Posted by: Lisa Hill | August 2, 2019

Nowhere to Be Found, by Bae Suah, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

For #WIT (Women in Translation) Month, I’ve chosen to tackle two translations long-forgotten because I could only buy them for my Kindle.  Unlike real books, which command my attention from the shelves and sulk if I don’t read them soon enough, books in the innards of my Kindle wait patiently and soon disappear from sight altogether as they are displaced from the Home Screen.  (Not that I buy a lot of books from Amazon.  You know that.)

Nowhere To Be Found didn’t deserve that fate, though I can’t say that I enjoyed it much.  I bought it because it was longlisted for the BTBA Best Translated Book Award Nominee for Fiction in 2016, and its translator Sore Kim-Russell was nominated for the PEN Translation Prize Nominee in the same year.  Paul Fulcher who I follow at Goodreads rated it four stars and gave it a handsome review concluding that it packs more power into its 100 slim pages than most 300 page plus novels…

But I should have paid more attention to what he wrote next, quoting the author Bae Suah as saying: “‘The most suitable way to not say something’—that’s what I think of as the aesthetic of my short fiction.”

While its elusive style would probably disqualify it from the genre, it reads like the kind of apathetic nobody-understands-me YA that I dislike.  In her early twenties, the narrator is a clerical worker in a mundane job in Seoul in 1988, but the drama of the Seoul Olympics and the revelations about atrocities that preceded it don’t concern her.  In this exchange she seems to agree with the proposition that the outcome of Korea using antipersonnel weapons is no different to murder, but she dismisses the idea of taking protest action as a waste of time.

“What kinds of people commit murder?”
“Murderers, I suppose.”
“Your minute is up.”
“Do you suppose we will ever be rid of all antipersonnel weapons?”
“Huh?”
“How are such weapons any different from murder?”
“They’re not.”
“I’m planning a demonstration. Everyone will form a human chain.”
“Doing that won’t change a single thing.” (p. 92, Amazon Crossing, Kindle Edition)

Well, I don’t have much patience with young people not interested in their own country’s future.  Is the author exposing this wilful naïveté to try to change it?

Predictably, the narrator is alienated from her family:

… my family is just a random collection of people I knew long ago and will never happen upon again, and people I don’t know yet but will meet by chance one day. Their dim, indistinct faces will ultimately, and meaninglessly, become the faces of the people in my life, though at the present moment they are unfamiliar strangers with no influence over me whatsoever. (p. 12 Amazon Crossing, Kindle Edition.)

She loses touch with her brother, who abandons his promise to help the family financially.  She is scornful about her little sister’s ambitions to transcend their poverty.

She thinks she has a true self, but it is nowhere to be found:

Rain falls inside the dark, abandoned house. It streams down the walls of the kitchen and front door like a waterfall. Burn me. Pour gasoline over me and set my body on fire. Burn me at the stake like a witch. Wrap me in garbage bags and toss me in the incinerator. I’ll turn into dioxin and make my way into your lungs. Stroke my face lightly with a razor blade and suck the blood that comes seeping out. Lap it up like a cat. I want to be covered in blood. I’ll cry out in the end and weep for fear of leaving this world without ever once discovering the me inside me, the ugly something inside me. But then I see her: another me passing by like a landscape of inanimate objects outside the window of the empty house quietly collapsing in the rain.

Where have you been all this time? Were you off somewhere singing, putting cats to sleep on the porch, drifting about in the rapids of time, the glow of the morning sun and the rain of a summer afternoon beating down as you pass by, your lips shut tight like a bloodsucking plant? The me that is nowhere to be found now, the me that will turn to ash and vanish, turn to darkness and rot—that me extends a squalid hand at the final moment of this crash, having entirely deserted and abandoned my life. In truth, I was not me. The me that was born into an animal body and lived as a slave to poverty and insult was nothing but the emptiness that had been momentarily bewitched out of me by an evil spirit. That distant me is precious and beautiful. No matter how decadent and corrupt my body becomes, I will, like a desert orchid that blooms once every hundred years, come to you bearing this frigidness toward life. (pp. 38-39, Amazon Crossing, Kindle Edition)

Unsurprisingly, the churlish boyfriend Cheolsu is — both physically and psychologically — also nowhere to be found. (And she’s better off without him IMO).

It outlived memory. Back then Cheolsu was nowhere to be found, and it would be no different in the future. Meaningless sensations lingered on my skin as clearly as teeth marks that refused to fade. Time pushes away that which is intended, rejects that which is rejected, forgets that which is sung about, and is filled with that which it turns its eyes from, such as the white hairs of a loved one.  (p. 93, Amazon Crossing, Kindle Edition)

Well, if you like your fiction narcissistic and nihilistic, maybe this one might appeal.  Sophie Hughes at Music and Literature sees qualities in the novella that eluded me entirely.

Author: Bae Suah
Title: Nowhere To Be Found
Translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell
Publisher: Amazon Crossing, 2015, first published 1998
ASIN: B00OV403X0
Purchased for the Kindle because that’s the only way it’s available in Australia.

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Posted in #WITmonth, 20th century, C20th-C21st, Female authors, Female authors in translation, FICTION, Korea (settings), Korean authors, Novellas (100-200 pp), Read in 2019, REVIEWS, Suah Bae, Translations | Tags: , , , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | August 1, 2019

Hearing Maud, by Jessica White

Hearing Maud, a Journey for a Voice is a most interesting hybrid: not quite a memoir, not quite a biography of a mother and her daughter, and not quite a survey of a pioneering Australian female author. It is not quite any of these things, but it is more than the sum of its parts.  This is the blurb:

Hearing Maud: a Journey for a Voice is a work of creative non-fiction that details the author’s experiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age four. It charts how, as she grew up, she was estranged from people and turned to reading and writing for solace, eventually establishing a career as a writer.

Central to her narrative is the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century Queensland expatriate novelist Rosa Praed. Although Maud was deaf from infancy, she was educated at a school which taught her to speak rather than sign, a mode difficult for someone with little hearing. The breakup of Maud’s family destabilised her mental health and at age twenty-eight she was admitted to an asylum, where she stayed until she died almost forty years later. It was through uncovering Maud’s story that the author began to understand her own experiences of deafness and how they contributed to her emotional landscape, relationships and career.

In the prologue, White explains the Greek concept of pharmakon, meaning that something can be both a poison and a cure. As a four-year-old, she contracted meningitis, and the antibiotics that saved her life, damaged the nerves of her cochlea, leaving her with limited hearing only in one ear.  But, she says, deafness can also be a poison and a cure, and the way the pendulum swung in favour of one or the other depended on the time and the culture in which the deaf person lived.  In this book White explores the contrast between the limited agency that 19th century Maud Praed had over her life, with her own.  For White, deafness has led to being a writer: her insularity has made her an avid reader and an acute observer of people.  Although there are difficulties and she questions some of the decisions her parents made on her behalf, she is independent, and she has a fulfilling life as an academic and a writer.

[Some of these difficulties should not occur.  There will, unfortunately, always be ignorant or difficult or selfish individuals who make things more difficult for the disabled than they need to be, but institutional disregard for legally-mandated facilities is something else again.  I was shocked to read that over an eight year period, Southbank Cinema Brisbane had at the time of this book’s publication, no hearing loop or other technology to enable deaf people to hear film soundtracks.  If this is still the situation, the owners and managers of this cinema should be ashamed of themselves for this discriminatory state of affairs in their state of the art — wheelchair accessible cinemas.  I have emailed them (and Palace, and Village) to find out which cinemas are hearing loop enabled: you don’t have to be deaf to care about this.  All of us can pressure our cinemas with a simple online query; as White’s audiologist once told her, ‘If you complain, you make it easier for the next deaf person who comes after you.’ (p.185).  If everyone reading this review took five minutes to pester their cinemas, things would change. The discrimination needs to be called out, and if necessary reported to state discrimination authorities.   There is no good reason why deaf people should be excluded from popular culture like this.  It’s completely unnecessary.]

Ok, off my soapbox…

For those who haven’t come across it before, White explains the issue of signing v speech for deaf people.  You can see it in practice in the excellent ABC series You can’t Ask That: there is vivacity, fluency and confidence in the language of the participants who sign (translated for the viewers); there are also participants who speak easily and clearly while others struggle to produce speech that hearing viewers can understand.  What White makes clear is that there is enormous effort involved in speaking for deaf people: Maud, whose mother Rosa was influenced by contemporary beliefs about what was best, was taught to speak despite having no hearing at all, but she lost this ability when institutionalised because there was no one to continue teaching her.  What makes this doubly tragic was that she retained the ability to write, and her letters from the asylum show that, at least in the beginning, she was still lucid enough to express herself and beg for help.

On the other hand, while the Deaf* community offers a sense of confidence and belonging, writing — which means so much to White and her sense of identity —  is ‘foreign’ to it:

For those who sign, writing is foreign because sign language has no written counterpart.  Spoken English also has tricks tucked into it, such as the silent ‘p’ in ‘psalm’, that don’t correlate with what is on the page.  Some deaf people are understandably resistant to a language that, as scholar Jennifer Esmail points out, ‘carries its own pejorative resonances for terms such as deaf, dumb and mute.’  (p.191)

I’m guessing, but perhaps it would be like trying to learn to write French, or Arabic, (or whatever) without already knowing the structures and sounds of it from speaking and listening to it. Somewhat like the difficulty people have learning character-based languages?

However — because her parents were determined that White should learn to communicate in a hearing world — it is hard-won speech and lip-reading (which is exhausting) that enables White to negotiate her hearing world.  She travels independently, she studies in the UK and US, and although there are many moments of intense loneliness and exclusion, she eventually finds a soulmate.   OTOH she rejects cochlear implants, though I won’t reproduce the arguments for and against here.

The structure of the book traverses time and space, not necessarily chronologically, and this is a little confusing in places.  However, this weaving of White’s memories and discoveries over time is like the way we interact with our friends.  We do not discover who they are and what they care about in a neat and tidy chronological way; we learn about them as issues and ideas crop up, in untidy but stimulating conversations.  So I liked this way of ‘meeting’ Jessica White, and of learning so much about the reality of life as a deaf person successfully navigating a world that isn’t as accommodating as it ought to be.

I’ll conclude with this episode, that follows her account of her father’s determination to hatch some guineafowl:

My father paused in his work, watching them too.  ‘Look at that, Jess. It just goes to show there’s no such word as “can’t”. If you really put your mind to something, you’ll achieve it.’

I believed my father. His words took me to America and England, and meant I never gave up on trying to make it into print.  I believe him still, but I also understand now that my determination has a huge emotional and physical cost.  People might read my story and think it’s inspiring.  If they do, they should remember the disability activist Stella Young, who coined the term ‘inspiration porn.’ People with disabilities aren’t put on earth to inspire other people; we’re just trying to get on with our day in a world that isn’t designed for us. (p. 236)

*White explains the difference between Deaf as capitalised, and not.  It has political connotations among deaf people, too complex to go into here.

PS As an aside, as well as the many other things I learned from this book, I discovered the existence of ‘finding aids’.  Researchers will already know what these are, but I didn’t.  White was pleased to find some when she was researching Rosa Praed, because they’re invaluable when there’s a huge mass of material in an archive.  A finding aid is a tool containing detailed, indexed, and processed information about a specific collection of records within an archive.  Needless to say, I’ve never come across one when I’ve been researching anything, possibly because my subjects haven’t been important enough or because the archive hasn’t warranted one!

You can find out more about Jessica White at her website. And in a remarkable piece of synchronicity, you can also read Bill’s review at The Australian Legend, published on the very same day as mine!

#Transparency Statement: Over the years Jessica White has been a great supporter of my ANZ LitLovers Indigenous Literature Week, publicising it on the Australian Women Writers website and retweeting about it as well, but I have never met her and my review is not influenced at all by this minor connection.

Update, the next morning 2/8/19: I’ve had a pleasing reply from Palace Cinemas:

All Palace auditoriums are setup with the Fidelio headset & neck loop options.  These receivers are available at the box office when tickets are purchased.  The neck loop option works in conjunction with hearing aids + the headset has adjustable volume to boost the dialogue levels.

Simply check in with a member of staff at the box office and they will be able to issue you with the Fidelio headset or neck loop option for you.

