Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 24, 2012

Sensational Snippets: All That I Am

StasilandAll That I AmI am reading Anna Funder’s debut novel All That I Am for the ANZ LitLovers book group, and as you’d expect from the author of Stasiland it’s full of Sensational Snippets – but this one especially caught my eye:

Refugees from Nazi Germany, Hans and Ruth, are coming to grips with English culture:

Hans, who was shy speaking to the English, spoke of them as they fitted his preconceptions: a nation of shopkeepers, tea drinkers, lawn clippers.  But I came to see them differently.  What had seemed like conformist reticence revealed itself, after a time, to be an inbred, ineffable sense of fair play.  They didn’t need as many external rules as we did because they had internalised the standards of decency.  (All That I Am by Anna Funder, Penguin, 2011, p162)

Funder’s description of the mysteries of an English afternoon tea being revealed reminded me of an invitation my mother received to ‘tea’ when we first arrived in Australia. She arrived – to a very flustered reception from her Aussie host – at four o’clock, not knowing that in Australia, ‘tea’ means dinner (the evening meal), served in the early evening (not at eight o’clock as in England).   (Which just goes to show that new arrivals can commit a faux-pas even when they speak the same language as the host country).

 The meal was announced as the clock chimed.  It was afternoon tea, not a repast we were familiar with. The table was fully laid; there were sandwiches made of white bread on tiered stands, with fillings of cucumber, smoked salmon, egg and mayonnaise, prawn.  Other stands held cakes – tiny chocolate squares in ruffled paper, berry tartlets, and pink-and-white coconut fingers.  Bowls of jam glistened darkly at each end of the table, next to ones of clotted cream.  The maid appeared with platters of warm scones and put them down.  We didn’t know what order to serve ourselves in.  We watched others closely and followed suit: it seemed you could have cake before a sandwich or an asparagus roll, but only one thing on the plate at any time.  Our hostess stood and poured tea from a height.  There was no lemon for it, but milk instead.  A serving girl came round with a tray bearing coupes of champagne. (ibid, p163)

Availability:
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All That I Am or (cheaper) pre-order for May delivery) All That I am

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Posted in Australia, Australian Literature, C21st, Female authors, FUNDER Anna, Penguin, Personal library, Sensational Snippets, Titles - A | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 21, 2012

The Man Who Lost Himself by Robyn Annear

Bearbrass: Imagining Early MelbourneThe Man Who Lost Himself: The Fabulous Story of the Tichborne Claimant

Robyn Annear is exactly the sort of guest I like to meet at dinner parties: I know from sitting in on a Melbourne Writers Festival session where she was a panelist that she has a marvellous quirky sense of humour and she knows all kinds of kooky stuff about our Australian history to keep the table entertained.  

Annear’s first book, Bearbrass: Imagining Early Melbourne, is my all-time favourite book about Melbourne,  which I recommend for anyone visiting my city, for all its inhabitants and especially for Victorian teachers of Australian history who want some chatty anecdotes to jazz up their lessons or excursion to Melbourne.  This is because there are all sorts of fascinating stories from the time when it was just a village, and it has a handy map so that you can wander around town finding the source of these stories without getting lost.   (My copy still has the Melbourne Writers Festival ticket from 1999 inside it, as a bookmark!)

Although it’s not about a place, The Man Who Lost Himself is about a most interesting character who could only ever have come from the Australian colonies.  It’s the story of the Tichborne Claimant, a truly amazing attempt at …well, was it fraud?  Even now, I am not sure…

In 1854, Roger Tichborne, sole heir to a fortune, was lost at sea en route to Chile, presumed drowned.  The estate went to an infant relative from a rival branch of the family, the Doughtys.  But Roger’s indefatigable mother, the Dowager Lady Henrietta Tichborne – possibly aware that she was ‘just the kind of mother a son might feign death to escape from’  refused to believe in her son’s demise, and advertised throughout the world for news of him. 

And lo! Sir Roger surfaces in Wagga Wagga in Australia. Well, maybe…

One Tom Castro, a dubious butcher of even more dubious antecedents, hailed from Wagga Wagga too. 

Robyn Annear tells this bizarre tale with all her trademark wry humour, all the way from Wagga Wagga to the law courts in England and Chile too.  It’s an extraordinary tale, complete with shonky ambitious lawyers, witness bribes from both sides of the bar table, and not one but two Commissions taking evidence from people at the opposite ends of the earth.  There were Tichborne Bonds and a Defence Fund raised by the working classes of England to support the Claimant against the oppression of the aristocracy (huh?), and the passage of legislation entitled the False Personations Act!  Ladies had to be cleared from the court to hear, a-hem, evidence about certain aspects of the Claimant’s appendages, and there must have been whole forests of trees cleared for the reams of paper expended at the trial. 

Most intriguing of all was the behaviour of the Claimant.  One would have thought that fraudulent or otherwise, the man who would have done everything he could to co-operate with his counsel and advance his case.  But he did not.  Most of the time he seemed to be disinterested in it, and often went out of his way to sabotage it.  

And it’s all true!!

Seriously good fun, and highly recommended.  No wonder it’s still in print ten years after its first release!

Author: Robyn Annear
Title: The Man Who Lost Himself
Publisher: Text Publishing 2002
ISBN: 9781877008177
Source: Casey-Cardinia Library

Availability:
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Posted in ANNEAR, Robyn, Australia, Australian history, Australian Non-Fiction, Author Gender - Female, C21st, Library (Casey-Cardinia), Text Publishing, Titles - M | Tags: ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 20, 2012

My Place, by Sally Morgan, read by Melodie Reynolds

My Place: Autobiography My Place, by Sally Morgan is now an Australian Classic, but it wasn’t when I first read it back in 1988, Australia’s bicentennial year. Like many Australians, I was shocked to read this deeply moving memoir which revealed without bitterness or rancour a chastening story of endemic racism in our country. I had thought I was an educated person and this book made me realise to my dismay that I knew nothing about the Aboriginal heritage that underpins Australian identity. When I saw My Place as an audio book, I wanted to revisit this memoir, to test its power in the 21st century when Morgan’s voice is now one of many Aboriginal Australians telling their disconcerting stories. Let me assure you, it has lost nothing of its impact…

Born in Perth, Western Australia, Sally Morgan is a year older than I am.  She and her siblings were brought up to answer questions about their colour by saying that they were of Indian origin, a strategy her mother and grandmother hoped would shield them from the racism of the schoolyard.  They believed that they were protecting the children by denying their Aboriginal descent, from the Palku/Baligu people of the Pilbara, and keeping the children in ignorance of it.

But Sally’s adolescence brought rebellion and stubborn questioning, and she embarked on a relentless quest to find out who she really was.  Despite the equally stubborn resistance of her grandmother Daisy, and the deep reluctance of her mother Gladdie, she began unearthing the truth.  Her grandmother, Daisy, had been born at Corunna Downs, a pastoral property owned by the Drake-Brockman family.  Under the auspices of the notorious A.O.Neville, Protector of Aborigines in W.A., she  had been taken from her mother Annie, a full-blood Aborigine who lived and worked at Corunna.   Daisy ended up working for most of her life, unpaid except in kind, at Ivanhoe, another pastoral property owned by the Drake-Brockman family.  She never married, and she never saw her mother again, though she was able to have some contact with her brother Arthur who came looking for her.

Daisy’s child, Gladdie, was sent away from Ivanhoe to Sister Kate’s, a ‘home’ for children:

They took you away when I was twenty. The man from the Aborigines Protection Board said it was the best thing. He said that black mothers like me weren’t allowed to keep babies like you. He didn’t want you brought up as one of our people. I didn’t want to let you go, but I didn’t have any choice. That was the law. That was the law.

