Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, Anita Heiss ed.

ANZ LitLovers Indigenous Literature Week

Late to the (ILW) party! Growing up Aboriginal got lots of rave reviews a year or so ago when it came out. I seem to remember I put my hand up for a giveaway and so received my copy, autographed by the author!, from Lisa. So a belated thank you Lisa and thank you too for Indig.Lit.Week which doesn’t seem to be replicated anywhere else in the blogosphere.

There is no single or simple way to define what it means to grow up Aboriginal in Australia, but this anthology is an attempt to showcase as many of the diverse voices, experiences and stories together as possible. [Anita Heiss]

 The anthology consists of 50 autobiographical pieces, each about 5 pages, by people including some writers and sports people that I recognise and lots that I don’t. I enjoyed reading them but I struggled reading them, struggled with the lack of continuity. The standard was good, not uniformly good of course, but ranging from strings of ‘I did .. and I did’s to quite beautiful prose (and poetry).

My favourite piece might be the first, “Two tiddas” by sisters Susie and Alice Anderson who interview each other – on the difficulty of being Aboriginal and pale skinned, which a lot of the contributors discuss – and then start reviewing what they’ve written

S. Hey, I actually think this is a really strong arc but that could be because I’m tired as.

A. Well, I’m reading it back and I got really emotional. maybe I’m just really tired too. I feel like this is a conversation that could go on forever. This is literally a conversation that will go on forever.

But then there’s the rush of Evelyn Araluen’s writing in ‘Finding ways home’

In high school, Aboriginal didn’t mean time immemorial as much as it meant the boys calling me shit-skin and abo. Aboriginal meant I was always angry in History class, and fridge magnets and beaded bracelets at NAIDOC, and the digging stick in the study and nangarra above our door.

These two stuck with me over the ten days or so as I made my way through the rest. The standard by which all the others were judged. Dom Bemrose writes a letter to Australia –

Please forgive me for being unsuccessful with my suicide attempt at the age of twenty-three ..
Please forgive me for identifying as gay ..
Please forgive me for not being lazy: I know how you want your natives to want nothing but a free handout ..
Please forgive me for being a success! ..

The saddest, to contemplate if not to read, is Yúya Karrabúrra by Alice Eather who committed suicide between writing and publication. On the completion of her schooling in the city she returned to her mother’s community in Maningrida –

A lot of my friends I grew up with had had babies. There were so many different stories. The stories you don’t tell kids. The stories you hear when you’re an adult. That really shook me up. All I did was write … Why are all of our families in this state? What has happened? … Why was my brother in jail?

Eather trains as a teacher. She has put depression, suicide attempts behind her. “I can actually help. I can sit with kids and family members and say ‘I can feel your pain.'”

That’s a tough one to follow, but I read on. Adam Goodes, an absolute champion Australian rules footballer who was booed into early retirement by racist supporters writes a straightforward account of his childhood. I think he wishes he’d chosen soccer.

Most of these stories are by young people, in their twenties or thirties, so Doreen Nelson’s story, ‘Different Times’ is important for the contrast it provides and for the link back to the old days. Dooreen was born in the WA wheatbelt town of Kellerberrin (200 km east of Perth) in 1947 and she grew up on reserves outside Kellerberrin and the neighbouring township of Doodlakine. Limited schooling, her parents had none, a mother at 15, problems with alcohol, a child in care, slowly growing into responsibility and ordinary middle class prosperity.

Carol Pettersen is another older woman, though she doesn’t give her age, brought up in a mission and segregated from her siblings because her skin was paler, to protect her from the ‘natives’, like her bother, who were darker. Dragged away by the missionaries’ daughter from the fence keeping out her mother.

Western Australian writer Ambelin Kwaymullina provides the perfect summation –

People ask me sometimes if I experienced any racism when I was a kid. Questions like that always make me wonder where the other person was living. They seem to be speaking from some kind of magical Australia where it’s possible for an Indigenous person to escape the effects of racism in a colonised land..

Yes, of course I experienced racism. It’s like standing in the sea and having waves crash over you; it’s regular and relentless and you forget what it’s like to be able to properly breathe.

Like most of you I was brought up in an Australia that believed it didn’t have a race problem. Even now I am surrounded by people who are offended when it is pointed out, yes we do. Those people are probably beyond educating, but hopefully schoolkids everywhere are reading and discussing this book.

 

Anita Heiss ed., Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2018

see also:
Anita Heiss, Dhuuluu Yala: To Talk Straight (here)
ANZLitLovers Indigenous Lit. Read List (here)

In Quarantine, Again

Journal: 052

Yes, I’m back in quarantine. The Covid-19 blow-up in Victoria has caught up with me. No, I’m not ill, but the understandable response of the other states has been to allow truck drivers from Victoria to drive and unload etc., but to otherwise be isolated.

Here are some figures, those for Indiana, USA and Birmingham, UK are for our friends Melanie (GTL) and Liz (Adventures in Reading etc..)

Victoria (pop. 6.5m)       New cases/deaths: 273/1   Total: 3,799/24 (source)
Rest of Aust. (pop. 19m)   New cases/deaths: 6/0    Total: 6,000/84
Indiana (pop. 6.7m)         New cases/deaths: 793/8  Total: 51,079/2,563 (source)
Birmingham (pop. 4.3m) New cases/deaths: ?/4     Total:  ?/3,145 (source)

Of course the situations in USA and UK are an ongoing, unmitigated disaster, as they also seem to be in Brazil, India and sub-Saharan Africa, though the Australian media don’t pay them much attention. I’ve commented before that we are living in an age that confirms the prescience of Science Fiction. This trip I listened to Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos (1985) about the future of the human race after a bug wipes out everyone except some castaways on a Galapagos island.

Science fact rather than science fiction. No-one seems to remember David Suzuki any more. Remember he said 30 years ago that it was simple mathematics that with the population of the world doubling every few decades, from 1 bil. to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16, we would very quickly get to a level the planet was unable to support. Well, now we are there. Yes, we can still theoretically grow enough food, but population densities and mobility are now such that the spread of new viruses is becoming uncontainable. I thought I might be dead before the inevitable Malthusian implosion, but seems not.

