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)

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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

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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.

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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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

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• 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

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It starts at about 14 minutes in:

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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• What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam on my TBR
• People of Earth by Christopher Edwards (I can’t find a supplier for this, Vagabond Press is upgrading its website)
• The Wing Collection: New & Selected poems by Diane Fahey
• Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears, see my review
• Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett, see my review
• All That I Am by Anna Funder, on my TBR
• Five Bells by Gail Jones, see Kim’s review at Reading Matters
• Autumn Laing by Alex Miller, on my TBR
• The Street Sweeper (Elliot Perlman, Vintage) (I’m reading this at the moment)
• Gig Ryan: New and Selected Poems by Gig Ryan
• Surface to Air (UQP Poetry Series) by Jaya Savige

Congratulations to all the nominees, their editors and publishers!

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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