heard it said by others similarly afflicted with illness, or grief, or losses of other kinds, that by being forced to live within a curtailment not of one’s choosing, there can be a corresponding expansion in the heart’s capacity. It is this I came to glimpse. I came to see that what I feared, though I called it blindness … was not of blindness itself, but of solitude; the solitude that necessarily comes with the curtailment of robust daily life and that, on first encountering it, brings with it the solitude of child separated from mother, lover from lover, friend from friend…
I came to see that what is required of us at such times is not performance – that endless dance of display – but the simple task of being.
p.118
To be honest, I have done this very fine work a disservice by reading it piecemeal, in between other commitments, so that I had forgotten how it began before I got to the end. What can I say? Read it for yourself, it is definitely worth reading, and pay attention might be first. There is a lot going on.
The novel begins with Ettie, an eighty year old with a large house and fine garden, in which she works every day, high up in the Blue Mountains which for a long time cut white settlement in Sydney off from the rest of Australia. Her story is told by the paintings of her which line the walls, and then, in bits and pieces, by herself.
Ettie, in Kings Cross before WWII, was an artists’ model for Jock. She sleeps with him, falls pregnant, goes to London to have the baby, a girl, who is taken back to Sydney and brought up there by Jock and his wife Helen. Ettie sees the war out in London, comes home on a refugee ship, and marries another artist she meets on the wharf, Gerhard.
Louise, who is friends with ‘I’ and of a similar age, meets Ettie. They all become friends and the house in the mountains becomes their refuge. There is a young woman often there, Clara, whom Ettie tells all the tales of princes and princesses that her Polish mother told her, but especially the legend of the girl whose hands are cut off to save her from the Devil; married to a king who makes her hands of silver; who is then lost to him; and whose hands grow back – which recurs throughout.
What Clara is not told is that she is Ettie’s granddaughter. “Very few people know the story that began with Jock in the George Street studio, long into the past, and comes into the present in the form of Clara.”
Clara’s lover Tom has betrayed her by using her opinions more or less verbatim, as his own, in his newspaper column. The subject is Artemisia Gentileschi a 17th century Florentine artist, a woman who was raped in her father’s studio, and then tortured to give evidence, who is now regarded “as one of the most progressive and expressive painters of her generation” (Wiki), and whose independence and ability are another sub-theme of this ‘novel’; as is the life of Stella Bowen, who had a daughter, born 1920, to her partner, English novelist, Ford Maddox Ford.
In fact, strong independent women, and what makes them, is what this discursive novel is about. In the final third, the author returns to her unhappy school days, boarded out at (fictional) Carn in Wessex and relates that back to what the highly educated but largely unschooled Virginia Woolf was seeking for young women in A Room of One’s Own (1929).
In the final scenes Tom, who apparently has reached some sort of accommodation with Clara, assists her to leave him, to take a job in New York. And although the novel goes on a little longer, this is the line that sums it up for me: “.. but then men rarely realise why it is that they lose the women whom they think it is sufficient simply to love.”
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Drusilla Modjeska, The Orchard, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1994. 268pp.
When I was a student, a long time ago, there was a circuit of hotels around Melb Uni that featured WWII era UK singers and dancing on Saturday nights – the Astor, Clare Castle, Sarah Sands. Mostly, if I could get my friend Di to go with me, we’d go to the Astor, in Lygon St, have a few drinks and a few dances – I grew up in the country ok, I didn’t know any other way to dance.
A generation later my son and his friends lived/still live a bit further north, in Brunswick and Northcote, and the Sarah Sands has been through many iterations as a venue for drinking, dancing and eating (the poor old Astor devolved into a meeting place for Carlton Football Club in-groupers).
Which is by way of introducing you to two things in Secondhand Daylight: that the narrator, a young man, dances at a nightclub in the Sarah Sands on Thursday nights; and he listens to the Dead Kennedys, specifically California Uber Alles, which my son’s best friend introduced me to, along with Lard, when he used to make me mix tapes in the 1990s, the starting period for this book.