It would have been interesting if the virus had come in a non-election year, because I think that the forces of reason, such as they are in the US, may have overthrown the president and attempted to contain the spread. But of course the forces of reason may in turn have been overthrown by the forces of naked capitalism, as indeed they have.

What I really meant to write, before I started running around crying ‘the end of the world is nigh’ (I have a white beard, I really should let it flow) is that 8 or 9 days ago, after a couple of weeks home and getting some work done on the truck, a customer popped up with a B Double load to Victoria, involving a detour to a farm down south which is my excuse for the photo above (it’s a Fargo, from the 1950s, and still a goer).

My delivery was to Leongatha in fertile, hilly Gippsland east of Melbourne where – speaking of ‘home’, as my last Journal did – we lived for five years in the 1950s, out past the milk factory which I used to see (and smell) across the paddocks from our little row of housing commission weatherboards down a gravel lane, and now surrounded by light industry. The paddocks so shockingly green after the mallee and desert country I’m used to.

My mate Homer who has loaded me out every trip for 15 months now since Dragan left me stranded in Melbourne on my first trip with my own trailers, was ready for me and I was in Melbourne for not much more than 24 hours before I was on my way home again. I was expecting trouble at the SA border (Yamba, near Renmark) and had been keeping a log of my contacts in Victoria, as required. That was ok but they also needed me to log onto SAPol and generate an entry number. Tedious at 10 o’clock at night, but soon done.

Twenty four hours later I was at the WA border, which had had the most formal entry requirements right from the beginning. An apologetic policeman told me that the rules had changed even as he was coming onto this shift and that as I was coming from Victoria he was obliged to put me under conditional quarantine. I, and he, signed some papers and then he requested that I photograph them as he had no copies.

I was to travel straight home by the most direct route, and there I must stay for 14 days unless “conducting authorised business as a specialist within your scope of work.” Apparently, I am permitted to leave if the house catches fire, but I must stay nearby and return as soon as possible. It was about 2 deg C in the middle of the night in mid winter on the cliffs above the Southern Ocean, though briefly not raining, as the poor bugger read all this out to me.

Now it’s Sunday, I’m home. Milly came round yesterday afternoon before I arrived and stocked me up with much better provisions than I would buy myself, to make up for the fact I guess, that if I continue running to Victoria it might be some months before I can go round to her place for dinner, let alone take her out.

This afternoon I will catch up on the Indigenous Lit Week posts I have missed (most of them), start writing up one of my own (Tues or Weds I hope, Lisa), catch up with the rest of you, do my EOFY bookwork (just joking, though I’d better do my end of quarter GST), tomorrow I will unload and Friday, I hope, I will be on my way again.

 

Recent audiobooks 

Kurt Vonnegut (M, USA), Galapagos (1985) – SF
David Quammen (M, USA), The Soul of Viktor Tronko (1987)
Peter Temple (M, Aust/Vic), The Broken Shore (2005) – Crime
Chevy Stevens (F, Can), That Night (2014) – Crime
JD Robb (F, USA), Kindred in Death (2009) – SF/Crime
Henry James (M, USA), The Turn of the Screw (1898) – Horror

Currently reading

Martin Boyd, The Cardboard Crown
Anita Heiss (F, Aust/NSW), Not Meeting Mr Right
Sally Rooney (F, Ire), Normal People
Elizabeth Gaskell (F, Eng), Cranford
Anita Heiss ed. (F, Aust/NSW), Growing up Aboriginal in Australia
Meredith Lake (F, Aust/NSW), The Bible in Australia. Don’t Ask!

Not Meeting Mr Right, Anita Heiss

ANZ LitLovers Indigenous Literature Week

Anita Heiss (1968- ) is a Wiradjuri woman, an academic and an author. I have previously reviewed her Dhuuluu-yala: To Talk Straight (here) on who should write Aboriginal stories, and plan hope to review her Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia towards the end of this Week.

As well as her academic work, Heiss has published a number of novels in the genre she likes to call Choc.Lit, ie. Chick.Lit with strong Black women protagonists. From the reviews I have looked at these are all as didactic as they are romantic. Not Meeting Mr Right (2007) was her first.

My younger daughter has been telling me off about using the expression Chick.Lit but I will leave her and Dr Heiss to fight that out between them. To be fair, I think that Gee’s concern was that men were too liable to characterise women’s writing as Chick.Lit. instead of engaging with their valid concerns about personal development and relationships.

Heiss’s mother is a Wiradjuri woman from Cowra in central NSW and her father was born in Austria. Heiss was born in Sydney and went to an eastern suburbs Catholic girls school. Alice, Heiss’s heroine, lives in the eastern suburbs, has an Aboriginal mother and an Austrian father, and teaches history at a Catholic girls school. That is not to say that Not Meeting Mr Right is autobiographical, but rather that it draws on her lived experience. At the time of publication Heiss, “who lives in Sydney, believes in love at first sight and enjoys being single!”, was going on 40. Alice, who lives in a flat overlooking Bondi beach, is 28 and determined to be married before she’s 30.

There is one other issue to be dealt with before I go on. And that is is that I sometimes find fiction by Australian Indigenous writers awkward to read, the most recent example being Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip. That is, that the flow of the words doesn’t feel right. In one of the many teaching moments spread through this book, Heiss addresses this:

I’d always thought the written and spoken word were very different in the white world. It’s so obvious in their literature. Aboriginal writing is closely aligned to the spoken word. We write like we speak, and reality is, that’s how our people read too.

What she leaves unsaid is that spoken Aboriginal English has significant differences, in its rhythms as well as vocabulary, from what we might call received English. I feel this sometimes just within ‘white’ English, moving from city to country and from lit.blogging to truck driving.

Two months after her twenty-eighth birthday Alice attends a ten-year school reunion

I’d been a self-conscious teenager who never really fit in – me being a Blackfella from La Perouse and the rest of the girls whitefellas from Vaucluse and Rose Bay. A triangular peg in a round hole, I used to say.

