Seasons Greetings 2021

Last year I had a photo of my then newest grandson, age 8 months, watching a campfire. This year he is already climbing trees and he has a younger brother, now just a few weeks old.

Another year, another year of Covid. Of course we have it easy over here in the West, at the expense, in my case, of seeing my older children and my mother for another year. Well, that’s not strictly true, we can visit, but entry or re-entry into WA requires 14 days isolation, and that’s not generally time we can afford, though we will if we have to, for Mum’s 90th next year for instance. Bron’s Covid Chronicles, of her life in inner-Sydney, are always interesting. This time she mentions the Covid pandemic is expected to last years longer than, say, the Spanish Flu. No doubt because all our vaccinating is just delaying rather than preventing its eventual spread and burn out.

Christmas Day this Saturday! Doesn’t it race up on you. Milly has to work, Saturday and Sunday mornings, phoning old people for Red Cross to make sure they’re ok. So it will be a simple christmas dinner, prepared in advance and set out by me and Ms 18. With, and this is the case with all of us probably, many absences round the table. A special call-out to Lou who is in lockdown in remote Tennant Creek, NT.

So, on to the wadholloway Best Blog Post for 2021 …

The first runner up might be my favourite because it goes to the heart of why we read. When I list a top ten it is always the ‘best’ 10, whatever ‘best’ means, but Lou/LouLouReads goes right for the nitty-gritty and lists her fifty (current) favourites (here)

I don’t mean to imply there is an order to the runners up, so next as I write, is Brona who is ‘This Reading Life’ now that we have her on WordPress, but is still Brona’s Books when she comments. Bron makes a point of having a regular poetry post, which I always find interesting. Dropbear by Indigenous writer Evelyn Araluen is a good example and demonstrates how far she digs down on our behalf (here).

I’ve only really been following Buried in Print the last couple of years, though of course I have seen her around for much longer than that. She writes often complex posts, generally about north American writers and I think it’s fair to say with a focus on Margaret Atwood, Black and Indigenous writing, Margaret Atwood, and the environment. Alongside Roots, which she and I and Liz Dexter read along together, she had a project this year, Slavery Past and Present, in four parts (here).

And the winner is …

Liz Dexter/Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home. Liz and I don’t often read the same books, though we read Roots together this year, which was both informative and fun, a really helpful way to get the most out of what is a big book. However the post I have chosen is a summary of the amazing breadth of Liz’s reading this year re race relations in Britain. (here).

My favourite post of my own, well it would have to be the 12 post series Such is Life, wouldn’t it. Thank you for allowing me that indulgence.

My annual spreadsheet, constructed hastily at the last minute as usual, says that I read 18 ‘new’ books, ie. from 2020/21. The best were How We are Translated and An I-Novel, though of course I loved the event of a new Sally Rooney. Did I read any new release Australians? Indigenous (Tasmanian) short stories Born into This and poetry Guwayu – For All Times. Kim Kelly’s Her Last Words was great and deserves wider release, and I’m part way through Western Australian poet, John Kinsella’s latest short story collection, Pushing Back. No more foreigners? A quick review brings up Simone de Beauvoir, The Inseparables, This Mournable Body and Butter Honey Pig Bread, all excellent.

I wonder what was the ‘best’ book I read during the year. I thought Clara Morison and Jane Eyre were as good as each other; Kylie Tenant’s Tell Morning This was a surprise, a step up from her normal journalistic prose; and then there’s Such is Life, which I didn’t read so much as tear apart.

Butter Honey Pig Bread reminds me I should thank you all for the books you recommend, this year Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series especially. Which segues into my next year project, to read Black and Indigenous writing from North America and to put up a review at the end of each month. All based on recommendations from you (crossed with what I can get from Audible). For those who might like to read along, January will be Their Eyes were watching God, and February The Autobiography of Malcolm X. For March I’m looking at Nalo Hopkinson, but which book?

Re Malcolm X (and Roots), today’s NYT (actually 17 Dec 21) contains an excellent article: Alex Haley Taught America About Race — and a Young Man How to Write.

I have another project for 2022 (and beyond) which has been mentioned elsewhere, though not my part in it, and that is The Australian Women Writers Challenge site which from February will become a journal focusing on early Australian women writers (Gens 1, 2 and 3 from my POV). Elizabeth Lhuede the convenor, has asked me to join Sue/Whispering Gums as a regular contributor, and we three, with at least one guest contributor each month, will post weekly, short stories from the archives, reviews and essays. It’s my job to find the guests so don’t hesitate to approach me with reviews or more general essays (theaustralianlegend AT gmail.com). AND PLEASE FOLLOW US.

Finally, AWW Gen 4 Week is 16-23 January, 2022. Gen 4 is defined as writers whose careers got underway in the 1960s, 70s and 80s (here). To be clear, although I’ve listed each author’s first work feel free to review anything they’ve written.

Enjoy the holiday season. I hope you all receive (and give) lots of books.

Bill

Seasons Greetings 2020

Hasn’t this been an odd year. A difficult year! Who would have believed twelve months ago that we would face a choice between being locked in our homes – Australia, or being left to die in the hundreds of thousands – USA. We Australians were lucky in our State Premiers, I’m not so sure Scott Morrison, our undeservedly lucky Prime Minister and Trump sycophant, on his own would have been as wise or decisive.

