Aboriginal readers are advised that this review includes the names of deceased persons.

Karenlee Thompson suggested this title for the forthcoming Indigenous Literature Week here at ANZ LitLovers – and I’m so glad she did.  It’s a captivating novel and a poignant counterpart to my recent reading of Lyndall Ryan’s The Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (see my review).

Colin Johnson aka Mudrooroo is a controversial figure in the history of indigenous literature.  His novel, Wild Cat Falling (A&R Classics) is said by some to be the first novel by an author ‘of Aboriginal blood’ in Australia. However he is not mentioned in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature – which one might perhaps expect to include an excerpt from a novel of such apparent significance.  However, he is listed on the AustLit database BlackWords.  Why the discrepancy?  Well, if you check out the author’s Wikipedia page, you can soon see why: his Aboriginality is a contested issue.

Well, as I said elsewhere, I’m not getting into the complex politics of Aboriginal identity: if an author identifies him/herself as indigenous, that’s good enough for me.  What is more problematic is that the novel tells the story of Trugernanna and the ‘last male of Bruny Island’ (p207), and the cover blurb refers to ‘the last native Tasmanians‘ implying that Tasmanian Aborigines are extinct.  They are not, as shown by Dr Ryan’s authoritative research in The Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 which also explains how the false belief arose and how Tasmanian activists have had to mount a long campaign to have their Aboriginality acknowledged.

But as it happens, Mudrooroo’s title prefigures that endurance into the 21st century. Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World is a remarkable book on any terms, and if it were to be reissued as an Australian classic with a clarifying introduction, any doubts about its author or intimations of successful genocide could be confronted. I think it would be a pity to let this book slide into obscurity because it is an elegy for a lost way of life and a snapshot of the dilemmas of the period. It makes an empathetic companion to The Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803.

The novel begins with the central character, Wooreddy, a small boy on Bruny Island off Tasmania’s south eastern coast. The island is separated from the Tasmanian mainland by the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and Wooreddy has learned to avoid all contact with this body of water because the sea and all its mysteries are women’s business.  When he stumbles onto something slimy from the sea at the same time as the arrival of white ‘ghosts’ coming across the sea, he interprets this omen as an intimation of the end of the world.  And he turns out to be right, because it is the end of his world, and the world of his people.

The last step had brought his toe against something slimy, something eerily cold and not of this earth – and worse, it was spiky and wriggled.  It was alive! He began to tremble violently.  Ria Warrawah wrapped him in a transparent mist. He was lost! His hands shut out the world as his mind desperately searched through remembered snatches of half-understood conversations in an effort to find a potent protection spell.  He tried a string of words.  As the last one left his lips, there came a strange moaning from the sea, then gruff voices speaking in strange tongues which were followed by a sharp crack that made the water heave and lap at his feet.  By magic his eyes clicked open to focus in a fixed stare on what had come from the sea.  It was an omen, an omen, he knew – but what came from the ocean was evil, and so it was an evil omen.  (p3)

At risk from sealers and whalers on the one hand, and settlers fanning out across the pastureland on the other, Wooreddy and his people are all too soon confronted by the dilemmas of survival.  Robinson, the ambitious humanist who disastrously tried to save the remnant Tasmanian Aborigines, enters the story, searching the bush for surviving communities to bring them under government ‘protection’.  A paternalist, his mission is to ‘civilise’ the Aborigines and Christianize them while at the same time providing a ‘safe haven’ to save them from extermination. With hindsight, we wonder why any of the Tasmanian Aborigines surrendered to him, but Mudrooroo shows how desperation, fear and sheer exhaustion combined with false hopes to make it happen.

Wooreddy represents resignation while Ummurah represents resistance, but both end in death anyway.  It is what happens to the women which hints at some form of survival: Trugernanna chooses surrender and watches her people die all around her in exile at Wybalenna, but her sister Lowernunhe survives abduction by sealers and has a child by the ‘ghost’ she lives with, George Robbins.  She repudiates government attempts to ‘rescue’ her because despite the rape which began the relationship she believes she is better off where she is, maintaining some aspects of her customary life and in good health.  She has a future of sorts, and it is improving as Robbins ages because he’s too old now to ‘hinder’ her (p142).  When they are briefly reunited, Trugernanna craves the freedom her Islander sister has, but feels she could not leave the others who live under Robinson’s dubious protection.

Mudrooroo shows very early in the book that each death means the inevitable death of ancient culture and ceremonies too: when the Elder, Mangana dies, he is buried according to white custom, and Wooreddy as the only surviving male of the community organises the overnight removal of the body to the other side of the island where it can be ‘cremated in the proper way’ (p57).  Even so, compromises must be made because rigor mortis has already set in and the pyre has to be made in an unorthodox way.  Wooreddy reminds himself that ‘the times themselves were unorthodox‘.  As a young man then, he knows that when his time comes there will be no one left from his community who knows how to perform these ceremonies in the proper way.