Gladdie stayed at Sister Kate’s until she was 15.   Both she and her mother expected that she would then be allowed to live at Ivanhoe but it was not to be.  Gladdie had to leave to board with a religious family who asked her to leave, because she had gone to the ‘sinful’ movies.  She married Bill, a war veteran obviously suffering Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, with whom she had five children, but he made their lives a misery with his drinking and violence.  When he died, Gladdie was left to bring up the children on her own because his parents had no time for Bill’s part-Aboriginal family.

This brief summary of these damaged lives is gradually revealed as Sally records her indefatigable attempts to give these women a voice.  She refuses to be ashamed of her heritage; she wants to know it and to be proud of it, but Daisy and Sally have had their whole lives disrupted by government policies, by exploitation and by racist assumptions so their reluctance to reveal their secrets is well-founded.  When finally Gladdie tells her story, beginning with the bleak days at Sister Kate’s when occasional visits from her mother were cherished memories, it is poignant indeed.    Separating kids from their families was perhaps not so unusual for Australian pastoral families who routinely sent their kids off to boarding-school, but Gladdie was only three.

When Daisy finally agrees to tell some (but definitely not all) of her secrets, she amplifies Gladdie’s memories of this time.  As an unpaid servant at the station, and subject to laws requiring her to work, Daisy had no say about the future of her child.  She had been separated from her own mother because she was a ‘light-skinned one’ (meaning that her father must have been a white man not a tribal Aborigine) and she had been sent away on the pretext of getting an education, which turned out to be training as a domestic servant.  Ashamed of her illiteracy well into her old age, she could not read or write so there could be no exchange of letters or correspondence about how her child was getting on at Sister Kate’s.  She had no money either, being entirely reliant on the Drake-Brockmans to give her leave and transport to make any visits.  And knowing that her separation from her mother had turned out to be irrevocable must have made her anxiety and distress even harder to bear.

For Sally, the mystery of her mother and grandmother’s parentage is a scab that must be unpicked.   Neither Daisy nor Gladdie know the identity of their fathers, and there are conflicting stories.  The Drake-Brockmans claim that there was a ‘Maltese Sam’, but when Sally picks up the trail from the old people in the Pilbara they say that it couldn’t possibly have been him.  For the first time Sally suspects the reason for the women’s shame, sending her to old photos of Howden Drake-Brockman where she saw a resemblance that shook her identity to the core.

The only aspect of this memoir that diminished its authenticity for me, was the inclusion of some quasi-religious experiences, such as visions and premonitions.  Daisy may well claim that ‘white people need to get educated about this’ but however sincerely it may be believed, this type of spirituality has never been authenticated in any scientific or psychological context.  To the contrary, it has always been shown to be linked to perception or memory (or fraud, though I’m not suggesting that this is the case here).  People remember that they foresaw something after it’s happened, and they forget the times that they were sure something was going to happen when it didn’t.  That’s human nature.

Sally Morgan received the Human Rights Award for Literature in 1987 and the Order of Australia Book Prize in 1990.  My Place was also short- listed for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award in 1987.

The narration by Melodie Reynolds is a little stilted here and there, as if Reynolds has not noticed punctuation, but the voice is superb.  It brings this story of three amazingly strong women alive, and is faithful to the Aboriginal English spoken by Daisy, Albert and Gladdie.

If you haven’t read My Place, add it to your wishlist, and make time for it soon.

Author: Sally Morgan
Title: My Place
Narrator: Melodie Reynolds
Publisher: Bolinda Publishing 2011
ISBN: 9781742677835
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh $39.99

 

Availability (the book, I can’t find an online supplier of the CD):
Fishpond: My Place: Autobiography
Book Depository: My Place
Fremantle Arts Centre Press also have a hardback 21st anniversary edition.

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Posted in Australia, Australian history, Australian Non-Fiction, Author Gender - Female, C20th, Indigenous Australian Writing, MORGAN Sally, Personal library, Titles - M | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 19, 2012

Sensational Snippets: The Man Who Lost Himself

The Man Who Lost Himself: The Fabulous Story of the Tichborne ClaimantThe Man Who Lost Himself is Melbourne historian Robyn Annear’s amazing account of the true story of the Tichborne Claimant, a celebrated 19th century case of identity.  In 1854 Roger Tichborne, heir to an English estate, was deemed to have drowned off Chile.  In 1866, a butcher from Wagga turned up in London, claiming to be the long-lost survivor, come to claim his inheritance.  It’s a fascinating tale, brought to life in Robyn Annear’s inimitable quirky style.

Here’s a Sensational Snippet:

By the Claimant’s account, the antipodean Tom Castro [aka Roger Tichborne] was born, full-grown, at Row’s Yard, Bourke Street, Melbourne, on or about Saturday, 26 July, 1854 [when Melbourne's Gold Rush was in full swing].

There he was, just off the Osprey in stiff new moleskins, a China blue shirt and his pair of elastic-sided boots.  He’d been led to the saleyard by a stream of rough-looking fellows (whom he would soon distinguish as ‘bushified’) on flash, toey mounts.  The streets were all clay and mud, with slush-filled potholes deeper than his boot tops.  Horses and bullocks – he’d never seen so many.  With the riot of building in progress and the rowdy folk crowding what passed for footpaths, it was noisier than parts of London he could have named.  There seemed to be a public house on every corner, with restaurants interspersed, all of them bustling with diggers – men dressed like him but with the stiffness rubbed off and a coating of grime and brazen clay laid on.  They wore battered wide-awake hats and wild whiskers.  Some of them sported fistfuls of gold rings, others dangled a nugget from an earlobe.  At the front of the big stores the footway was made unnavigable by stacks of tin dishes and buckets, picks, shovels, wooden tubs and billy-pots.  In every shop window was a set of gold scales beside an untidy pile of the genuine article, serving in lieu of a notice: Gold Bought Here.  (The Man Who Lost Himself by Robyn Annear, Text Publishing 2002, p 205)

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Posted in ANNEAR, Robyn, Australia, Australian Non-Fiction, Author Gender - Female, C21st, Female authors, Library (Casey-Cardinia), Sensational Snippets, Text Publishing, Titles - M | Tags: , ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 17, 2012

The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman

The Street Sweeper

Usually when I read a book that the book group is discussing later in the year I take copious notes as I read, but The Street Sweeper, Eliot Perlman’s latest novel had me so absorbed, I just didn’t want to stop reading.  At 544 pages it’s a long book, but it held my attention throughout.

In a fractured world where people seem less and less connected to each other, Perlman’s story shows us that we can be drawn together by the networks of history and our common humanity.  Indeed, despite the barriers of modern life, it may well be that we have more in common with the strangers that we brush up against than we suspect.   And although the author builds his plot around the greatest crime of the 20th century – the Holocaust – and the most persistent social problem of America’s history – its pernicious racism –  it is a profoundly optimistic work, celebrating compassion, courage and truth.

We live in an era when a member of the British Royal Family – the beneficiary of a good education and with any amount of advisors to guide him – thought it was funny to dress as a Nazi for a fancy dress party. Clearly it is important for generations far removed from the immediacy of the Holocaust to learn about it. But when you’ve read a fair few books about the Holocaust as I have, you could be forgiven for wondering how this complex and fraught topic might be explored in fiction. Perlman, however, has succeeded in writing a novel that tells what happened in a sensitive way for a new generation and with a different slant for those who already know about this unfathomable event.   He tackles the issue of American racism against its African-Americans from a new angle too.  He has framed his story around the research of a jaded professor so that he discovers long-lost recordings of Holocaust survivor stories while searching for evidence to prove a link between African-American liberators of Death Camps in Europe with the eventual birth of the civil rights movement.  In this way, Perlman brings a fresh but respectful perspective to histories that should unite us all in revulsion for the evils of extreme racism.