I wish you all, all my friends around the world, a happier and safer 2021.

The photo I have chosen to represent Xmas this year is of my new grandson, born in April, out camping. Just with his mum and dad this time, a month or two ago, but often too with his multitudinous siblings who I think have already taken him white water rafting. Ok, joking, but definitely canoeing. I got to hold him in June when I got back from Darwin, then not again as interstate trucking and the situation in Victoria took me into indefinite isolation. Which ends, for a few weeks anyway, tomorrow, Xmas Eve.

So, on to the wadholloway Best Blog Post for 2020 …

First, there are two runners-up. Kim Kelly, last year’s winner, made a mad dash for the post at the last minute and very nearly pulled it off with a subject dear to my heart – “how can we try to ensure our fictions are steeped in useful, meaningful truths?” (here)

The other was Naomi at Consumed by Ink for a post on Book Spine Poetry compiled by her and her kids (here). I had a shot at it for a poem encompassing our year, and it’s much harder than it looks. Too few verbs!

Diary of a Bad Year

White House boys

A bunch of ratbags

Speak

Force and fraud

Violence

Madness

Something happened!

Crime and punishment

For the term of his natural life.

Wishful thinking, I know, but on to the 2020 winner. For an amazing effort continuing throughout the year, the ‘prize’ goes to Karen of Booker Talk for her series on how to deal with the new block editor and with WordPress generally. It will be a reference for years to come. (A-Z of Blogging here, more links at the end).

For my favourite post of my own I generally choose one that I think has been a bit of an orphan, and surprisingly (to me) my recent Ursula Le Guin post is in that category. But let’s go with the one that was the most fun to do, reading Chris Tsiolkas’ The Slap with Melanie of Grab the Lapels.

Elsewhere on the internet, I continue to follow Guy Rundle in the Australian newsletter Crikey, and the doings of the crime family in the White House in The Palmer Report, and also while it’s cheap, in the New York Times.

Going back for a minute to our sleazoid Prime Minister, you might remember his response to the Black Lives Matter movement coming here:

Scott Morrison has warned against “importing the things that are happening overseas to Australia” after protesters gathered in Sydney to denounce the killing of George Floyd in the United States and to rally against Indigenous deaths in custody.

Guardian Australia, 4 Jun 2020 (here)

As it happens, as I set out at the time, Black Australians are far more likely to be arrested than Black Americans, and the rate of deaths in custody is a national disgrace, and proof, if any were needed of our systemic on-going racism.

Morrison also famously said Australia had no history of slavery. This story from National Indigenous TV, 10 things you should know about slavery in Australia (1 Sep 2020) puts the lie to that.

What can I say about all the exciting new books released this year? Nothing. I’m not sure I’ve read a single one, and if you include 2019, which after all most of the prizes do, then that still only gives me The Place on Dalhousie, by Melina Marchetta about which none of you were enthused, and Jess White’s Hearing Maud about which many of us were. Maybe next year I’ll be allowed in bookshops again.

Despite all these days at home I’ve been struggling to read but yesterday I knocked off Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends in one sitting, so I’d better find time to squeeze a review of that in, and an EOY 2020, and get ready for AWW Gen 3 Week Part II 17-23 Jan, 2021. Look at those dates – I go back to work on the 14th. But we’ll manage! Have a good Christmas (and if you haven’t seen, Jackie/Death by Tsundoku had a baby girl on the 17th).

.

Booker Talk’s blogging tips:

A-Z of book blogging (here)
WordPress retires Classic Editor (here)
Latest changes, thumbs up or thumbs down (here)
Ask me a Question (here)
Getting blog traffic from Facebook (here)
Getting blog traffic from Pinterest (here)
How to solve the headache of image alignment (here)
Changing my WordPress theme (here)
Three ways to add colour to your blog (here)
How to use WordPress to get free photos (here)
Avoid blogger burn out (here)

Seasons Greetings 2019

Happy (northern) Winter Solstice to you all, but “remember whose birthday it is” as they say – a bit like the Queen’s birthday, which is celebrated on every day but the real one. Perhaps in the future it will be Trump’s Birthday seeing as a significant portion of the GOP apparently see him as the new Jesus. Imagine the sermon on the mount beginning “and verily, I grabbed them by the pussy”.

You may remember the christmas tree ladder from last year. Apparently it is a tradition now. I’d better go round to Milly’s and get it out of the shed. She’s ‘it’ again, though the remote kids – in Darwin and Malawi – won’t be home this time. Still, there’ll be one daughter, grandkids, some of Shelley’s sisters, a boyfriend, a niece, the niece’s family, two dogs. We’ll do ok.

Hopefully Lou will send us some Christmas photos from his village in Malawi that I can share (that’s a hint Lou). Psyche’s photos from Darwin might scare the horses.