Mudrooroo revisits this tragic premonition in the last chapter as Wooreddy reads in the  ‘Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle‘, a plea for the Christian God to rescue them from inevitable death:

He stared down at the black marks and his eyes went right through them to the twenty-nine people that had recently died, leaving the sick behind to suffer and to recover listlessly.  Death was the central fact of their lives – the steady placing of bodies into the cold ground in the Christian way.  No more smoke to waft a spirit warmly on its way as in the olden days.  He knew the new rituals just as he knew the old, not from the lips of the old, but from attending funeral after funeral after funeral – twenty-nine of them stretching back to more deaths.  Softly he chanted the words of the burial service as he imagined himself dead and being put into a hole. (p145)

Their nemesis Robinson is shown to be a complex character.  Nicknamed Ballawine (red ochre) because of his red hair, but called ‘Fader‘ (Father) to his face because he likes it, he is well-meaning but has an inflated view of his understanding of the multiplicity of languages and customs across Tasmania.  Ambitious to improve his own social standing (and prospects for a government pension) he invents his own job: Conciliator, Commandant and Protector of Aborigines.  Supremely confident in the superiority of his own religion, he literally tramples across sacred sites and imposes bans on ceremony.  His pompous paternalism is backed up with all the vigour of a Victorian Paterfamilias:  his punishments include deprivation of food and liberty.  Worst of all, his inherent racism makes him judge Lowernunhe’s child as an immoral hybrid: whatever his plans to ‘civilise ‘ his charges might mean, they do not include mixed marriages.  The contradictions in this position are shown when the Islander Munro confronts him:

‘Oh go to Hell,’ Constable Munro said suddenly. ‘That child is a happy little bugger, and his mother and father are happy too.  No trouble between them at all.  It’s sorts like you that have harmed the race.  We live on these islands in our own way, then you come along to hound, not only us, but these poor women who have taken refuge with us.  If they are held against their will, let them say so.  Here is one of them, ask her!  Do you think that she will elect to go to that hell-hole you call a station to die there in a few days?’

Robinson looked at Lowernunhe and softened his expression and voice.  ‘Leave these evil men,’ he murmured, ‘leave them and come to my establishment where you will learn to be happy.’

‘I will never go there.  That place you call Wybalenna Blackfellow’s Home is Meracklenna, The Home of Death, and I will not go there. (p144)

But Robinson is also shown to be devastated by the stories he hears from cocksure witnesses to massacres and atrocities; he is aghast at the death rates on Wybalenna and frantically lobbies the Governor for redress.  He struggles with his own physical attraction to Trugernanna and successfully represses it, and he is never happier than when he is out on his expeditions, glorying in the beauty of the wilderness and enjoying the physical challenge of the rugged landscape.  As Lyndall Ryan also shows in her history of this period, Robinson was a flawed man whose legacy was the destruction of the Aborigines he ‘rescued’.  But within his limitations, which were many, his motivations were good and he was the first ethnographer of the hapless indigenous people of our island State.

Mudrooroo’s achievement in this book is to humanise the names and faces of Aboriginal leaders of this period, especially the women.  Dray, the sole survivor of the South West nation, adjusting her customs and language in a new grouping with Ummarah, chiding the men for making fun of a serious situation.  Walyer, grimly insisting that Ummarah should acknowledge that retreating into mountain areas long unused because there’s never been much food there, will have the same end result as surrender. He’ll be tracked to the hideout and killed, she says, and leaving your country isn’t defending it.   Trugernanna, initially young, sexy and confident, finally trapped into listlessness and despair, unable to rejoin her sister in freedom, doomed to be fossilised for over a century as a symbolic ‘last of her race‘.

Despite its grim subject matter, the story is not oppressive to read.  The Aborigines take opportunities to outsmart Robinson, and they mimic him mercilessly.  Behind his back, there is joy and laughter when they are together, and their last defiant ceremony of the bird clan is a strong assertion that this culture lives on all the same, through story.

The cover picture is ‘Morning Star Ceremony’ by Terry Yumbulul.

To sign up as a participant in the 2012 Indigenous Literature Week in the first week of July, please click the link.