These days, Alice, probably shapelier and prettier than her former schoolmates, doing well as a senior teacher, is made to feel inadequate in another way. All the others are flashing engagement and wedding rings, the talk is all weddings and babies (It doesn’t help that Alice’s mother is applying the same pressure). Of course Alice “loves being single”, but by the end of the night she has decided that she will find and marry Mr Right before she turns 30.

She calls a meeting of her friendship group and they come around immediately to begin strategising – Dannie, happily married with children; Peta, a serial dater, who does something high-powered in Indigenous Education policy; and Liz a lawyer with the Aboriginal Legal Service. The upshot is that she will do what it takes – blind dates, classified ads, attend professional gatherings … to get a man who is ‘single, straight and wanting to be in a relationship’, financially secure, shows affection in public etc, etc. but she will not ‘put out on the first date’, date friends’ exes, or get picked up in a pub. There’s also stuff about star signs, which I ignored.

There follows, over the course of 20 months, a series of meetings with men who might fit the bill. Her friends line her up, her mother wishes to line her up with her best friend’s gay son, her garbo turns out to have a degree in something and to be an altogether nice guy; she dates white guys, Indigenous guys, a Samoan guy – who is just getting into bed when she mentions Wedding Island on the horizon and he disappears in a cloud of dust; she dates a lilywhite guy who is sure he is black – if by dating you mean drinking till you black out and waking up on the floor of a strange flat beside a man you’ve never seen before; early on she dates a friend of Dannie’s who might be perfect but rejects him because his face is pockmarked with chickenpox scars. Yes, Alice is a lookist.

The teaching moments deal with how to introduce your Black girlfriend; ‘significant moments for women in Australian history’ (interestingly she has Cathy Freeman’s gold medal at the Sydney Olympics but not Evonne Goolagong’s 14 Grand Slams); other stuff I forgot to write down; not reading Murdoch newspapers (duh!).

A couple of guys are nearly ok. An awful lot of makeup is applied and gin drunk to not much effect. More desperation comedy than romantic comedy. But enjoyable.

 

Anita Heiss, Not Meeting Mr Right, Bantam/Random House, Sydney, 2007

The Hand that Signed the Paper, Helen Demidenko

The Demidenko affair is an old story now but still a relevant one as we continue to struggle with the idea that white and male authors crowd out minorities, people of colour, women who wish to tell their own stories, tying ourselves in knots in the process.

For the benefit of non-Australians, the controversy surrounded the awarding of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award to Helen Demidenko for The Hand that Signed the Paper, the story of a Ukrainian family collaborating with the Nazis during the Holocaust. The granting of the Award to an anti-semitic work was justified on the grounds that Demidenko was telling the story of her people, until Demidenko, who would  attend speaking engagements dressed in the costume of a Ukrainian peasant girl, was finally unmasked as Helen Darville, a University of Queensland student of entirely English background.

I have reprised here a university essay I wrote on the topic 15 years ago, cut down from its original 5,000 words, as you might tell from its unusually, for me, formal language.

The plot concerns a young Australian woman of Ukranian descent, Fiona Kovalenko, who attempts to understand how her father and his brother came to take part in the mass murder of Jews at Babi Yar and Treblinka during the Second World War. The retelling of their experiences uses theirs and many other voices, including at times, an omniscient narrator whose viewpoint is also that of a Ukranian anti-semite. The tone of the writing, generally described as cool, flat or amoral, infuriated many readers but earned the praise of others.

The attacks on The Hand took four major phases –

1.The previous year, 1994, three, arguably much better written, works by important Australian writers were listed for the Miles Franklin and explicitly rejected on the grounds that their content was not Australian; a judgement which, if carried forward, might also have encompassed The Hand.

2.All the major characters in The Hand, except for Fiona, are grotesquely anti-semitic.

3.Despite Demidenko defending The Hand as a work of ‘faction’ derived from the authentic experiences of her relatives, she was eventually forced to acknowledge that she was really the daughter of British migrants.

4.There were some issues relating to phrases and passages derived from other texts which may have been plagiarism.

The literary establishment’s initial concern seems to have been that The Hand, which has some raw power but is of very uneven quality, had been successful where the far more substantial work of Moorhouse (Grand Days) in particular had been explicitly rejected on what now seemed to be spurious grounds; and the conclusion naturally drawn from this was that Demidenko was the MF judges’ token ethnic.

On the other hand, the concern of the reading public seems to have been with The Hand’s anti-semitism. Louise Adler’s anguished response was typical: “If one wants to understand the psychopathology of evil the literature is plentiful … [but] for the rest of us this novel’s representation of a community of individuals as simple, rutting and drunk peasants and their victims as fucking Jews or roasted meat must be condemned.”

Demidenko took to the road, but then so do most authors with a newly published book. The public want to know the face, the person, behind the name, or, at least, they want the ‘name’ to put on a performance, to ‘be’ an author for their entertainment. “Helen Demidenko performed as a stage Ukranian … by wearing embroidered peasant blouses, dancing Ukranian dances, drinking vodka and mumbling Ukranian phrases.”

I don’t think even postmodernists believe that passages by other authors should be used without attribution. Sampling in modern music, referencing in movies, quotation in literature are all acts of respect, acknowledgements of a shared or derived textuality, and are designed to be noticed. Demidenko references Dylan Thomas and Thomas Keneally in her title and opening lines; her use of sources is appropriate for a historical novel – and her critics cannot consistently accuse her of both historical inaccuracy and of borrowing from Holocaust sources; and after all that, there appears to remain some plagiarism, an area in which she had form.

[An interesting discussion about the death of the author, Barthes, Foucault, post-structuralism, must, sadly, be deleted]

What Demidenko intended with either her novel or her masquerade we cannot be sure, least of all from what she herself has said, but both may be judged/consumed as ‘art’. Her writing is clumsy, but often urgent and expressive; her use of multiple voices following, she says, Faulkner, is interesting; and her subject matter, the participation in the Holocaust by people who are now Australian, is new. But the greater work of art – which, judging by her subsequent grudging apologies, was unintended or, at least, not fully carried through – was the masquerade, sustained in public for more than two years, of Helen Darville as Helen Demidenko, the reaction to which demonstrated clearly and unequivocally that not just ‘readers’ but critics and theorists were reading through the text to the author; were reading the text through the prism of their reading of the author; that their reading of The Hand was entirely dependent on their reading of Demidenko as Ukranian/Australian.