With the perspicacious eye of an Outsider in New York, Perlman charts the course of an Invisible Man: an African-American wrongly convicted of armed robbery as he tries to rebuild his life without bitterness or recrimination.  Lamont Williams has little in the way of resources except hope, and his challenge is to find his small daughter, lost to him because of his estranged girlfriend’s indifference.  Through a rehabilitation program he gets a job as a janitor where by a simple act of kindness he meets Henryk Mandelbrot, a cancer patient, with whom he strikes up a friendship.

Mandelbrot has a ghastly story to tell, and like many Holocaust survivors, he feels an urgency about telling it, now as he nears the end of his life.   ‘Tell everyone what happened here’ he says, insisting that Lamont learns this story, committing strange and hard-to-pronounce names and places to memory so that he can retell it, though what the context of that retelling might be, and what significance it might have, remains a mystery almost to the end of the book.

In the early chapters, it’s hard to see how the disparate stories of the characters might intersect.  Mirroring the fleeting opportunities that people have to connect with each other in modern life, the story is presented in scraps.  There is Lamont and old Mandelbrot.  There are people who know them and see them, others who see them but fail to notice them or have time for them, and others who seem to have nothing to do with anybody. Professor Adam Zignelik lectures his students about this, the unlikely possibilities of history.  His life has been shaped by the American Civil Rights Struggle and he piques their interest with a story about Germans singing Negro spirituals during the Hitler years, pulling the jagged shards of history together to show what might be ‘true, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true or there is not enough known to you to say.’ (p93)  But his own life both personal and professional is a mess, and he himself seems unlikely to be any use to anybody.

I like the way Perlman manages to keep a sense of perspective about human grief.   It is difficult, I think,  for any author to restrain the overwhelming tragedy of the Holocaust in a novel, yet Perlman gives equal dignity to the other characters who are isolated by their circumstances, and by their grief – even though their losses are, sadly, of the everyday kind in modern life.  For Lamont, the loss of his freedom and life prospects is nothing compared to the loss of his daughter who he has not seen since she was a toddler.  For Adam, the break-up of his relationship with Diana is a disaster which threatens to overpower him.  Perlman manages to depict Adam’s sense of shame about having failed to live up to his early academic promise as poignant even though his life circumstances are so radically different to Lamont’s.

I also like Perlman’s mastery of voice.  Lamont’s voice is a simple uneducated one, familiar to any of us who’ve seen a few Hollywood movies.  Mandebrot’s has the rhythm and cadence of Yiddish.  Adam pontificates and lectures in public while he rambles when alone in his desolate apartment.   The tumult of voices and the evocation of place brings New York alive even for someone like me who’s never been there.  This is a splendid book and very rewarding to read.

Highly recommended!

PS There’s a terrific review by Jane Sullivan at the SMH, and another one at Tony’s Reading List.

Author: Elliot Perlman
Title: The Street Sweeper
Publisher: Vintage (Random House) 2011
ISBN: 9781741666175
Source:  Personal Library, purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh, $32.95

Availability:
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Posted in Australia, Australian Literature, Author Gender - Male, C21st, Holocaust, PERLMAN, Eliot, Personal library, Random House, Reviews, Titles - S | Tags: ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 12, 2012

Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland

Girl in Hyacinth Blue Luncheon of the Boating Party Susan Vreeland is an American author of historical fiction who specialises in vivid novelisations of art and artists, and like Girl in Hyacinth Blue,  Luncheon of the Boating Party is based around a particular painting.  Ever since I read The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary I’ve looked out for books that explore the mind of the artist, and I had also enjoyed Vreeland’s Passion of Artemesia - about the first woman admitted to the Accademia dell’ Arte in Florence – and The Forest Lover - about the ground-breaking Canadian artist Emily Carr. So when I saw this one at the library, I snapped it up.

Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Wikipedia Commons)

Luncheon of the Boating Party, by Pierre- Auguste Renoir was one of his major paintings, completed in 1880-1881.  He painted it from life, depicting a group of his friends on the balcony at the Maison Fournaise on the River Seine in Chatou, a suburb of Paris.  He wanted to show Paris enjoying the good life, in recovery from the horrors of the Franco-Prussian war,  and he wanted to capture the conviviality of everyday people relaxing in an everyday situation (rather than the conservative themes of the pre-Impressionist era).   Wikipedia tells us that these friends include:

  • His patron, Gustave Caillebotte, seated facing his chair on the lower right.
  • Actress Angèle Legault (in blue) and the journalist Adrien Maggiolo leaning over her shoulder
  • Eugène Pierre Lestringez and Paul Lhote, also an artist, flirting with the actress Jeanne Samary in the upper righthand corner of the painting.
  • Charles Ephrussi, a wealthy collector, wearing a top hat, talking with (probably) Jules Laforgue, his personal secretary and also a poet, wearing a brown coat and cap
  • The actress Ellen Andrée in the centre with her face obscured by her glass of water and next to her
  • Baron Raoul Barbier sitting with his back to the viewer.
  • Renoir’s future wife, the seamstress Aline Charigot, on the left, fondling a dog.
  • The restaurant-owner’s daughter Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise (leaning on the railing) and
  • her brother, Alphonse Fournaise, Jr, in the foreground on the left.

But who is the man obscured by Maggiolo’s shoulder?  According to notes in the back of Vreeland’s tale, his identity is unknown.  It could be Guy de Maupassant or it could be Renoir himself.  Whoever he was, he was needed to balance the composition.  A person had to be there for Ellen to be talking to, and a 14th person was also needed because Renoir was worried that superstitious buyers would have rejected a painting with 13 subjects.

(This reminds me of when CD cover shots were done of The Australian Cotton Club Orchestra in its heyday (when The Spouse was leader, arranger and trombone soloist extraordinaire.  You can hear a track on iTunes here.)  For reasons I can’t remember, the then piano player had absented himself, so The Offspring was decked out in a white dinner suit and sat facing the piano so that only his broad back can be seen. Will future scholars researching the history of big band jazz in Melbourne sweat for years to discover the identity of this ‘piano-player’?)

In her novel, Vreeland imagines the complex process by which Renoir’s masterpiece came to be, and she includes a scene where a girl called Circe flounces out half way through the painting and refuses to participate any more because Renoir wanted to paint her in profile rather than face-on.  Even then, sitters knew that their faces might become famous.  They could never have imagined how famous, not then, when Impressionism was struggling to find its place.  (See my review of The Judgement of Paris, by Ross King, a wonderful book which explains the politics of the Paris art world in this period.)

Vreeland writes convincingly about Renoir’s ambitions for the picture, how his difficulties in paying for the paint and canvas were resolved through his own enterprise and the generosity of friends and patrons, and about his complex negotiations with his subjects to persuade them to attend at the restaurant and pose for long periods of time.  (Think about Caillebotte, leaning backwards on that chair for ages – ouch!)

Even when he’d persuaded everyone to come along for the sittings, Renoir felt constant anxiety each Sunday about whether they would continue to come and to turn up as agreed.  Also, with a painting of this size and scope, it wasn’t easy to maintain the same details from week to week – what film makers call continuity.  The apparently casual table napkins and empty bottles had to be replaced exactly as they had been while clean linen and fresh wine were supplied each week.  In the novel it is Augustine who (for reasons of the heart) does this.

Luncheon of the Boating Party is an interesting book for anyone interested in art,  and although never a page-turner, there is enough of a plot to carry the story along.  Tension is provided by the quest to find the fourteenth member of the group; the romantic triangle of Renoir, Augustine and Aline; and the politics of keeping the Impressionists group together in the face of sustained opposition from the Salon and also from the birth of new movements such as the Realists.

Most enjoyable.

Author: Susan Vreeland
Title: Luncheon of the Boating Party
Publisher: Viking Penguin, 2007
ISBN: 9780670038541
Source: Kingston Library

Availability:

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Posted in Art, Author Gender - Female, C21st, Historical Fiction, Library (Kingston), Reviews, Titles - K & L, USA, Vreeland Susan | Tags:

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 11, 2012

Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize in the news!