Author: Mudrooroo a.k.a. Colin Johnson
Title: Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World
Publisher: Hyland House Melbourne, 2007, first published 1983
ISBN: 9780908090549
Source: Stonnington Library via inter-library loan

Availability: Difficult.  Fishpond has Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World listed but unavailable.  However by following their links to the publisher, and then doing a Google search, I found that Hyland House, a long-established indie publisher in Melbourne, is still thriving, mainly publishing books about the natural environment, self-sufficiency, cookery and pets.  But they also publish an Aboriginal culture list – and Doctor Wooreddy is still listed in their catalogue.  However the ordering process is a bit laborious because they don’t sell online.  My advice would be to order it from Fishpond and let them do the messing about, or try AbeBooks, Brotherhood Books or the library. (You may need to search under the author’s various names to find it).

2012 shortlists announced

The wait is over! The shortlists for the 2012 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced.

In announcing the shortlisted entries, Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Arts Minister Simon Crean congratulated the shortlisted authors and producers noting that this was a very competitive year for the Awards with over five hundred entries across all the categories, including the inaugural poetry award and the newly incorporated Prize for Australian History.

The shortlists include a diverse range of entries from richly illustrated children’s books to powerful documentaries with themes as broad as alienation, family conflict, Indigenous history, memoirs and magical worlds.

This year’s fiction shortlist includes highly emotionally works and dark humour with a strong representation of historical fiction.

The shortlist for the inaugural poetry award – a welcome and important introduction to the Awards – includes strong and innovative works, continuing Australia’s rich tradition of the poetic voice.

The entries for the non-fiction category and newly incorporated Australian history prize include original and insightful works covering diverse topics, from Australia’s Indigenous history to what it is like to have your child diagnosed with autism.

In the young adult fiction category no subject was off limits. Many entries explored themes of adolescent turmoil with humour and compassion.

The children’s fiction category attracted creative entries that will fire children’s imaginations and develop their love of language and reading.

The 2012 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards shortlists are:
Fiction shortlist [those in bold are also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award].
All That I Am by Anna Funder (see my review)
Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville (see my review)
Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears (see my review)
Autumn Laing by Alex Miller (see my review)
Forecast: Turbulence by Janette Turner Hospital

Poetry shortlist
Ashes in the Air by Ali Alizadeh
Interferon Psalms by Luke Davies
Armour by John Kinsella
Southern Barbarians by John Mateer
New and Selected Poems by Gig Ryan

Non-fiction shortlist
A Short History of Christianity by Geoffrey Blainey
Michael Kirby: Paradoxes and Principles by A J Brown
When Horse Became Saw: A Family’s Journey Through Autismby Anthony Macris
Kinglake-350 by Adrian Hyland
An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark by Mark McKenna (on my TBR)

Prize for Australian History shortlist
1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia by James Boyce (see my review)
The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage
Breaking the Sheep’s Back: The Shocking True Story of the Decline and Fall of the Australian Wool Industry by Charles Massy
Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation by Russell McGregor
Immigration Nation: The Secret History of Us by Renegade Films Australia Pty Ltd

Young adult fiction shortlist
A Straight Line to My Heart by Bill Condon
Being Here by Barry Jonsberg
Pan’s Whisper by Sue Lawson
When We Were Two by Robert Newton
Alaska by Sue Saliba

Children’s fiction shortlist
Evangeline, The Wish Keeper’s Helper by Maggie Alderson
The Jewel Fish of Karnak by Graeme Base
Father’s Day by Anne Brooksbank
Come Down, Cat! by Sonya Hartnett, illustrated by Lucia Masciullo
Goodnight, Mice! by Frances Watts, illustrated by Judy Watson

Jenny has won a copy of Grace Beside Me by indigenous author Sue McPherson.  The book is published by Magabala Books who kindly donated it as a giveaway for Indigenous Literature Week here at ANZ LitLovers in July.

I already have Jenny’s postal address so the book will be on its way in the next post.

Here’s the blurb for Grace Beside Me from the Magabala press release:

Written from teenager girl Fuzzy Mac’s perspective, Grace Beside Me is a  quirky, warmly rendered story of home and family life in a small town. The black&write! judges remarked on the authentic feel of the Indigenous home life of Fuzzy Mac and her grandparents — her guardians since the death of her mother.

Awkward episodes of teen rivalry and romance sit happily alongside the mystery of Gran’s visions and an encounter with a ghost. The story sits against a backdrop of amazing characters including the holocaust survivor who went to school with Einstein; the sleazy, once-good-looking Mayor; the little priest always rushing off to bury someone before the heat gets to them; the wife basher up the road; Lola’s Forest, dedicated to Lola, a traditional Aboriginal woman who met Ned Kelly — and Nan and Pop.

Grace Beside Me interweaves the mundane with the profound and the spiritual — it is full of wisdom and good advice (Fuzzy call’s Nan ‘the queen of all knowing’) on everything from how to to ‘sit a while’ in the bush and connect with country to how to properly hang out the washing.