Following her ‘unmasking’, Demidenko’s defenders in the Literary Establishment, who had previously praised her bravery and authenticity, were now reduced to lauding her ‘imaginative genius’, a SMH editorial argued that “fiction has to be accepted as fiction”, but does it? Does historical fiction have a ‘duty’ to be historically accurate? More importantly, why do we constantly read through the text to the author? Because, whatever is going on in the romantic plot in the foreground, we depend on the author for the authenticity of the detail. The use by authors of ‘counterfeit identities’ breaches “that fiduciary contract between author and reader which justifies our assumption that what we are reading is genuine”[Foucault, What is an Author?].

Late in 1995, Helen Daniel, editor of Australian Book Review, wrote:

“I believe Demidenko/Darville merited neither the ASAL award nor the Miles Franklin. I believe she has since brought shame and outrage to the literary community and done immense disservice to the literary credibility of this country. On what grounds should she be allowed to keep these awards?”

Why is she outraged? Not because the author’s name has changed from Demidenko to Darville, but because The Hand is revealed to be entirely imagined. What an astonishing position for the editor of a literary magazine!

So the literary community is brought to acknowledge what the ordinary reader has always believed, that the author matters. Not that our reading is determined by the intention of the author, but that the authenticity of the text depends first and foremost on the ‘lived experience’ of the author.

 

Helen Demidenko, The Hand that Signed the Paper, Allen & Unwin, 1994

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*ASAL. Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Their 1995 Gold Medal was awarded to Helen Darville AFTER she was revealed as the author.

 

 

The Cockatoos, Patrick White

Patrick White (1912-1990) is an unlikely candidate for the title of Australia’s best writer. Born into a firmly upper class life, he lived as a child in Sydney and on his family’s properties in the Hunter Valley (NSW), he and his sister were brought up by a nanny, and at age 12 he was sent to boarding school in England. He left school early and jackarooed for a couple of years on an uncle’s 28 square mile station in the Snowy Mountains (similar country to and maybe 100 kms SE of Miles Franklin’s families’ properties) before returning to England to study French and German Literature at Cambridge.

When his father died in 1937 White was independently wealthy, living and writing in London and for a while in the US. His first novel, Happy Valley, which he had commenced while jackarooing, was published in 1939. He enlisted in the RAF at the outbreak of WWII and served as an intelligence officer in Egypt, Palestine and Greece during which time he met Manoly Lascaris, a Greek army officer, who became his life partner.

White lived with Lascaris for six years in Cairo before, in 1948, bringing him to live in Australia where they had a hobby farm at Castle Hill on the outskirts of Sydney. Their life as ‘farmers’ formed the background for one of White’s most admired novels (not by me!), his fourth, and the first written in Australia, The Tree of Man (1955). To be clear, Patrick White lived as an Englishman, rather than an Australian, until he was 36.

His fifth and greatest novel, Voss (1957) draws on the life (and death) of the explorer Ludwig Leichardt and also on White’s own time in the outback at another family property near Walgett, NSW. White wrote 13 novels all up and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The Cockatoos, his second collection of short stories was published in 1974.

I always knew I should read White and attempted, unsuccessfully, The Aunt’s Story (1948) while I was at uni. Some time later I read and enjoyed Voss, and also the David Marr biography, and I read, and wrote about, The Aunt’s Story and The Twyborn Affair (1979) during my (very) mature age M.Litt. I have vague memories of starting others – I own A Fringe of Leaves (1976) and Memoirs of Many in One (1986) and I thought I owned the memoir Flaws in the Glass (1981) but maybe not.

I look up ‘Cockatoos’ in Marr. “So dry were the early months of 1973 that flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos flew in from the bush to plunder city gardens”. White is correcting proofs of The Eye of the Storm and putting together some stories written over the previous six years. “The latest story is called “The Cockatoos”, [White wrote], and that would be the title of the collection.” He submitted the stories in July and moved on to A Fringe of Leaves which had been lying ten years in a drawer waiting for Mrs Fraser “to recover from the mauling of librettists and composers” (see also: Finding Eliza, Larissa Behrendt).

Here are the stories and their lengths in pages:
A Woman’s Hand 104
The Full Belly 30
The Night the Prowler 58
Five-Twenty 34
Sicilian Vespers 86
The Cockatoos 59
so you can see why the collection is subtitled ‘Shorter novels and stories’.

Gail Jones in her 10 page introductory essay begins at the same place as I have, Marr’s “So dry were the early months of 1973 …”. She describes White’s work as “the singular project of someone for whom art offered questions, not answers, and an anguishing search for resolution in the irresolute business of being.” After waxing lyrical about The Tree of Man, she writes:

So what of The Cockatoos? Wonderfully broad in setting – the stories take place in Sicily, Greece, Egypt and Australia – they are also typical of White’s fiction in their combination of social comedy, inner quest and revelations of deep wounding. All engage modernist effects and concern melancholy and suffering.

I have read, struggled through, these stories. White’s work has layer on layer of meaning and intertextuality. They are mostly about older couples making do together, and White expresses his usual disgust with women’s bodies and with middle class Australians with deliberately ridiculous names like the Fazackerleys (A Woman’s Hand). The Full Belly is a short re-imagining of Greek life under German occupation, a period White was familiar with from his life with Manoly and the years he spent living in the Greek community in Egypt. The Night the Prowler Jones says strikes a false note. A couple attempt to come to terms with their daughter being raped, the daughter attempts to come to terms with being raped by becoming a sexual predator. This was made into a movie which I haven’t seen.

Let’s look at the final story, The Cockatoos. It’s a story of neighbours, people, middle aged couples mostly, living in the same suburban street, knowing each others’ names but hardly neighbourly. Mr Goodenough wears shorts at the weekend, showing his varicose veins. He and Mrs Goodenough have an only child, Tim, almost nine, who avoids other children, wanders streets and parks on his own. White makes fun of himself:

It bothered the father: what if the boy turned out a nut? or worse, a poof – or artist?