In passing, Secondhand Daylight is also the name of an albumn by “UK post-punk band Magazine”. I listened to it for a while, while I was looking up other stuff, but obviously, though having made it over the years from rock to punk, I’m not going to make it ‘post’.
Chapter 1
1990
I came to on the tarmac outside the Sarah Sands Hotel. I felt my feet, wriggled a toe inside my boot. I stood with caution, scratched my head. The fog just happened?
X, I think he gets a name later, has just experienced his first time loss, while dancing with a girl not called Em he has just met.
He starts to lose time more frequently, minutes, hours, days, his one friend, his job, his mostly absent father (his mother long gone); before 6 months lost makes him realise he’s jumping forward in time. During one long absence Moonee Ponds City Council seizes his house; he banks the proceeds; as he skips forward increasingly longer periods, ageing only incrementally as he does, compound interest makes him rich.
In maybe the 2020s, getting a clothes fitting in Spring St, not Em passes the door, but by the time he’s outside she’s gone.
In the 2050s he discovers he owns a social media and research company, managed by himself cloned as an AI; that they have discovered a way to travel back in time; that an employee, a young woman, Zada, has gone back looking for him.
And then we have Zada’s story.
X’s story (I have his surname at least, Green) keeps aiming for a Grunge vibe and not always hitting. In an encounter with a briefly met 9 year old half brother, X tries for juvenile football slang, but then, no doubt for foreign readers, says ‘Melbourne Cricket Ground’ when there isn’t a person in Melbourne who says other than ‘MCG’, except, when talking to 9 year olds maybe, they might say ‘the G’
I’m pretty sure the Green guy’s story has been written by Hook, a Brit, and Zada’s by Bacon, who is African/Australian. They fit together, one after the other, ok, but they flow differently. Though they both have a good feel for Melbourne, and an innocent, early-SF vibe of over-eager talking about sex, Heinlen-ish, without the misogyny.
[I’m writing as I read, and Zada, written if I’m right by Melbourne resident Bacon, on meeting Green’s one (ex-)friend as she jumps backwards, does say ‘the G’. Which she then spoils with some unnecessary explaining about footy teams].
Zada jumps back and back, trying to match where she is to where he should be; never quite meeting up; gathering information from his friends, family; matching herself to each new/old version of Melbourne; till she’s at the Sarah Sands, at the bar of the nightclub, on a Thursday night, in 1990.
Zada looks around. This is it, that’s how it feels like. The last stop. She has no way back or forward in time. The Tesseract should close history here, in Green’s furthermost place, the beginning place where his time jumps began.
The ending isn’t predictable, it isn’t even an explanation. I’m still thinking about it.
It’s at least a year since I last let anyone send me a new release for review, and now I’ve had two in a week, both time travel – though otherwise completely different – and both fun reads.
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Eugen Bacon & Andrew Hook, Secondhand Daylight, Cosmic Egg Books, 2023
Debbie Robson is an author, based in NSW, with a couple of novels to her name, plus this one just out. I think it would be fair to say she mostly sets her fiction in the period between the two World Wars. You may know her also as a regular contributor to the Australian Women Writers Challenge, most recently on Australian women doctors and nurses with Scottish Women’s Hospitals during WWI.
The Hermitage, a novella set in Sydney in 1937, has a twist which I really enjoyed. Sadly, it’s spelt out on the back cover, or the beginning of it anyway, so it doesn’t come as a complete surprise. And that is that the Hermitage and its grounds, on the north shore of Sydney Harbour (map) is a closed system, accessible, by the Taronga Zoo ferry, from other times.
A woman, Vere, and two men, Roger and John, board the ferry at the Zoo. They are the only passengers and the captain remains invisible, shouting at them to disembark when the ferry arrives at the Hermitage. All three have very little idea of how they came to be there, except some memory of being invited to stay with Celeste and Dereck Williams, whom none of them know.
Celeste proves to be a young woman, thirtyish, with or caring for a baby, Blythe. There is no Dereck, but an older man, Bernard, and a cook, Mrs Jenkins. I’m not sure Vere and Roger are given ages, but let’s say late thirties. John is younger, early twenties, and dressed in an old fashioned suit.