I’m still waiting on a reply from Village, and have had a reply from Admin Cineplex Australia, but it’s only about the cinema at Victoria Point.  So I’ve asked them to forward my query on to Head Office, because I want to know about all their cinemas, that is, I want to know whether they are compliant across their chain, as Palace obviously is.

Author: Jessica White
Title: Hearing Maud, a Journey for a Voice
Publisher: UWAP (University of Western Australia), 2019, 269 pages
ISBN: 9781760800383
Source: Bayside Library

Available direct from UWAP and from Fishpond: Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice

 

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Posted in REVIEWS, Australian Authors, Memoir, Female authors, 21st century, UWAP (University of Western Australia Press), Queensland authors, Read in 2019, Aust 2019, WHITE Jessica | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 31, 2019

Dead Men Running, by D’Arcy Niland

Dustjacket drawing by Russell Drysdale

I began reading this book in an attempt to make room for some new books on my ‘Australia’ shelf, but I knew from the first few pages that I wouldn’t be parting with it afterwards.  Dead Men Running by D’Arcy Niland (1917-1967) had me captivated from the first words, narrated by Joey:

Tuesday Evening, 1916

I heard the front door slam, the feet clattering up the stairs like the rataplan of drums.  The door flew back and rebounded as he charged in, wet as a shag, full of the excitement and urgency of action. I would have asked him who was chasing him only the violence and grimness I sensed shut my mouth on the words.  He said nothing.  He swiftly crossed the room, a slish of oilskins drippling water, and dragged the tin trunk from under his bed.

“What is it?” I said. “What’s up?”

He had two guns in there, the one he settled Amos Frost with and the unlicensed one the police knew nothing about.  He checked and pocketed that and pushed the trunk back. (p.11)

… wet as a shag … a slish of oilskins… can’t you just see him standing there, in his Driza-Bone?

Finished only two days before D’Arcy Niland’s death at the untimely age of only 49, Dead Men Running was published posthumously by his widow Ruth Park.  This is the blurb from the first edition dustjacket:

In this poignant and eventful novel D’Arcy Niland presents the question: What really happens when the ordinary world of evasion and pretence meets a man who is completely honest?
Starkey Moore is this man, an island unto himself, impartial to mores or morals, traditional thinking or his fellows’ opinion.  Yet he is no figure from a morality play; he  is vital, humorous, courageous and completely shocking, as unadorned truth and candour always must be.  Across his path comes the young, lonely Joey, his very opposite, tender, vacillatory, carnal and priggish by turns, needing a hero and insisting upon finding one.
This story of friendship and archaic disaster is played out against a remote landscape during a flare-up of nationalistic rage and hysteria.
The mellow meditative style conceals a steely framework of tense and suspenseful story.  With a Kazantzakis-like simplicity and inevitability D’Arcy Niland leads the reader towards the crashing last chapter.
This is D’Arcy Niland’s last novel, finished only a short time before he died, and this book contains the full story as it was written.

It’s a remarkable story, and the blurb does the character of Joey a bit of a disservice.  This is a coming-of-age story in which hero-worship confronts the reality of human nature.  Though the story is set in 1916, the reader learns through flashbacks that Joey was orphaned in Ireland, came to Australia as a teenager to escape poverty and make a new life for himself, and soon found himself work with the Larrissey family who treated him like a son.  But things went awry when Joey witnessed the indiscretion of his employer’s wife, and he had the maturity to recognise that her fear of exposure had soured their relationship irrevocably.

So he left, and soon found himself alone in a strange town, friendless and sick.  Shivering with fever on the teeming streets of Hope, he was ignored by passers-by until Starkey rescued him, took him home and nursed him back to health.  Starkey also used his hold over the local powerbroker Walsh, to set Joey up with work:

“He owns half this of this town,” Starkey said.  “That’s how I kicked off with him—maintaining his properties.  Saving old houses from the grave. Making them fit to live in.  When I worked it out and showed how much money he was losing in depreciation and repairs he never slept for days.  He wanted me to get a gang and take charge but I told him I’d had enough of it.  Then he gave me this job, bringing me in and making me foreman over all the others waiting in front of me.  But I know why he did it.  He thought I was the one to get more work out of the men.” (p.95)

Walsh needs Starkey more than Starkey needs him.

But Joey gets work with a local auctioneer instead, partly because it was Walsh who turned him out into the rain on the way to Hope, but also because he isn’t sure that he wants to work at the same place at Starkey.  An incident in a café, where Starkey is outrageously rude to one of the customers makes him feel uneasy:

I experienced for the first time a shift of feeling for Starkey, and it worried me.  It was nothing definite; just something vaguely disquieting, like the rumour of a calumny: more, I think, a lessening of respect, a disappointment in feeling the idol chipped.  In every way I disapproved of his behaviour, though I wanted to find reasons to justify it.  There seemed no need for such insulting and cutting remarks especially to women.  (p.97)

When he admits his disquiet to Starkey, he gets a blunt answer:

“Well, that’s me,” Starkey said.  “Take it or leave it.  They poke sh__ at me, I poke it right back with interest.  I’m nobody’s doormat.”  (p.97)

Starkey is an arrogant man who thinks that there are no limits to his often brutal truth-telling.  He is disliked by many in the town because he has offended them and respectable people do not approve of his candour about an affectionate relationship with the town prostitute Chicky.  And in a time of war when nationalism is rampant, Starkey’s former career as a mercenary soldier brings his patriotism into question.  Joey’s support for Starkey makes him friendless too.

Before long, Joey has to confront further unpalatable truths.  His emerging affection for an innocent Irish girl called Teresa Doherty is at odds with his initiation to manhood with Chicky — an initiation that was set up by Starkey.  As far as Starkey’s concerned there should be no hypocrisy about a man’s needs, but Joey finds his tender flirtations with Teresa sullied by his experience with Chicky.  Perhaps this is what the blurber meant by him being priggish?

However, there are worse issues in the offing.  1916 is not just the year after Gallipoli when recruitment went into overdrive because of the slaughter, it was also the year of the Easter Rising. A local group has formed to support the Irish rebels, and it is proposed that trains carrying ammunition for the war effort should be sabotaged.  Some of the supporters think that there is no difference between a British victory and a German one, while others acknowledge the thousands of Irish volunteers fighting in the British Army, while yet others think that Irish independence stands a better chance if the British win the war.  And then there are those who on moral grounds are opposed to any kind of violence to support the Irish cause.

Joey finds himself caught between Teresa’s father Doherty who opposes the sabotage, and Starkey who supports it.  And when it turns out that someone has informed the police about these plans, things get very messy indeed.

Dead Men Running has a nail-biting conclusion, and culpability is tantalisingly ambiguous.

Although I liked this novel very much indeed, there are a couple of aspects which demonstrate how values have changed since it was written in 1969.  There is some casual racism and sexism in the language used, and when there is a suggestion that Starkey’s relationship with Joey might be predatory, the hostility to homosexuals in his rebuttal would be considered extreme today.  Well, we can’t judge books and authors by the standards of the present day; suffice to note these issues so that other readers are aware of them.

The book however, is long out of print.  There appears to have been a Penguin reprint in 1978, but it looks as if there are only second-hand copies available now.

You can find out more about D’Arcy Niland here.

Image credit: DrizaBone: https://everythingaustralian.com.au/riding-coat-heavyweight-oilskin-brown.html

Author: D’Arcy Niland
Title: Dead Men Running
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, Sydney, 1969, First edition hbk., 350 pages
ISBN: None
Source: Personal copy, an OpShop find that is now worth much more than I paid for it, if AbeBooks is anything to go by.  There was a copy at Kay Craddocks for $40AUD on the day I looked.

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Posted in 20th century, Aus 1969, AusMale, Australia NSW (settings), Australian Authors, FICTION - AUSTRALIAN, Hodder and Stoughton, Male authors, New South Wales authors, NILAND D'Arcy, Read in 2019, REVIEWS | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 30, 2019

2019 Miles Franklin Award winner

Yay!  Melissa Lucashenko has won the 2019 Miles Franklin Award for her novel Too Much Lip.  I am so pleased!

I told you it was a great book back when I reviewed it a year ago:

With great characterisation which includes a helpful ghost and a talking shark, plus a compelling plot which includes a dash of romance, Too Much Lip laces grim realism with witty dialogue, and a message of hope and future reconciliation.  This is Lucashenko’s best book yet.

Let’s not forget the shortlisted books, which are all great reading too.

 

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Posted in LUCASHENKO Melissa, Miles Franklin winners | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 29, 2019

The Library Always Wins, by Outi Pickering

There are not a lot of books that announce the denouement in their own title!

Outi Pickering is a recently retired former librarian who has used her experience in a staff library at a NHS hospital in the UK, as fodder for a venture into writing. The Library Always Wins (2018) is her second effort, the first being Two Point Five Cheers for the Library. (2015)  Both of them are published by an outfit called Olympia Publishers, whose website I consulted because of suspicions I had about the editing of this book.  Yes, Olympia do what they call traditional publishing, but if they are unable to offer a traditional contract, they make an alternative offer […] known as a ‘partnership contract’ and is based on a contribution, to be paid by the author, to cover initial production and printing of the work. Well, I hope Pickering didn’t contribute much of her retirement savings, though the fact that this book made its way to prominent display at a suburban library in Melbourne on the other side of the world, indicates that the title is marketable, at least to libraries and the people who love them.

The story is a simple one, and familiar.  As one who helped to man the barricades when a premier best forgotten wanted to close libraries all over Melbourne, I recognise the panic when closure seems imminent.  The library staff at Cardigan Bay Healthscare Library are beset by the plans of bean-counters, so they rally as best they can, handicapped by their own follies and foibles.  The tone of the book is established by the ludicrous names of the characters: Simon Pendrive is the manager and Vladimir Logoff is the IT librarian.  Outsider Claire Twinset — otherwise known as The Choke (Chief Officer for Knowledge Etc) — is the replacement manager when Simon takes leave to join his amateur choir for three weeks. Her supervisor is Justin Drakonian.  And so on.

A series of mildly amusing episodes take place, culminating in, as the title told us it would, the library’s triumph.  Having been told, repeatedly, about the intrinsic worth of the work this library does, it comes as a bit of an anti-climax to find that its reprieve is based on exactly that.  The circumstances, however, seem highly unlikely to me.  But what would I know about the professionalism of the NHS? Maybe they are a bunch of incompetents who need to read reference books during surgery.

But surely there’s YouTube on an iPad for that?

Author: Outi Pickering
Title: The Library Always Wins
Publisher: Olympia Publishers, London, 2018, 208 pages
ISBN: 9781848978775
Source: Kingston Library

 

8 Comments

Posted in 21st century, British authors, England (settings), Female authors, FICTION, Pickering Outi, Read in 2019, REVIEWS | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 27, 2019

The Returns, by Philip Salom

Reading Philip Salom’s fiction is like an enchantment.  His characters are distinctive and yet familiar; they are every person you’ve ever met who doesn’t quite ‘fit in’, but you don’t care because you like them anyway.

If you loved the setting of the Miles Franklin shortlisted Waiting (and I certainly did) The Returns is set once again in inner-Melbourne.  There are shops and pubs within walking distance, and dogs share Royal Park with the joggers every morning.  The beggars know where the best stakeouts are, and the supermarket is one of the small independent ones. Trams clatter along the street, and there’s always the hum of the city in the background.  Best of all, because the houses have corrugated iron roofs, you can hear the rain falling.  Urban redevelopment does not seem to have strayed into Salom’s vividly depicted world; it is so resolutely single-storeyed that the room that’s a catalyst for the plot, has been built underneath the existing house.

The central characters are again misfits: Trevor is a bookseller with an aborted career as an artist, has a failing marriage and seems old before his time.  Apart from his disagreeable wife, he has no family, except possibly for the reappearance of a scoundrel father thought to be long since dead.  Elizabeth is a freelance editor with a needy mother in Ballarat and an adult daughter who flits in and out of her life.  She has a condition called prosopagnosia, (difficulty recognising faces), which impacts on her social relationships.  Both Trevor and the reader have to learn what this might mean:

Not for the first time he wonders what it feels like to see a current lover and not recognise them immediately.  It had always seemed to him a stranger’s face made the first exciting impression, which then became deeply familiar, admired, and that love with its profound fondness grew from this familiar.  She would have to adjust anew each time.  The proverbial gamut: she would rush through exciting, familiar, loved in fast forward every day. (P.251)

(Alzheimer’s disease is an entirely different, degenerative condition, but it also takes the familiar into the unknown and is distressing for everyone.  Imagine the anguish of not being able to recognise the faces that come into your room.  If someone you love has this cruel condition, long before memory goes, begin wearing the same clothes and scent every time you visit, and announce your name in a cheery greeting as soon as you enter the room.  A time will come when this strategy fails too, but it’s a kindness while it lasts.)