Now, without further ado, the wadholloway Best Blog Post for 2019 …

Well, a little bit of ado. During the year, from time to time I copy links to the draft for this post and at the end of the year, ie. this morning, I review them. So, in the sequence we are used to with other awards, here is the short list:

Brona’s Books, The Vindication of Accidental Feminists (here)
Melanie at Grab the Lapels, Is Grab the Lapels actually Feminist (here)
Emma at Book Around the Corner, A master class on how to talk about race (here)
Sue at Whispering Gums, a very clever Six Degrees (here)
Lisa at ANZLitLovers, The White Girl by Tony Birch (here)
Kim Kelly, On inappropriate use of the Holocaust (here)

It seems, WG’s amusing piece aside, I am very much into analysis this year, how we write about difference. I loved, and was impressed, reading them all again, but there can only be one winner and I’m going with… drum roll

Kim Kelly, On inappropriate use of the Holocaust. Congratulations!

My favourite post of my own, for the past year, was the most recent one, Moll Flanders. I think I’m finally getting a handle on the birth of the English novel.

Elsewhere on the internet, I haven’t read so much of Helen Razer as I’m used to, or as I would like. But she’s no longer with Crikey and I no longer seem to be getting Daily Review (it was in Junk for a while which I check insufficiently often). I still read and enjoy the analysis of Guy Rundle in Crikey but my new go-to political rag is the Palmer Report, a day by day, minute by minute account of the downward spiral of the criminal monster in the White House.

And thanks to cousin Kay, a librarian in Bendigo, who pointed me to this story, which may give us all hope: Turkish garbage collectors open library full of discarded books.

As usual, I read too few new releases to make any meaningful comment, in fact I may have read more from the C19th than I did from 2019. What do I remember? Bruny, The Weekend, Blakwork, because they were recent. Wintering. Gerald Murnane’s A Season on Earth was by a long way the standout, but of course was as usual with Murnane, ignored by our very middle-of-the-road awards judges. Of the books in my TBR I mentioned last year, I read only Solar Bones, which I loved. Bloodlines, One, Doing Life, Georgina Molloy, The Art of Time Travel are all still up there behind me, waiting, waiting.

I hope you all have books on hand for Australian Women Writers Gen 3 Week, 12-18 January 2020. I hope I do! Just to recap: the period we will cover is between the Wars, and the themes are Modernism, Social Realism, and, carrying over from Gen 2, the recognition of women’s role in Pioneering (farming) – which I have overlooked in previous posts – the ‘seminal’ work being Miles Franklin & Dymphna Cusack, Pioneers on Parade (1939).

Enjoy the holidays. I will, though I’ll be back at work early in January, if there is any work, the weeks up to Invasion Day are a quiet time for general freight. And good reading!

Season’s Greetings 2018

Season’s greetings once again and thank you for accompanying me on my random wanderings through literature and life. The photo above is of Western Australian christmas trees, Nuytsia floribunda, which flower from October to January, hence the name. Their Noongar (local Indigenous) names are are moojar, moojerool, munjah and mutyal.

I took the photo a few years ago near Eneabba, sandy coastal heath country 300 kms north of Perth, and the year after bushfires by the look of it. The trees are everywhere about, flowering brilliantly, in bits and pieces of roadside scrub around Perth, and after Sue/Whispering Gums reviewed Katharine Sussanah Prichard’s Christmas Tree (here) I meant to get another photo, but this one will have to do.

KSP’s short story (here in Trove) contains the lines –

Against the dim blue of the summer sky the Christmas trees had thrown their blossoming crests; they lay along the horizon like a drift of clouds, fluted and curled, pure gold.

The trees stood irregularly in the dry, scrubby land of the plain beyond Gillard’s fences to the north of Laughing Lakes homestead. Their trunks were not visible from the backdoor of the house to where Jinny Gillard stood, her eyes on that distant line of yellow blossom.

What writing! But I think few non-Western Australians would realise what she was writing about.

I’ve read even fewer new releases this year than usual: Extinctions, Josephine Wilson; The Drover’s Wife, Frank Moorhouse ed.; Charmaine Papertalk Green & John Kinsella, False Claims of Colonial Thieves; Krissy Kneen, An Uncertain Grace; Nikki Gemmell, After; Robert Edeson, Bad to Worse. And they are a mixture of 2017 and 2018. My favourite (new release fiction) was Elizabeth Tan’s Rubik; but there was also Arundhati Roy’s compelling The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. I only received one book for review – my own fault, I didn’t chase any up – Bohemia Beach, Justine Ettler’s return to literary fiction after a considerable hiatus. There was some 2017-18 fiction amongst the 190 audiobooks I read; of those Lincoln in the Bardo was disappointing and the rest were just entertainment. The standout, from any year, was Kate Atkinson’s When Will There be Good News? (2008).

Of course, the book release highlight of the year was Michelle Scott Tucker’s Elizabeth Macarthur (review, interview) which I attended, along with Lisa Hill and spouse. And as they say, a very pleasant evening was had.

Now. The wadholloway Best Blog Post for 2018 goes to …

Kate W at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest for the LOL funny The Rules of Engagement.

Kate also got a ‘runner up’ for the much more serious The Green Bell, as did Emma at Book Around the Corner for The Meursault Investigation. A late runner up prize (because I only read it today) goes to Mairi Neil of Up the Creek with a Pen for Can Poetry Promote Peace and Creativity Challenge Politicians Effectively? – a collage of text, photos and poetry on the theme of Remembrance Day 2018.

