Further to my previous post back in April, I am pleased to announce ANZ LitLovers is hosting Indigenous Writers Week in the first week in July to coincide with NAIDOC Week here in Australia.
However, your choices aren’t restricted just to Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Maori literature. Participants are welcome to join in reading indigenous literature from anywhere in the world, from Canada to Guyana, from Native American to Basque to Pashtun or Ixcatec. (For a list of indigenous people of the world, see this list at Wikipedia.) As to how we define indigenous, that’s up to indigenous people themselves. If they identify as indigenous themselves, well, that’s good enough for me.
I’d love it if you join me in exploring the fascinating world of indigenous story-telling - so – with help from many fantastic contributors, I have generated a reading list to inspire you. For reasons of space and time and personal preference my reading list is limited to literary fiction titles by indigenous Australian and New Zealand authors but participants are free to choose any form you like – short story, memoir, biography, whatever takes your fancy! The permanent link to the reading list is on the ANZLL Books You Must Read page in the top menu, and you can also find it in the list of Pages near the bottom of the RH Menu.
Thanks to my fellow book bloggers – Kinna at Kinna Reads, Iris on Books, and Kim from Reading Matters, who inspired me to try this:)
Interested? Sign up now to give yourself time to source the book you want to read, and please, leave a comment here on this page after signing up. This post will become the host page where you can post your comments about the book and/or a link to your review on your own blog or at GoodReads or Library Thing.
To sign up
1. If you have a blog or a Library Thing or GoodReads account, click on the Mr Linky image below. Mr Linky will open up on a new page where you enter your name and blog/LT or GR URL. If you don’t have a blog or one of these accounts, just use the comments box below.
2. Tell us what you think you might read in the comments box. (You can always change your mind later if you want to).
If you want to check that you’ve signed up with Mr Linky, refresh this page, click on the widget again, and you will see something that looks like this and you should be able to see your name on it.
Blood, a debut novel by Tony Birch, has been shortlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award.
In the blurb at Fishpond, it’s described as ‘an epic moral fable, a gothic odyssey set on the back roads of Australia’. It’s the story of two kids, thirteen-year-old Jesse and his little sister Rachel, aged eight. They have the kind of mother they’d be better off without. Her name is Gwen.
That’s not me, sitting in judgement. It’s Jesse, who narrates this story, who tells us so. Gwen’s life is a disaster, and her adolescent son has finally given up on her. She’s been on drugs and drink throughout his whole life, there’s been a succession of men but the relationships never last, and she makes endless promises that she never keeps. She has occasional dead-end jobs but they never have any money, and he’s learned not only not to have any qualms about skipping out on the rent, but also how to steal petrol, food from supermarkets and anything else they need.
There’s no affection in these kids’ lives. They have no friends their own ages, no extended family to offer support except a pallid grandfather. They have no amusements except obsolete TVs scrounged from nature-strips: Gwen doesn’t even do Christmas. She’s always angry, and constantly bawls commands at the kids. Jesse has learned the hard way that for now, he has to just keep quiet, and do what she says.
What Jesse craves is a quiet, routine sort of life. But apart from a transient episode when Gwen takes up with an ex-con called Jon, and a sojourn at his grandfather’s, he doesn’t get that. This is a bleak life indeed.
(The alternative view of masculinity offered by Jon and the possibility of an ex-con as model parent is refreshing. Who knew that blokes learned to bake cakes in the nick?)
So as far as Jesse is concerned, the only person Gwen cares about is herself. The bond that matters to him is the one he has with Rachel, and he’s been taking responsibility for her since she was born. In the chaos of their lives, school is only ever intermittent, and welfare authorities have little chance of catching up with them because they’re always on the move. On the one occasion when they did, he caused awful trouble for a foster-carer because they separated him from his sister. He is determined that they will always be together.
Trouble looms as Gwen loses her looks, and the men that she attracts are violent, ruthless criminals. At the same time, Jesse becomes old enough to imagine a different future for himself, but not old enough to realise the risks involved in antagonising the kind of men his feckless mother has brought into their lives.
Birch uses allusions from To Kill A Mockingbird to conjure scenes from the B/W film: Rachel is inspired to have courage like Scout’s; Jesse quickly suppresses his longing for a father like Atticus. But even for a moral fable, I found this book too black-and-white in conception, like many YA novels. The perspective is adolescent but there is no coming-of-age nor redemption. While the bad guys are stock characters who deserve what they get without a backward glance, Jesse’s view of his mother is hyper-critical: she has no redeeming features and there is only blame for the hardships that – in the overlong lead-up to the road journey - are laid on with a trowel.