Elizabeth also has an eating disorder, and almost passes out the first time she encounters Trevor.

The second time they meet is when Elizabeth places an ad for a room to let in his shop window.  Trevor, who has been living with his estranged wife for some years, decides to take the room himself.  He moves into the underground bedroom (with ensuite) and sets up the backyard shed as a studio to resurrect his art.  But they share a compact kitchen and it turns out that Trevor is the kind of home cook that his ex-wife is going to sorely miss!

Just as the reader is lured into predicting that the stage is set for a romance, Salom introduces the parents, and my word, what proverbial ‘spanners in the works’ they are!  Trevor has enough trouble with ‘difficult’ people in his shop, without the man who turns up claiming to be his father.  The irony here is that it’s Elizabeth who has trouble recognising faces but has developed strategies for coping when relationships matter to her — but Trevor has no strategy for remembering what should have been one of the most important relationships in his life.  He does not know whether the man is a fraud or not. Elizabeth’s mother, OTOH, is a hoarder, and now that she’s becoming frail, the state of the house is a major concern.  Elizabeth is torn between duty and guilt, and resentful memories of how her mother simply abandoned her when she joined a sect. Is Trevor going to have to move out so that she can move in?

Salom is a poet with a wry sense of humour.  Elizabeth’s mother is named Mrs Sermon.  Here she is in hospital after a ‘turn’, stacked against the linen-service pillows like a bag stuffed with old clothes in a corner of her house.  She’s relieved not to have had a stroke, but not at all happy:

What use is astrology if it hasn’t warned her off this ward of smelly food and other people?  To her annoyance she has even seen some of her old astrological clients, one of whom is looking much healthier than he should.  The people that want to live past 90?…are the people who are 89.  Life has made a mistake and kept adding years to her life, dammit.  It is meant to be her life.  Except she can no longer decide if she wants more years or not. (p.258)

Both the central characters have memories to deal with:

On the weekends, Trevor drives to the boathouse. Whenever he begins rowing, his childhood returns.  Asd a kid he sometimes spent his school holidays on a farm that was, luckily, on his mother’s side of the family.  His father?  Away, as always, on his field trips.  After he had been shown how to manage the oars and keep the old rowing boat upright and moving more or less straight ahead, Trevor was free to untie the boat, get in, push off and row upriver, against the slow current.  This meant he could row with the current on the way home, just in case he was too tired.

His rowing now is filled with its own peace, and rhythm, and the sound of the hull passing through water, along with the past memory of his father, in a good mood, rowing upriver to fish.  Therefore Trevor, rowing on the gleaming water with two oars and two states of mind, is double-dipping. The pun makes him smile even if his father does not. (p.213)

Some of the humour is sly.  Trevor, waiting for the cops after a would-be break-in at the shop…

…inspects the books by his front, not bashed-in door display, noting the new title by a local author: Waiting.  Yes, quite.  He waits. (p.271)

I won’t be the only one to think of another fictional artist’s predilection for unauthorised outdoor art, just before Salom bounces in with the allusion:

As he works he uses his wide house-painting brushes to move litres of acrylic paint back and forth across the horizontal space of the wall.  Over this he sprays and sprays, walking from the pavement end to the top of the blind alley.  What a joy, he thinks, if only canvases were this big and he wasn’t some obvious dickhead trying to win the Archibald Prize by size alone, he could do this all day as well as all night.  He thinks of Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth. He sweeps spray and paint across the wall, walking sideways to expand his image across the wall’s size and scale, his face under the mask cheeky with smiling. (p.230)

I suspect that The Returns would make a wonderful film.  Just don’t let Hollywood anywhere near it.

PS That perfect artwork on the cover is by Josh Durham/Design by Committee.

Author: Philip Salom
Title: The Returns
Publisher: Transit Lounge, 2019, 336 pages
ISBN: 9781925760262
Review copy courtesy of Transit Lounge

Available direct from Transit Lounge; from Fishpond The Returns; and from good bookshops everywhere.

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Posted in 21st century, Art in Fiction, AusMale, Aust 2019, Australia VIC (settings), Australian Authors, FICTION - AUSTRALIAN, Male authors, Melbourne (settings), Read in 2019, REVIEWS, SALOM Philip, Transit Lounge, Victorian authors | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 25, 2019

Imminence, by Mariana Dimópulos, translated by Alice Whitmore

Recently, I went to a most impressive art exhibition at the Carlisle Street Artspace at the old St Kilda Town Hall.  The young artist Daniel Coulson is upfront about his struggle with mental health, and the artworks on display were a testament both to his sense of disassociation and alienation, and his recovery.  He draws and paints in what is called Expressive Art, and you can see the style he uses and the artists he admires at his Pinterest page.  I’m beginning this review by reflecting on my experience of seeing a visual representation of dislocation and alienation, compared to reading about it.  When I look at a painting like this one, the play of light, colour and texture shows the paradox of the self dissolving and at the same time insisting on breaking through.  The eyes of the young woman suggest that she is determined not to submit to the torment she feels.  It’s a very powerful painting.

But reading Imminence is a more depressing experience.  A young woman drifts through a day and a life without feeling.  As the book begins, she has come home from a prolonged stay in hospital after the birth of her baby.  She cared so little about the existence of this infant, that she left the decision to abort it or not, to her lover.  Now she feels nothing for it, and abandons its care to Pedro.  And it’s not post-natal depression because she’s been like this all her life, an observer of others, disengaged from the business of living.

We’re alone together, for the first time.  I have to touch him now.  I try stroking a foot, then a shoulder.  But no current lifts in me, nothing pulls at my chest the way they said it would.

The baby has a foot that shines silver from the wool of his bootie.  I try again, but I can’t even get close.  Removing the covers, removing any of his layers, is suddenly unthinkable.  I laugh to myself.  I tell myself it’s impossible, and the thought is like a soothing caress; nothing is wrong, it will pass.  (p.1)

Her cynical friends are contemptuous of men, and love, and commitment.  Her male lovers — Pedro, Ivan and Cousin — are perfunctory experiences.  There are episodic events in a haphazard chronology, but the only one that engaged me at all was an episode of sheer stupidity when the narrator and Ivan were stranded in the desert because their car broke down.  I understood that this extreme event was to show the extent of the narrator’s lack of feeling: it really is the ultimate in not caring about yourself and others when you put yourself in danger to no purpose, but still, while I recognised that I was meant to empathise with the narrator, I felt more in sympathy with the 17-year-old boy who had to risk his own safety in order to help her out.

In his thoughtful review, Joe at Rough Ghosts comments that some readers might find it hard to ‘forgive’ the narrator’s detachment — and I think that’s how I felt.  I was impatient with her self-absorption, I got tired of her whining, and I found that the only character I cared about was the poor little unloved baby.  I was also frustrated by my inability to make sense of the book, even after I had consulted my own review of All My Goodbyes by Dimópulos … which I did because I remembered that I’d only made sense of that one by reading up on trends in Argentinian Lit in Michael Orthofer’s The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction.  

So, yet again, I find myself not liking the style or preoccupations of this type of Argentinian writing very much!

I read Imminence for Stu’s Spanish-Portuguese Lit Month at Winston’s Dad, and as a prelude to #WitMonth (Women in Translation), in August.

Author: Mariana Dimópulos
Title: Imminence
Translated by Alice Whitmore
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing, Southern Latitudes collection, 2019, 152 pages
ISBN: 9781925336962
Review copy courtesy of Giramondo Publishing

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Posted in 21st century, Argentina (settings), Argentinian authors, C20th-C21st, Dimópulos Mariana, Female authors, Female authors in translation, FICTION, Giramondo (University of Western Sydney), Latin American authors, Novellas (100-200 pp), Read in 2019, REVIEWS | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 24, 2019

Vale Margaret Fulton (1924-2019)

It is with sadness that I share the news that Margaret Fulton OAM has died, aged 94.  I wrote my Homage to Margaret Fulton 10 years ago, in 2009, when it seemed that she would always be with us…

Born in Scotland, Fulton migrated to Australia when she was three.  Her cooking career began in 1947 when she began teaching at the Overseas Corporation and introduced the pressure cooker to Australia.  She went to become a demonstrator and eventually ran a Tuesday cooking class at Sydney’s Bistro, which was the catalyst for her regular contributions to women’s magazines.  (This was when women’s magazines were useful, with recipes and knitting patterns and informative articles, not like the trashy things sold as women’s magazines today).

Now credited as Australia’s first ‘food-writer’, Margaret Fulton introduced generations of post-war domestic cooks to enjoy cooking and to be creative.  All of her cook books were informative and easy to follow, and they introduced novice cooks to essential techniques like making stock or featherlight pastry.  She progressed from having a cookbook section called ‘International’ to incorporating a wide variety of cuisines amongst the soups, entrees and main courses, so we learned to cook Chinese, Italian and French along with making biscuits, jams and chutneys.

I will always think of Margaret Fulton at Christmas, when I use her guide to cooking the perfect turkey, and use her tip for heating up the Christmas pudding, in the crockpot.  (Bung it in the night before, on low, with a cup of water under the pudding basin, and the pud will be piping hot, no stress, by the time you’re ready to eat it).

If ever an Australian deserved a State Funeral, it’s Margaret Fulton. She brought more happiness to Australian family life than anyone else I can think of.

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Some details of this obituary were sourced from Margaret Fulton’s Wikipedia page.

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Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 24, 2019

My Pain, My Country, Dewi Anggraeni

My Pain, My Country is a fictional response to true events that happened in Indonesia in 1998. In May of that year there was widespread civil unrest attributed to food shortages and mass unemployment, and the riots ultimately led to the resignation of President Suharto and the emergence of democracy in Indonesia.  The main targets of the violence were Indonesians of ethnic Chinese descent, and it is this aspect of what is now often referred to as Tragedi 1998 which forms the focus of Dewi Anggraeni’s novel.

Dewi Anggraeni is an Indonesian journalist now based in Melbourne, and the book is written in English, not translated. I infer from the numerous explanations of traditions and cultural mores, that it is intended for an audience beyond Indonesia, to expand on the headlines that surfaced briefly and were then lost again in the 24/7 news cycle. Anggraeni has four significant concerns:

  • Ethnic divisions, and anti-Chinese sentiment in particular persist in Indonesia, and violence may recur;
  • Neither the instigators or the perpetrators have been brought to justice, which increases the prospect of future violence;
  • The widespread rape of Chinese-Indonesian women was under-reported and hushed up, and is still denied by many; and
  • The refusal to look back and investigate exacerbates the ongoing distress of the victims and their families.

Anggraeni was previously the Melbourne-based correspondent for Tempo and other Indonesian media, and from her profile at Goodreads, it can be seen that she has previously written a non-fiction account of the riots: it’s called Tragedi Mei 1998 dan Lahirnya Komnas Perempuan (Buku Kompas, 2014) which translates as The May 1998 Tragedy and Birth of the National Commission on Women, a body that was set up by President Habibi (briefly in office in the transitional period from Suharto to democracy, from 1998 to 1999):

The KP deals with basic human rights of women in Indonesia, notably all sorts of violence against women, in conflict as well as peace situations. Together with social organisations, the KP develops concepts, standards, instruments and mechanisms intended to prevent, handle, and abolish all forms of violence against women. The Commission has initiated advocacy activities and has been involved in several processes of human rights investigations. The major achievements have been the establishment of one-stop crisis centres for women in several places in the country and the set-up of special departments for female victims of violence in police hospitals.

Whatever the good intentions of this commission, it would appear from Anggraeni’s novel, that the 1998 rapes are outside its remit.  Characters in the novel are disappointed by the inaction of Indonesia’s first female president (Megawati Sukarnoputri, 1999-2001) and by the novel’s end in 2013, nothing much has changed.  Like the issue of the so-called Comfort Women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese occupation forces in WW2, it seems that the use of rape as a weapon is a taboo that some cultures would rather deny.  So it takes some courage for an Indonesian author to broach this topic.