My favourite post of my own was Border Districts, Gerald Murnane which will go on (the book not the post) to be an enduring Australian classic. But I should also mention in this context my Journals which really are an indulgence which you allow me to write without the bother of background reading and research; and also AWW Gen 1 Week, to which so many of you contributed.

As usual, my favourite on-line columnist is Helen Razer at (paywalled) Crikey and (free) Daily Review. During the year she linked to a NYTimes article which discussed the false equivalence of deaths in the Holocaust, under Hitler, and deaths under Stalin which mostly came from famine and the Siege of Leningrad. Razer’s article today is The Problem with End-of-Year Lists (her Person of the Year is always Malala Yousafzai, who “still managed to get away with attending Marxist conferences, denouncing global poverty and Australian refugee policy and not appear like the genuinely transformative force she is”).

A new blogger I ran into this year is Indian, The Horrible Prophet, and he may already have run out of steam. After reading Arundhati Roy I’ve been interested in the dysfunctional and almost Trumpish aspects of inter-ethnic and inter-class relationships in India. I’ve just finished Q & A (Slumdog Millionaire) which was not the feelgood story I expected, and is explicitly anti-police, and am now reading All The Lives we Never Lived, by Anuradha Roy. The Horrible Prophet here has a little rant about expectations on Indian brides.

And just to get you in the mood for the season, another blogger I follow, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog has Kropotkin: Merry Effing Xmas.

My driving year finished yesterday (Monday). I’ve pulled my last trailer for Sam and Dragan. For all their sturm und drang, I’m grateful to them for getting me started, and for the truck they sold me which, unlike the ones they retained, ran like clockwork for the whole year. Next year, hopefully, I will be an independent contractor with my own trailer(s), Dragan has offered to sell me two which would be very suitable – set up for machinery cartage – but which I suspect he has priced to recover some of the bargain I got with the Volvo.

I’ve already handed the truck over to a mechanic who has promised to set it up for the next million kilometres of its working life, and am home with my feet up, though not for long. Christmas is at Milly’s this year, with all the kids and grandkids and various sisters in law. Over dinner – Greek, Zeus Street, on the roof of her local shopping centre car park – last night, Milly gave me my instructions which include clearing her back patio so a handyman can do the brick paving I haven’t got round to finishing, rubbish removal and the collection and distribution of items between our various houses (mine, hers, Gee’s).

Don’t forget AWW Gen 2 Week, 13-19 Jan. 2019 and enjoy your holidays!

 

Australian Book Review

January/February 2018

The Australian Book Review has entered its fortieth year. I’ve been a subscriber for the last ten of those – since I was getting to the end of my M.Litt and was looking for a way to stay plugged in to Australian writing – but this will be my last year. Lisa at ANZLitLovers has been telling me for ages that she feels that ABR has drifted away from Aust.Lit and out into the wider world, which is much better covered by other publications, and now at last I agree with her.

For most of those ten years and no doubt for the thirty prior the ABR has done its job. A wide range of new Australian books have been reviewed by leading writers and experts in their field – and I think here in particular of regular contributor Neil Blewett, a senior minister in the Hawke and Keating governments – there are annual poetry, short story and essay competitions, visual arts editions and so on. And of course there is a website, which I don’t usually look at.

Once upon a time I would go straight to Letters to the Editor where there would nearly always be at least one author complaining bitterly about their review and the reviewer, always given right of reply, biting back. This has been less the case over the past two or three years and in this issue there are no letters at all as far as I can see.

As for new releases, over the years I have been introduced to some marvellous novels that I would otherwise have missed but again, less so in the past couple of years, partly of course because I follow lit.bloggers who post two, three four times a week and keep us all pretty well up to date.

Let us look more closely at the Jan-Feb 2018 issue pictured above. It begins with half a dozen pages of bits and pieces, ads and self-promotion, rather like an old newspaper beginning with the classifieds. The first review, the ‘Review of the Month’ is of Alexis Wright’s Tracker – her 650pp collage/biog. of Tracker Tilmouth – by Michael Winkler. It’s a cracker and ends –

Wright’s brace of ineffable, awkward, uncanny novels (Carpentaria, The Swan Book) will be unravelled and enjoyed by readers when other contemporary fiction is forgotten. Tracker, a book performed by a folk ensemble rather than a solo virtuoso, adds to her enduring non-fiction oeuvre that captures the unique ground-level realpolitik of Aboriginal Australia.

Then we have reviews of The Cold War: A World History by a Norwegian professor at Harvard; The Pivot of Power on Australian prime ministers 1949-2016; Chris Masters on Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan (not my cup of tea!); A New Literary History of China (reviewed by Nicholas Jose); David Malouf and the Poetic; and the next highlight, although it’s not Australian, Brenda Niall on Claire Tomalin’s memoir, A Life of My Own. Our own Michelle Scott Tucker and Nathan Hobby have distinguished careers in front of them if they follow Tomalin’s path: “Tomalin was forty when she wrote her first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft, in which she had an almost unexplored field.” Though her subsequent biographies on “Shelley, Austen, Pepys, Hardy and Dickens” might prove a tough act to follow!