There is no psychological insight: the boy moves on only from grim resignation to mad heroic impulse and dogged determination to survive the odyssey that ensues. Jesse’s belief in his ability to outwit everyone else is sadly only too similar to his mother’s immature self-delusions. He even mimics Gwen’s demands for unquestioning obedience when he invokes Rachel’s blind trust, telling her that she must always do what he says for their survival. The plot seems to conspire in Jesse’s view of himself as a saviour who must do whatever it takes, with Rachel trailing after him. Two events which masquerade as heroic exploits stretch credibility: I can hear the Year 9 English classes discussing the question of justification already…
While some readers may find that the simple prose suits the age of the narrator and the bleak tone of the book, I found it lacking in the literary qualities that I look for in Miles Franklin nominations. This passage comes from a page selected at random: two savage dogs are circling their car.
The dogs went quiet all of a sudden. I looked across the yard and saw an old man hobbling towards the car. He was dragging a leather whip behind him. His skin was black and his bare arms looked like charcoaled tree branches.
He stopped and spoke quietly to the dogs. ‘Get off, you fellas, get off.’
When they didn’t move he threw his arm back and cracked the whip across the back of the dog at Gwen’s window. It jumped in the air and slammed itself against the car door. Rachel screamed and the dog circling the car took off from where it had come from, yelping in pain, like it had been whipped too.
The old man gave the second dog a couple more cracks before it gave up. It dropped down from the car, looked at the old man and opened the side of its mouth and snarled. Yellow froth dripped from its cracked tongue. The old man raised the whip in the air to be sure the dog got a good look at it.
‘You get off, old fella. Or you can have some more of this, here. You don’t wanna try me, boy.’ (p124)
However, Tony Birch’s poetry and other writing excerpted in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature is stunning, with striking imagery and a powerful emotional punch. Here’s an example, which shows that Birch’s plain style in Blood is an authorial choice.
Beruk moves quietly through the canyons of the city – all is stone still now. He passes the winking lights – imitating life. He listens for machines grinding to failure. Beruk obseves his reflection in the flaws of glass, now inhabited by the petrified few.
(‘The True History of Beruk’, in The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter, Allen & Unwin, 2008)
Jo Case reviewed Blood for Readings and found that it ‘delivers edge-of-your-seat suspense and engrossing characterisation in equal measures’, while Conrad Walters at the SMH thought that Birch ‘deftly balances the naiveté of youth and insights forged through hardship’. And obviously the Miles Franklin judges loved it!
Author: Tony Birch
Title: Blood
Publisher: UQP (University of Queensland Press), 2011
ISBN: 9780702239274
Source: Review copy courtesy of UQP
The winner of 2012 Winner of the National Biography Award is Dr Martin Thomas, for his 2011 biography, The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist. The prize is worth $25,000.
Mathews was a 19th century anthropologist, so this biography will interest many people who are keen to learn more about the cultural history of our indigenous peoples.
Well, 24 hours ago the Shadow IFFP announced its choice of winner for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: we selected From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon. All of us felt that it was an exceptionally good book and were happy to endorse it as our winner.
However today in London the actual winner was announced – and I’m just as pleased to see that Blooms of Darkness by Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld was the official winner. It’s a very fine book, and you can see my review here.
My fellow juror-and-conspirator from Australia, Tony from Tony’s Reading List has written a thoughtful post (in his usual inimitable style!) about the experience of contributing to one of these Shadow juries, and well, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Check it out here.
The real winners, I think, are those who take a step out of their comfort zone and read a book in translation. As the chair of the Shadow Jury, Stu from Winston’s Dad often says, it’s an opportunity to ‘read the world one book at a time’!
Check out some of the other Translated Books I’ve reviewed by clicking here, or on the tag in the RH menu.
Author: Aharon Appelfeld
Title: Blooms of Darkness, A Novel
Translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green
Publisher: Schocken Books, 2010
ISBN: 9780805242805
The 2012 Kibble and Dobbie Award shortlists have been announced. The winners will be announced on July 25th.