However, it is not an easy novel to read: it’s confusing. The central characters, the mother and sister of the rape victim, are still traumatised many years after the event, and they still don’t know exactly what happened to Nina. To depict this and to create narrative tension culminating in the final revelation about Nina’s heroism, the novel travels back and forth across many settings and time periods.  At the same time, to depict the ongoing impact on the extended family and other members of the community, there are so many characters that I found myself wanting a family tree.  These problems could have been resolved with better editing, but the publisher Austin Macauley is not noted for that.

My Pain, My Country is the August choice for my Indonesian bookgroup.

The name of the designer who created the exquisite cover art unfortunately isn’t provided.

Author: Dewi Anggraeni
Title: My Pain, My Country
Publisher: Austin Macauley London, 2017, 252 pages
ISBN: 9781787104228
Source: On loan from Jo, in my Indonesian book group. (I had a Kindle edition of the book, but much preferred to read it in print, thanks, Jo!)

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Posted in 21st century, AusFemale, Australia VIC (settings), Australian Authors, Female authors, FICTION - AUSTRALIAN, Indonesia (settings), Indonesian authors, Melbourne (settings), Read in 2019, REVIEWS, Victorian authors | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 22, 2019

Circe, by Madeline Miller

Circe was another ‘catch-up-with-the-hype’ choice, but this one I didn’t regret bringing home from the library.  Like Miller’s first book, The Song of Achilles (which won the Orange Prize, see my review) it’s undemanding, enjoyable ‘historical’ fiction, and appealing to anyone interested in Ancient Greek mythology.  Perfect for when I was bogged down with another book: not quite wanting to jettison it, but wanting something else for bedtime reading.

Circe is a chronologically coherent rewrite of the ancient stories of Circe, written from a feminist perspective.  The Circe of Homer and Ovid gets a bad press: the daughter of the god Helios and either the goddess Hecate or the nymph Perse, she is a violent, predatory female who uses her powers as a witch to wreak vengeance when she is thwarted.  Famously, she used her powers of transformation to create the monster Scylla, and to turn Odysseus’ men into pigs while she delayed his journey home.  In John Williamson Waterhouse’s painting at left, she is offering a cup laced with drugs to Odysseus, and you can see the docile pigs and the allusion to the tame lions that roamed her isolated island home. You can also see Eurylochus lurking in the background: he was the only one to suspect Circe’s treachery and was able to warn the wily Odysseus…

In Miller’s story, Circe gets a makeover.  She, alone among the gods, has a moral compass.  They are wilful, carelessly cruel, and unambiguously selfish.  For Circe to feel compassion as they do not, she cannot be a goddess, so in Miller’s version she is descended from the nymph Perse, not Hecate.  However, she retains the ‘gift’ of immortality and some magical powers, though she says they are an act of will, which can be learned by mere mortals too.

She angers her powerful father when her attraction to a mortal causes her to cast a dark spell, and so she ends up exiled on the island of Aiaia. Her visitors cause her nothing but trouble, but although she is an independent woman, she yearns for company and so she tolerates the visits of Hermes, messenger of the gods but more often merely indulging his love of gossip. In this novel, Circe is a psychologically credible character: she feels love and loss, she takes pride in her achievements and feels guilty when her acts of vengeance cause the deaths of innocent people.  When she becomes mother to the fractious Telegonus, she feels that fierce, overwhelming love that every parent knows.

Written in first person entirely from Circe’s point-of-view, the novel shows us a woman negotiating the patriarchy of the ancient world. She is an astute observer of men, even as a child:

Her [mother’s] hair was a warm brown, so lustrous it seemed lit from within.  She would have felt my father’s gaze hot as gusts from a bonfire.  I see her arrange her dress so it drapes just so over her shoulders.  I see her dab her fingers, glinting, in the water.  I have seen her do a thousand such tricks a thousand times.  My father always fell for them.  He believed the world’s natural order was to please him. (p.2)

But her mother was no fool when Helios came courting:

My mother knew he was coming.  Frail she was, but crafty, with a mind like a spike-toothed eel. She saw where the path to power lay for such as her, and it was not in bastards and riverbank tumbles.  When he stood before her, arrayed in his glory, she laughed. Lie with you?  Why should I?

My father, of course, might have taken what he wanted.  But Helios flattered himself that all women went eager to his bed, slave girls and divinities alike.  His altars smoked with the proof, offerings from big-bellied mothers and happy by-blows.

‘It is marriage,’ she said to him, ‘or nothing.  And if it is marriage, be sure: you may have what girls you like in the field, but you will bring none home, for only I will hold sway in your halls.’

Conditions, constrainment.  These were novelties to my father, and gods love nothing more than novelty.  (p.2)

(You can see the very effective cadence of Miller’s prose: frail she was and went eager to his bed… these rhythms convey a sense of an archaic language even though the words are all contemporary.  It’s very cleverly done.)

Men are challenged, and humbled — whether they know it or not — over and over again in this novel! But Circe has no admiration for her mother’s kind of female scheming.  Rather, she wryly wonders whether her mother values the gifts Helios brings her on the birth of her children, more for the amber beads or for the envy of her sisters when she wore them.  Circe has more admiration for her rival Penelope, because they share the same protective urge for their children.

Not every rewrite of a classic to give it a feminist twist is successful, but this one is.

Image credit: By John William Waterhouse – en:Image:Circe_Offering_the_Cup_to_Odysseus.jpg http://moontale.egloos.com/865206, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=426808

Author: Madeline Miller
Title: Circe
Publisher: Bloomsbury 2018, 336 pages
ISBN: 9781408890073
Source: Bayside Library

 

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Posted in 21st century, Ancient Greece (settings), Female authors, FICTION, Miller Madeline, Read in 2019, REVIEWS, US authors | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 20, 2019

Blooms and Brushstrokes, A Floral History of Australian Art, by Penelope Curtin and Tansy Curtin

I’ve been thinking about this latest beautiful book from Wakefield Press during my (almost) daily walk with Amber*…

You might think, with Melbourne in the depths of winter, that our suburban gardens would be a bit bleak.  But you’d be wrong: already there are jonquils and daffodils in the avenue; there’s a stunning white camellia lush with blooms next door; purple and white hardenbergias are weaving through the fence in our street’s most ambitious garden (created by a Vietnamese couple who are an inspiration to us all); on the trellis outside my library window there is one stubborn spray of white jasmine that has no business flowering in July; and there’s a wattle just about ready to burst into bloom — early next week, by the look of it.   I’ve tried photographing these gorgeous splashes of colour that brighten a dull day, but really, they need an artist to paint them…

And when it’s bucketing down, like it did last week, the flowers are outside, and I’m not.  Which is where this stunning book comes into its own.  Curled up by the fire, with a nice cup of tea and some crumpets, I’ve been reading Blooms and Brushstrokes with delight.

Created by mother-and-daughter team Penelope and Tansy Curtin, Blooms and Brushstrokes is an A-Z of flower types, as painted by Australia’s best practitioners of floral art, but also showcasing the art-historical trajectory of Australian art.  The task of selecting the artworks was difficult: still lifes were very popular in the first half of the 20th century and many of them were painted by well-known names: Nora Heysen, Vida Lahey, Adrian Feint and Margaret Preston.  Margaret Olley’s passion for painting flowers means that just about the whole book could have featured her still lifes.  But Bendigo Art Gallery curatorial manager Tansy, and her mother Penelope, a passionate gardener and freelance editor, wanted the book to be representative of the art canon as well as of the flowers.  So there also are beautiful artworks by artists you’ve probably never heard of.

And surprisingly, some flowers just didn’t make the cut.  The humble violet that makes its uninvited way under the banksia in our front garden hasn’t been featured in an art work of any note, and the same is true of the snowdrops which used to herald warmer weather in my mother’s Melbourne garden (before she debunked to the Gold Coast).  So the book skips from — Sweet Peas in ‘Floral Still Life’ (1917) by Horace Trenerry and ‘Tulips and Wild Hyacinths (c1920) by George Lambert which you can see here in the Art Gallery of NSW — to Lucien Henry’s ‘Waratah**’ (1887) ; Water Lilies in Riddle of the Koi (1994) by Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus; and the Wisteria in the exquisite ‘Chatelaine’ by Robyn Stacey also in the Art Gallery of NSW.   (The book is worth having for this one photographic tableau alone.  I don’t often wish to be rich but I want this artwork.  I want it in my house, where I can see it every day.  I want this one too. And all of these — especially the one with the books.   (Maybe not the watermelon, I can get by without that one.)

The striking artwork on the front cover is by the Melbourne artist Polixeni Papapetrou who died in 2018 aged only 57.  The work is called ‘Blinded’, and it’s a portrait of her daughter Olympia, from a series called Eden. The series was commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Photography, to create works that respond to the Melbourne General Cemetery:

These highly evocative works, created as Papapetrou contemplated her own mortality and the legacy she would leave, also explore the language of flowers and ‘the metamorphosis from child to adolescent and adolescent to adult, and a oneness with the world, fertility and the cycles of life.’ This transition was an ongoing theme throughout Papapetrou’s oeuvre, with the artist’s own daughter, Olympia, at times providing inspiration; this series includes portraits of Olympia and her friends.  In this work the crown imperials represent majesty, while the rose is the well-known symbol for love.

The Eden series also contains a strong religious or spiritual sensibility, appearing to allude to representations of catholic saints.  Blinded invites us to consider the stories of saints and the miracles they perform. The girls [in Papapetrou’s Eden series] are enclosed in a floral embrace that symbolises their unity and acceptance of this miraculous thing we call life. (p.80)

Fritillaria imperialis ‘Rubra Maxima’ (Wikipedia*)

The plant that’s featured is one I’ve never heard of: fritillaries, which are rare, especially the large and flamboyant crown imperials. They belong to the lily family, endemic to mountainous ares of Turkey, western Iran and east of Kashmir, but they were once grown in English cottage gardens.

Blooms and Brushstrokes is a sublime work of art.  My favourite pictures (after ‘Chatelaine’) have literary associations: one is Joshua Smith’s ‘Dame Mary Gilmore’ (1943) and the other is ‘Sitting Room, Mulberry Hill, (1927) by George Bell.  We have this one at the NGV, and it’s almost certain that the woman reading beside a sumptuous flower arrangement is Joan Lindsay herself.

But I also love the striking B&W photography of Viva Gillian Smith (‘Still Life with Daffodils’ 1995) and Max Dupain’s Angel’s Trumpet (‘Salvadorium Dalii, 1982), and  I’m impressed by the subtext in the internationally famous Indigenous artist Tracey Moffat’s Cherbourg No 1, from the ironically series Picturesque Cherbourg: stunning red ‘native’ bottlebrush not contained by the white picket fence.   There is so much to love in this book, it would make a beautiful gift, but it would take strength of character to actually give it away.

Highly recommended.

**I have to say that I much prefer Margaret Preston’s Waratahs.  She painted many of them, and we have one of the best in the NGV.  IMHO in the painting by Lucien Henry, the turquoise of the vase and the background compete with the rich ruby red of the waratah and leach out some of the colour.

* Just in case you didn’t know, (and any excuse to show off her cute and lovable self will do), this is Amber, an occasional guest reviewer here at ANZ LitLovers.

Image credit: Fritillaria imperialis ‘Rubra Maxima’ (Wikipedia) by mhaller1979 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/mhaller1979/2455437824/sizes/l/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18731325

Authors: Penelope Curtin and Tansy Curtin
Title: Blooms and Brushstrokes, A Floral history of Australian Art
Publisher: Wakefield Press, 2019, 210 pages, 23 x 28cm
ISBN: 9781743056493 (hbk.)
Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press

Available direct from Wakefield Press and from Fishpond: Blooms and Brushstrokes: A floral history of Australian art

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Posted in 21st century, Art & architecture, Aust 2019, Australian Authors, CURTIN Penelope, CURTIN Tansy, Female authors, NON-FICTION - AUSTRALIAN, Read in 2019, REVIEWS, Victorian authors, Wakefield Press | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 19, 2019

Perth (New South City Series #8), by David Whish-Wilson

One of the interesting aspects of the New South City Series is that the authors vary in their approach to the task.  David Whish-Wilson has surveyed Perth by using the landscape as a catalyst for his observations and memories from the landscape, covered in four long chapters:

  • The River
  • The Limestone Coast
  • The Plain, and
  • The City of Light.