Our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize Jury gets a mention at the Shortlist Press Conference!  (Held simultaneously at the Man Group offices in Hong Kong and London on January 10 2012).

It starts at about 14 minutes in:

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Posted in Book news, Man Asian Literary Prize, Shadow Man Asia Literary Prize Longlist 2011, This Reading Life | Tags:

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 10, 2012

Dreams of Joy by Lisa See

Dreams of JoyBack at work after the long summer break I was in the mood for a bit of light fiction, and at GoodReads I’d picked up on conversation about Lisa’s See’s latest book set in Communist China.  Dreams of Joy is a sequel to Shanghai Girls, which I haven’t read, but I enjoyed Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (see my review) so I borrowed Dreams of Joy  from the library.

The initial premise isn’t terribly convincing: Joy, an American teenager of 19, is so devastated by family revelations about the past that she takes off by herself to find her father in Shanghai.  Miraculously she finds him, starts art classes with him and lo! turns out to be amazingly talented with the brush.  But there’s not enough self-flagellation in that to make up for the problems she’s caused back in America,  so off she goes to live in a commune.  There she cheerfully gives up all the comforts of western life and goes to work in the fields alongside the rest of the peasants in Green Dragon Village.  She submits to all kinds of disagreeable privations, to constant sniping about her decadent Western origins, to  backbreaking work, to bad weather and to bad food - and she miraculously learns to hold her tongue in a way that contrasts markedly with the way assertive American teenagers of the period were portrayed on our TV screens.

But if you can suspend disbelief about all this, the story of Joy and Pearl’s visit to China in the late 1950s is very interesting.  Pearl, Joy’s putative mother, is so aghast at these events that she takes off for China after her daughter.  There she meets up with her old flame  – there is some complicated backstory about Pearl and her sister May (the original Shanghai girls) – and so there is more than just the relationship with her daughter to sort out.  What makes these romantic elements interesting is the setting, because this is the period of Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward and the resultant famine which caused the deaths of millions of people in China.  (Estimates of the mortality rate vary from 18 to 45 million people, and the truth will probably never be known.)

Lisa See is a very prominent writer in the US, and this novel hurtled up the bestseller lists, so I think we can assume that it was properly researched.  What See achieves is to bring to life the reality of the sloganeering, the ‘struggle sessions’, the absurdly unachievable agricultural targets, and the way that peasants had to confront directions from The Great Helmsman to plant crops and harvest them in ways that they knew from centuries of practical farming would not work.  There are distressing scenes representing the misery and desperation of the famine, and there are also examples of the ways in which some people were able to circumvent the shortages through corruption and the black market.  Even though this is a very negative portrayal of China, I think that  -  in what is now being called ‘the Asian Century’ -  there is value in Lisa See’s fans learning about a period of Chinese history in this palatable way.

The last part of the story seems to have been written with a movie script in mind.  Joy and her mother and other characters I won’t name to avoid spoilers have to escape if they are to survive.   Events conspire to create enough dramatic dialogue and cliff-hangers to have an audience enthralled.  I’ll be very surprised if it hasn’t been optioned already.

You can read more about Lisa See here.  

Author: Lisa See
Title: Dreams of Joy
Publisher: Random House (Large Print Edition), 2011
ISBN: 9780739378182
Source: Kingston Library

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Posted in Author Gender - Female, C21st, Historical Fiction, Library (Kingston), Reviews, See, Lisa, Titles - D, USA | Tags:

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 8, 2012

ALS Gold Medal shortlist 2012

Once again I am indebted to Bookseller and Publisher magazine for the news that the high prestige ALS Gold Medal shortlist has been announced.  The nominees are:

Congratulations to all the nominees, their editors and publishers!

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Posted in ALS Gold Medal, AMSTERDAM, Steve, Australian Literature, FUNDER Anna, JONES, Gail, MEARS Gillian, MILLER, Alex, PARRETT Favel, PERLMAN, Eliot | Tags:

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 7, 2012

A Soldier’s Tale by M.K.Joseph

A Soldier's TaleThe temptation with this gripping  novel is to rush through it because you simply have to know how it is resolved.  The problem with that approach is that such a rich and complex novel of ideas and exquisite writing, deserves more attention.  This is a perfect book for book groups to explore, and an even better one to read and re-read, taking time to ponder the moral ambiguities that underlie the tale.

A Soldier’s Tale by M.K.Joseph (1914-1981) was first published in 1976 but has been recently reissued to great acclaim.  It’s the story of a soldier caught up in a moral dilemma not initially of his making.  It’s set in Normandy in 1944,  when the Germans were in retreat and the Allies were making their way through rural France towards Paris, liberating villages and towns as they did so.  During a lull in the fighting two young British soldiers go for a stroll, looking for some loot or a ‘nice bit of crumpet’.  They come across a young girl alone in an isolated cottage and Saul has begun his pick-up routine when suddenly the girl freezes in terror.  Three men from the French Resistance have arrived to deal with her.  She is a collaborator, they say, and not just one who slept with the enemy.  They are going to kill her.

Saul, who’s a bit of a lad and has only a rudimentary sort of moral code, reacts in a matter-of-fact kind of way.  These three are amateurs, as far as he’s concerned and he’s a battle-hardened killer who knows what he’s doing with a gun or a knife.  It doesn’t take him long to show them that they are in no position to challenge him, but they know that he has to move on with the rest of his company.  The protection he offers her is temporary at best unless he can find some other sanctuary for her.  So the tension in the novel comes from the resolution of this stand-off.  That is why you have to keep reading long into the night when you ought not to because there is work in the morning and that hateful alarm at six a.m.

But there is much more to it than that.  Saul’s mercy is tempered by opportunism and betrayal stalks the novel.   In the Foreword by Janet Hughes, she notes that Joseph, a former soldier and academic, as well as one of New Zealand’s finest poets and novelists, was interested in the moral sphere:

For the most part he is more concerned with the ethics of individual conduct than with warfare itself – with the way war sharpens dilemmas, intensifies pressures, and magnifies consequences, rather than with its physical or political violence.

The relationship that develops between Belle and her protector is complex and ambiguous.  They both have assumptions about each other that erupt into conflict.  He thinks he has entitlements; she is willing to please him but she wants to choose it, not to owe him.  A man not in the habit of reflecting on his motives and behaviour, Saul isn’t very good at expressing himself either and their communication is hampered still further by her lapses into French when her English fails her.  There are moments which will make most readers angry with both characters; there are also scenes so poignant you may weep.

It’s unforgettable.

© Lisa Hill

Author: M.K.Joseph
Title: A Soldier’s Tale
Publisher: Harper Collins (New Zealand) 2010
ISBN: 9781869508555
Source: Personal library, purchased from Fishpond, $22.68

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Posted in Author Gender - Male, C20th, Harper Collins, JOSEPH M K, New Zealand, Personal library, Reviews, Titles - S | Tags:

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 6, 2012

The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely, by Mungo MacCallum

The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia's Prime MinistersGuess which Australian Prime Minister counted his three greatest achievements as winning a Cambridge Blue, captaining the St Andrews Golf Club (the one in Scotland, not the one at Gunnamatta) and being a member of the Royal Society?  Not, you will have noticed, running our country for six years.  He’d have had to have been here in this country for that, and he wasn’t any too interested in Australia, hanging out in London for most of his adult life including large chunks of his term of office. Presumably he thought that running our little backwater was a minor achievement, perhaps analogous with managing the staff in a country house.

Give up?  Stanley Melbourne Bruce (1923-29) was his name (christened thus to acknowledge the place where his family made their impressive fortune) but (serves him right) this arrogant prat’s claim to fame is that he left the economy in ruins and was so out of touch with the electorate that he lost his own seat when they booted his government out in 1929.  (John Howard (1996-2007) is the only other PM to suffer this ignominy, in the rubble of the Kevin 07 landslide).