According to the Trust website:
The Awards recognise the works of women writers of fiction or non-fiction classified as ‘life writing’. This includes novels, autobiographies, biographies, literature and any writing with a strong personal element.
The Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers is worth $30,000 and recognises the work of established women writers. The nominees are
Simon Cleary’s second novel, Closer to Stone is a stunning novel. It opens in Casablanca, where (as shown in the Sensational Snippet that I posted last week) the central character Bas Adams is overwhelmed by a culture completely alien to a country boy from The Springs near Toowoomba. He is on a quest to find his missing brother.
Bas has lived in the shadow of his more impressive older brother since childhood. The boys’ bombastic father makes no attempt to conceal his preference for Jack, who has fulfilled the family’s military destiny by becoming a peace-keeper with the UN in the Western Sahara. It is unthinkable that his mysterious disappearance could be desertion. Bas is expected to put his (by inference, trivial) work as a sculptor on hold and to find out what’s happened. And despite some vaguely ambivalent feelings, Bas, because he loves his brother, does what he’s told. He’s not a psychologically strong personality like his brother, he’s a follower.
Deserts, despite dangers well-known to any Aussie, seem to be romantic places, and Cleary masterfully evokes the ascetic beauty of the Sahara and its isolated settlements. Images from the films The English Patient and Lawrence of Arabia spring to mind; we feel the winds, we can almost taste the gritty sands. A laconic Aussie called Logan at the military base, and a chance meeting with a beautiful American volunteer called Sophe provide leads, and Bas – no longer alone – sets off for places ever more remote. Ironically, the journey seems to become a little safer as public transport and corrupt officials in larger towns are left behind, but private transport over rough roads is rugged indeed. The discomfort of bouncing around on the tray of a ute in extremes of heat and cold is visceral. And there are still significant hazards, not the least of which is suspicion and hostility against westerners who don’t respect the local culture.
Bas, blundering through a culture he doesn’t understand, does his best. He reads his guide-book obsessively, he adjusts to a backpacker kind of life without any of the pleasures of the trip. But he never learns more than the most rudimentary Arabic, relying instead on his school French (which is, of course, the language of the only too recently removed French Occupation). What’s more, his own faith is Catholic and he’s affronted when Lhoussine, a passenger on the bus finds the Bible wanting in comparison to the Qur’an. Bas surprises himself a bit with his own defensive reaction: although he was moved by religious ceremony as a boy and he has nostalgic memories of his dead mother’s Book of Saints, his religion in adult life has been low-key. He’s had no experience of religious extremism, and is mildly surprised by Logan’s scorn for religious schools which teach children to chant a holy book and not much else. Bas is completely taken aback when he’s harshly rebuked for depicting the human form in a small scupture that he’s made.
At this stage, however, he’s prepared to consider that Islamic art captures a kind of purity, because as a sculptor, he sometimes feels a kind of ambivalence about the assault on the stone.
Nothing in the world of The Springs had perpared me for this. Suddenly all those Arabesques I’d seen, all those tiled mosaics on the floors of those hotel foyers began to make sense. The fading hennaed patterns on Sophe’s hands when she held them out to me. Look, see. Flowers and plants indivisible. An infinite pattern extending beyond the visible world into the eternal.
A part of me had registered the absence but hadn’t yet translated it into thought. Just another of the countless things that had disturbed me since I’d been there, unsettling in a way I hadn’t even realised. Sometimes the most profound things are the most difficult to see. That to introduce the human into art might be an affront to the perfection of God.
My own nagging thought came back: that carving stone, no matter the image, is an affront to beauty. (p152)
Naïve he may be, and still hidebound by the kind of insular life he’s led, nevertheless he is vaguely open to considering ideas from a different point of view. And so he is utterly unprepared psychologically for an act of terrorism which transforms his life.
Tackling motives for and responses to terrorism is a brave venture, for any author. It’s fraught territory. When the novel becomes a meditation on of a change of heart provoked by religious extremism (both Christian and Islamic) it risks censure from both ends of the tolerance/intolerance continuum. It won’t please moralists of righteous anger who preach Old Testament retribution or moralists in opposition, those who preach forgiveness. We have seen this dichotomy for ourselves when the bereaved of 9/11 and the Bali bombings are interviewed. Cleary’s depiction of Bas’s response seems utterly realistic to me but is the first I’ve seen so bravely tackled in literature. While Bas’s tortured path towards redemption made me feel uneasy, I think the power of fiction to open a window on feelings usually suppressed is not to be denied.