Sue McPherson is a visual artist living in Eumundi, Queensland. She was born in Sydney to an Aboriginal mother, from Wiradjuri country.  Sue was adopted into the McPherson family, landowners from the Batlow area in News South Wales, when she was very young.

Sue was inspired to write by her two teenage sons. She took a writing workshop in Coolum and, three months later, started writing Grace Beside Me. 

You can buy Grace Beside Me from Fishpond, from Magabala online and good book stores.

This is not what I would have said back in the days when I was studying Classics at the University of Melbourne.  Classical Studies was not actually my initial choice for a second major: it was more a matter of what lectures were available as evening classes. However I soon fell in love with the subject because I had some wonderful lecturers to ignite my interest – notably Professor Michael Osborne, and Denis Pryor who took us for Greek and Roman Lit.  I ended up spending many happy weekends absorbed in the books and journals in the Classics Library but keen as I was, I only browsed and read the required sections of Herodotus and his successor Thucydides. (I never got to Xenophon at all).

When one reads these key texts as a student, there’s an academic agenda underlying that reading.  We had no personal computers or laptops in those days, much less an iPad, but the pen was always busy taking notes for the impending essay or exam.  When one reads these histories for fun, at leisure, and spread over weeks and months of reading only when the mood strikes, one can enjoy the gossipy bits, the quirky details and the observations that remind us that the Ancients were not so very different to us after all.  So any student dropping by to find erudite quotables will be disappointed with my thoughts here - this post is strictly frivolous.  Serious scholars who’ve stumbled here should abandon this site immediately…

The other point to note is that there’s no way I could have afforded these lovely annotated editions with their bountiful maps and illustrations, even if they’d been available back then.  These are handsome investment editions, and even though they are now much cheaper than they were when first published, (and you can get them in paperback) they’re still more expensive than the Penguin versions equivalent to the edition I still have from all those years ago.  (It’s just called The Histories).  The Landmark Series is an indulgence.

The Introduction by Rosalind Thomas explains the caveat for the use of the title, ‘Histories’.  Herodotus was a Greek who lived in Ionia in the 5th century BCE.   Using ‘research’ from his extensive travels, his ‘Histories’ is a narrative explaining how the Greek city states briefly stopped arguing with each other to stave off conquest by the mighty Persian Empire.  Herodotus was actually the world’s first historian, though not in the modern sense of the word.  He blends facts, legends and bizarre digressions about gold-digging ants and hippos with manes like horses.   And, just as the rigours of travel can muddle the details for contemporary travellers who are blessed with cameras, SmartPhones, Moleskine notebooks and travel blogs, Herodotus didn’t always get things right.  He didn’t always write things down immediately; he wasn’t always discerning about the veracity of other travellers’ tales making their way into his histories; and he was a creature of his time, convinced that there were gods running about and influencing events.

His immediate successor, Thucydides, was snooty about Herodotus (without actually naming him) and in some ways with good reason: his History of the Peloponnesian War is more coherent because it’s written as a chronological narrative.  Thucydides skips the gods as agents in human affairs, and (though scholars argue about this, as scholars do) his account appears to be unbiased. But he is coy about his sources, whereas (even when he thinks what they say is ‘silly’), Herodotus almost always attributes his sources, and often offers multiple accounts leaving the reader to sort it out for herself.  I like this, and I also prefer Herodotus’ less dry style.  Thucydides is inclined to be a little rather pompous.  Herodotus is more like a bloke at a bar in a pub, getting sidetracked from the main game, but much more interesting.

Anyway, much of what Herodotus tells us is verifiable using modern scholarship, and his labours give us a marvellous picture of life among the ancients.  It’s for that reason that readers will find that allusions to Herodotus crop up in all kinds of places, and so he’s worth reading much as the Bible is, or Shakespeare.

I can’t remember if Thucydides has much to say about women.   But in Book One Herodotus tells us some interesting anecdotes about two queens of Babylon, Semiramis and Nitokris.  These women had a practical turn of mind, Semiramis organising engineering infrastructure to prevent flooding, and Nitokris diverting the Euphrates with channels as a defensive strategy against enemies.  She had a sense of humour too, for her tomb was inscribed with a tantalising offer of money inside it – along with a stern warning not to touch the tomb unless the money really was needed.  And it was actually left alone until Darius the Persian King (522 -486) happened along.  He quickly succumbed to temptation and the ruse was revealed: no money, just scorn for his greed.