The three are met by Bernard and when Celeste subsequently appears Vere can see that her dress is not quite right, too modern. It is Vere who catches on the quickest, and when she subsequently goes through Celeste’s things she finds she is reading The Pursuit of Love, which we know from my last post was published in 1945.
It is soon apparent, to Vere and to the reader, that Celeste and Bernard are from some years ahead and John is from 1917 or 18. I won’t say more than that about the time travel aspect, except that Robson deals with it quite nicely, and the explanation, when it comes, works beautifully.
Vere coaxes John into being her lover, while Roger, who is meant to be in the middle of an important business deal, rants and storms about the place, going off on long walks which invariable return him to his starting point. The Hermitage is not a place guests can leave without an escort.
The author implies, or perhaps Vere just wrongly believes, they are in a “locked room” mystery. Which is to say someone dies and there is no way in or out. But no one dies, well not here anyway, and they all eventually satisfy the conditions for leaving.
What struck me was the writing. Consistently throughout it’s like reading a play script. Each chapter begins with the scene being set and then proceeds mostly by dialogue. Not that I minded, it works quite well.
Pre-Dinner Drinks
The grandfather clock in the hall strikes the hour of six as Bernard and Roger sit drinking whiskies in the sitting room. Daphne [the dog] is asleep at Bernard’s feet.
“Where are the girls?” Roger asks.
“Unfortunately, Celeste is not feeling well, so she won’t be coming in to dinner. I’m not sure where Vere is. Sketching I think.” Bernard takes a puff of his cigar. “I saw her walk off into the bush below the tennis court with her sketch pad a couple of hours ago.”
I enjoyed the story, read it straight through in one sitting. It is far gentler than most SF – and yes it is SF. I wonder if Debbie enjoyed herself genre-hopping from Hist.Fic. romance like this. I imagine she did. She handles very well the progress each of the characters makes with understanding their situation, and also their interactions. In just 138 (double spaced) pages we get to know all the characters, and to like them, Vere and Celeste in particular.
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Book Launch: Tuesday 19th September, Hippy Java Cafe, Lake Macquarie NSW
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Debbie Robson, The Hermitage, Alien Buddha Press, 2023. 138pp [available from Amazon Aust or US]
When we left off at half-way, and ok, I cheated by 10 or 20 pages, Cause Man Steel and Dance’s son, Aboriginal Sovereignty, had walked out into the sea to drown, with his little brother Tommyhawk watching through the night, from the mangroves, for him to reappear. He doesn’t and in the following days the town, Praiseworthy, is frantic for any sight of him.
01 Aug.
I’ve been thinking about the writing in this book and it reminds me of Jean Paul Sartre – writing round and round in circles but each iteration moving the idea under consideration a little further forward. I have often wondered what Abstract Art would look like when applied to writing. Modernism in Literature appeared to stop at Impressionism, and then maybe step sideways into Surrealism with Postmodernism. William Burroughs had a shot at it, but Praiseworthy may be the first great Abstract novel.
10 Aug.
In a long weave spell of rainless nights, when only the waft of nightmares drifted in Praiseworthy’s dry-season dust bowl, a superhero cop arrived on the scene. He came to find Aboriginal Sovereignty too…. This fellow … was called Maximum Security Service.
Once the big yellow-haired God man masquerading as a superhero cop had heard the news that the natives were stirring … he jumped straight into his Avis rent-a-car … drove non-stop on the long road north, days of travel on teeth-shattering corrugation … to find out what this Aboriginal Sovereignty nonsense was about.
p.343
Maximum recruits the whole town to search for Ab.Sov. but is soon confined to his hotel room in irrelevance as they lie to him, and he makes up lies for Canberra.
Butterflies swarming from the interior fill Praiseworthy’s skies as they flock into the sea. There are moths and butterflies throughout the novel. Perhaps their significance will eventually become apparent.