This is a signficant, thoughtful and thought-provoking book.
Angela Meyer reviewed the novel for the SMH as did Jay Daniel Thompson for The Age.
Author: Simon Cleary
Title: Closer to Stone Publisher: UQP (University of Queensland Press), 2012
ISBN: 9780702239229
Source: Review copy courtesy of UQP
Reviewing a psychological thrillers is always a bit difficult to do without revealing spoilers, (especially if the reviewer is like me and doesn’t read very many of the genre) but some are more difficult than others. Berlin Syndrome, the debut novel of Melbourne author Melanie Joosten, relies for its impact on the reader’s gradual realisation that things are not what they seem. So I’m not going to tell you much about this book at all except that you ought not read it late at night and not at all if you are claustrophobic.
There are (almost) only two characters. Clare is a photojournalist on leave from her job in Australia, travelling through eastern Europe. She’s researching a book about Soviet architecture, waiting patiently to take her shots so that there are never any people in the photo. Andi is a Berliner, a somewhat reluctant teacher of English. They meet by chance near Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, and are attracted to each other. And she goes home with him.
You have been warned!
Author: Melanie Joosten
Title: Berlin Syndrome Publisher: Scribe 2011
ISBN:9781921844140
Source: Personal library, purchased from Embiggen Books $29.95
The winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is shortly to be announced in London, so it’s time for the Shadow IFFP Jury to announce its choice of winner.
The following is the press release from Stu, from Winston’s Dad the Chair of this year’s Shadow IFFP.
*drum-roll*
I want to thank all my fellow Judges for making this a successful first year for the Shadow IFFP. [That's Rob, Simon, Gary, Mark, fellow Aussie Tony, and me].
We all undertook the journey of judging the 2012 shadow IFFP eight weeks ago. This journey first took us to Asia, 1980’s Tokyo (or is it?), a mother’s disappearance in Seoul and a chilling look at the AIDS crisis in rural China. Then we read two Hebrew novels: the first set in the present, introducing us to an old man and a village; the other in World War Two, showing us a young Jewish man on the run, hiding in a most unexpected place.
Next, it was off to Germany, and two books dealing with death. In the first, a husband is shocked at discovering his wife’s view of him after her death; in the other a women called Alice has friends and lovers alike die around her. At this point, we relaxed for a while in Hungary, soaking in a little of the country’s rich history – and its hidden sexual underground – until deciding to head north to make the acquaintance of an eccentric Icelandic autodidact with an interest in sea creatures and the occult.
We then journeyed further into Scandinavia, meeting a professor stuck in a mid-life crisis, who is witness to a murder, and a roguish leader of a Jewish community in a Second-World-War ghetto, before two Italian novels introduced us to a villain of the top order in 19th-century Europe, and a shipwrecked man with a forgotten heritage. Skipping forward to 1980s Paris, we learned about a group of friends facing the AIDS crisis head on, while a trip back in time courtesy of a Basque writer took us to Colonial Africa and a man heading into an army camp gone rogue.
This journey hasn’t been the easiest for us as judges, as most of the books dealt with death and the darker side of human life. However, they show the wealth of literary talent around the world and the wonderful work modern translators carry out. We as judges have discovered a lot about each other, digesting and discussing the books and slowly trimming our list down to our winner… and it is with great pleasure that we announce that winner:
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón Translated by Victoria Cribb Published in the UK by Telegram Books
We all liked – and some of us loved – this book; nobody really had a bad word to say about it. All of us felt entranced by the writing and by Sjón’s voice. Through Jonas’ eyes, the writer captured 17th-century Iceland so well, and this was helped by Victoria Cribb’s translation which, through its usage of archaic vocabulary and grammatical forms, gave it the feel of a book that had just been unearthed, not written. From the Mouth of the Whale is a worthy first winner of the Shadow Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Aboriginal readers are advised that this review contains the names of deceased persons.
Like everyone else my age, I learned at school that Tasmanian Aborigines were extinct. We learned that they died of diseases inadvertently introduced by White settlers and that the name of the last Aborigine was Truganini. In the 1970s, when Tasmanian Aboriginal activists came to national prominence, I became aware that this information was wrong. Lyndall Ryan’s new book, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803 tells the history of the indigenous people of our island state, and consigns the myth of their extinction to the dustbin. It’s a book every Australian should read.