Herodotus was no feminist, though.  He strongly approves of the Babylonian system of auctioning off its women so that the high prices paid for the beautiful could subsidise the dowries of the plain who would otherwise not had husbands at all.   On the other hand he describes another of their customs as disgusting, and I’m inclined to agree.  These unfortunate women, rich or poor, once a year had to ‘sit down in the sanctuary of Aphrodite and have intercourse with a stranger’… receiving silver tossed into their laps as recompense.  (And the silver, being sacred property, can’t be spent either).   Curious how often it is that religious rites involve sexual abuse of women, isn’t it?

But that was not the only case of cruel practices in those days.  There was a fellow called Harpagos who plotted revenge for many years against his rival Astyages and it was this that led to a revolt by Cyrus who went on to become king of the Persians.   Astyages  (who was in power in Media) suffered from that all too common omen that his son would usurp him, so he had sent Harpagos to kill the boy.  When he eventually discovered that Harpagos hadn’t done it, he had the son of Harpagos killed and served him up to the unsuspecting father on a platter.  And then he had the nerve to criticise Harpagos for helping the Persians!  He ended up being enslaved himself in the end, which seems a mild enough punishment to me, though a bit rough on his subjects (the rest of the Medeans) who’d already  had to put up with his cruelty for 35 years.

By the time we get to Book Two, Herodotus seems like an old friend.  I was fascinated to see that more than two millenia ago, the Persians were interested in the origins of life.  They wanted to know where the earliest people on earth emerged.  And how to find out?  With another example of extreme cruelty.  Two infants were selected from among the ‘ordinary people’ and raised in a ‘secluded hut by themselves’, with no human contact and fed only by goats.  This was because Psammetichos (the Egyptian king) thought that the first sounds uttered by these poor children would reveal the answer.  It turned out to be ‘bekos’ (bread) in the Phrygian language so, lo! proof incontrovertible that the Phrygians were first, yeah! (Too bad about the children’s psychological development, eh?)

Sometimes, of course, Herodotus trips himself up with an opinionated observation where he comes off badly.  There’s a sequence which is rather droll for a modern reader who enjoys the benefit of modern astronomy: Herodotus pours scorn on various theories about the origins of the Nile and when it floods.  ‘A man could at least think logically about such things’ he pompously says, and then shares his own complicated little pet theory about the sun being driven off its usual course by storms …

Other observations are just funny.  He records that Egyptian women had only one garment while the men had two  – but fails to tell us what the women wore on laundry day – their birthday suits?  On the other hand he goes into more detail than you really want to know about how they care for, butcher and sacrifice various animals.  As well as the description of the hippo (which proves he never saw one), there’s also a lovely one about a pet crocodile with golden ear-rings and bangles on its front feet.  You can also learn all you ever wanted to know about embalming, and the ‘true’ story of Helen of Troy.

I’m working my way through Herodotus during commercial breaks of the current Masterchef season on TV.  There are soooo many ads I’ve read up to the end of Book 2 and we’re only up to Week 3! I’ll come back to this post when I’ve read some more as and when the mood takes me but I’m not reading this with any timetable in mind – that’s the pleasure of reading it when there’s no exam to pass…

Editor: Robert B Strassler, Introduction by Rosalind Thomas, Translation by Andrea L. Purvis
Title: The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
Publisher: Quercus 2008
ISBN: 9781847246868 (Hardback) 1024 pages

Availability:
Fishpond: The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories

Other titles for your classics shelf in this series:

•  The Landmark Thucydides
• The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika

(These are available as paperbacks, but they are big heavy books of 1000+ pages and will almost certainly fall apart with reading so I recommend the hardbacks.  However, if you wish to find them at Fishpond, follow the hardback links above, and then click the link on Robert Strassler’s name.  eBooks are currently unavailable, but you may also be able to make enquiries from there.  (But I wouldn’t want an eBook version: the maps would not be big enough to see the details, and their value is in being able to see all three of the overlapping maps that show the locator map, the main map and the inset map.)

Bring Larks and Heroes won the Miles Franklin in 1967, the third novel in Thomas Keneally’s long and impressive career as an Australian novelist.  Reading it is a little bit like finding an undiscovered Patrick White, because its style, to my surprise, is modernist – utterly unlike Keneally’s later novels that I’ve read: Schindler’s Ark a.k.a. Schindler’s List (which won the Booker in 1982); The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, (see my review); and The Widow and Her Hero (see my review).  I think it would be most interesting to trace Keneally’s development as a writer through his entire oeuvre – but he’s such a prolific author, there’s a PhD in it, I am sure.