This and many other interesting titbits come from Mungo MacCallum’s entertaining new book, The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely, Australia’s Prime Ministers.   It is just the antidote needed for an electorate that is bored witless by what passes for political debate in this country at the moment, and a salutary reminder that, as PM Paul Keating said in the election campaign that he lost to Howard, leadership does matter.

If you’re like me and have paid mild attention to politics for most of your life, you’ll already know a fair bit about our most recent PMs, so it’s the early ones that will be the most interesting.  MacCallum lifts them out of the dry and dusty pages of our early political history with amusing anecdotes, and he analyses their contribution with a wry eye.  While I would have liked this book to include a timeline* and for each chapter heading about each PM to have included the term of office*   this is a terrific survey of our political history as well as an interesting portrait of each leader.  MacCallum has been around the Aussie political landscape so long that there’s not much each doesn’t know about it.  As he tells us, his lifespan is covered by 15 PMs, of whom he’s met 12, and been on first-name terms with 11.  This familiarity, he says, accounts for his ‘less than worshipful tone’ but, a-hem, he’s none too worshipful of the long-dead ones either…

And why should he be?  Let’s face it, Australians are not very good at tugging the forelock or doffing the cap, to politicians dead or alive.  And MacCallum seems to be fair.  He goes out of his way to identify the achievements of some whose reputation has been trashed by history, even finding a few kind words for Joseph Lyons who is basically only famous (if famous at all) for having a wife who became Australia’s first female minister. Goodness me, there’s some interesting goss about his cradle-snatching romance with her!

But at the end of the day we’ve had a few duds in the job, and MacCallum says so.  (Nothing comparable with, a-hem, political leaders in a certain very powerful country, though. Nobody who took advice from astrologers, for example.  Nobody starting unwinnable wars, or supporting torture when it suits.  Our duds have mostly stuck to general incompetence or just being derivative and dull.)

Some of our PMs were just unlucky – and the poor old Labor Party with its penchant for taking office in times of economic downturn and crises not of its making had more than its share of those.  (The ALP has also created a lot of their own problems, of course, but hey, how boring would Oz Politics be if we didn’t have Labor Party dramas to liven things up?)  One of the unluckiest was James Scullin (1929-32) who led the nation during the worst of the Depression, but he’s one of my favourites because the Commonwealth Literary Fund was his baby even though they bundled him out of office before it got off the ground.  He also – way, way back in 1931 – established the Arnhem Land Reserve in the Northern Territory, a brave landmark step towards land rights for our indigenous people.

John Curtin: A LifeI’d read David Day’s excellent biography John Curtin: A Life some years ago so I already knew a fair bit about Curtin (1941-45) Australia’s most-admired PM, who steered the country through WW2 and died in harness from overwork.  But MacCallum also draws on a biography by Lloyd Rees, and his summary of Curtin’s achievements, his selflessness and his courage is a good introduction for those not motivated to read a biography the length of Day’s. (It’s 784 pages, so you have to be keen).

 What does this lovable pooch at left have to do with MacCallum’s book?  I’ve been waiting for a ‘relevant’ opportunity to upload a picture of our dear little dog on this book blog and this is it: his name is Chifley, named after Prime Minister Ben Chifley (1945-49).  A friend had suggested that our little refugee from The Lost Dogs Home looked like Churchill, but like many Aussies I have ambivalent feelings about Churchill.  His WW2 demand for our Aussie troops had the effect of leaving Australia unprotected against the Japanese onslaught.  It was PM John Curtin who brought the troops home and who for a fortnight while they were at sea suffered agonies of fear for their safety – because Churchill wouldn’t provide an escort and the route home was the haunt of Japanese subs.  So no, while Churchill is a great hero who stood alone against the Nazis for most of the war, The Spouse and I weren’t going to name our Aussie pooch after him.

We couldn’t in all honesty name him after Curtin either.   Our stoic little patrolman is more loved than admired (because he is, alas, a pooch of Very Little Brain), so we named him Chifley instead. (Because, I hasten to add,  everybody loves him, not because his namesake had any deficit in the brains department. Far from it.)  Since we don’t know Chifley’s date of birth (except for an approximate vet-guess based on how many teeth he had), we celebrate his birthday on September 22nd,  the same as his namesake Ben’s.  Proof of enduring affection for the PM who bears his name occurs whenever during our daily walks he is introduced to older Australians, who always smile in recognition, and murmur something about what a great man Ben Chifley was.    (BTW Sapphire – aka Marie Antoinette in a past life - is only included here on this post because she will sulk if she finds out that Chifley is internationally famous and she’s not.   She is on the Right because that is her political preference since  – as befits her aristocratic pedigree – she is much opposed to Chifley’s welfare, or anyone else’s for that matter).

Chifley’s Home in Bathurst

Chifley: A LifeAnyway, Ben Chifley was another one of the better PMs. David Day has also written a fine biography Chifley: A Life but again, it’s long (720 pages) as a definitive bio tends to be, and MacCallum’s 10 pages is a handy introduction to the man who is Australia’s best-loved PM.  He came from humble beginnings, and never lost his touch with the common people.  He refused to live in The Lodge and commuted by train from his modest home in Bathurst.  (A must-visit site if you’re in the area, even if you’re not interested in politics).  Chifley began his career as an unskilled labourer and rose to this country’s highest office because of his hard work, determination, and integrity, but he was also ambitious from an early age because he saw that political power was the way to make things better for ordinary people.

But some of our PMs were, to use the Australian vernacular, drongoes.  Joseph Cook (1913-1914), for example, was a ‘drab and colourless figure’, ‘left no record of wit or flamboyance’ and presided over ‘fifteen months of spectacular non-achievement’.  He was also the first of the Labor ‘rats’ i.e he abandoned his own party over the conscription issue and helped to form Billy Hughes’ minority Nationalist government.   Hughes, of course, was the quintessential ratbag politician,  who ‘was in at the birth of six political parties, led five of them, served as a minister in four of them and ratted on three’.

One of the aspects of American politics that’s always baffled me is the public prurience about their politicians’ private lives.  They probe and prod until they find some indiscretion as if it has anything to do with the hapless candidate’s competence for public office, and they end up excluding some of their best and brightest because he had some foolish dalliance with a kiss-and-tell opportunist.  Someone like Harold Holt (1966-1967) wouldn’t have had a chance if his private life had been the subject of press scrutiny.  He had a long-standing affair and fathered a number of sons while his eventual wife was married to somebody else, but (even though the other politicians must have known about it) nobody took any notice of his playboy image because the Australian media has mostly minded its own business and kept out of so-called sex scandals.

Holt was heir apparent to Robert Menzies (1949-1966) who made my mother weep when he retired - though there were probably plenty of others quietly cheering on the other side because he was our longest-serving PM and had been unbeatable in the polls. MacCallum has much to say about Menzies, (how could he not, given his political longevity?) but this post is getting a bit long so I’ll content myself with sharing a little ditty that he quotes from ‘those centres of ferment, the universities’:

There’ll always be a Menzies
While there’s a BHP
For they have drawn their dividends
Since 1893.

There’ll always be a Menzies
For Menzies never fails
As long as nothing happens to
The Bank of New South Wales.

If we should lose our Menzies
Wherever should we be
If  Menzies means as much to you
As Menzies means to me. 

MacCallum makes the point that Menzies was lucky to preside over a long period of post-war prosperity. His championship of the White Australia Policy and support for Apartheid South Africa to remain in the Commonwealth makes his legacy more dubious than his reputation would suggest, but hey, the Australian people voted him in, time and time again.  The economy was good, things were stable, relaxed and comfortable, and the Opposition was a disorganised rabble with the most uncharismatic leader you could imagine.  I’ve never forgiven Menzies for dragging Australia into the Vietnam War and introducing conscription (for 20 year-olds to young to vote for or against it), but again, that decision was decisively endorsed by the Australian people.