18 Aug.
P.368, a new chapter begins, ‘Goddess of Scales’. I should really have half-wayed here. At midnight the night of Ab.Sov’s suicide a fascist muffled voice kid has called every mobile phone in town threatening to expose all you paedophile parents “nah getting your mongrel kids ta bed early, like the Australian Government said you were supposed ta.” Who is this prodigy, expert on the “Emergency Act for Intervening more greatly into the lives of Aboriginal people”?
Supercop insists every bad parent should tell him why they did not love their children like white people loved theirs, illustrating again the bitterness that is in every line, not just against racist government, but against the racist society, us, with which Aboriginal people have to live every minute of every day.
Out in the ocean, the sea lady hears Ab.Sov. fretting about his missing Basics Card as he dies, just more polluting plastic as far as she is concerned. The old fishermen fruitlessly searching, “knew the sea air was not the same sea air it used to be … there was only one thing causing their bodies to rot: they were being infested with microparticles of racism … in the plastic hazes the size of a thousand kilometres circling the sea, and floating in the dusty haze dome over Praiseworthy: all racism.” (p.399)
With Widespread stuck far away in the desert, the engine of his wrecked Falcon in pieces, the feral donkeys escape from the cemetery and attack the searchers on the beach.
The expensive government medical staff … stayed in their cyclone-proof fenced compound, behind a three-and-a-half metre-tall cement wall around the hospital grounds annexed by state government from traditional Aboriginal lands, and handed medicine out to the sick people through a hole in the wall… Ditto the police officers who hid in their compound on land long ago excised by state laws too.
p.417
Widespread eventually makes his way home to find his enterprise ruined, his loved older son dead, and his unloved, fascist, younger son missing or hiding. A new chapter starts, Sitting in the Bones (p.455)
19 Aug. I’m pushing on to get this monster finished.
Hundreds brave injury-causing donkeys, scouring the beach for clues; Tommyhawk waits fruitlessly to be rescued by the sunshine halo gleaming Blonde Hair White Mother Minister in Canberra; Dance, off with the butterflies, dreams of a new homeland in China; supercop goes home, defeated; while all there is to be found in the sand is the ghosts of all the dead children past, who had made their pacts and walked out into the water, who had felt the pointlessness of the new era with no future.
Mayor Ice Pick puts a stop to the grief scene, permanently closing the beach. “I am the Commonwealth Government of Australia’s forward plan for Praiseworthy … So! Go home you people and get back to working with reality.” (p.502).
But, if A.S. Steel is finally dead, or accepted as dead, then there must be a murderer. Where’s his father? Blame Widespread, also probably head of the Praiseworthy paedophile ring. Ice Pick sends a dossier to Mother Minister for the Affairs of Aboriginals. (p.559)
20 Aug. ‘Cargo Shifter’
Wright’s anger has been simmering all along, but for a section of 5 or 6 pages here she lets it rip, going back to describe in detail the 20 man police squad sent to arrest 17 year old Aboriginal Sovereignty for rape, for paedophilia, for sleeping with his promised and traditionally married 15 year old wife
“The Prime Minister himself made these laws with his own brain to change the slack black welfare attitudes of you people, to open up your so-called locked up Aboriginal land, and to lock up men that prey on children. Came law in 2007. Little Children are Sacred! Remember those words? We have laws now to deal with all those allegations on the national ABC TV about rampant child sexual abuse, rivers of grog, and neglect in the Aboriginal community.”
p.562
and then they beat him to a pulp, screaming black bastard and paedophile at him all the while, beat him into unconsciousness. “Rise your fists. You niggers like to fight. Rise them.”
Here, nearing the end, it becomes less certain that Aboriginal Sovereignty has died. From drowning, the sea lady has escorted him for days perhaps, sometimes underwater, sometimes at the surface, on the back of a turtle, till way out to sea he is brought, dead, on board the deck of a people smuggler cargo boat for peoples whose land is permanently underwater, then lifted, unconscious, into a Border Force helicopter. To be imprisoned in an offshore concentration camp?
as [he] moved through the years of his continual circling over the same piece of ground in the barren exercise yard of the detention centre while all the other prisoners watched, and thought he was really somewhere else ..
p.594
One Donkey at a Time Holy Donkey Business Ice Queens The Giant Kelp Hair Sea Lady Gulped!