The Preface gets the stuff about the History Wars out of the way. Let me say as a non-academic, that the sooner this tacky episode in our cultural history is dead and buried, the better. As a non-indigenous Australian, I am interested in the history of the indigenous peoples of this country, and I’m keen to learn from scholars of integrity whose work is accessible to the general reader. Professor Ryan’s book fits my criteria admirably.
The book begins with a biographical sketch of the woman whose portrait is on the front cover: Fanny Cochrane Smith (1834-1905), from the Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island. She was the only Tasmanian Aborigine from Wybalenna to leave descendants: she married William Smith, a sawyer and former convict and they had eleven children, six boys and five girls. In 1854, in recognition of her claim as a Tasmanian Aborigine, the colonial government paid her an annuity of £48, increasing it to £100 in 1876 after the death of Truganini, and granting her 300 acres of land. From 1854 to 1857 she ran a boarding house in Hobart and after that she and William took up land at Oyster Cove where she hunted and gathered bush foods and medicines, wove traditional baskets and maintained religious practices. In 1899 and 1903 (more than 20 years after the death of Truganini) she recorded Tasmanian Aboriginal songs on wax cylinders, preserving her people’s musical culture for posterity.
How on earth did the myth that Truganini was the ‘last’ Tasmanian Aborigine ever gain any credence? The answer to that comes late in the book when Ryan explains how her remains were desecrated and put on display in the Hobart Museum: it was populist myth-making backed up by ‘science’. It was also because Tasmanians wanted to believe that their island’s troublesome indigenous people were extinct. It has taken a very long time indeed for this disinformation to be overturned.
Even this recent (presumably) well-intentioned clip of Fanny’s recordings from YouTube perpetuates the ‘Last of her Race’ concept. You can hear her clear, confident voice and (from 1:48 onwards) her song.
Part I of Tasmanian Aborigines begins with the prehistory of Tasmania, in the Pleistocene era when it was joined to the mainland by sea The Tasmanian Aborigines were then the most southerly peoples on the globe, and, along with their creation myths, the stories that have come down to us from this time tell how they came by land but that water later covered the land-bridge. These stories are confirmed by modern archaeological and geological research which establishes that the waters of Bass Strait rose about 10,000 years ago. Over the 40,000 years of their occupation, the Tasmanian Aborigines adapted to significant changes in climate, expanding their territories and developing new technologies such as fire-stick farming and stone traps for fishing. By about 2000 years ago, the island was called Trouwunna by some of its people, a name I rather like.
Ryan consistently uses the term ‘invasion’ to describe the arrival of British settlers, and that’s what it was. Ryan has used the work of archaeologist Rhys Jones and copious documentary sources to detail the range and sophistication of the Tasmanian occupation of Trouwanna: there are maps and tables which show that the Tasmanian Aborigines had clearly established prior ownership of the land. They built dwellings (as anyone would, in Tassie’s brisk climate); they had grazing lands and mining sites; they made artworks and sophisticated tools; they had a complex cosmology underlying their spiritual practices; and they had a clearly defined social organisation consisting of family, clan and nation. There were four major languages spoken, which have similarities to the languages spoken in Victoria and parts of South Australia.
At the time of the fiercely resisted invasion the population was somewhere between the contemporary conservative estimate of 6000 and colonial estimates of between 6000 and 10,000 people. Sifting the evidence, Ryan concludes that there were probably about 7000 people and the population was probably growing. There were at least 48 clans as identified by the anthropologist Norman Plomley, and there may have been as many as 100. Their political grouping into nations was recognised and named as such by the colonial ethnographer G.A. Robinson, who also noted their patriotism as ’a distinguishing trait in the aboriginal character’ (p207). Rhys Jones’ research indicates that there were nine nations in Trouwanna, six of them in the north and east and three in the less hospitable south-west. (You only need to do a quick circuit of the island by car to understand why.) A table on pages 15-16 lists the nations, the names of the clans and the clan locations. The South East Nation, for example, included the Mouheneener at Hobart; the Nuenonne at Bruny Island; the Mellukerdee at Huon River; and the Lyluequonny at Recherche Bay.
For each nation, assembling irrefutable evidence from a plethora of sources, Ryan describes their shelters, their diet, their hunting and gathering practices, their tools and their crafts. She notes their political relationships with other nations. She names their languages and the names of some of the chiefs that were known to the colonial interlopers.