That’s democracy for you.

This is a terrific book.  Highly recommended.

© Lisa Hill

*These links go to the National Archives timeline but it’s very clunky.  I can’t get it to link to a succinct timeline that just shows the PMs and when they ruled.  To get that, and not an interminable list of everything everyone ever did that’s not very fascinating, scroll down the page to ‘Search Timelines by Category’ and you should see ‘All PMs’ ticked and the radio button for Prime Ministers already selected.  Scroll down and click Go and you will get a nice timeline that shows the PMs in chronological order and a one-sentence summary of each one.  But it will do you no good to bookmark that timeline because it reverts to the long and boring one.  Bookmark where you started from i.e. http://primeministers.naa.gov.au/timeline/

Author: Mungo MacCallum
TItle: The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely, Australia’s Prime Ministers
Publisher: Black Inc, 2012
ISBN: 9781863955539
Source: Won in a Black Inc competition where we had to choose a favourite PM and say why. Nope, I’m not telling you which one I chose, but the fact that I said he was the sexiest should eliminate a few for you if you want to guess. (Noooo, definitely not Bob Hawke.)

Cross-posted at LisaHillSchoolStuff.

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Posted in Australia, Australian history, Australian Non-Fiction, Author Gender - Male, Black Inc, MACCALLUM MUngo, Publisher/Publicist, Reviews, Titles - G | Tags:

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 6, 2012

2012 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature shortlists

I am indebted to Bookseller and Publisher for the news that the shortlist for the 2012 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, have been announced.

Fiction ($15,000)

Nonfiction ($15,000)

You can see the shortlisted titles in the Children’s Literature and Young Adult categories at the Bookseller and Publisher website.

Award winners will be announced on March 3rd during  the 2012 Adelaide Writers’ Week.  There is also an overall winner’s prize of $10,000.

Congratulations to all the authors, editors and publishers of the shortlisted books – well done!

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Posted in Adelaide Festival Award, Awards and Prizes, BOYCE James, CAPP, Fiona, DAVIDSON Jim, FUNDER Anna, JONES, Gail, MCKENNA Mark, MILLER, Alex, ROWLEY Hazel, SCOTT, Kim, SMITH Dominic, WALKER Brenda, WILSON Rohan | Tags:

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 5, 2012

Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William Dampier by Adrian Mitchell

Dampier's Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William DampierThe publication of Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William Dampier by Adrian Mitchell is not just of interest to readers keen on Australian history, it’s timely for another reason.

Starting in 2013, Australian teachers will begin teaching the new national Australian Curriculum, and so any primary school teacher under the age of 40 will probably need to learn something about the history of European Exploration.  It was, I believe, last taught as a compulsory topic in the 1956 Course of Study when students of my vintage laboriously traced maps into exercise books and with coloured pencils marked the voyages of assorted explorers across the world’s oceans.  I found it fascinating because of Miss Baird, who told us tales of high adventure, danger and mayhem while we struggled to keep those dotted lines even and in the right place.  I loved Miss Baird.  She was young and pretty, and, I now realise, she had taken the trouble to jazz up her lessons by doing some background reading that went beyond the dry facts mandated by the Victorian Department of Education.

The 21st century version of that curriculum for 9 year-olds in their fifth year of schooling looks like this:

The Level 4 curriculum introduces world history and the movement of peoples. Beginning with the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, students examine European exploration and colonisation in Australia and throughout the world up to the early 1800s. Students examine the impact of exploration on other societies, how these societies interacted with newcomers, and how these experiences contributed to their cultural diversity.  (ACARA, The Humanities – History)

And the mandated content goes like this:

The journey(s) of AT LEAST ONE world navigator, explorer or trader up to the late eighteenth century, including their contacts with other societies and any impacts.    (Content description ACHHK078)

The (non-compulsory) suggested examples are Christopher Columbus, Vasco de Gama, or Ferdinand Magellan – but I hope some teachers choose the politically incorrect buccaneer William Dampier instead.   He was the first to circumnavigate the world three times, so he counts as a world explorer, but he’s much more interesting to Aussies because in 1688 (100 years before James Cook’s portentous landing at Botany Bay on the east coast) Dampier in the Cygnet became the first English explorer to make landfall in Australia.   And if he wasn’t a pirate, he was perilously close to it…

Alas for Mr Dampier, he landed on what he found to be an unprepossessing north-west coast and didn’t find any opportunities for either plunder or trade.  Although he returned in 1699 in the Roebuck for more than his previous cursory inspection, in one of those fascinating ‘what might have been’ moments of history, he dismissed the West Australian coast and its inhabitants as unworthy of further notice.  So Cook and his Union Jack got the gig as the explorer who claimed Australia for the British, and Dampier was relegated to comparative obscurity…

But as Adrian Mitchell’s book makes clear, Dampier deserves better.  Even though the biographical details are a bit scanty, and Dampier himself rejected any suggestion that he was a rogue, enough is known about him for us to be sure that he was more than a bit disreputable, which – let’s face it – makes him much more interesting for kids to learn about than the respectable Captain Cook!

If teachers do decide to lift Dampier from his relative obscurity, they will find Adrian Mitchell’s Dampier’s Monkey a useful resource for background information.  They will discover, for example, the reasons that Dampier didn’t – as he wished to - explore more of  the ‘New Holland’ coast.  I was enchanted to discover why on his first voyage he didn’t sail south:

Like all buccaneers, Dampier navigated the world’s oceans in the hope of making money, and he was especially keen on finding precious metals, i.e. gold and silver.  His New Holland Plan was, clearly, to make his fortune in this new world, and that meant finding gold, preferably gold already dug up by accommodating natives who could be persuaded by one means or another to part with it. This ambition cost him a significant place in the history of Australian exploration, and for a reason I could never have guessed.

Though he occasionally found it handy to use sailors’ superstitions to persuade others to do what he wanted, Dampier was a rational man who made his decisions on the basis of known evidence. He sailed north and not south because he reasoned that ‘the gold and silver which the new continent must surely contain would be in the tropic latitudes, as everywhere else around the world’ (p125).  This ‘concept of geology determined by geographic zone’ with ‘echoes of an older, medieval notion of some correlation between warmth and mineral wealth’ (p126) precluded Western Australia’s Kalgoorlie and South Africa’s Johannesburg as well as California and the Klondike in the Northern hemisphere,  not to mention the lucrative Victorian goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo and Bathurst in New South Wales.

(Mind you, if he had sailed south, he’d have had a bit of a hike to find the nuggets lying about in Kalgoorlie because it’s a good six hundred kilometres inland and there’s a good reason for the pipeline that runs alongside the highway all the way from Perth; there’s very little water to be had.  Still, he would have found some very desirable real estate all the same.)

HMS Roebuck 1690, source Wikipedia Commons

And why on his second voyage in the Roebuck didn’t he explore the eastern coast as he wished to?  For the most prosaic of reasons – because of borers in his ship.  After the publication of his first book, New Voyage Round the World in 1697 there was a lot of enthusiasm for this second voyage but less so for provisioning it, and the ship he was fobbed off with was deficient in many respects.  So having made the first detailed survey of the flora and fauna of Shark Bay, and discovered to his dismay that the local Aborigines had no concept of trade that he could exploit, Dampier had to abandon the rest of his plans because of the incompetence of his ship’s carpenter, and set sail for Timor.  Just as well he did, because it wasn’t long before the ship sank, off Ascension Island.  Fortunately Dampier was able to salvage his journals and some specimens, and it was his expert navigational records that eventually enabled the wreck of the Roebuck to be located by divers in 2001 and some relics including its bell to be salvaged.)