Widespread dumps Tommyhawk way out in the desert.
We spend a strange night with Major Mayor Ice Pick – who must surely be a satire on Aboriginal bureaucracy – his Ice Queen disciples, and his 3am broadcast to the town and to the world on the evils of paedophilia.
Alexis Wright (1950- ), a Waanyi woman, is Australia’s greatest living writer. Greater than Gerald Murnane, Kim Scott, JM Coetzee? Hmmm .. Murnane has certainly written more; Scott has not re-risen to the heights of Benang; Coetzee has been here a while, but …
No, I’ll stick with Wright. Praiseworthy (2023) is her fourth novel; then there’s the amazing, innovative, Stella Prize-winning, biography, Tracker (2017); all clunksters – I’m yet to read Plains of Promise (1997), but let’s say 3,000 pages. That’s a substantial body of work by most standards, and she didn’t get started until she was in her forties.
I’m yet to read Praiseworthy for that matter. As I type this I am, after some weeks, at page 105 of 720. Am I going to wing it? No. What I’ll do is write not an overview, but my experience from time to time of being immersed as I make my way through until I emerge, some weeks hence, at the end.
Once upon a time for some people in the world, but not so plenteous, nor perfect for others, there lived a culture dreamer obsessing about the era. […] Anyhow! This planet fixer ended up wasting away among the others who did not give a rat’s arse about saving the dying world …
p.1-5
07 June.
And so we begin, in the town of Praiseworthy, in the Gulf country I suppose. The planet fixer becomes Planet, becomes Widespread becomes … I’ll add names as I go (Cause Man Steel). His wife is Dance and their sons are Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tomahawk.
To the extent there is meaning, it must be extracted from a great storm of words. Praiseworthy is in effect an enormous prose poem.
The town is under a haze “full of broken ancestors breathing on them with virus air from who knows where else.”
… you would lose count of the many delegations flying off to Canberra to implore politicians across the political spectrum from the extreme Pentecostal right to every crazed independent governing sector in the country to amend the Australian Constitution to get rid of the haze, and also now, to stop shooting butterflies
p.10
We meet another character, Major Mayor, who, obsessed by becoming white, gets the name Ice Pick and so we go on for some time with the haze, and Major Mayor/Ice Pick and, for a while, a golden dung beetle; till at last we circle back to Cause/Widespread/Planet who has a plan to save the world from ominicide; to make Praiseworthy wealthy; to find the perfect grey donkey from among Australia’s five million feral donkeys; to pen donkeys on Dance’s Native Title land, the town cemetery; to build a mighty donkey-hauled transport empire.
14 June.
Dance is out in the dark “searching for emperor moths, studying their eagle-eye wings spread out on the surface of night-scented gum leaves”, and Planet is sneaking out of town in his old Ford Falcon
In the dawn, the heavy haze falls over the donkey nightmares of Praiseworthy as Widespread’s vehicle puffs, crawls into motion, moves slowly while reciting its aubade*, through a distant world …
p.132
26 June
Widespread drives round and round in the desert for days, a guide donkey in the back seat. Finally, he crashes into a tree and descends into delirium. So ends, on p.164, chapter 1, New Gods.
The new chapter begins with Aboriginal Sovereignty, whom you might remember is Widespread’s son, 17, dead. In the continuing storm of words, Aboriginal Sovereignty – in “Praiseworthy where so many children were ending it all” – waded out into the sea, never came back.
Tomahawk, Ab.Sov’s 8 year old brother, hides in the mangroves all night, watching Ab.Sov lying face down, taking forever; has taunted Ab.Sov with being a paedophile, How old is your girlfriend? All the newspapers know that paedophilia is rife, the schools have the Help Line up on the board. I’ll report you to the white police.
07 July
In the paedophilia era of belief running through the mind of national Australia, the story was that everywhere you looked in an Aboriginal community you would find a paedophile.
p.238
This is the foundational lie of the Intervention, when the disgusting little man Johnny Howard really let his inner racist bile flow after building up a head of steam on brown refugees. And Wright hammers home just how damaging it was for Aboriginal children. Tomahawk believes it of his brother, of his father.