It was the religious allusions, the brutal imagery and that sharp adjective ‘futile‘ on the very first page that made me think of Patrick White:

The afternoon is hot in this alien forest.  The sunlight burrows like a worm in both eye-balls.  His jacket looks pallid, the arms are rotted out of his yellowing shirt, and, under the gaiters, worn for the occasion, the canvas shoes are too light for this knobbly land.  Yet, as already seen, he takes long strides, he moves with vigour.  He’s on his way to Mr Commissary Blythe’s place, where his secret bride, Ann Rush, runs the kitchen and the house.  When he arrives in the Blythe’s futile vegetable garden, and comes mooning up to the kitchen door, he will, in fact, call Ann my secret bride, my bride in Christ.  She is his secret bride.  If Mrs Blythe knew, she would do her best to crucify him., though that he is a spouse in secret today comes largely as the result of a summons from Mrs Blythe six weeks ago. (p1)

That ironically named Mrs Blythe also reminded me of Patrick White’s savage characterisation of women in The Aunt’s Story.  No wonder that His Excellency’s true motive for restricting his own household to the newly imposed ration is to ‘starve his own wife, short of killing her, until her pious gut cracked’(p3).  Here is our first glimpse of her:

So Halloran turned the handle, and came into the room where Mrs Blythe used all the day on her devotions and her leg ulcers.  She sat in a heavy, straight backed Italianate chair.  Her feet rested on a hassock, and there was a rug over her knees.  On a table to her left stood all that was needed to rub, anoint, lance, probe, cauterize and dress her leg.  A squat stone lamp, the spoons and needles and lancet, the rags and jars of stewing poultice were, all together, the staple of her life. For Mrs Blythe had been blessed with a putrid leg as other women are with children. (p4)

Don’t assume, however, that Keneally is misogynist.  Characters of both genders come in for his excoriating pen.  Bring Larks and Heroes is set in an unidentified British penal colony – somewhere remote from regular supply ships and with extremes of climate that add to the misery.  The novel is unsparing in its depiction of the horrors of convict life, reminiscent of For the Term of His Natural Life (see my review) but it satirises the redemption that brings Clarke’s novel to its conclusion.  There are no innocent Sylvias or cleansing waves to wash away sin in Keneally’s novel.

Novels depicting humanity in extremis are not uncommon.  From William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward we see the struggles of conscience when pushed to the limit.  In Keneally’s microcosm of society, Original Sin flourishes.  The Seven Deadly Sins are all there one way or another - wrath, greed, sloth, gluttony, lust, envy, and pride, and in this place where the gaoler suffers hunger and isolation much as the prisoner does, absolute power corrupts absolutely too.

Official sloth sees a eunuch convicted of rape and a man’s prison term unjustly extended; this same man is flogged because of an officer’s lust for revenge and greed for power.  Aboriginal women are crudely used to satisfy lust, while Mrs Blythe’s pride in her own virtue sabotages the only innocent love there is in the novel.  The Commissar satisfies his gluttony by stealing extra rations, and wrath pervades the entire novel.  All the characters, free or bond, envy the life they have lost…

The central character is Phelim Halloran, a complex Irishman whose conscience is tortured by his wavering faith in God and man.  He is the only character capable of love and honour, but tempted by fate, he is only too human.    As the novel reaches its horrific conclusion, Halloran’s poetry is given to His Excellency as a reminder of the ‘varied herd he ruled’ and we see him consign to the flames Halloran’s symbols of hope and redemption – the larks and heroes of the novel’s title.  It is the humanity of these other characters that is called into question by this unforgettable novel.

Now that Bring Larks and Heroes is readily available, I hope that many readers will enjoy it too.

Author: Thomas Keneally
Title: Bring Larks and Heroes
Publisher: Cassell Australia 1967 (First Edition)
ISBN: none, for this edition
Source: Personal library

Availability:
Fishpond: Bring Larks and Heroes (Text Classics)
Book Depository: Bring Larks and Heroes

He was born in Toowoomba in 1968, and attended university in Brisbane.  He has lived in Sydney and Melbourne and travelled widely in Europe, Africa and North America.  He now lives in Brisbane.

His first novel, The Comfort of Figs, was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Unpublshed Manuscript Awards in 2005 after which he became Emerging Writer in Residence at the Queensland Writers’ Centre.  The novel was then published by UQP in 2008 and received very favourable reviews (including mine, see it here).   His new novel is Closer to Stone (UQP, 2012), which not only passes the ‘Second Novel’ hurdle with flying colours but also shows an author not afraid to tackle confronting contemporary issues. (You can see my review here and a Sensational Snippet here.)

I think Simon is a great new talent so I was delighted when Simon agreed to participate in Meet an Aussie Author! Here are his answers to my questions:

I was born on the rim of the Great Dividing Range in Toowoomba, overlooking the Lockyer Valley.