After that were reviews of (tv journalist) Mike Willesee’s memoir; something about a French restaurant in America; Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown’s diary; yet another David Attenborough; a novel about a character out of Henry James (reviewed by Brenda Niall); something, something a character out of King Lear. I’m barely even reading the headings at this point; The Best Australian Stories 2017 edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke; All My Goodbyes from Argentina; a few pages of fill – Australian publishers pick their favourite book of 2017.

By now we’re at the middle, I can see the staples, and a review of (Victorian Governor) La Trobe which makes me hopeful; but we go right back to Hilary Spurling on Anthony Powell (who?); the “Right’s stealth plan for America”; Richard Nixon: The Life !!!!; a book on philosopher Derek Parfit, edited by Peter Singer; a biography of Czeslaw Milosz; a few pages of poetry; it just goes on and on, occasional Australian novels, the story of a cricket photographer; a few pages on The Arts. The ABR is a magazine entirely without direction.

I sometimes muse while I work – truck driving is a great job for musing – about an Australian lit.mag of my own. Our own really, as the AWW Gen 1 page demonstrated, with 14 articles by nine contributors in little more than a week. Of course this is at least partly a solution looking for a problem. There isn’t a lot wrong with our current model of writing what interests us and following and interacting with bloggers with similar interests. And all though we sometimes deny it, we also tend to write and therefore read, in order to interest others, to keep our readerships happy.

I get great joy from my participation in this corner of the blogosphere, but it, so far anyway, has shortfalls in two areas:

Reading top flight Australian authors on other top flight Australian authors – which the ABR at least sometimes fills; and

Discussion of Australian literary theory – which the ABR ignores.

I could probably deal with the latter by subscribing to one or more journals, google suggests the Australian Literary Studies Journal (here). For the former there is apparently the Australian, but the Murdoch press is so virulently anti-worker that I refuse to have anything to do with it. My own local paper the West Australian which I sometimes still buy on Saturdays, reviews only page turners.

Of course, I don’t have time to collate a magazine and anyway it wouldn’t make sense unless it somehow achieved a readership way beyond the few thousand who follow Whispering Gums and ANZLitLovers, envy-inducing as that is. I don’t know what ABR’s readership is, it doesn’t appear in Gary Morgan’s annual readership survey, but 30,000 maybe? That was the readership of Truck & Bus Magazine in its heyday. Soap World, whatever that is, has a readership of 40,000 and Readers Digest (Australia) 436,000, so if I ever retire that’s what I’ll aim for.

 

---

Update: Miles Franklin page

Review by Emma, Book Around the Corner of My Brilliant Career  here

---

Update: Australian Women Writers Gen 1 page

Reviews by Lisa, ANZLitLovers of:
Ellen Clacy, A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53 here
Bronwen Hickman, Mary Gaunt: Independent Colonial Woman here

Sue, Whispering Gums posted three consecutive ‘Monday Musings’ on early Australian women writers:
Literary Culture in Colonial Australia, 22 Jan 2018 here
Reading Aloud in Colonial Australia, 29 Jan 2018 here
Women Academics on Colonial Women Writers, 5 Feb 2018 here

Season’s Greetings 2017

Sturt’s Desert Pea, Great Sandy Desert WA

Another year, another 70 or 80 posts. I love it, much more fun than doing a degree – and I’ve spent 30 odd years studying over these 66 – and just as stimulating, and just as much hard work. Anyway, all the best for another year. Thank you all for reading what I write, for commenting, for your posts and for all the great discussions.

I’ve illustrated this post with Sturt’s Desert Pea for Melanie at Grab The Lapels who is an American and not up on Australian flora. I said I’d send you some Melanie, sorry they’re late. The photo is from around September, four years ago. The Great Sandy Desert is north of the Tropic of Capricorn and mostly dry, as you’d expect! But prone to floods in the rainy season (summer monsoons/cyclones). I haven’t been up there this year, to my sorrow, and instead have a ‘retirement’ job tootling between Perth and the Eastern Goldfields (Kalgoorlie etc.).

As usual I’ve read far too few new books over the course of the year, just squeezing in Kim Scott’s Taboo and Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love in the last couple of weeks. Both of them deserve all manner of prizes and in fact it’s about time Scott won the Booker, though I think Benang (1999) is probably still his best work, certainly his most ambitious. Jane Rawson is still my favourite underrated author and this year she released From the Wreck which I thoroughly enjoyed and I would also recommend the similar in spirit, Terra Nullius from new author Claire G Coleman.

As well as ‘real’ books I got through 150 audio books this year, only some of which I reviewed. Leaving aside Jane Austen (I probably listen to each of her novels on about a two year rotation) the best I listened to this year was Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, but I would like to give an honourable mention to Kingsley Amis’ Booker Prize winning The Old Devils (1986), one of the very few books about guys my age I’ve bothered reading.

So, drum roll, we get to Best Blog Post for 2017 (as read by wadholloway), and the winner is:

Lisa Hill of ANZLitLovers for the amazing, never-ending Finegan’s Wake series which has been alternately informing and bemusing us throughout the year.