15 July
Round and round we go. Ab.Sov. dead/missing, in death/absence noticed, important as he had never been in life, funeral celebrated in all the town’s rival churches, while Dance Steel, his mother, mourns alone with her butterflies in the town cemetery/Steel native title land. Cause Man Steel comes back, and in crying the loudest for his lost son, so alienates the rest of the town that they decide he must be Chinese or something, and Dance too, and not possibly the proper Native Title holders.
Cause Man and Dance move on to fighting about Tomahawk “learning white shit at school” while ironically, ABC radio booms endlessly across the cemetery
.. the chattering classes on repeat [..] speed-talking about all the paedophiles rampant in Aboriginal communities, where those Aboriginal parents did not love their children, and all Aboriginal men were violent. And the chorus – wait for it – why should they have special rights?
p. 288
16 July
For a while we spread our focus to the whole town, all the churches and denominations competing to pray for the missing boy, Major Mayor Ice Pick rousing the town to search for the body missing at sea, search all the houses for clues, search all the people for evidence of unassimilationist behaviours and beliefs that might offend the Australian Government for Aboriginal people; “or were they just searching for anything at all, which meant they did not know what they were looking for?” Tomahawk, a little round boy of 8, hides in the oleanders, watching the searchers, sending messages on his iphone to his Golden-Hair real mother Minister for Aboriginal Peoples in Canberra, whose motorcade from Manuka to Capitol Hill is blown up, again, by terrorists and she can’t answer.
And finally, we get to the point, the point that Aboriginal Sovereignty just turned 17 was arrested, dragged from school where he was the star pupil – because his girlfriend, 15, now 16, promised to him in marriage, was underage and Ab.Sov. thereby a paedophile – broke out of the town lock-up and in despair threw himself into the ocean.
The boys questioned by the police say
they had never known anyone named Aboriginal Sovereignty, and did not believe in Aboriginal Sovereignty because that would be against the Australian state, and they said that they only believed in assimilation – in becoming white as quick as possible, and were belted by the police for insulting white people by thinking that black paedophiles like themselves could ever become white people.
p.339
And perhaps their teacher should be locked up too. Did she support paedophiles? One call by the police to the Minister of Education and she would be out of there on the next flight.
And so we are half-way through and I must spend the next week at least reading and writing up Tess. What I think Wright is doing – brilliantly of course – is representing all the cross-currents in a small, isolated community responding inadequately, strangely even, to the constant pressure of the news media, Murdoch and ABC-Murdoch lite; to the loss of the law that has guided them for millennia; to their own poor understanding of the new laws, arbitrarily imposed on them by systemically racist police.
Eugen M. Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD is a Melbourne-based, “African Australian author of several novels, prose poetry and collections. A computer graduate mentally re-engineered into creative writing” (author’s bio).
Lisa recently reviewed her Serengotti, which led to me being offered an SF novel, Secondhand Daylight. The accompanying letter said, “I’ll also drop a copy of Languages of Water – it’s a speculative fiction anthology, a story in different forms of itself, which might perhaps intrigue your scholarly side… ” and here we are. ‘Scholarly’, maybe, it definitely captured my readerly side.
Though even after having read it I struggle to describe what is going on. Let’s say a group of international writers taking part in an RMIT digital workshop have written riffs on a story of Bacon’s, “When the Water Stops” – a village entirely without water, bleeding for each other, but it’s not enough.
Really though, this is 200 plus pp of poetry. The story is important, or at least the message is, and the form it takes is often prose, but it’s the words, the telling, that the writers here are focussing on.
That’s the first thing. An invitation to write water.
Then this: slam poet and Djapu writer from Yirrkala in East Arnhem Land Melanie Munungurr brings with her the skins of saltwater people, memories soaked in water, where the water remembers…
Water, memory, and I think of sprinklers, making fanning circles on the hoped-for lawns of half-parched Perth …
Water, futures, and once not too long ago our government spent a vast amount of money building a desalination plant, in those seasons when the long drought came. Since then it has gone into mothballs …
The luckiest thing is to float down a river, have the current take you away …
Francesca Rendle-Short and David Carlin, To Write Water.