The book is also influenced by the author’s current preoccupation with his family:

Because my three children are relatively young, and because I spend so much time with them, it’s natural that my experience of the city often revisits my experiences as a child.  Down on the beach after sunset, I watch them settle as the colours on the horizon fade and they begin to sense the night’s quiet ghosting, inhabiting the darkness in a way that’s really only possible in a city like Perth,  It’s a city with presence, but balanced with an expansiveness that is perfectly suited to dreamers… (p.121)

That expansiveness is in part due to Perth being ‘one of the most sprawled (120km long) cities on earth.’  It’s a city very dependent on cars, and it’s a bit startling to read that

… to sustain an individual in Perth’s current housing stock ‘tales 14.5 hectares of land, seven times the world average.  Western Australians, Saudi Arabians and Singaporeans share the increasingly dishonourable status of being the most unsustainable people on  the planet. (p. 213)

It’s disconcerting to read about their rates of homelessness too, not that Melbourne has anything to be proud of on that issue either…

Another issue that would be interesting to contrast with Melbourne has to do with the obsession with sport:

Perth’s obsession with sport has literally shaped the character of the city.  Some eighty percent of all open spaces within the city limits are sporting grounds, which are in turn used by only five percent of the population on very rare occasions. (p.250)

I wonder if that’s true of Melbourne too?  The area where I live has countless sporting grounds, and our local council (like most others, probably) spends a vast amount of ratepayers’ money maintaining them and building infrastructure like stadiums, changing rooms, watering-systems and carparks, and as far as I can tell, there are never any complaints about this expenditure.  Indeed, when it comes to voting for community grants, sporting projects win every time over anything else.  As in Perth (with the exception of the golf courses because the wealthy play golf whenever they like) the majority of these sportsgrounds are play places for dogs during the week.  But they are certainly used at weekends.  Woe betide any pooch that strays onto a match in progress!

Perth Skyline by Dot Silbereisen

Perth made me realise that it’s been too long since I visited the most westerly of our cities. The book was published in 2013, and some places seem completely different to how I remember them.  Some lovely buildings have been lost from the CBD, and it’s changed the ambience.  You only need to look at a 1980s painting I have of the Perth skyline and the one on the cover of the book to see it; I suppose you’d see the same sort of changes in any modern city but Whish-Wilson suggests that Perth has been more rigorous in protecting its suburban sprawl from medium and higher-density housing than in conserving the lovely old sandstone buildings that I remember. This video shows some of historic buildings that have been lost, and their replacements.  Not all of them are awful, but I can see why some Perth residents rue the demolitions.

Perhaps it’s true, as one senior architect I spoke to about the Elizabeth Quay project remarked, that a consistent development narrative such as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, a response to and vision of the city in currency since the 1880s, with its implicit undertones of excellence and playfulness, might have made all the difference in Perth, too.  Large parts of other cities were sacked in the name of building capacity, of course, but the scars in Perth seem to be deeper, the memories perhaps longer. (p.273)

Hunting around online for more images, I came across a more optimistic perspective on Perth’s historic heart.  There’s an App that you can download to guide you through the historic precincts to do a Stadium Walk, an Architecture Walk and an Art Walk.  I have downloaded it for future use…

My memories of the light in Perth accord with the author’s:  it’s what I remember of Fremantle when our ship docked there en route to Melbourne, and it’s what I remember from winter-time visits to The Offspring when he was networking UWA’s library computers in the 1990s.  It’s what’s celebrated in Dot Silbereisen’s painting.

Whish-Wilson’s book is not a travel guide.  It’s a blend of memoir, history and literary reminiscence, and parts of it reminded me of T A G Hungerford’s Stories from Suburban Road (which I reviewed here).  There is the same nostalgia for a childhood that allowed freedom to roam: swimming, fishing, exploring derelict buildings, and all of it apparently without parental anxiety.  There is the same celebration of mothers who make do and yet enable a marvellous childhood; and there is the same evocation of a landscape qualitatively different from the concrete jungles of today.

The reader learns about a variety of Perth identities: Indigenous elders; early settlers; bushrangers and entrepreneurs.  Many writers get a mention, including Elizabeth Jolley, Stephen Kinnane, Robert Drewe, Amanda Curtin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Josephine Wilson, and of course Tim Winton.  There are also musicians and artists, but these allusions passed me by, because I didn’t know them.  (I did find myself wishing that there were images of the artworks and statues, but none of the books in this series seem to have illustrations.) Some readers may feel the same way about the allusions to unfamiliar books and authors.  The point is well made that until comparatively recently, Perth’s isolation meant that they relied on their own creatives for entertainment.  Because I’m not interested in popular culture, I don’t know if their artworks and musicians are known beyond WA, but their writers certainly are!

Author: David Whish-Wilson
Title: Perth
Publisher: New South City Series #9, New South Publishing, 2013, 292 pages
ISBN: 9781742233673
Source: Bayside Library

The City Series is available from Fishpond:

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Posted in 21st century, Aust 2013, Australian Authors, Male authors, New South (UNSW Publishing), NON-FICTION - AUSTRALIAN, Read in 2019, REVIEWS, Travel, Western Australian authors | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 18, 2019

Nutshell, by Ian McEwan

Yes, I know, everyone else read this book three years ago, and I’m only just reading it now that McEwan has another book out for us to enjoy.

The thing is, it has an unborn baby narrator, and my track record with oddball narrators (galahs, babies, dead people) isn’t great.  All of them have one thing in common and that is that they are helpless observers, fated to be unable to change the course of events.  And so it is in Nutshell, where the pregnant mother, Trudy, plots the murder of her husband, John, with his brother and her lover, Claude.  The unborn baby delivers a wide-ranging and often arch view of the rotten state of Denmark the world — taking pot-shots at everything from Islamic extremism to climate change and the US using torture, and he shows off his what he thinks is his erudite knowledge of literature and poetry, all gleaned not from reading, of course, but from podcasts, like many a faker who pretends to have read The Canon.  But he also, in considering his future, vacillates between love of one parent over another, and wanting vengeance for his father’s death but not wanting to pay the penalty himself.  Hamlet? Yes.  Credible? Hardly, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

Nutshell is also a satire on the crime genre itself.  Even inexperienced readers of crime novels can see the flaws in the murder plot, and they are meant to.  The novel moves inexorably towards a dénouement that is always in plain sight.  The baby might think he has influenced events, but he is self-deluded, just like everyone else in the novel.  The perpetrators are not as smart as they think they are; and John with his efforts to make Trudy jealous is merely banal (like his poetry).

And just as McEwan skewered the newspaper industry, oh, waaay back with Amsterdam, in Nutshell, he satirises the contemporary obsession with what passes for news.  Baby’s rants are drawn from the scripts of Facebook and talk-back radio: scanty scraps of current affairs from a facile 24/7 news service, delivered as half-baked opinion.  Baby knows as much about Korea as the reader most commonly does: they have a bomb to scare us with, and they are Bad.  Baby’s shallow view of the world, his lack of agency, and his preoccupation with personal matters is ours too.

Nevertheless, the book is enjoyable and it has a satisfying ending.   Pure entertainment…

Sue at Whispering Gums reviewed it here and Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best reviewed it here.

Author: Ian McEwan
Title: Nutshell
Publisher: Jonathan cape, 2016, 199 pages
ISBN: 9781911214335
Source: Kingston Library

21 Comments

Posted in 21st century, England (settings), English authors, FICTION, London (settings), Male authors, McEwan Ian, Read in 2019, REVIEWS | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 15, 2019

Mother of Pearl, by Angela Savage

Angela Savage is a well-known literary identity in Melbourne: she’s Director of Writers Victoria, and she’s an award-winning writer of crime novels. Mother of Pearl, however, is a departure in genre, written as the creative component of her PhD thesis.  It’s a novel about commercial surrogacy in Thailand.

Readers might remember the grotesque story of an Australian sex-offender who had used commercial surrogacy in Thailand and then refused to take one of the resulting twins because the child had Down Syndrome.  Thailand has since banned commercial surrogacy (and so has Nepal and India) but that just means that agencies have debunked to Cambodia where surrogacy remains unregulated, and desperately poor Thai women are still travelling there to have embryos implanted.

So although Mother of Pearl is set in Thailand before commercial surrogacy was outlawed, the issues raised remain relevant today.  The novel explores the situation from the perspective of Meg, a Melbourne woman who has never come to terms with her infertility; her sister Anna who has spent her entire career as an aid worker trying to empower women in Southeast Asia; and the surrogate Mukda, a single mother who wants to improve the life chances of her son by earning the kind of money she could never otherwise earn.

Like an increasing number of us, I suppose, I’ve seen both sides of assisted reproductive technology, close up.  I’ve seen joy at the arrival of a longed-for baby, and I’ve seen the unresolved mental health issues caused by the promise of IVF as against its real success rates. These are now more transparent in Australia, but at best they’re around 35% for women under 30, and there’s always a gap between ‘clinical pregnancies’ and live births.  But it’s not so long ago that women were lured by false promises when the success rate was extremely low and the probability of a baby remained a dream for most who tried it.  And I’ve formed the view that the longer a woman persists with years of unsuccessful IVF the more likely it is that an obsession forms.

It’s that pathway that is followed by the character of Meg.  A chance encounter with a couple of gays and their new baby born through commercial surrogacy in Thailand is the trigger for her suppressed yearning to erupt into a new quest for a child.  And so begins the journey into what is an unfamiliar culture, a change in her relationship with her sister, and a steeliness about the transaction that will make some readers feel very uncomfortable.  Anna has to reconcile her professional concerns and her love for her sister, while the surrogate Mukda has to negotiate emotional burdens of her own.

I was interested to see that Savage also depicts the impact Meg’s childlessness has had on her friendships. :

She’d known Eleni, Simone and Michelle since school; and Annika since they studied gold-and silversmithing design together.  Perhaps it was her imagination, but Meg sensed the relief in the room was not all hers.  All four of friends had children […] Meg realised it had been a long time since her friends had talked about their kids in front of her.  She was grateful for their sensitivity, though it bothered her too, to think that they’d spent years tiptoeing around her.  (p.239)

What the author doesn’t show is the unreasonable rage that a childless women might feel when people aren’t sensitive.  Normal ‘water-cooler’ conversation about weekend family life can be interpreted as deliberate cruelty, when of course it’s not.

The book is written in three parts: Preconception; Gestation and Afterbirth, and although the reader feels fairly confident that a baby will be born, the narrative tension is maintained by the uncertainty that surrounds commercial transactions of this type.  Will it be healthy?  Will the birth mother hand over the baby?  Will the mother who has no genetic relationship with the baby bond with it?  However, I think it’s the ethical decisions that will engage readers most: the pressure that Meg puts on her loved ones to get what she wants; Anna’s angst about her role in facilitating something she feels uneasy about; and the implications of using women’s bodies within a culture where they have little power in the way of decision-making.

Reading group notes are available from Transit Lounge.  See also Surrogate, a Novel, by Australian author Tracy Crisp.

The striking cover design in by Peter Lo.

You might be interested to read Angela Savage’s post about switching genres here.

Update: see also this interview with Angela Savage at Amanda Curtin’s 2,2, and 2 series and — showing how topical the issue of commercial surrogacy is — this ABC article about the tension between the rising international demand for surrogacy and the possible ramifications of the final report to the UN General Assembly in October on the rights of children born from surrogacy.  The UN Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, released her first report in 2018 on commercial surrogacy and the sale of children, which warned that a regulatory vacuum in international surrogacy arrangements was exposing children to human rights violations.

Author: Angela Savage
Title: Mother of Pearl
Publisher: Transit Lounge, 2019, 318 pages
ISBN: 9781925760354
Review copy courtesy of Transit Lounge

Available direct from Transit Lounge or Fishpond: Mother of Pearl

 

17 Comments

Posted in 21st century, AusFemale, Aust 2019, Australia VIC (settings), Australian Authors, Female authors, FICTION - AUSTRALIAN, Melbourne (settings), Read in 2019, REVIEWS, SAVAGE Angela, Thailand (settings), Transit Lounge, Victorian authors | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 14, 2019

The Kadaitcha Sung, by Sam Watson

The Kadaitcha Sung is a confronting book, and if I hadn’t declared my intention to read it when I announced the 2019 Indigenous Literature Week, I wouldn’t be drawing attention to it by reviewing it at this time.  My purpose in hosting Indigenous Literature Week every year since 2013 has been to celebrate Indigenous Writing with the aim of promoting reconciliation, but this book does nothing to further those aims.