Take a moment to consider that. Just over 200 years ago, there was an ordered, thriving, well-established population of about 6000-7000 people in Tasmania. And then - within about 30 years – that society was destroyed by colonial settlement and the people almost wiped out.
This is not ancient history like the Assyrians or the Persians or the Babylonians…this is recent. Contemporary descendants of these Tasmanian Aborigines can trace their family histories back to this time through oral histories confirmed by the documentary record, just as I can with my family history. It’s about time Australia dealt with this issue, starting with learning the Black History of our country.
Ryan pulls no punches. She tells us that the first massacre took place at Risdon in May 1804. The perpetrators were able to act with impunity because of a court judgement in Sydney which had overturned the legal status of Aborigines from British subjects with legal rights, to ‘savages’ with none. Judge Advocate Richard Atkins had ruled that ‘it was impossible to bring an Aborigine to trial for a crime committed against either a colonist or another Aborigine’ thus justifying sanctions without trial and violent reprisals. Determined to settle the island to ward off any potential French claims, Lieutenant-Governor David Collins[1] implemented a policy of ‘distance and fear’ to clear Aborigines out of the new settlement and adjacent hunting grounds, and Ryan is unequivocal about the effects:
There is no doubt that the Mouheneer clan, whose territory included Hobart, experienced a massive population decline in this period, and the absence of any information about any clan around Launceston suggests a similar outcome. (p17)
Ryan documents the sorry history of events, including well-meant attempts to educate orphaned Aboriginal boys such as George van Dieman in England so that they could become leaders. She explains the emergence of a Creole society between 1808 and 1820, noting how some women were abducted by sealers and others traded by their own chiefs. She distinguishes between conflicts: while the over-zealous hunting practices of sealers and whalers compromised the sustainability of the catch, they did not encroach on land with permanent settlements because the work was seasonal. She names resistance fighters: Musquito, Mannalargenna, Kickerterpoller (Black Tom) and William Lyttleton Quamby; Montpeliater, Tongerlongter and Petalega; Umarrah and Wareternatterlerhener. She names some of the numerous orphaned children taken into domestic service, notably Mahinna (about whom Richard Flanagan wrote most movingly in his novel Wanting. She observes that the basic human rights of these children were mostly ignored and that even after the 1833 Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire, ‘many colonists still considered that blackness was synonymous with slavery’ (p69).
It’s ironic that I remember learning about the Napoleonic Wars at school but nothing about their impact in Tasmania. When the wars ended, discontented returned officers and gentlemen who felt they were owed recompense for their war service were (like soldier-settlers after WW1 in Australia) fobbed off with grants of land in remote places. In both cases, that land granted to them was falsely held to be terra nullius, land belonging to no one. The Napoleonic veterans fared better than their WW1 counterparts, however, because their grants of land were accompanied by a convict labour-force. It was this massive invasion of pastoral settlers that effected the transformation of Tasmania from a creole small-scale agricultural society – with some accommodation between roughly equal numbers of indigenous people and the settlers – to a pastoral society. The colonial population surged from about 2000 to 23,500 by 1830. There was bound to be resistance, and there was.
Attacks, reprisals, and atrocities against unarmed women and children on both sides led to martial law being declared from 1828-1830. Pursuit and roving parties, of the type depicted in Rohan Wilson’s novel The Roving Party were despatched by Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur whose policy it was to effect a surrender in what was by then open warfare. Arthur understood clearly what the settlers were up against: the remnants of the Tasmanian Aboriginal nations were determined to expel the encroaching pastoralists from their kangaroo hunting grounds. (There are several useful maps which show the rapid extent of settlement across the island, and 17 places where mass killings of Aborigines took place between 1826-28).
Gilbert Robertson [who led a large roving party] told Arthur that the Aborigines were fighting for their country:
They consider every injury they can inflict upon white men as an act of duty and patriotic, and however they may dread the punishment which our laws inflict upon them, they consider the sufferers of those punishments as martyrs of their country … having ideas of their natural rights which would astonish most of our European statesmen. (p111)
What really shocked me in reading this book was the Arthur’s ‘Black Line’ of 1830-31. I had never heard of it, and I bet most other Australians haven’t either.