Mrs Davoren and her husband Mick, an Irish airman during the war, live amicably enough in the same house but avoid meeting, communicate through notes. Miss Le Cornu lives alone in the house left her by her parents. Mrs Davoren and Miss Le Cornu both cook tea for Mick who puts on his hat and walks up the street to eat his overcooked steak and bed Miss Le Cornu before wandering home again while Mrs Davoren scrapes the teas she cooks into the bin.

Cockatoos settle on the Davoren’s lawn, are offered food and water until they briefly accept a better offer from Miss Le Cornu. The Davorens bump into each other in a dark corner and briefly reconcile. Figgis, the neighbour everyone dislikes, brings his shotgun into the street, fires at the birds. Mick Davoren wrestles him for the gun, is shot, dies in the arms of Mrs Davoren and Miss Le Cornu, who afterwards sometimes speak. Tim spends a night in the park and beats a crippled cockatoo to death with a branch.

All very Patrick White. I’m sure it all means something.

 

Patrick White, The Cockatoos, first pub. 1973, this ed. Text Classics, 2019, Introduction by Gail Jones

Miles Franklin, Majorie Barnard

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was born on her maternal grandmother’s property in the high country of southern NSW in 1879 – there’s a line I could write in my sleep, this might be my 25th Miles Franklin post – after an epic ride by her mother through the snow from the Franklin property at Brindabella, south of present day Canberra, up into the mountains to the Lampe property at Talbingo.

Marjorie Barnard was 18 years younger (ADB). As I wrote a week or two ago, the two met in the early 1930s at the Fellowship of Australian Writers when Franklin returned from years abroad, in Chicago and London, to keep house for her recently widowed mother in Carlton, an inner Sydney suburb, where she stayed for the rest of her life.

Barnard’s Miles Franklin: The Story of a Famous Australian was published in 1967, thirteen years after Franklin’s death in 1954, and three years after the release of her papers though she doesn’t appear to have made much use of them. This is a strictly literary biography with some reference to Franklin’s childhood and only such references to Franklin’s years in Chicago and London as Barnard gleaned from conversation with that unreliable witness, Miles Franklin.

The best references for Miles Franklin’s years abroad, apart from Jill Roe’s great work, are Verna Coleman’s Her Unknown (Brilliant) Career (Chicago) and Sylvia Martin’s Passionate Friends (London). Colin Roderick, who did have the advantage of Miles Franklin’s papers – in which he himself appears in a less than glowing light – also wrote an MF biography, though as I’ve written elsewhere, not one worth reading.

Barnard and Franklin moved in the same circles for twenty years so Barnard knew her well and it is this acquaintanceship which informs the biography and Barnard’s reading of MF’s works, rather than any great research.

[Franklin] was spirited and provocative in conversation but her audacity smacked of the 1890’s. All her daring had an antique air. She was, and remained, an enfant terrible. She might have shocked people by her forthrightness fifty years ago. She obviously thought that it would shock them still and felt a little snubbed when it did not.

Because she was vulnerable, Miles was secretive. There were other reasons too. She loved a mystery and used it partly as display and partly as cover… She was fiercely virginal yet even to the end of her life she was habitually flirtatious… She wanted to cut a figure in the world of literature, she wanted to hide… I am tempted to say that, like the spoilt child she once was, she still wanted everything her own way. The child lived on in the woman and was bitterly hurt by life.

All Franklin’s best work is rooted in her adolescence, in her exile from her families’ stations in the high country and in the lives of the men and women of her grandparents’ generation who pioneered that country.

Franklin achieved instant success with My Brilliant Career (1901), wrote two follow-ups in the next couple of years without being published, wrote the mediocre Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909) and then as far as Barnard is concerned, disappeared from view for decades.

In fact, Franklin was in the US from 1906 to 1915, where she wrote two books of which Barnard seems entirely unaware The Net of Circumstance (1915) and On Dearborn Street (1981); then in London and Serbia during WWI – which she reported on extensively I think, though again Barnard is unaware, and I’ve seen no evidence that MF ever revisited this writing to have it collected; and then London, with one visit home around 1927, until about 1932 [I’m writing without access to Roe!] when she returned to Sydney for good.

Barnard devotes the first couple of chapters to Franklin’s family and childhood with most of the material drawn from Franklin’s own writing, Childhood at Brindabella (memoir), and My Brilliant Career and Cockatoos (autobiographical fiction). She deals briefly with Franklin’s failure to find a publisher for My Career Goes Bung, and then moves on to the (mistaken) heart of her thesis ‘Thirty Years in Exile’. Barnard looks to Ignez, the heroine of Cockatoos and the absent centre of Back to Bool Bool for an explanation.

The days in [the USA] were, in so far as the development of her special talents were concerned, wasted. She had fallen among reformers, and that for an artist is more fatal than for a merchant to fall among bandits. Her heart was frozen by a secret tragedy. [Back to Bool Bool]

MF did fall among reformers, the National Women’s Trade Union League of America, and had to deal with the tragedies of the loss of her singing voice, which she had hoped to make her first career, and of the death back in Australia of her nearest sister, but she also continued to write both then and in London after the War.

I have written elsewhere that these were her middle years stylistically when she attempted contemporary fiction at which she proved to be less than good. Barnard treats the work written around 1925 and published much later as Prelude to Waking as Franklin’s first attempt at returning to writing after a long hiatus.

Perhaps this book had to be written to get Miles into the habit of writing again. It did not have to be published.

I’m not clear whether by 1967 it was known for sure that Brent of Bin Bin was Miles Franklin. Barnard surmises that ‘he’ was and goes on to analyse in some depth the five books of the Up the Country saga published under the Brent of Bin Bin name, and then the books published under Franklin’s own name: Bring the Monkey, Old Blastus and her crowning achievement, All That Swagger, all written in the space of ten years from 1926 to 1935.

At that point inspiration dried up. There followed her collaboration with Dymphna Cusack, Pioneers on Parade (1939), a biography of Joseph Furphy and a book of essays, Laughter not for a Cage arising out a lecture series at UWA, Perth. Franklin in fact quite often gave public talks in these last 20 years, but her career as a novelist was over.