In fact, I might not even have finished reading it. It’s a nasty book, full of vengeful violence, drunken brawls, racist hate-filled sprays, and brutal exploitative sex against women and gays.

So why then was it awarded the National Indigenous Writer of the Year award in 1991? Why would anyone give such an award to a book that depicts Indigenous people in a way calculated to cause disgust and reinforce negative stereotypes?

The only interpretation I can come up with is that the novel is an allegory for the violence visited on Indigenous people since colonisation.  The horrific way that rape is depicted can be seen as a metaphor for the way White people have treated Indigenous people as objects and discarded them afterwards.  But whatever the author’s intent, the Black characters’ violent treatment of women, both Black and White, is highly problematic and revolting to read, as are the gratuitous details of sadistic homosexual rape by and on characters both Black and White.  Sex as an instrument of power is an ugly thing in any context and the very rare instances of tenderness in this book are mercilessly quashed by the demands of destiny in the plot.

Black on Black male violence is equally problematic.  The vengeance visited on Booka Roth, which is the driving focus of the plot, seems to be a metaphor for the punishment due to Indigenous people who were complicit in the settlement of Australia, people who in a different context would be called quislings.  (Update 24/7/19, you can read more about this here). While The Kadaitcha Sung is an angry book, explicit in its characters’ hatred of White Australians, who are expressly stated to deserve any violence inflicted on them, most (though not all) of the violence is between Blacks.

However I am bereft of ideas to interpret a scene in which a brawl erupts because a cabbie refuses service to a drunken Aboriginal woman who has previously lost control of her bowels and vomited all over his taxi.  This episode only reinforces negative stereotypes.

The book begins with a cosmological myth: I don’t have the resources to know if this is the author’s creation or an authentic myth.  It might be an amalgam of several myths, as the myth underlying the ABC’s Cleverman series apparently was.  Whether authentic or a work of imagination, this prologue features ancestral beings in the kind of power struggle common to ancient myths from around the world, culminating in twin brothers Koobara and Booka vying for a father’s favour and the role of Kadaitcha Man, dispenser of retributive justice and armed with the power of life and death. The rejected one takes up a satanic role in the world, while the supreme being Biamee, unable to act, looks on from afar.  Koobara appears from the prologue to have been vanquished, but unknown to Booka he has fathered a son by a white woman.  This son, Tommy, despite his alienation from his own culture, is destined to become the new Kadaitcha man once he is initiated.

By the time the novel begins in late 20th century Brisbane, Booka’s concept of payback against his own people means that over the centuries since First Contact, he has formed an unholy alliance with the infamous Native Mounted Police, and is directly complicit in the dispossession of Indigenous people in general and massacres in particular. So, just as Booka believes that he is entitled to extract vengeance from those he thinks have wronged him, Tommy, heir of the Kadaitcha man, is commissioned by the ancestral spirits to kill Booka.  To do this Tommy has magical powers, the assistance of a mentor called Ningi, and a priapic death spirit called Junjurrie.  Oh yes, and there’s a set of Kundrie stones which confer power, and Tommy has to retrieve the eighth one from Booka in order to restore powers to Biamee. (In that respect the skeleton elements of this avenger plot seem to follow a Superhero movie script. But Superhero movies are all based on simple binaries from ancient myths about Good v Evil anyway.)

As with books featuring magic realism, the reader has to suspend disbelief every time manifestations of magic occur in the otherwise brutal realism of the plot.  The reader also has to buy into the underlying theme of vengeance as a legitimate driving force for behaviour, and is confronted by the idea that innocent individuals can be marked for death because of the sins of their fathers before they were born. Thus every migloo (White person) is guilty and deserves punishment; any theft is justified because the migloo stole the land; and Black Australians don’t have to recognise White Law because White Australians don’t recognise Black Law. The ‘logic’ of this point of view is expressed by contrasting the capital punishment meted out by a court of law to Bulley for the murder of one White policeman, while the murder of hundreds of Black men, women and children in numerous massacres has gone unpunished.

(Assuming that I have interpreted things as the author intended), I am not sure that all readers will recognise the book as an allegory.  In fact, I doubt if many would persist in reading The Kadaitcha Sung.  I think it’s been written to be horrific because what has happened to Indigenous Australians is horrific, and perhaps Watson felt that readers should know more about the reeking truth of it.  Maybe Watson just couldn’t contain his anger and frustration about the denial of Australia’s Black History and wanted to shock people into recognising it.  Nevertheless I regret that I spent $50 on a hate-filled book that was (for good reasons IMO) out of print and hard to find.

OTOH it would be fascinating to know the inside story of Penguin’s decision to bring it to publication, eh?

You can download a review by Maureen Fuary in the Australian Aboriginal Studies journal (1993, no 2) here. She expresses similar concerns to mine, but recognises the book’s importance.  We part company when she writes that it cannot be dismissed by not reading it.  Indigenous people have every right to be angry about past and present wrongs, but I can’t see any merit in advocating retaliatory racism, hatred and violence, because that offers no solace, no way forward and no hope. To me, The Kadaitcha Sung seems like the literary equivalent of ‘hate speech’.  (It’s for that reason that I haven’t quoted anything to back up my interpretations: I don’t want to offer any means of spreading Watson’s words to extremist groups and the like).

I have, as always, shared my honest response in this review of the book, but I’m aware that as a non-Indigenous person, some might say that I have no right to pass judgement on it in the way that I have.  My response to that could be that I’ve read a great deal of Indigenous literature, but never encountered anything as unpleasant as this novel.  However, I’m open to hosting an Indigenous review of the book, (subject to the review meeting my style guidelines and family-friendly language because this blog is recommended as a resource in many school libraries).  Use the Contact form on the About page if that’s what you’d like to do.

PS Thanks to Titian at Kingston Library, — whose help was above and beyond the call of duty when the reference book I needed was out on loan — I have been able to check the PEN Macquarie Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter) to see if The Kadaitcha Sung is included in it.   Titian enabled me to access a digital version of the relevant page.  An excerpt from the prologue for The Kadaitcha Sung is in the anthology, with a profile of the author, but there is no commentary about the novel to guide its interpretation or explain its significance.

Author: Sam Watson
Title: The Kadaitcha Sung
Publisher: Penguin, 1990, 312 pages
ISBN: 9780140111729
Source: Personal copy, purchased from The Grisly Wife, $50.00

Availability: out of print.

4 Comments

Posted in 2019 Indigenous Literature Week, 20th century, Aus 1990, Australia (settings), Australia Outback or Bush (settings), Australian Authors, Brisbane (settings), Indigenous authors, Male authors, Penguin Australia, Queensland authors, Read in 2019, REVIEWS, WATSON Sam | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 13, 2019

The Yield, by Tara June Winch

I liked this absorbing book so much, as soon as I’d finished it, I read it all over again. There is so much to discover within its pages!

The Yield is the long-awaited second novel of Wiradjuri woman Tara June Winch who transfixed the Australian literary scene with her first novel Swallow the Air in 2006 (see my review) and followed that up in 2016 with an impressive short story collection called After the Carnage (see my review). That collection had an international perspective (Winch now lives and works in France), but The Yield is unmistakeably Australian.

This is the blurb:

Knowing that he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. He finds the words on the wind.

August Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for ten years when she learns of her grandfather’s death. She returns home for his burial, wracked with grief and burdened with all she tried to leave behind. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends she endeavours to save their land – a quest that leads her to the voice of her grandfather and into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river.

The central motif that threads all through is the missing:  missing people; missing history; missing documentation; a missing dictionary, missing artefacts and other memorabilia; and a missing language.  But the people who are missing are not from the Stolen Generations; they are missing because of dysfunctional modern life, which is a consequence not just of the Stolen Generations but also because of the other things that are missing in their lives: safety and protection; a secure family life; respect and fairness, and the opportunity to thrive and prosper without having to leave their community.  Their stories are told through three distinctive narratives: August Gondiwindi in the present day; Reverend Greenleaf’s anguished letters to the British Society of Ethnography in 1915; and Poppy Gondiwindi’s missing dictionary.  While the reader knows the content of the letters and the diary, August does not, which gives the novel its narrative tension because she needs that information to stave off the looming second dispossession.

Reverend Greenleaf is the German missionary who set up the Prosperous mission.  Winch charts both his paternalistic ambitions, and the violence he witnesses against the Indigenous people by frontier townsfolk.  Writing in 1915, he has fallen from grace, so to speak, from being a missionary whose role commands respect even from people who don’t like his (paternalistic) protection of the Wiradjuri, to being an outsider himself, a victim of anti-German sentiment as an enemy alien during WW1.

Poppy’s dictionary, which is his attempt to rescue his endangered language Wiradjuri, may not sound like an engaging way of storytelling.  But it is, and the best way I can explain how it works is with an example.  Each week in my French class, we talk about something we’ve done during the week, and in one of my accounts I mentioned Bunnings.  ‘What is Bunnings?’ asked our recently arrived French teacher.  ‘A hardware store’, someone answered.  But that’s not enough to explain how Bunnings is part of the cultural fabric of suburban Melbourne, like Myer is to the CBD.  So we explained how it’s a chain of mega-stores, about its sausage sizzles and DIY classes, and how families and DIY aficionados jostle with tradies in the aisles. (Update 14/7/19, I’ve just thought of this: there is also Bunnings’ more dubious history of ‘dispossessing’ family owned hardware stores.  The chain’s huge footprint simply obliterated any local competition by ruthlessly undercutting prices, making it impossible for competitors to survive).

There are so many elegant examples of this expansion of the idea of a dictionary, that it’s hard to choose.  Poppy begins the book like this:

I was born on Ngurambang — can you hear it? — Ngu-ram-bang.  If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words.  Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language — because that is the way to all time, to time travel! You can go all the way back.  (p.1)

But on page 33, we learn how to say

where is your country? — dhaganhu ngurambang The question is not really about a place on a map. When our people say Where is your country? they are asking something deeper.  Who is your family? Who are you related to?  Are we related? (p.34)

On page 103, we learn not just the Wiradjuri word for the Southern Cross, but how the children learned:

star constellation the Southern Cross — gibirrgan Sometimes only the women would come and collect me and we’d go and sit by the fire at the riverbank.  They taught me how to count up to a thousand by counting the stars.  First we’d start at the less bright ones, I’d count along my toes, count with each joint in my legs, then the brighter, those I’d count with my arms, elbows, fingers, then the brightest with my face, tap tap tap on my nose, eyes, chin and ear all night.  The brightest stars were gibirrgan — the constellation of the Southern Cross, which features on this country’s flag — it’s made of five bright stars almost in a cross shape.  The woman told me the story of gibirrgan once, and they’d begin the story with ‘When the world was young.’

Poppy’s dictionary isn’t just an old man’s memories.  It’s from this diary that we deduce what happened to Jedda, and we learn that his wife Elsie was no pushover.

rib — dharrar In the Book of Genesis  2:18-22 it says that woman was made from man’s rib.  Elsie said, ‘That’s a load of b—s—. ‘  I laughed. […] Anytime we argued in our marriage, she’d scream and point to her side, ‘I’m not your dharrar!  You want a dharrar, get to the butcher!’ It’s a good insult that one, I hope we taught the girls that — not to be anyone’s rib. (p.106)

Names are significant in this novel: beyond the obvious allusions in the (fictional) place names of the Prosperous Mission and Massacre Plains, and the droll barb behind the Rinepalm Mining Company, there are also significances in the names of people.  Rev Greenleaf who anglicised his German name is painfully naïve; August’s missing sister Jedda has the name of a 1955 film whose plot involves taboos (and is indirectly referenced in Poppy’s dictionary entry for ngurrungarra (which means lust after, passionate).  August herself is anything but venerable and eminent. She has been away in London for a decade, but has returned more painfully confused and disorientated than ever.  She has been missing to her family; but although she is physically present in their lives, she is still psychologically absent.

‘Maybe I just feel weird, I don’t know.  Stuff changes.  I feel as I’m just floating through life or something.  Like my whole life I haven’t really been me.’ (p. 143)

She also realises that her absence has led to further losses:

She’d never heard Poppy talk politics before, but he’d been talking about Native Title with Joey; it was as if she’d missed out on a version of him.’ (p.143)

(I felt exactly the same way when I met professional colleagues of my father at his funeral.  A different version of someone I thought I knew intimately).