Arthur bowed to the inevitable. On 9 September he called on every able bodied male colonist to assemble on 7 October, at one of seven designated places in the Settled Districts, to join in a drive to sweep the Aborigines from the region. The levée en masse quickly became known as the ‘Black Line’. The war which had now been raging for nearly four years was taking its toll on both sides. In the twenty-three months between the declaration of martial law on 1 November 1828 and the announcement of military operations on 9 September 1830, at least sixty colonists, including five women and four children, had been killed in the Settled Districts. It is estimated that 300 Aborigines were killed in the same period, with at least 100 of these killed in mass killings of six or more. (p130)
Let’s be clear about this. This was not a case of some redneck settlers ‘overstepping the mark’ on the frontier. This was a military operation coordinated by the military commander of the colony. Ryan quotes Charles Esdaile, who she says is the ‘leadinghistorian of the Peninsular War’:
the Line was more like ‘a very large scale’ Scottish Highlands shooting party: the soldiers and colonists were the beaters and the Aborigines were the prey waiting to be flushed out of the bracken’. (p133)
By the time the Black War was over an estimated 1000 people had died, an Aboriginal to colonial death ratio of 4:1 . In a country littered with war memorials, there is none commemorating the Fallen in this war.
So, what became of the remnant Tasmanian Aboriginal population? They came under the protection of G.A.Robinson, ethnographer and humanist, and Ryan is insistent on the point that whatever the tragic consequences of his attempts, this man was the first to try to learn about the Tasmanian Aborigines, and without him they would certainly have been exterminated, probably by 1835. His journals reveal just how hard the settlers tried to do just that.
But it is chilling reading; Ryan documents Robinson’s search parties to locate the pitifully small numbers still surviving in the bush and his attempts to persuade them to surrender. But as fast as he brought them in to ‘sanctuary’ at Wybalenna, they died. They died for all sorts of reasons but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many died of a broken heart. It must have been ghastly for them to witness one death after another.
Still, the resilience for which Aborigines are noted reasserted itself. They paid only token attention to expectations of ‘civilised’ behaviour. They hunted mutton-birds, initiation and religious ceremonies were held, languages were retained and customary ways were practised as best they could. In time, they demanded return to the mainland and it was then that Fanny’s Cochrane’s claims were recognised. However her death soon led to the denial of Aboriginal existence, and it took a long, long campaign and sophisticated leadership in the 1970s before there was any recognition of the existence of Islander Aboriginal communities and their claims.
I think it’s important to note that Ryan’s tone is calm and measured. While occasionally the reader can sense her disgust about what happened, she is not making a case for guilt or shame, she is setting the record straight and making a compelling case for honesty about our history and restitution for past wrongs. She notes in the preface that the Tasmanian government responded positively to the Mabo Judgement with the return of some land to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community in Australia and was the first government to apologise to the Stolen Generations. But there is more, much more to be done on the path to Reconciliation and Justice.
It’s up to those of us who read this book to advocate for that.
As well as copious maps, tables and illustrations, there are comprehensive notes, references, a bibliography and an index. I hope that in summarising what I’ve read I haven’t distorted any facts: my intention in this review is to encourage others to get the book and read it for themselves.
[1] David Collins is described in the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online as having (in Sydney) a ‘compassionate interest in the Aboriginals’. The only reference to the Tasmanian Aborigines in his profile is a terse reference to the ‘hunting [which] led to much trouble with absconders and Aboriginals’.
Author: Lyndall Ryan
Title: Tasmanian Aborigines: A New History
Publisher: Allen and Unwin, 2012
ISBN: 9781742370682
Source: Casey-Cardinia Library, courtesy of Josie, who delivered it personally to my place when I wasn’t well enough to collect it myself. Thank you, Josie!
Now, I know what all those readers who’ve been teasing me about being inundated with free books for review because of the Best Blogs Competition are going to think, but you’re wrong about this one. The publicist contacted me about it a while ago (before the nomination, much less anything else) and I said yes, yes please, because I couldn’t resist it. This blog’s focus is Australian literature, not coffee-table foodie books, but hey, this is another chance to brag about my beautiful city and about its gourmet reputation. I’m just taking a little side trip into promoting tourism for a moment, ok? (And Masterchef is back too, you’ll just have to bear with my enthusiasm for food and cooking for a while, sorry!)
Now, where was I? Oh yes….