This is a flawed work, the biographer too close to her subject, but nevertheless probably remains the best and most comprehensive treatment of Franklin’s work.

 

Marjorie Barnard, Miles Franklin: The Story of a Famous Australian, Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1967 (the cover above at the time of writing, is from a UQP reprint, but I will replace it with a photo of the dustjacket of my own first edition when I eventually get home).

For more of my (and other bloggers’) reviews and writing about Miles Franklin go to my Miles Franklin page (here)

Setting Out

Journal: 050

I’m setting out on this post with no clear idea of where it will end up. It’s Sunday 6.46 am and in a few hours I am setting out on another trip to Melbourne (from Perth WA if you’re new here). Yesterday I was planning to go half empty but a truck came up on Loadshift, I tendered my usual price, within 15 minutes I had the job, within 3 hours the truck was loaded and back in the yard (my mate’s back paddock).

Today, I’ll run that trailer ‘up the hill’ to the assembly area on the highway south, go back for the other two, and head down to Esperance, 800 km away on the south coast, to load scrap steel. Then it’s off across the Nullarbor, to the northern outskirts of Adelaide, then for the first time as a road train in my old home state, across the north west corner of Victoria and down the river, on the NSW side, to Echuca (map). Break up, run one trailer into Melbourne, then the other two to Wodonga where the steel is remade in an electric arc furnace. Which should put me empty in Melbourne Friday too late to load out.

Sue (WG), who is flat out getting her elderly parents settled in new nursing accommodation (I think at 90 and 100 it’s safe to say elderly), says I should cherish my mother while I have her, so I guess it’s out to mum’s for the weekend.

If you follow Whispering Gums, and doesn’t everyone, you’ll see she’s running a series called Bill Curates, which is me choosing representative posts from her back catalogue – I’ve made my way so far from May to June 2009 – picking out items to repost. Lots of fun for very little effort. A good way, as Karen/Booker Talk suggested in her excellent A to Z of Blogging, of revisiting material not seen by most of her followers, and a good way too of keeping Whispering Gums ticking over while Sue is so busy.

I have to write Journals because I read so little, even when I have “days off”, which mostly involves moving trucks and trailers from one spot to another to get them repaired or serviced or new tyres, or a paint job and new guards (mudguards) as with the trailer immediately behind my ute in the picture above, white and light blue is going to be my new colour scheme, not to mention keeping my bookwork up to date, though none of that explains why I read only a few pages in the evening, catch up on the news, solve a killer sudoku and am fast asleep by 10pm.

Remember, four months ago, when ‘the news’ was that the Australian government was doing nothing about climate change, then bushfires across half the continent made even the Liberal Party aware that climate change was here now, and just when we thought something might happen Covid-19 wiped everything else off the front pages and the Morrison (and Trump) governments took the opportunity to begin sabotaging every remaining climate initiative they could think of, and now the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has wiped Covid-19 off the front pages, except for the relatives of 110,000 people killed by Trump’s willful negligence, but of course it couldn’t happen here. Except it does.

“there’s no need to import things happening in other countries here to Australia. I mean, Australia is a fair country … I mean, Australia is not the United States.” [Prime Minister Morrison]

African Americans make up 12% of the adult population, but 33% of the US prison population; in Australia the ratio for Indigenous people is 3% of the population and 29% of the prisoners. [Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia, 7 June 2020]

Do the maths. Black Australians are FOUR times more likely to be jailed than Black Americans and TEN times more likely to be jailed than white Australians.

Since 1991 and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 432 Indigenous people in prison or in the hands of police have died and not one person has been convicted of any offence in connection with those deaths.

That is the Australia we live in, whether we set out to achieve it or not, an Australia founded on the murder of its original inhabitants, as I have attempted to document, and in which those murders continue today, unpunished.

 

Remember: Indigenous Literature Week (July 5-12, 2020) on ANZLitlovers

 

Recent audiobooks 

Stephanie Laurens (F, Aus), Four in Hand (1993) – Romance
as far as I can tell, Laurens has lived in England for a long time, but she does have some reviews on the Australian Women Writers Challenge database. I should contribute another.
Janet Evanovich (F, USA), Seven Up (2001) – Crime
Camilla Lackberg (F, Swe), The Lost Boy (2013) – Crime
Anne McCaffery (F, USA), Damia (1992) – SF
Susan Choi (F, USA), The Foreign Student (1998)
Blake Crouch (M, USA), Good Behaviour (2016) – DNF
Belinda Alexandra (F, Aus), Silver Wattle (2007) – DNF

Currently reading

Patrick White, The Cockatoos
Majorie Barnard, Miles Franklin
Flannery O’Connor, Complete Stories
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (I just bought it, I hope I start reading it)

 

Melbourne and Sydney

This post went up yesterday as a guest post on Whispering Gums’ Monday Musings series.

In the 1870s and 1880s Melbourne was both Australia’s largest and wealthiest city and its literary centre – around figures like Marcus Clarke, George McCrae (son of Georgianna), Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Kendall, Ada Cambridge, Tasma.

What I want to discuss here is the movement of the literary centre to Sydney and how that worked out, during the first half of the twentieth century. This is an opinion piece rather than the result of any great research so feel free to add to what I say and to correct my mistakes.

Sue (Whispering Gums) has always been interested in the women of this period of Australian writing, and over the past few years we, the Australian Lit.Blogging community, have done a lot to establish in our own minds at least, who the women writers were and to review their work. On my blog, I broke Australian writing into ‘Generations’ more or less in line with HM Green’s ‘Periods’ in his History of Australian Literature, so: Gen 1 1788-1890, Gen 2 1890-1918, Gen 3 1919-1960.

Gen 2 and the first years of Gen 3 were characterized by being both Sydney-centred and seriously misogynist. Gen 2 covered the years of the Sydney Bulletin magazine’s greatest influence, Federation, rising nationalism, WWI.  The Bulletin‘s stable of writers: Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson, Steele Rudd, Joseph Furphy and a host of bush poets, and the drawings of Lindsay Norman (who moved up from Melbourne after leaving art school) followed by the War reporting of Keith Murdoch and CEW Bean left us with an indelible image of ourselves as resourceful bushmen, and larrikin fighting men. An image which both excluded women and around which they had to work.