I guess I have a thing about series because my runner up is Michelle (MST) of Adventures in Biography for her step by step account of writing and getting published a biography of Elizabeth Macarthur, from when she was accepted into Hard Copy (with a finely polished first chapter) way back in April 2015 through to book launch/release in April next year.

There is another series I must mention, Jane Rawson and Annabel Smith’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Book. If you’re thinking about writing a book or are just interested in the process, read this lively (and informative) series.

Melanie at Grab The Lapels too does some excellent series, like reading/reviewing every single Anne of Green Gables book and this year reviewing Fat Women’s Lit (which I discussed here) but I chose this post ‘Apology, College in Prison, and Belly Song book thoughts‘ as representative of why she is such a delight to follow.

My favourite post of my own for the year, I won’t say all of them though there is a place in my heart for the ones that receive the least attention, is Author Interview, Justine Ettler,  a really informative look into the process and perils of writing post-modern fiction.

My favourite online columnist continues to be communist and feminist Helen Razer in the Daily Review (free) and Crikey (paywalled). Who could not love the line “Liking the TV version of Atwood’s mediocre work of speculative fiction serves as a substitute for feminist knowledge.” (about The Handmaid’s Tale, of course) in this essay on the new female Dr Who (here). Though Guy Rundle, also in Crikey, also a communist and generally more serious, runs her close.

Next year I will be hosting Australian Women Writers Gen 1 Week 15-21 Jan. 2018 and have already put up a ‘beta’ version of a page (AWW Gen 1, above) as a resource for readers interested in the first generation of Australian women writers (1788-1889). I have guest posters lined up and some reviews, but please, I’d love you to read one of the books and give me a link to your review. Ada Cambridge, Rosa Praed and Tasma are all eminently readable and can be found online here at the AWW Challenge site.

In passing, I have also converted Miles Franklin Central to a page (Miles Franklin, above) to make it more readily accessible.

I’m behind in my xmas present buying this year, so no list, though I did follow up a recommendation by one of you after my review of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and buy Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – now, who to give it to? At least I’m home this year, I often work through – the roads are very quiet on Xmas Day – Mum and teacher son are coming over from Melbourne and my niece and geology daughter who live nearby to each other south of Fremantle have a day of eating and drinking planned for our extended family, lots of kids!. Enjoy the holidays and all the best for the New Year!

Hydra, April 2017. If only

 

A late addition: Helen Razer’s Year of Living Magnanimously: Our Five Faves for the Festive Season, Daily Review (here)

 

Australian Women Writers Bingo 2017

I meant all along to enter this years’s AWW Bingo and didn’t realise I’d missed it until I saw the winner announced a few days ago (here). As usual there were two bingo cards, and as it happens, no one completed the second, the Classics Challenge, so I thought I would go back through my reviews for the past year and see how I would have done.

19th Century. I read/reviewed three (Australian) works first published in the C19th:

Ada Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings, 1883 (review)

Tasma, A Sydney Sovereign, 1890 (review)

Catherine Helen Spence, A Week in the Future, 1888-9 (review)

Early 20th Century. Here, I’m afraid, I have to cheat.

Miles Franklin, Cockatoos, first written as On the Outside Track in 1903 but not published until 1954 after being re-written to fit into the Brent of Bin Bin series (review)

If they ask the same question next year I will make sure I can answer:

Barbara Baynton, Human Toll, 1907 which has sat in my TBR for years.

And if it comes to that, I have read and should put up reviews of MF’s first two published novels, My Brilliant Career (1901) and Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909).

1920s and 1930s. The work I have done this past year to review all of ‘Brent of Bin Bin’and to contribute to Lisa at ANZLL’s Christina Stead page pays off here.

Miles Franklin, Ten Creeks Run, 1930 (review)

Miles Franklin, Back to Bool Bool, 1931 (review)

Miles Franklin, Old Blastus of Bandicoot, 1931 (review)

Christina Stead, The Salzburg Tales, 1934 (review)

Henry Handel Richardson, The Young Cosima, 1939 (review)

1940s and 1950s. More Franklin/Brent of Bin Bin and more Stead, but also …

Kylie Tennant, The Honey Flow, 1956 (review)

Charmian Clift, Travels in Greece, first pub. 1958-9 (review)

Miles Franklin, Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang, 1956 (review)

Miles Franklin, Prelude to Waking, 1950 (review)

Christina Stead, Letty Fox Her Luck, 1946 (review)

1960s and 1970s. Stead keeps writing.

Christina Stead, Cotters’ England, 1966 (review)

Christina Stead, Miss Herbert (A Suburban Wife), 1976 (review)

Thea Astley, A Kindness Cup, 1974 (review)

A Contemporary Classic. I reviewed a few from the 1980s on, but I think these three, and particularly the last, deserve to be ‘classics’

Elizabeth Jolley, The Newspaper of Claremont Street, 1981 (review)

Helen Garner, The Spare Room, 2008 (review)

Alexis Wright, The Swan Book, 2013 (review)

Non-Fiction. You’ll see a ring-in amongst these, about an AWW rather than by, which led to a guest post/Monday Musings on Whispering Gums (here)

Bertha Lawson, My Henry Lawson (memoir), 1943 (review)

Miles Franklin, Laughter, Not for a Cage (collected essays), 1954 (review)

Brian Matthews, Louisa (biography), 1987 (review)

Chris Williams, Christina Stead: A Life of Letters (biography), 1989 (review)

Larrissa Behrendt, Finding Eliza (historiography), 2016 (review)

Sarah Goldman, Caroline Chisholm, 2017 (review)

Not yet Reviewed for AWW. I think that was true of all the old books I put up, except maybe A Sydney Sovereign. I’ll choose the least well-known.