The significance of the brolgas on the cover?  It’s an inspired choice by designer Adam Laszczuk. Poppy’s dictionary mentions many birds, sometimes telling their creation story, and other times explaining their behaviour and relating it to the behaviour of humans (e.g. the aggressive attacks by plovers and magpies).  But at Poppy’s smoking ceremony it is a lone brolga that holds them all transfixed:

 [August] spied the lone bird at the edge of the dam, dancing, as did her nana, who stopped moving when she noticed. It was as if the bird were coming towards the fire.  Everyone else was looking too.

It was a brolga.

A few family members pointed in the direction of the dam where the red bonnet of the brolga rose and fell, and its white and blue-grey feathers opened and collapsed. At the edge of the water, with its stick-thin, sinewy legs and dipping knees, it danced.  It flapped its wings, showing its black underside.  When it bowed its head August thought she could see its yellow eye.  It had a trumpet call, its caw rising, rising.  Then its beak dipped right down to the ground — and up, up its wings went, the long body of he bird rose, its legs cycling in the air before it fell again.  As the brolga hit the ground, a wing, then the other, whooshed into the smoke blowing in the field.  One leg up, and then the other leg joined so that the brolga was airborne for a moment, and then as its body, atoms, molecules joined the ground its head rose up with the billow of dust, rising.  Over and over, the brolga repeated the dance.  There was music.  Everyone was still, watching — seeing suddenly not the freedom of the bird, but its belonging.  (p.163)

The sound track on this video is annoying, but the video is the best of those I could find:

I’ll conclude with Poppy’s definition of murru:

marks or tracks, impressions of passing objects — murru This is the tracks the snakes, the goanna, the birds and us make as we crisscross the world.  We all leave murru behind, so leave a gentle one. (p.128)

The Yield is a wonderful book.  Highly recommended.

Author: Tara June Winch, A Wiradjuri woman who now lives in France
Title: The Yield
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2019, 342 pages
ISBN: 9780143785750
Review copy courtesy of Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Random House

Available from Fishpond The Yield, and good bookshops everywhere.

 

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Posted in 2019 Indigenous Literature Week, 21st century, AusFemale, Aust 2019, Australia NSW (settings), Australian Authors, Female authors, FICTION - AUSTRALIAN, Hamish Hamilton, Indigenous Australian Authors, Indigenous authors, Penguin-Random House (AU), Read in 2019, REVIEWS, WINCH Tara June | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 13, 2019

The Uncle’s Story, by Witi Ihimaera

The Uncle’s Story (2000) is a mid-career novel from Witi Ihimaera, New Zealand’s best-known Māori author because of the popularity of The Whale Rider (1987) which was made into a film. (See my review of the novella). He has sixteen novels to his credit, including Bulibasha (1994) which I reviewed here.  As the NZ Book Council’s website explains, although his intentions have changed over time, he is an author who writes about ‘the emotional landscape of the Māori people’, and their political and social reality.

The Uncle’s Story confronts the awkward truth of Māori hostility to same-sex relationships.  Ihimaera came out explicitly in 1996 with Nights in the Gardens of Spain, which (I gather from Goodreads reviews) is set in New Zealand and is a raunchy novel about reconciling sexuality with family. The Uncle’s Story traces the same issues, but it explores the story of Sam Mahana, whose existence has been excised from the family because he came out as gay.  Decades later his nephew Michael finds out about Sam when he too refuses to conceal his sexual identity and comes out to his family — and is also exiled from his community because of it.

Obviously things have changed in New Zealand because they legislated for same-sex marriage in 2013, well before Australia did.  But this novel tells a story of the not-so-recent past, when Sam was tied to a fence and flogged by his own father, and was refused burial in the marae.  (One thing readers need to note is that Ihimaera makes no concessions with Māori terminology or language.  Either you read it with Google Translate at hand* or you just press on without knowing what is meant in some parts.) The marae is a the communal meeting place used for sacred and social purposes in Māori communities (and elsewhere throughout Polynesia).  Entry is by invitation, and there are traditional rituals to usher visitors and family members into it. Sam’s father Arapeta is the hyper-masculine patriarch, his word on all matters is law, and he enforces it with brutal violence.  When he says that there are no gay Māoris, no one dares argue until his grandson Michael forces the family to confront the issue.

Michael tells his story in the present, in first person narrative.  Sam’s story is told through the journal that Auntie Pat has kept hidden for decades.  It reveals the story of his relationship with an American helicopter pilot called Cliff Harper, and the scenes of jungle warfare in Vietnam are every bit as confronting as you might expect.  In Vietnam in 2007 I saw the Cu Chi tunnels and the Vietnamese booby traps designed to main but not to kill, and Ihimaera does not spare the reader the horror of this grotesque war. It’s obvious from various scenes that his intention is to force an inclusive redefinition of masculinity.  Cliff and Sam are every bit as brave and heroic as any other man.

Michael’s courage is of a different order.  Emerging from a disastrous relationship with Jason, and dismissed from his family entirely, he embarks on a more political role through his consultancy work with the Arts Council.  In the wake of the AIDS epidemic, he sees it as crucial that Māoris recognise the existence of gays among them instead of denying their existence.  And he recognises that this cruel silence is common to other First Nations as well. In America at a First Nations conference, he tackles the denial, but he also gets the opportunity to seek out Cliff Harper so that he can explain the true story about the end of his relationship with Sam… however, #NoSpoilers things don’t go as he expects.

Most modern societies now enable same-sex couples to have children through assisted reproduction, but The Uncle’s Story doesn’t offer that resolution.  Instead, what is proposed is a bi-sexual alliance with Michael’s longstanding friend Roimata, a strong and decisive character who can enable him to continue his all-important whakapapa (genealogical line) because she will marry him and bear his children while accepting his sexuality. Perhaps to some that’s an acceptable solution during a transitional period of attitudinal change, but it still denies same-sex couples the right to the companionship and security of living together and making a family with the one you really love.

Whatever about that, what the novel clearly shows is the loneliness of people who are excluded from their own communities by rigid traditions.  Most of us need the love and support of our family and friends when an important relationship fails.  None of the gay characters have this support, and Auntie Pat lives with a huge burden of guilt all her life because of a childhood impulse based on something she didn’t understand but could never confess.  The Uncle’s Story is a powerful novel that I won’t forget.

Highly recommended.

Witi Ihimaera is descended from Te Aitanga A Mahaki, Rongowhakaata and Ngati Porou tribes, with close affiliations with other Maori tribes.

* Even with Google Translate, one can get risible results.  These are the last lines of the book, and they follow Michael’s solemn promise to Sam that he will always tell his story:

… I will tell your story to everyone I meet, whether they want to hear it or not. I will tell them how you loved a man and how wonderful that love was. With that love I will bind the outer framework of the world with the inner framework.

I have realised, Uncle Sam, that the telling of our stories will bring a location and a history to the world that we build.  We who are gay and lesbian must fix the stories with firmness and solder their knots with purpose so that they become part of the narratives — the foundations, walls and roof — all people tell about each other.  We must speak our stories, we must enact them, we must sing our songs throughout this hostile universe. We must bring a new promise to life and a new music to the impulse of history. (p. 371)

Tuia i runga, tuia i raro
Tuia i roto, tuia i waho
Tuia i te here tangata ka rongo te Ao
Ka rongo te Po
Tuia. Tuia

 Click on it, click it down
Dig in, print out
Put on the human love that the world hears
Night will hear
Tuia. Tuia

I’d love to know how this lament should be properly translated.

Author: Witi Ihimaera
Title: The Uncle’s Story
Publisher: Penguin, 2000, 373 pages
ISBN: 9780143018988
Source: Personal library

Available from Fishpond: The Uncle’s Story

 

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Posted in 2019 Indigenous Literature Week, 20th century, FICTION - NEW ZEALAND, GayLit / LGBTQIA, IHIMAERA Witi, Indigenous authors, Male authors, Maori authors, New Zealand (settings), New Zealand authors, Penguin (NZ), Read in 2019, REVIEWS, War, armed conflict & its aftermath | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 12, 2019

Rare Book Week 2019: Legal Luminaries and their Libraries

Our last event for Rare Book Week was held today at the Victorian Supreme Court library.  The train from Sandringham was running, the rain gods spared us, and the library (as you’d expect, given the ubiquitous lawyers in Melbourne’s legal precinct), was conveniently close to nice places for lunch.

Victorian Supreme Court exterior (Wikipedia)

The building is both beautiful and suitably impressive. Built between 1874 and 1884, in Renaissance Revival style and faced in Tasmanian bluestone, the building consists of a square enclosing a circular courtyard, with the eight courts within the wings.  I have been in one of these courts when I was on a jury, and a very sombre space it is indeed.

Supreme Court Library reading room (see attribution below)

The Supreme Court Library is underneath the dome.  It’s a stunning room, with an decagonal reading room table similar to the one in the State Library reading room, with the library stacks in recesses leading off the side walls.  Between the wings there are portraits of assorted legal big wigs most of whom appeared to be long dead and gone — with the exception of the rather incongruous one of the first female supreme court judge, the Honourable Marilyn Warren AC.  (Incongruous, I hasten to say, not because she’s a woman, but because of the modern style of painting, and the others are all bewigged and robed in red). The other exceptions were a fine portrait of the first Chief Librarian, John Schutt (whose name *smacks forehead* I forgot to note) and one of William Barak (1824-1903), included because he was a prominent figure in the struggle for Aboriginal rights and justice.  As the factsheet tells us:

… the portrait holds pride of place among the Court’s past and present Chief Justices — a fitting tribute to a man considered as the last Chief of the Yarra Yarra tribe.

Victorian Coat of Arms (Wikipedia*)

The dome and balcony (Photo: The Spouse)

I have consulted my copy of How to Read Buildings, a Crash Course in Architecture by Carol Davidson Cragoe (2008) but I can’t find the proper term for round windows in a dome, but these ones are painted glass.  We were told that (since the building predates Federation) the coats of arms are not the Australian one [with its IMO dopey kangaroo and emu] but the Victorian coat of arms, which we could not really see so high up but from below looked suitably dignified.  I now regret Googling to see what it actually looks like. If we ever get round to having a republic, and a nice new flag, perhaps we could then turn our attention to our soppy coats of arms.  I am all for cherishing history and all that but really, someone was having a laugh at colonial pretensions when these coats of arms were designed.

Yes, I digress…

On display there were also exhibits of interest to feminists everywhere.  It is 50 years since the landmark 1969 Menhennit ruling on the legality of abortion in Victoria, which was the first legal precedent with regard to abortion law anywhere in Australia.  The ruling in R v  Davidson stated that abortion might be lawful if necessary to protect the physical or mental health of the woman. The cabinet contained Justice Menhennit’s notebook from the trial, and reactions to it from the time.

BTW that’s not Justice Menhennit in the portrait, that’s Sir Henry Arthur Winneke who was a Chief Justice of Victoria and the 21st Governor of Victoria from 1974 to 1982.  He presided in some notable cases too.

Justice Joanne Cameron was the first speaker, and she spoke about how she owes her love of the American poet Emily Dickinson to a school librarian.  If you saw the recent film and/or have read Dickenson’s poetry, this was familiar territory, but she shared with us ‘I Heard a Fly Buzz’ and ‘I Could Not Stop For Death’ as examples of Dickenson’s innovative style which was ‘a world away’ from ‘the heaving bodices of Wuthering Heights’ and the US Civil War poetry of Walt Whitman.

Tim McFarlane (from McFarlane Legal, a firm that specialises in mediation) was next to speak, and charmed us immediately by confessing that he was not just a bibliophile but also a bibliomaniac and a sore trial to his family because of the books all over the house. He likened his collection to the Golden Days Radio station playlist, with a bit of everything: biographies and autobiographies, books about trains and explorers, legal histories and so on.  He started off by showing us a prized copy of Biggles, a collection which he says he started as an inducement to an offspring who was a reluctant reader.  The tales of derring-do were a great success, and his son is now a keen reader as well.

McFarlane became fascinated by St Thomas More since he was nine years old.  (Yes, St Thomas More as in A Man for All Seasons, which many of us read at school and also saw as a film.)  Someone gave him a copy of St Thomas More by Elizabeth Ince, and he now has 50 books about him including a rare 1840 edition by W. Job Walter.  (He confessed to not having read them all, but plans to do so in retirement).  His fascination with More extends to having visited the cell in the Tower of London from which More was executed, not an easy excursion to arrange because it’s in a part of the Tower not open to the public.