The Bulletin openly scorned home life and dismissed the popular women writers of the previous generation as ‘Melbourne-based romance writers’.

“The Sydney Bulletin liked to believe that in ‘virile cultures’ where ‘home-life [had] not become so all absorbing: ‘men live and struggle and fight out in the open most of the time. When they go to their homes they go to beat their wives…’{3 Nov. 1888} According to the Bulletin, home life trammelled a man’s spirit and sapped his masculinity. And it robbed him of his independence.” Marilyn Lake, 1986

This bled into Gen 3 and the Lindsay-led Sydney Push of the 1920s, an antipodean Bohemia where women were only of use as models and for sex.

For those of us over say, 50 our history, including such literary history as got past the anglophile gatekeepers, was written and taught by returned servicemen, and they very much bought into the myths of the lone bushman, mateship etc. So it is important to realise that there is another history, that of strong, independent women, which is not taught. In the 1890s both Melbourne and Sydney had vibrant women’s movements focussed on (white) female suffrage, yes, but also on domestic violence, temperance, and women’s welfare. The Melbourne movement coalesced around Annette Bear and Vida Goldstein, and Sydney around Rosa Scott and Louisa Lawson, and Lawson’s newspaper, Dawn.

Miles Franklin is the prime example of a woman writer who was influenced by the nationalism of the Bulletin but wrote with a definite pro-woman and anti-marriage slant. After the publication and instant success of My Brilliant Career in 1901 Franklin was taken up by Rosa Scott, and then subsequently fell in with Goldstein’s lot when she moved to Melbourne and became life-long friends with Melbourne suffragists Mary Fullerton and Mabel Singleton. Her fictionalised biographies My Career Goes Bung and Cockatoos describe her year in the Sydney literary set, living with Scott, flirting with AB Paterson, and meeting Lindsay and (Bulletin editor) Archibald.

Franklin lived overseas for many years, from 1906 to the 1930s and when she came back for good, to her mother’s house in Sydney it was to a changed literary scene, one dominated by women. During the 20s women had been excluded from the Sydney Push’s literary magazine, Vision and maybe only Zora Cross with her erotic poems fitted in with the times. Anne Brennan, daughter of drunken poet Christopher Brennan, who hung around the Lindsay push for grog and sex, and tried to write, tried to fit in and failed. Christina Stead was tempted to join the Push, but her compulsion to earn enough to flee overseas saved her.

The Melbourne scene gathered around Nettie and Vance Palmer. Vance, originally a Queenslander, tried hard to be a writer in the Bulletin tradition but hasn’t stood the test of time. They were friends with Louis and Hilda Esson and with the poet Maurice Furnley. But more importantly Nettie and Hilda had been at school together at Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies College, and subsequently at university. Hilda had been neighbours with Katherine Susannah Prichard’s family and introduced KSP to Nettie. Earlier alumni of PLC included Vida Goldstein and Henry Handel Richardson who of course wrote about the school in The Getting of Wisdom.

Nettie, a poet and scholar, maintained an enormous correspondence with a great many Australian writers and was important in maintaining links with expatriates like Richardson.

Sydney women wrote from their homes, isolated from each other until the formation of the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1928 by Mary Gilmore, Steele Rudd and John le Gay Brereton. Later in the 30s the FAW’s most prominent members were Miles Franklin, Marjorie Barnard and Frank Dalby Davidson [Sue says I should include here that the FAW’s first female president was Flora Eldershaw in 1935].

So what can I say about that fixture of Australian life: Melbourne-Sydney rivalry. Melbourne ‘had’ Katherine Susannah Prichard, but she was living in Perth; Henry Handel Richardson, acknowledged for years as Australia’s best writer, but long since based in England; (the late) Joseph Furphy, writer of the Great Australian Novel, Such is Life; and Nettie Palmer.

Sydney, by the outbreak of WWII, had a blossoming of writers: Kylie Tennant, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw, Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark, Ernestine Hill, and Patrick White just setting out. You be the judge.

 

For a compilation of posts on Australian (mostly) women’s writing up to 1960 see

theaustralianlegend, AWW Gen 1, 1788-1890 (here)
theaustralianlegend, AWW Gen 2, 1890-1918 (here)
theaustralianlegend, AWW Gen 3, 1919-1960 (here)

The Babe is Wise, Lyn Harwood ed.

In the bookcase behind the door of my study ar the Viragos I bought years ago as a job lot and am only now getting round to reading. The book at the end stands out or would if I ever shut the door, for being taller than the Viragos and having a pale blue cover. Whether I bought them all at the same time I no longer remember but have come to assume I did. A few nights ago, deciding against The Little Ottleys (for being too long), I pulled out next the pale blue book and discovered it to be an anthology of 31  Australian women’s short stories, published in 1987.

Flicking through, I thought how lovely and young so many of the authors were, and checked their years of birth. Ten to fifteen years before mine. Which brought to mind a discussion I had here or elsewhere with Sue (WG) that the authors of Gen 4, writers of the books which came out when we boomers were young adults, like the musicians we listened to, were not themselves boomers but were born during or just before the War.

Then chasing up a cover photo, I came up with not one but two snippets of history. First, the cover picture is a portrait of Australian author Jean Campbell, painted in 1940 (not 1909 as stated on the title page) by Lina Bryans and now held in the NGV. The title of the painting is The Babe is Wise. The second is from an article by Jean Campbell herself which explains that the painting is named after a novel of that name she wrote in 1939. Incidentally, Campbell is not included in the collection.

Because I see her oft times in our corner of the blogosphere I started with Carmel Bird, Buttercup and Wendy, a cheerful little story about the prettiest girl in Tasmania 1955-59 and how she didn’t marry but made a career and bought a house in Kew (Melbourne) and the discrete part in her life played by her former high school boyfriend –

a boy with ice blue eyes and a very attractive laugh. [They] went together to school dances to which he wore a white sports coat with a pink carnation and she wore an orange skirt beneath which undulated a vast white petticoat edged with rope.