Catherine Helen Spence, A Week in the Future, 1888-9 (review)

Free Square. Maybe not a ‘classic’, but certainly a favourite. I’m going to choose, drum roll ….

Jane Rawson, From the Wreck, 2017 (review)

I think in a hundred years time Wright’s The Swan Book will be the stand-out of all these, and maybe Astley’s A Kindness Cup, though I hope Stead is still rated highly (and Jolley, of course, but maybe not for Newspaper).

So, I wonder, what are the ‘classics’ of Australian women’s lit.? This is probably a subject for another post, but how about these five for starters:

Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land, 1941

Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children, 1940

Elizabeth Jolley, The Well, 1986

Justine Ettler, The River Ophelia, 1995

Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, 2006

Arbitrarily stopping at five means I have unhappily left out two novels I have reviewed in the past 12 months Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost (2007) and Astley’s A Kindness Cup and also Clara Morrison (1854) by Catherine Helen Spence which Miles Franklin in Laughter not for a Cage suggests is the best novel of the C19th (by an Australian woman).

Also left out are Franklin’s own My Brilliant Career (1901), Seven Little Australians (1894) by Ethel Turner and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1918) by May Gibbs which are all certainly classics, but not, I think, literary. What do you think?

 

An Australian Trump

photo released by US Embassy, Venezuela (here)

This is, or is meant to be, a blog about representations of Australianness, so I was intrigued to see in yesterday morning’s (Mon 28 Aug. 17) Crikey roundup:

Why Germany will never have a Trump (Der Spiegel): “Who could emerge as a German Trump? There are no men like him in the German political world, nor are they prevalent in other areas of German life either. This aggressive, primitive archetype is no longer accepted here. The American masculinity myth stretches back to the cowboy, while the German equivalent is rooted in the soldier — and the latter died in World War II.”

Like the American cowboy, the Australian Legend has its roots in the myth of the Noble Frontiersman – a simple, honest man living in and conquering nature – while I guess the author is saying that the German equivalent is derived from the ideal Prussian officer. But what is the connection between “masculinity myths” and elections? And are we as equally likely as the Americans to elect a Trump?

Here is the central question of the essay: “Why does the U.S. — the political, moral and military leader of the Western world since the end of World War II — now have a dangerous laughing stock, a man who has isolated his country, as its president? Why does Germany, a former pariah, now enjoy a more positive political standing than ever before?”

The author’s thesis is that since Hitler and since the Holocaust, Germans have been frightened by what they were capable of, and have made a conscious effort to be both moral and conservative – ie. slow to change.

In the U.S., the individual may prevail, but in German politics it is the system that rules. This means that the circumstances in Washington change more starkly depending on who is in office. The governing system in Germany is more stable, uniform and enduring.

Before Trump, America and Germany both had mostly centre-right governments and were both run by competent career politicians. However, though the author doesn’t say so, Trump did have precursors in Ronald Regan and George W Bush. Regan was best known for being an actor and Dubya was a cipher. Both were fronts for competent, if seriously right wing cabinets. (It is my theory that much of the present incivility in politics arises from right wing anger at and retaliation for the general derision that Dubya attracted). The Der Spiegel essay attempts to analyse what it is about America that made Trump possible, and I will attempt to do the same for Australia.

Dreams: In Hollywood anything is possible and Regan, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Trump himself, best known to Americans as a reality tv star, demonstrate that there is only a low bar to crossing over into ‘real life’. Germans take themselves more seriously.

Salvation: Right back to the Mayflower Americans have believed that the One will come, to save them. Hitler makes this belief impossible for modern Germans.

Freaks: The US primaries offer aspiring politicians the chance to appeal direct to the public; an opportunity that does not exist to the same extent in the party systems of Germany and Australia.

Media: There is no German equivalent to Fox News, not even the right wing Axel Springer Group which is constrained by its constitution. Australia’s nearest equivalent is the poorly watched Sky TV and the (Murdoch owned) tabloid newspapers. This difference may decline in importance as consumers follow more targeted news sources on the internet.

Business: Germans see themselves as engineers, Americans as entrepreneurs. Trump the property speculator would not be so admired in Germany. In Australia? – I give you Alan Bond.

Change: The US four year cycle offers opportunities for radical discontinuities in policy. Germans prize continuity. The Australian system, which is much closer to the German than the US, nevertheless has the American tendency for severe directional changes, eg. from Whitlam to Fraser or from Rudd to Abbott, which implies that the difference is cultural rather than systemic.

Class: Germany does not have the enormous divide between liberal, educated, metropolitan elites and the red-necks of the mid-west and the south which characterises the US. Red necks have more opportunities to influence policy in America (and Australia) than they do in Germany. The author does not discuss the significant underclasses in both countries.