When I was a child I wrote directions on treasure maps to help navigate the lantana tunnels in the bush behind my childhood home.

The person who encouraged/inspired/mentored me to write is/was my father – a man who composed a thousand poems across his life-time as gifts for friends and family to mark events in their lives.

I write in the early morning when the world is quiet and the night has done its work sweeping my mind clean of the previous day’s clutter.

I write when I can, as much as I can.

Research is seductive.

I keep my published work/s on the shelves of my library.

On the day my first book was published, I … I can’t recall where I was or what I was doing that day. But I do remember when I got news that my first poem had been published, many years before.  I was ringing back to Australia from the main post office in Bamako, Mali.   My exhilaration was spontaneous and unrestrained.  To the crowded African post office, it must have been comical to watch, if not downright bizarre.

At the moment I’m writing a piece on what a novelist might have to say about ‘multiculturalism’ – an exploration of the relationship between imagination and empathy.

When I’m stuck for an idea/word/phrase, I  listen to music, walk, make a coffee, or sleep.  In my experience, if it’s important enough, the subconscious will find it.

***

I am rather chuffed to learn that Simon and I have something in common – because not only did my mother write poems for her family too, but we also had treasure hunts when we were kids and spent ages dreaming up maps with obscure clues!

To buy Simon’s books, click the book covers above, or these links:

• The Comfort of Figs
• Closer to Stone

The other regional winners were

Regional Winner, Africa
Jacques Strauss, South Africa The Dubious Salvation of Jack V, Jonathan Cape

Regional Winner, Asia
Shehan Karunatilaka, Sri Lanka, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, Random House

Regional Winner, Canada and Europe
Riel Nason, Canada, The Town that Drowned, Goose Lane Editions

Regional Winner, Caribbean
Alecia McKenzie, Jamaica, Sweetheart, Peepal Tree Press

Launched in 1987, Magabala Books is a not-for-profit Indigenous publishing house based in Broome, W.A. that aims to promote, preserve and publish Indigenous Australian culture.  They have offered to donate a copy of Grace Beside Me, which has just been released.  It’s by Sue McPherson, who was winner of the inaugural black&write! kuril dhagan Indigenous Writing Fellowship.

Be in it to win it: Any Australian readers who signs up for Indigenous Literature Week is eligible (including those who’ve already signed).  (I’m sorry, Kiwis!) Please indicate your interest in the Comments box below and I’ll select a winner using a random generator by the end of this week i.e. Friday May 24th.

All entries from Australian residents will be eligible but it is a condition of entry that if you are the winner, you must contact me with a postal address to pass on to Magabala Books by the deadline that will be specified in the blog post that announces the winner.   (I’ll redraw if this deadline isn’t met).

Here’s the blurb for Grace Beside Me from the Magabala press release:

Written from teenager girl Fuzzy Mac’s perspective, Grace Beside Me is a  quirky, warmly rendered story of home and family life in a small town. The black&write! judges remarked on the authentic feel of the Indigenous home life of Fuzzy Mac and her grandparents — her guardians since the death of her mother.

Awkward episodes of teen rivalry and romance sit happily alongside the mystery of Gran’s visions and an encounter with a ghost. The story sits against a backdrop of amazing characters including the holocaust survivor who went to school with Einstein; the sleazy, once-good-looking Mayor; the little priest always rushing off to bury someone before the heat gets to them; the wife basher up the road; Lola’s Forest, dedicated to Lola, a traditional Aboriginal woman who met Ned Kelly — and Nan and Pop.

Grace Beside Me interweaves the mundane with the profound and the spiritual — it is full of wisdom and good advice (Fuzzy call’s Nan ‘the queen of all knowing’) on everything from how to to ‘sit a while’ in the bush and connect with country to how to properly hang out the washing.

Sue McPherson is a visual artist living in Eumundi, Queensland. She was born in Sydney to an Aboriginal mother, from Wiradjuri country.  Sue was adopted into the McPherson family, landowners from the Batlow area in News South Wales, when she was very young.

Sue was inspired to write by her two teenage sons. She took a writing workshop in Coolum and, three months later, started writing Grace Beside Me. 

You can buy Grace Beside Me from Fishpond, from Magabala online and good book stores.

The title, as the reader discovers in the concluding chapter, is apt.  The story begins with a family reunion of sorts: Ruth and her two children Giordana and Ben have moved in with Natalie and Peter and their sons Alek and Sasha because Ruth has left her husband.  Giordana’s is the first of multiple perspectives, each revealing events from their own point-of-view, from different points in the family’s timeline.  But from the normalcy of family life Amsterdam weaves a little magic: each character has a special gift, one that challenges the reader’s view of reality.  Giordana, for example, can become invisible, as and when she pleases.