It doesn’t end how you might think.

I’m moving backwards and forwards, selecting randomly. Next is a typical Helen Garner. Her husband leaves, she cries, lives with friends, her daughter bangs her eye, cries “you don’t know how to comfort..”

Robyn Sheiner, a WA woman “with many Aboriginal relatives in the north of the state” imagines herself as an older woman at her sister’s funeral in Broome. The sister has worked all her life as a servant in a convent some distance out of town. The sisters, having a white father, were stolen and handed over to the nuns, and the story reflects on their lives.

Another Aboriginal woman, Kantjuringa (Lallie Lennon) is an Antikirinya woman from northern South Australia. Her story is an extract from her testimony concerning the Maralinga atom bomb tests in the 1950s which were conducted on Aboriginal homelands. She’s just had a baby in the creek bed and these army trucks start going past and “a big war tank – guns sticking out, you know, it was frightening.” A few days later they hear two or three bombs in the distance and see the mushroom clouds, and a few days after that, another bomb, and the smoke is blowing towards them and they and all the trees are covered in dust and soon the kids are getting sick, overheating, the little girls are having fits and the station lady gives them castor oil.

Some of the authors are well known Judith Wright, Kate Grenville, Joan London, Beverly Farmer, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley. Olga Masters I had to look up – she’s got lots of famous children.  Her little story is of a man, his wife just died, who must marry again before he runs out of dishes and clean bed linen.

I think my favourite was In Defence of Lord Byron by Ilona Palmer, a little mix of life in Melbourne and growing up in Yugoslavia, her school friends going to faraway places to build socialism, “or laying a few railway sleepers and getting pregnant in the process”, as her father put it. A story about her, not “a friend told me”; growing into middle age with her husband; dreaming of a man’s bedroom, realistic, his undies on the floor in the corner; “he did not ask me when he could see me again”; a dream realised, or a dream lost?

Thea Astley’s is a disappointing story of hippy stereotypes. I move on to Jolley, a dense story intermingling school days, nursing days, single-motherhood. An extract I’m guessing from My Father’s Moon published a couple of years later.

 

Lyn Harwood, Bruce Pascoe, Paula White ed.s, The Babe is Wise: Contemporary Stories by Australian Women, Pascoe Publishing, Melbourne, 1987. 313pp.

Bloodfather, David Ireland

  The author of this guest post is John who comments here and posts on Goodreads as Fourtriplezed. He wrote to me recently about my 2019 David Ireland project: “I have read all of Ireland’s novels up to City of Women and am at present half way through Bloodfather. I have The Chosen and World Repair to go and then I am a completist.” He has since completed Bloodfather of which he says: “I thought it a work of art. I suspect I am on my own there lol.”

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As the baby was born on a butchers slab his mother sang religion. He was the leader, she the led. The baby, unless there are exceptional circumstances, is the great dictator in all households. The baby’s aunt Ursula said that when the baby arrived in the house ‘A lord of atmosphere had taken up residence’…. Aunt Mira asked, “ ‘Who’s a bornless child then? Here’s a fine kettle of kitsch. What’ll he be when he grows up? A gifted bus driver with a stern view of things?’ A few Sherries shut her up.” Author David Ireland is an observer of the human condition.

The writer can get the reader hooked by words. The word “God” is one such hook. That one word plays a part in the life of the baby, Davis Blood. From the beginning he is imbued with his mother’s songs of religion, Aunt Ursula through her thoughtful dialog with her gifted young nephew and Aunt Mira with wordplay that challenges him. He listened to them all. This young boy was listening from the time he was a babe through to his endeavour to discover his inner self at the ripe old age of 16.

If one is looking to read a Bildungsroman along the lines of the customary life of a young man then they will be disappointed. Ireland writes of this boy as a sponge of all that is around him. Sport and girls? Yes a little but so tiny as to be almost missed. Learning is beyond important in this Bildungsroman. The reader looking for the predictable should read no further. This is a deep look at the boy as an individual struggling with what makes him what he is and what he intends to be. He is learning from all sources be that physical, scholastic or spiritual. This is a pursuit, a pursuit of a hopeful future.

Hope is the key to what is Ireland’s most optimistic of novels. There is a strange uplifting demand of the reader to get inside the boy’s thoughts and be part of the world around him. From birth to his 16th birthday he is no ordinary child, he is listening and learning. He is both objective and subjective with his thoughts, be that his need for his individuality or his requirements for spirituality. The words of this book demand that the reader take that journey. Read and ponder.

Most of Ireland’s previous novels had the inner city ramparts as a constant. The closed walls of Puroil, Merry Lands and The Southern Cross Hotel were inner city and tribal. This is different; rural with descriptions of an almost homely paradise surrounded by nature. Did his readership want that? Maybe not. He failed to have another book published for nearly 10 years. His readership had passed him by. They had found new literary fashions. So be it.

This is a long read and not for the fainthearted. It will not be for everyone so I do not recommend it. But then who cares, I loved it.

 

David Ireland, Bloodfather, Penguin, Melbourne, 1987

Other David Ireland posts/reviews:
Fourtriplezed’s David Ireland shelf on Goodreads (here)
David Ireland (here)
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (here) Lisa/ANZLL (here)
Burn I found intolerably racist and could not finish.
John writes: I am of the opinion that Ireland, as a writer is not right wing, nor left for that matter. I take on-board your thoughts about Burn but must respectfully disagree. Burn as a novel morphed from a play he wrote called Image in the Clay. He wrote of that play “No opinions are presented: my interest in aborigines is no more than anyone else’s, except that they are people. That is my interest” and in my opinion that was the same for Burn and all his other works. He, from what I have read elsewhere, was describing a situation that he witnessed while working out west [in NSW] just after WW2. Burn is a strange novel in that it is more conventional in delivery than the rest of his output.
The Glass Canoe (here) Lisa/ANZLL (here)
A Woman of the Future (here) see Bonny Cassidy Sydney Review of Books (here)
City of Women (here)
The World Repair Video Game (here) Lisa/ANZLL (here)