Voss (1957), dust jacket designed by Sidney Nolan

The next slide was of a first edition of Patrick White’s Voss. Yes! McFarlane also collects first editions of Miles Franklin winners, just like I do, only *pout* he’s got all of them, even the elusive Dal Steven’s Horse of Air which I could only read as a tatty old paperback on loan from a regional library. Apparently he belongs to an all-male book club, (whose members have threatened to expel him if he ‘outs them’) and (like my optometrist, who also belongs to an all-make book club) they take turns to choose a book.  Many of their choices have been MF winners, and he has a high opinion of Oz Lit.  (Well, we bonded straight away, of course!)  BTW he likes the art work on the first editions because they are works of art in themselves.  True, though not recently, alas.

Our last speaker was the Chief Librarian, Laurie Atkinson, who told us all about the Classics Collection.  These books were primarily donated by Sir Redmond Barry and are a gentleman’s collection imported from London.  With great ceremony a selection of these were brought downstairs in a red velvet bag, and we were treated to a slide show of special pages from

  • Leaves from the journal Our Life in the Highlands, which was a gift from Queen Vic herself and suitably inscribed in her own hand.  Apparently she was persuaded to publish these journals of her travels in Scotland, England and Ireland and her yachting trips, and she kindly distributed them widely including to our Supreme Court Library.  Yes, there are scholarly books about how heavily edited these journals were, but hey! it doesn’t take much imagination to guess that any negative opinions about the Scots or the Irish would have been very promptly excised, eh?
  • Mill’s Principles of Political Economy. This, unlike most of the books in the Classics Collection, shows signs of being very well read.  Make of that what you will!
  • Byron’s Poetical Works, complete with the bookseller’s stamp: it’s from Guillaime’s, a Colonial Bookseller in London.
  • Volume 1 of the Complete Works of Voltaire – a gorgeous edition with #envy beautiful illustrations.
  • A Handbook to England’s Cathedrals, a sort of travel companion, with the library’s Rules glued inside the front cover.  (You can see an example of this in my slide show below). Ms Atkinson had us all laughing when she said that the first thing librarians do when they get a new book is to ‘mutilate it’ with stamps, and accession numbers, and yes, rules.  (Which apply, BTW only to men, since it was assumed that only men would be using the books.  Women can do whatever they like with them!)
  • The Trial of Queen Caroline 1820 by Sir George Hayter.  It wasn’t actually a ‘trial’, it was a parliamentary debate about whether George IV could divorce her or not. (He was not the mad one, that was George III). Unlike most of the books in the Classic Collection, this one is actually a law book.  And so was the next one, a more sobering choice:
  • The Trial of German Major War Criminals 1945, which is a collection of speeches from the Chief Prosecutors.

The last book was a bound catalogue of the Supreme Court Library.  It contains a list of all the books (of course) but also a list of all members of the legal profession, including where they came from, e.g. from the Inns of Court in London.  I wonder if family historians know about this treasure trove of information?

We were then invited to take a look at the Classic Collection, up a spiral staircase on the first floor.

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Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 12, 2019

Ned and Katina, by Patricia Grace

Patricia Grace DCNZM QSO (b. 1937) is a significant Māori writer of novels, short stories, and children’s books and her work has won multiple awards and is widely translated. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand tells us that she is:

… of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa and Te Ati Awa descent, and is affiliated to Ngati Porou by marriage. She has gained wide recognition as a key figure in the emergence of Māori fiction in English since the 1970s. Her work, expressive of Māori consciousness and values, is distinguished also for the variety of Māori people and ways of life it portrays and for its resourceful versatility of style and narrative and descriptive technique.

In 1975 she published Waiariki, the first collection of short stories by a Māori woman writer, and in 1978 she followed that with one of the first Māori novels, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps. Wikipedia lists the novels that followed as

But the inclusion of Ned and Katina as a novel is an error.  It’s not a novel, it’s a double-biography, and it’s not even a work of creative non-fiction using imagination to fill in the gaps.  Much as I have enjoyed all of her other books, this one is a bit of a disappointment.  The book was commissioned by the sons of Ned and Katina, who met when he was on active service on Crete in WW2 and she was a village school teacher in a place that made heroic efforts to protect allied servicemen from the Nazi Occupation.  But the book suffers, in my opinion, from the uneven focus on the two protagonists.

What soon becomes apparent is that despite an abundance of letters, photographs, voice and video recordings, interviews, log books, articles and memorabilia, Katina’s voice is mute.  The book primarily focusses on Ned’s Māori family history; his service in a Māori battalion and its cultural mores*; his service history including being separated from his unit; his time on Crete evading capture but finally being taken as a POW; his repatriation to England due to injury; and the anguish of his unanswered letters to Katina back on Crete.  There is background about her family, and village life, and the dangers faced by villagers supporting the allies, but almost none of this is in Katina’s words, and very little of it is from her personal perspective.

And when the couple are finally reunited, and Ned brings Katina to New Zealand as his bride, we learn nothing about how she coped with the cultural shock, with not knowing the language, or how she felt about being so far from her family, or how she made friends of her own outside the Nathan family.  Mindful of Eleanor Limprecht’s thoughtful novel The Passengers (see my review) which told the story of an Australian war bride in the US, I was expecting Ned and Katina to capture something of Katina’s emotional experience.  It’s frustrating not to know whether this is because of Katina self-censoring her feelings, or if the adult sons or other family members have in any way suppressed content that would have detracted from the family narrative of a great love story.

In the Introduction we see an admission that hints at the possibility that Grace may not have had permission to tell the whole story:

All told, the writing of Ned and Katina has been a group effort—quite a different experience for me from flying solo on fiction. For the first time I was writing a story I did not own. It was new, challenging, a shared adventure. (p.11)

Is there any significance to the fact that so far, it’s an experiment that Grace hasn’t repeated?

Ned and Katina is a story of great heroism and accomplishment, and it tells the story of a little known aspect of WW2, but the story fails to engage.

Clark Issacs at the Otago Daily Times was more impressed than I was.

* The cultural mores of Māori servicemen as detailed in this book make an interesting contrast with the Indigenous servicemen in Australia.  Our Mob Served (which I reviewed for Indigenous Literature Week 2019) is a collection of oral testimony from Indigenous men and women who served in Australian Defence Forces, from the Boer War onwards.  Where Māori served together in the same Battalion, insisting on elaborate farewell and returning ceremonies as well as distinctive protocols for bring the dead home, Indigenous Australian service personnel were integrated into regular units and appear from the testimonies to have valued the opportunity to be treated the same as any other Australians.  (Which was not generally their experience in civilian life, either before or after their service.)

Author: Patricia Grace
Title: Ned and Katina, a true love story
Publisher: Penguin Books, New Zealand 2009
ISBN: 9780143007401
Source: Personal library, purchased from Brotherhood Books

 

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Posted in 2019 Indigenous Literature Week, 21st century, Biography, Female authors, GRACE Patricia, Indigenous authors, Maori authors, New Zealand authors, NON-FICTION - NEW ZEALAND, NZ 2009, Penguin (NZ), Read in 2019, REVIEWS, War, armed conflict & its aftermath | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | July 11, 2019

Rare Book Week 2019: Medieval and Early Modern Marginalia

Sue from Whispering Gums and I have faced off many a time over the issue of marginalia: she does, and I don’t — but *chuckle* she would have won hands down today because this morning’s Rare Book Week event about marginalia was fascinating:)

The event was presented by Dr Anna Welch from the State Library of Victoria, and what she showed us was that marginalia is much more than jotting down a few thoughts on the sides of a page.  Some marginalia helps to establish the provenance of a book, while other examples offer commentaries on the text, and not always serious commentary at that…

In the back of a beautiful 17th century book bound in vellum there was some droll doggerel about St George and his dragon, while in a book called Egypt and the Pyramids (1814) by the scholar who decoded the Rosetta stone, someone who was ‘showing off’ added commentary not just in English and Ancient Greek – but also in hieroglyphs.  Then there was the terse comment in a 1599 English translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince, which simply said that ‘Hanbury is Machiavellis – scrape-tongue.’  If only we could know who Hanbury was!

And similarly intriguing is the case of the library’s first edition of Gulliver’s Travels (1726): as many will know the book was published naming (the imaginary) Gulliver as the author, though of course his contemporaries knew that the real author was Jonathan Swift.  Inside the book there is a ‘portrait of Gulliver’ and on the reverse side, it’s annotated ‘Gulliver himself’.  Is the portrait really of Swift? Have a look at the Charles Jervis portrait of Swift (1710) and see what you think.

Then there were examples of marginalia as censorship.  In the library’s 2nd edition copy of Copernicus De Revolutionibus, you can see the Inquisition’s censorship of the bits they didn’t like.  They didn’t ban the whole book, they just redacted parts that they thought were heretical.  They used some kind of ink which has deteriorated so it looks as if they’ve actually cut chunks out of the text, which is a pity because with today’s technology we’d probably be able to read the original.  Petrarch fared better: his prohibited poem mocking the Avignon papacy is simply annotated with a cross and the word ‘prohibiti’ to warn people off.  It was up to the reader to decide whether to risk the flames of hell or not!

Occasionally, marginalia is an accident.  An inky fingerprint in A devoute treatise in Englysshe, published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1531 reminds us of the human element in the making of books, back in the days when each one was hand written, not printed.

Then there are children’s doodles.  The academy of eloquence (1670) was a schoolboy’s textbook, and some time in the 19th century some lads amused themselves in a dull lesson by inscribing their names on the back page.  Terence’s Comedies (1585) is lavishly illustrated by a lad who preferred to draw than learn his Latin.  And a young lady called Ann Mansell decided to practise her penmanship and to draft a letter in her father’s copy of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1627). Imagine what he might have said when he saw it!

Sometimes, marginalia is just a case of re-using paper in an era when it was very costly.  There are drawings throughout a 16th century copy of the Life of Benedict of Nursia: some of them are really impressive. And sometimes it’s just a bit of ribald poetry or a heartfelt reflection, as in the case of a book annotated in Latin, which translated means I sought rest, and found it nowhere, unless I was in a little nook with a book. 

But most impressive is the kind of 15th century medieval marginalia that we associate with illuminated manuscripts.  The library has a good collection of these, many of which were on display some years ago when they held an exhibition called The Medieval Imagination. (The book at left is the catalogue; apparently it’s now out of print so my copy is a bit of a treasure, eh?) Dr Welch showed us a leaf exquisitely preserved in the flyleaf of the Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, (1495) and there were many examples of drolleries, faces, and coats of arms in the borders and decorative elements of a Pontifical from Paris  c 1500-25, and a Book of Hours from the Southern Netherlands c 1490.

Sue, you will be pleased to learn that marginalia is now studied as an artform, and we were referred to a text titled From the Books, State Library of Victoria, Redmond Barry Reading Room 000-999, which is the result of some research done in 2016.

Plants found in New Holland (Dampier)

In the afternoon I went to a session called Rakish Plundering or Scientific Enquiry, but it was a bit of a disappointment.  From the title and the blurb I was expecting an examination of the career of William Dampier, who was an explorer, navigator and naturalist but also a buccaneer.  (Some readers might remember my enthusiastic review of Dampier’s Monkey by Adrian Mitchell).  I had assumed that we would see something of his account of his expedition along the coast of Western Australia, A Voyage to New Holland in 1703, and an evaluation of his contribution to cartography and natural science. That’s not quite how it worked out.  But the rest of the audience seemed happy enough, and it was interesting to see some of the very old maps from the library’s collection.

Tomorrow we investigate the law library in the Supreme Court.  I hate to think what Melbourne’s transport system has in store for us then!

Update, the next day: I had a lovely email today from Anne Welch, and she suggests that I should remind readers that you can always see medieval books on display in the library’s World of the Book exhibition, most of which feature marginalia.  It’s good advice, because tourists — both local and international — often don’t realise that Melbourne’s cultural institutions have remarkable collections equal to the great museums of the world due to there being so much money sloshing around here because of the Gold Rush.  In those days extravagantly wealthy people regarded philanthropy as a public good, and the institutions that they built and the cultural trusts that they set up benefit us still.

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