This invisibility is not like H.G.Wells’ The Invisible Man , where invisibility is an irreversible curse that’s a catalyst for crime.  Griffin’s self-inflicted condition leaves him with few choices: invisible, he is a victim of small town rejection of anything that’s different, and then he is betrayed.  Amsterdam’s riff on this idea from Plato’s Ring of Gyges in The Republic is more sophisticated and more morally complex.

The Ring of Gyges is a parable which reveals how people would behave morally if they had no fear of being caught out.  Amsterdam asks, how would a teenage girl behave if she could eavesdrop on household conversations, overhear those uncensored adult discussions or follow an older sibling on a romantic assignation? How would a middle-aged woman use her knowledge of the innermost thoughts of other people, in her work as a palliative care nurse or in her own love life?  Would a troubled soul who could fly, soar away never to return - or is there a homing instinct? Would it be satisfying to change the past to ease regret?

It is the chapter about Peter, lost in a morass of grief after the sudden death of his wife, that moved me most.  Peter receives what he thinks is a senseless gift: he can wish for peaches out of season, but not for the one thing he really wants.

Peter’s sister-in-law has come to sort out Natalie’s clothes…

Ruth wrapped herself in Natalie’s pale blue cardigan, saying, ‘I always loved this, but I don’t know if I could stand to wear it.’

Peter nodded once, to let her know that it was all right if she did.  Natalie used to put it on for gardening.  It mystified him, but she always managed to keep it spotless.  Would he be able to stand it if Ruth wore it till it was stained and moth-eaten? If she didn’t take it, could he let it go to the Salvation Army – that recycler of lives? Yes, yes.  He tried to consider it all.  The clothes were there, they were connected to Natalie, but they weren’t her.  He saw each garment in crisp detail.  They didn’t make her her, any more than Peter had – or any more than she had made him him.  Peter had not been her conductor and Natalie had not been his.  This was the clarity he had been waiting for.  You live your life adjusting the notes, meddling with tempos.  You silence the brass, chase crescendos, but only you get to be the conductor.  They had stood next to each other on different podiums, waving their little sticks for all those years.

This was why he couldn’t bring her back.  It was as if the power itself had come to underline this point: it was his life to master.  The thought that they were truly different people didn’t depress him now.  No, it made his mind rise, excited him that they had stayed in tune for as long as they had.  They had done well.  (p228)

This is true wisdom, and the imagery is perfect.

Is there magic in this book?  Magic realism only ‘works’ if it belongs in the story.  There should be no ‘huh??’ moment to befuddle or irritate the reader.  Karenlee Thompson’s wizardry works in 8 States of Catastrophe, and Glenda Guest’s works in Siddon Rock because all of us moving through the vast Australian Outback have yearned to be there without the intervening miles.  These storytellers have vanquished ‘are we there yet?’ with a stroke of the pen.  But Amsterdam’s story is urban, its map is the map of the human soul muddling around in the 21st century family.  His magic is ambiguous: we are never really sure if the gifts these characters discover come from their own inner life, or from Alek, with a mental illness that shapes a different reality for himself.  From the outset, it doesn’t matter.  The magic, real or imagined, works.  It reveals the mysteries of life to the characters…

Amsterdam’s characterisation shifts across generations with authentic portraits.  Giordana’s perspective is darkly comic, self-deprecating and wry, as an adolescent view of the world often is; Ruth’s middle-aged persona is self-doubting yet professionally confident.  The passage of time is lightly sketched: Amsterdam has an impressionist style that avoids cumbersome detail.

I liked this book very much, and am glad I hoarded a copy of Things We Didn’t See Coming.  (It’s lurking on the A shelf, I hope!)

Highly recommended.

This book has been widely reviewed.  Cate Kennedy at The Monthly enjoyed Amsterdam’s ‘ferocious intelligence and playful curiosity’; Greg Day at the SMH had reservations about its ambiguities

You can find out more about Steven Amsterdam here.

Author: Steve Amsterdam
Title: What the Family Needed
Publisher: Sleepers Publishing 2011
ISBN: 9781742702117
Source: Personal Library, purchased from Readings $24.95

Availability: What the Family Needed
Book Depository: What the Family Needed

The 2012 SMH Best Young Novelists Awards were announced at the Sydney Writers’ Festival today.

Jennifer Mills for Gone (see my review) and a Sensational Snippet

Melanie Joosten for Berlin Syndrome (see my review)

Rohan Wilson for The Roving Party (see my review) and a Sensational Snippet

Congratulations to these wonderful young novelists, their editors and publishers!