What I found from Mitchell’s book is that it’s not the bare facts of Dampier’s journey that make him so interesting.  You can find those on Wikipedia:

Dampier reached Dirk Hartog Island at the mouth of what he called Shark Bay in Western Australia. He landed and began producing the first known detailed record of Australian flora and fauna. The images are believed to be by his clerk James Brand. Dampier then followed the coast northeast, reaching the Dampier Archipelago and then Lagrange Bay, just south of what is now called Roebuck Bay all the while recording and collecting specimens, including many shells.  (The Roebuck Expedition, Wikipedia)

What Mitchell does is to analyse Dampier’s journals and his published books to discover discrepancies between them.  Dampier began sailing at a time when a blind eye was turned towards buccaneering; the spoils it brought benefitted cash-strapped kings and it led to the development of all-important trade.  But James II issued a proclamation against piracy, and Dampier was hauled before the Board of Trade twice (1697 and 1698) and court-martialled too in 1702.  It was his books which saved him and his reputation: while the pirate Captain Kidd was strung up and his body left in chains on display to warn others not to replicate his crimes, Dampier was a guest of Samuel Pepys in 1698 and presented to Queen Anne in 1703.

His journals are the key to this differential treatment: while his style was influenced by The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a book  of marvels and monsters based on Mandeville’s supposed travels first circulated between 1357 and 1371, , Dampier’s books documented marvels that he had seen and actually knew about, based on the careful observations in his ship journals.  New Voyage Round the World (1697) and its successors Voyages and Discoveries (1699) and the two-part Voyage to New Holland (1703 and 1709) were written to captivate his readers with artful descriptions of massive birds and peculiar animals, but in a rational and coherent way.  Dampier was arguably the first of the great travel writers.

Mitchell also includes a very interesting chapter about the words that Dampier introduced into English.  He was very keen to report back using the indigenous words for things, and this is how we have the word ‘gong’ and also ‘barbecue’!

So you’d think that Dampier’s journal of the 1681-1691 voyage in the South Seas would have made it into print long before this, but no, it’s in this book by Mitchell that we can see it for the first time, complete with Dampier’s (sometimes sanitising) annotations and written in that eccentric seventeenth century spelling as well.  (I’d be tempted to give a short extract to a small group of clever Year 4 students for a fun proof-reading exercise!)

The cover illustration is of Norman Lindsay’s The Landing of Dampier (1925), and there are also some interesting reproductions of maps and engravings from Dampier’s books, including one accompanying his record of sailing through a violent storm to Aceh after being deliberately marooned on Nicobar Island.  Dampier and his Companions in their Canoe, overtaken by a dreadfull Storm (1777) which (unlike most of the rest of them) is actually in the National Library of Australia.

Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages is a scholarly work and here and there it’s a bit arcane,  a bit opaque for a general reader.  If you’re trying to find a simple summary of why Dampier matters in the history of Australian exploration then this is not the book for you.  But to discover  the life and interests of a complex, influential and morally ambiguous man who played an important part in the development of natural science, linguistics and anthropology, it is worth the effort.

Miss Baird would have thought so.  She’s actually the only teacher whose name I remember from the patchwork of primary schools I attended across three continents.  Her approach has to be worth emulating, I would say.

Cross-posted at LisaHillSchoolStuff.

© Lisa Hill

Author: Adrian Mitchell
Title: Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William Dampier
Publisher: Wakefield 2011
ISBN: 9781862547599
Source: review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press

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Posted in Australia, Australian history, Australian Non-Fiction, Author Gender - Male, C21st, MITCHELL Adrian, Publisher/Publicist, Reviews, Titles - D, Wakefield Press | Tags:

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 4, 2012

Rebirth by Jahnavi Barua (Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011)

Well, I had to drop everything else that I was reading for this, but it was well worth it.  Thanks to Penguin India, my copy of Rebirth by Jahnavi Barua arrived this week, and it has been a real pleasure to read it.  Although the novel is based on a culture so very different to my own, its central premise is universal: the desire to love and be loved, and to protect the unborn from all harm.  Some might say that such a theme makes this a ‘woman’s’ book, but in my opinion, that’s like saying that novels about war are ‘men’s’ books, when I would argue that ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ is, for example, a book for everybody because it’s a book about humanity.  Rebirth is a book about humanity too.

Rebirth is a woman’s journey into personhood.  Kaberi has been living in limbo, waiting and hoping for a child, waiting and hoping for her indifferent husband to care for her.  It was an arranged marriage, as marriages still apparently are in parts of India, and the gulf between Kaberi and her husband is more than the difference in their social status and aspirations.  It is not just that he has another woman and that his so-called business trips have escalated into separation just as the longed-for child is conceived. And – inconceivably from a western perspective – it is not even that he beats her.  It is because he believes that he alone has the right to make decisions about their future.  Kaberi, on her journey to personhood begins to see that she has not only has the right but also the responsibility to make decisions about her future and that of her child.

A new yearning swells inside me; I want to be pampered and for you to be made much of.  That is the right way, the traditional way to do things.  I demand love.  Now, especially now, at least now. (p41)

Kaberi has always been a follower.  She has let others make decisions for her; she has been placid, and patient and obedient to the desires of others.  She has suppressed her individuality, her own barely-recognised wishes and her creativity.  But in the course of her pregnancy Kaberi not only has to resolve her unsatisfactory marriage, she also has to deal with life events that all of us will experience at some time though the context is unique to her culture.  She has to come to terms with the death of Joya, a friend since childhood; she has to learn to let others befriend her without feeling that she is betraying Joya’s memory; she has to accept that the political movement for which such sacrifices were made has achieved nothing much.   The death of her father brings into focus the difficult relationship she has with her parents and the competing claims of her in-laws.  The child means so much to all of them, and even the issue of whose name it might bear is fraught. Coming-of-age novels are usually about adolescence, but what Barua traces here is that later growth of maturity when we realise our parents’ imperfections are much like our own.  It is a chastening moment in our lives…

But what makes this book so special is the narrative voice.  Barua captures the bond between mother and unborn child perfectly by writing entirely from Kaberi’s perspective – her character speaks not to us, but to her child.  As mothers do, from the moment they become aware of the life within, Kaberi addresses her babe in a deeply private conversation, sharing her dreams, her memories, her fears for the future and her ambition that this child will be loved and nurtured as it should be.  She describes her environment in loving detail so that the child can see it: the busy city of Bangalore, the glorious scenery in Guwahati, the trees, fruits, flowers and birds.  Her disappointment when a childhood memory is spoiled by ‘rows of concrete houses that grow like cancer‘ (p191).  A pleasure trip upriver when she sees a tiger on the bank is a special moment which makes her tremble with excitement: ‘Can you feel it darling?’ she murmurs even as she reflects that a tiger ‘cuts us down to size, in a way, reminding us of our largely insignificant place on the immense stage of nature’ (p58).  Every thought and action is framed around the future life of her child, but it is not sentimental.  A steely determination emerges as the pregnancy progresses, evidenced in ways that might perhaps not be noticed at first by the reader, so skilful is the writing.

I am going to tell you every day, as long as I live, and even after I die, from that great darkness – or maybe it is light – that I love you, my child. You can never love too much.  Or say it enough.  (p169)

A simple truth, not often expressed.  Rebirth is a lovely book.

If you missed them before, check out reviews of Rebirth by Stu from Winston’s Dad, and Fay’s review at Read, Ramble!

******

Now that I have read all the books on the Man Asian longlist, I will reveal my shortlist.  There were six books on it before I read Rebirth but I don’t have to drop one out for Rebirth because  the judges shortlisted seven, so I can too!  (Those in bold are the ones that the judges also chose.  Links are to my reviews, and the official shortlist is here).

The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy
The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam
Rebirth by Jahnavi Barua
River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh
The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattachariya
The Valley of Masks by Tarun J Tejpal
The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad

For descriptions of all the books (with links for where to buy them)
and all the Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize Team’s reviews (updated as we write them),
click here.