Egotism: America believes that it has a duty to lead the world. Americans react inconsistently when their leadership is challenged. Germany also has a leadership role, but its history leads it to work through consensus.

Morality: Americans are moralistic but Germans are moral, arising of course out of their guilt for the Holocaust, and demonstrated most recently in their enormous intake of refugees.

Dynamism: The Americans have a huge appetite for reinvention which the Germans lack and which the author regrets: “our nation of splendorous boredom isn’t particularly well-equipped for the future.”

This is an interesting essay. The author investigates how the way Americans and Germans see themselves influences the sort of government they choose, though without really addressing the issue of cowboys vs (ex-) soldiers. As for Australia – I would say our stolid, suburban middle classes have far more influence than any image of ourselves as independent, larrikin bushmen, and that the outliers – Latham, Abbott – thrown up from time to time by our party system are evidence of the influence of extremists within the factions, rather than of weirdness in the electorate.

So, are we as equally likely as the Americans to elect a Trump? Of course the answer is Yes. Leaving aside Pauline Hanson who is only a minor irritant despite often being mentioned in this context, and taking into account the differences in our political systems, there is no doubt that the 2013 election of a leadership team headed by Tony Abbott and containing Barnaby Joyce, Joe Hockey, Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison, Kevin Andrews, George Brandis … contained all the elements – narcissism, clownishness and incompetence – to qualify.

photo Independent Australia (here)

Dirk Kurbjuweit, A Tale of Two Countries: Why there won’t be a German Trump, Der Spiegel Online, 23 Aug. 2017

The World Today, ABC, Mon. 28 Aug. 2017, contained an interview with the editor of Der Spiegel re this essay (here)

 

 

Monday Musings

Melbourne

Yes I know it’s Tuesday already (here at Melbourne Airport anyway), but I’m not running late, Sue at Whispering Gums was kind enough to ask me to do a guest post on the subject of men writing biographies of Australian women writers and she put it up yesterday as this week’s Monday Musing. So here it is.

And as a bonus, Grab the Lapels recently reviewed Sarah Anderson’s book Big Mushy Happy Lump and included a link to Sarah’s Scribbles – here‘s one we can all identify with.

I’ve been on holidays (again!) spending a week in Melbourne with my son, who stayed behind when the rest of us moved to Perth, and my old mum. Had some great meals, caught up with old girlfriends, blogging friends and rellos, saw a photography exhibition in Monash – Under the sun, Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker – and joined the crowds for van Gogh at the NGV.

Friday’s post is already ‘in the can’, just as well, as I’m told my truck is loaded and I have three trailers to take up north as soon as the plane lands. Wouldn’t have it any other way!

Van Gogh, NGV

Housekeeping

The author when young

Laws governing truck driving in Western Australia allow us to work 17 hours per day – 15 hours driving, 2 hours breaks – up to 12 days a fortnight, and when we’re busy that’s what we work. I’m not complaining, I’m 66 now and seven hours mandated sleep per night suits me fine. The problem is, last year we weren’t busy and I got in the habit of writing and posting a couple of thousand words every week.

Since I got back from holidays I have been busy and today, for the first time in a while, I found myself with nothing ready to publish. I think that is going to happen more often. At the moment I have the last Brent of Bin Bin novel, Back to Bool Bool read, with lots of notes and ready in my mind to write up. I’ll probably get it done today for posting next Tuesday, and the way things go, I could easily get tomorrow off as well and another post knocked up, and be temporarily back on track for two posts a week. As x-Mrs Legend texted recently “It’s always a flood or a droubt with you” (she uses the same spell “checker” as Sue Whispering Gums).

I’m not just getting behind with my writing, I’m getting behind with my reading. In Seasons Greeting 2016 I listed half a dozen new books I had on my shelves waiting to be reviewed. They’re still there. I mostly carry old books around with me and my next review will be Gerald Murnane’s Landscape with Landscape, I’m about half way through and so far I’m loving it.

While I’m working, my best reading time is if I’m stuck in a queue waiting to load, and while I’m unloading (I’m a tanker driver and the unloading largely does itself) but  my first priority – since I ditched newspapers – is emails and news, generally Crikey, then books, though the last two ABRs are also sitting in the truck unread.

Luckily I get to spend a lot of that 15 hours a day driving time listening to audio books. And I’ve joined a new library, Vic Park. So this week I’ve listened to Mr Darcy’s Daughters (a romp, though I don’t believe Elizabeth would have let her daughters get that wild), Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Jo Nesbo’s The Son (a Norwegian thriller), and I’m currently a few chapters into Lionel Shriver’s Big Brother, which I plan to review.

Over the rest of the year I’ll get to those six books at the head of the ‘new book’ TBR and to which I have added The Museum of Modern Love and Bloodlines; I’ll press on with Miles Franklin – there’s Old Blastus, All That Swagger and Joseph Furphy to go (and I’ve never directly reviewed My Brilliant Career); there’s new and secondhand books which will leap out and bite me – I bought half a dozen oldish Australians from Save the Children this morning; and there’s libraries full of audio books.

So, I’m sorry to let you down today, I’m sorry to let me down, I enjoy what I’m doing here but unfortunately not driving is not an option. Not yet anyhow.