That’s the lead-in, by the course professors it turns out from the list of participants (below); then Bacon’s “When the Water Stops”, “As the climate turned, it hurled at them bush-fires that razed huts to the ground, dust storms that swept away families…”; Hecq, “Quand l’eau se tarit”; Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, “New Winds”, “As the wind called Renovation! runs through the village it hurls at them bushfires dust storms …”; then the same story in Vietnamese; Erin Latimer, “Deeper Still”, A mother and the son she thinks she maybe should never have had, the daily struggle to extract water from a parched land; Andrew Hook, “So Close to Home”, fuel storages, useless now, repurposed for ‘potable’ water,
Finch remembered the initial news reports. The scientist who warned of the crisis and the prime minister who nodded. The nod which evolved into a condescending smile that undermined the science …
To Audrey Chin, “Apabila Air Berhenti”, Bacon’s story in Malay – with illustrations; Oz Hardwick, “Stories from the Sandpaper Tongue”, “Bolt holes burn with a taste like blood, with a taste like excuses, with a taste like a tin cup scraped on rock in lines that wave like water”; Aldegunda Matoyo, “Maji Yanapotuama”, Bacon’s story in Swahili; Clara Chow, “New(er) Water”, “There is no time for childhood. The world’s water crisis awaits. Each dawn brings with it the race to sell the state’s patented waste-water recycling and de-salinisation technology to the other countries clamouring at their door”; Tamantha Smith, “Old Water”, “What stands between the girl and me is one last sip of water so old and feral … She’s bones under a brittle hide… She could be six years old, she could be ten.”
And doesn’t that bring it home. We are setting our children and grandchildren up to die.
In this week’s news: Leaked documents show Western Australia’s Environmental ‘Protection’ Authority continues to back its recommendation that Woodside’s licence to operate the North West Shelf Natural Gas export project be extended until 2070, potentially releasing 3.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. And of course the processing plant will continue to be expanded on the world’s oldest rock art site.
The collection goes on, in prose and poetry, in English, patois, Cantonese, Bengali; water stories; writers writing about writing water stories. The final, longer, story a Nigerian parable, “Black Queen” by Nuzo Onoh, the giving up of the old ways, the author’s discovery of “Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Credo Mutwa”; the government in Lagos accepting Chinese money; the slow poisoning of “our forests and beaches”; the disrespecting of the river mother, the Black Queen; her revenge. “And my village, the place my ancestors and I had lived, laughed and cried, sang and danced for countless generations; […] had ceased to exist.” And, by extension, our world.
It’s a fascinating and timely – though probably too late – work.
.
Eugen Bacon ed., Languages of Water, MV media, Fayetteville, GA, 2023
RMIT University – the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
WrICE – Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange at non/fictionLab RMIT, Oct 2021 Participants: Aldegunda Matoyo, Tanzania Andrew Hook, UK (co-writer of Secondhand Daylight) Audrey Chin, SE Asia Cheng Tim Tim, Hong Kong and UK Clara Chow, Singapore Clare Rhoden, Melbourne David Carlin, UK, now a Professor at RMIT and co-founder of WrICE Dominique Hecq, Belgium and Melbourne E Don Harpe, USA Erin Latimer, queer Australian-American Eugen Bacon, African Australian Francesca Rendle-Short, Professor at RMIT and co-founder of WrICE Jill Jones, Adelaide Kyongmi Park, Korean Japanese Nicki Bacon, I’m guessing Melbourne Nuzo Onoh, Nigerian-British Oz Hardwick, UK Pandora, Myanmar (here) Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, Vietnam (here) Ramya Jirasinghe, Sri Lanka (here) Rina Kikuchi, Japan Seb Doubinsky, France/Denmark Stephen Embleton, South Africa/UK Sudeep Chatterjee, India (first language Bengali) Tamantha Smith, Australia Zephyr Li, Chinese-Welsh
The Australian Legend 