© Lisa Hill

Author: Jahnavi Barua
Title: Rebirth
Publisher: Penguin (India), 2010
ISBN: 9780143414551
Source: Review copy courtesy of Penguin Books, India.

Availability: This book is not yet available outside India, but I have no doubt that as its international reputation grows, the distribution issues will be resolved!

7 Comments

Posted in 21st century, Author Gender - Female, Barua Jahnavi, India, Man Asian Literary Prize, Publisher/Publicist, Reviews, Shadow Man Asia Literary Prize Longlist 2011, Titles - R | Tags: ,

Posted by: Lisa Hill | February 2, 2012

The Battlers by Kylie Tennant, read by Jacklyn Kelleher

The BattlersOne of my favourite innovations of the digital age is the audio book that can be downloaded for free from a local library.  I belong to the Casey-Cardinia library (near work) and the Kingston library (near home) and both offer this service, which is facilitated through Bolinda Audio.  All that’s needed is to log in with a current library card, download to a computer, and then either listen to it using Windows Media or transfer it to an iPod using iTunes.  After four weeks the loan expires, and the files should be deleted.

During the holidays I downloaded The Battlers, a novel by the journalist Kylie Tennant (1912-1988).  This classic of Australian literature was written in 1941 during WWII but it was based on Kylie Tennant’s extraordinary research during the Depression. In the introduction she explains how she wrote this novel: joining unemployed itinerant workers on the road and living as they did, sharing the same awful living conditions, poor food, and prejudice from respectable people in towns.  It’s a remarkable piece of reportage and a novel which despite its flaws can stand the test of time.

Tennant was a city girl: she’d been educated in Sydney, and she’d had no experience with the horse she needed to pull her caravan.  In the Introduction, she tells how a kindly drover showed her how to knot a harness to control the animal but in her inexperience she made a slip knot by mistake - and watched horrified and guilt-stricken as the terrified animal strangled itself.   That she chose to share this gruesome experience shows that far from being hardened by her experiences on the track, she was still haunted by this incident a lifetime later.

An Australian Life: Kylie TennantHunting around online for biographical information about this author, I also found it was saddening to  learn from a review by Peter Pierce of Jane Grant’s biography An Australian Life: Kylie Tennant that Kylie Tennant had a terrible life of grief and hardship herself, especially in her latter years.   Her husband, who suffered from depression, injured himself grievously in a suicide attempt, and her son who was a drug addict, was bashed and murdered.  The compassion Tennant showed towards one of the murderers was heroic.

Perhaps it was her experiences on the Track which enabled her to recognise humanity in all its forms without judging.  As a young woman, Tennant had certainly witnessed terrible hardship.  Those who took to the track in search of occasional work during those dreadful Depression years were often hungry, cold and wet or scorched by the sun and wind, harassed by authorities, exploited by callous employers and – despite the camaraderie which sometimes developed, often very lonely too.  And yet this is not a dreary book.  Occasionally Tennant lets her socialist philosophy get the better of her narrative but by and large this is an uplifting testament to the human spirit, enlivened by a fine cast of characters.

Snow, the reticent central character, is a drifter, not home much, and not much welcomed by his wife Molly when he returns.  He has an instinct for knowing when things are ‘different’, however, and isn’t much impressed by his wife’s new ‘lodger’, Derek.  (It’s not just that he talks too much about trivial things, either.)  But Tennant doesn’t make judgements: the loneliness of the wife left behind is hard to bear but it’s no life for a wife and kids on the track either.  ‘If you could only have got a steady job!’ wails Molly, but there are no jobs and this must have been one of many marriages broken up by unemployment and poverty.  The saddest aspect of this is that separation in those days meant complete separation: men left –  and believing that it was best for the kids to make it a complete break, often severed all ties to the family.  Most kids never saw their fathers again.  The farewell scene is heartbreaking.

The motley collection of battlers includes

  • ‘The Stray’, Dancy, a brave but vulnerable young woman who’s only 19 but toothless and weathered by hardship. She looks as if she’s 60.  She was abandoned on the track by her husband;
  • ‘The Busker’ aka The Yodelling Rouseabout, who collects Australian songs along the track with the ambition of making money;
  • Miss Phipps, an educated woman fallen on hard times.  She has grand dreams for reorganising the world, and takes the high moral ground whenever the opportunity presents itself, but is quite capable of taking the main chance when it arises too.

The battle to survive is tough indeed, and prejudice is everywhere.  Shopkeepers try hard to keep the travellers out – with good reason sometimes because they gang up to conceal petty thieving that often accompanied genuine purchases.   At the camp beside the riverbank, a caste system operates even amongst the down-and-out, with ‘permanent residents’ looking down on the travellers, and all of them looking down on the ‘dark people’.

People exploited these unemployed with miserable pay rates for occasional work, which no worker could refuse because a complaint from an employer meant no dole would be paid. Futile attempts at unionism petered out because people moved on, and pay that was acceptable to a young single man was not enough for a married man with children.

In the central section of the novel there are times when the polemics become a bit wearisome.  One character after another seems to launch into a speech about poverty, disenfranchisement, exploitation and so on, and the sense of Them and Us is further reinforced by little sermons from the narrator and arguments about unionism.

Fortunately the characterisation is enough to shine through this and provide light relief.  Harry ‘The Apostle’ Postlewaite and his wife are a generous kindly couple and take Dancy on for a while when Snow, a classic introvert who likes being on his own, goes chasing work  in Crookwell where ‘it’s no place for a woman’.

Then there’s Dick and ‘Thirty Bob’ who offer to take Dancy with them.  They have a code-of-honour that might ‘take down’ any man but never would rip off any woman, but Dancy declines their offer.  She decides instead to stay on with Mrs Marks, an interesting contrast because she’s a miserable old woman who doesn’t hesitate to exploit Dancy.  Dancy had taken this job with her so that she could stay in town while Snow was in hospital – but it’s a job of household drudgery and Mrs Marks, apart from her endless moaning, is always trying to work her harder and pay her less.

It’s when Snow is gone and Dancy is about to take off after him that Jimmy, Snow’s son turns up.  Mrs Marks is no fool and she’s worked out that Dancy and Snow aren’t married, and she’s pretty sure that Jimmy isn’t her kid.  But Dancy has sharpened up a bit and gets away with absconding with the boy because she offers to leave without asking Mrs Marks for her last week’s pay.  The two set off on after Snow on foot, and suffer terrible hardships on the way, a testament to loyalty and determination that reminded me John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

The narration by Jacklyn Kelleher isn’t fantastic.  She over-emphasises Dancy’s comparative youth and naïveté so that she sounds like a child rather than a young woman in her twenties, and sometimes her ‘elocution’ voice breaks through the working-class accents of the characters, which sounds rather odd.  Still, there are a lot of diverse characters to portray, and most of them are convincing.

Michael Heyward is right to say that Aussie Classics ‘are going to waste’.  The Battlers is an example of the kind of Aussie Classic that more readers could be seeking out, enjoying, and learning from.  I haven’t read enough novels of this period to assert this strongly, but – based on this reading of The Battlers (1941), and of The Pea Pickers by Eve Langley (1942), and Vance Palmer’s The Big Fellow, (1959)  -  it seems to me that there was a strong social justice streak in Australian writing of the 1940s and 1950s.  It offers a portrait of an Australia most of us do not recognise but should, in my opinion, know about, because as the generation that lived through the Depression passes on, stories like these matter more and more.  They are part of our heritage.

© Lisa Hill

 Author: Kylie Tennant
Title: The Battlers
Narrator: Jacklyn Kelleher
Publisher: Bolinda Digital Audio 2010
ISBN: 9781742604657
Source: Kingston Library

Availability:
Fishpond: The Battlers

10 Comments

Posted in ALS Gold Medal, Audio books, Australia, Author Gender - Female, Bolinda Publishing, C20th, Library (Kingston), Reviews, TENNANT Kylie, Titles - B | Tags: ,

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