I reviewed Charmaine O’Brien’s terrific book called Flavours of Melbourne, A Culinary Biography , a while ago, but this one is different. That was more of a social history of food and cooking, in the style of Bold Palates, Australian’s Gastronomic Heritage, but (as is obvious from the title) with a Melbourne focus. This new Flavours of Melbourne does have a chapter called ‘Our Tribal Ancestors’ and there’s a timeline of our history and a few photos of the early days, but that’s not the book’s focus. Its subtitle is Favourite restaurants and bars in Melbourne’s laneways and rooftops and it’s a big, bold photojourney through my city’s nooks and crannies where some of my favourite restaurants are.
Melbourne as we all know was voted the most liveable city in the world in 2011, but what many don’t know is that the CBD is consciously designed to make it nice to walk around in. Melbourne City Council has a Director of Design, the eminent Rob Adams, and there’s been a deliberate strategy for over a decade to increase public space and urban amenity. One of his concepts is that while you can travel easily around town on our trams, from just about anywhere you can slip out of the hustle and bustle of the roads that criss-cross the city in Hoddle’s grid - and stroll into side streets, laneways, small squares and arcades. Adams’ urban revitalisation strategy included opening up our laneways for retail activity, and what this book shows is just how enthusiastically Melburnians have taken these spaces to heart.
For me part of the pleasure of this book is finding my favourite places in it. There are plenty of ‘hip’ spaces featured, and the authors obviously have a taste for grunge and graffiti (a taste I don’t share) but there are some stunning photos of restaurants, bars and coffee shops more to my liking. I may have mentioned once or twice before that Melbourne makes the best coffee on the planet because our postwar Italian migrants taught us how to, but hey, I was born in England so I drink tea too. I’m very fond of the Lupicia Tea Shop in Artemis Lane near the QV Village which was created from the old Queen Victoria Hospital. It is so conveniently close to my favourite habitats in the CBD: the Wheeler Centre and the State Library! I also like the Hopetoun Tea Rooms in the National Trust listed Block Arcade, the perfect spot for high tea when taking a break from Melbourne Writers Festival events. (The last time I was there I started reading Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night A Traveller and nearly missed the next event!) Another literature-related haunt (or would be if I were a man and could be a member) is the Savage Club in Bank Place (which lets women in) when the State Library Foundation has its annual dinner.
Bourke St isn’t a quiet spot, not even in the mall, but it is home to Grossi Florentino where we’ve enjoyed some memorable meals. The last time we went there it was for a Penfold’s Wine Tasting dinner, and though we had to watch our pennies for weeks afterwards to put the budget back in order, it was worth every cent. I like the rustic-classy Italian food at The Society restaurant too, but for views of our city and fabulous fusion food with an Asian twist, you can’t beat Taxi at Federation Square. (The book features the bar downstairs, not the dining room).
Mind you, I haven’t yet seen Shannon Bennett’s new Vue de Monde at Level 55 in the Rialto. I bet the view from there would be sensational…but I’d be too busy looking at the food to know. The Spouse took me to Vue de Monde in its previous incarnation for a special night out, and it was the best meal I’ve ever had anywhere in the world. (Yes, even better than Domaine des Hauts de Loire which was our one-and-only scandalous extravagance on our first trip to France.)
Flavours of Melbourne features quite a few upstairs places of interest, notably our rooftop cinema. I went there once not to watch a movie, but to get a glimpse of the adjacent archaeological dig. There were rumours that they might find the parliamentary mace which was nicked from over the road, but if they ever did, I didn’t hear about it. The photos of the famous Movida in Hosier Lane not far from Fed Square reminded me of Movida Aqui, hidden away upstairs at Level 1 500 Bourke St, where the launch of their cookbook waylaid me from one of my Melbourne Writers Festival events. Getting there even feels kind-of Spanish, because you make your way down a small alley, and then up some steps, and around a corner, and there it is, tucked away in the lee of the building.
The book includes some feature recipes from some of Melbourne’s best chefs:
calamari with chickpeas and radicchio, and also risotto venero with bug tails to die for, from Guy Grossi and Matteo Tine, at the Grossi Grill (which is nice too, for quick meals before a show)
cured ocean trout with fennel and vanilla custard, oyster, candied olive and pine-nut crumble, from Michael Harrison at Syracuse in Bank Place (we might try just the candied olives part, with olives from our own tree)
strawberry and berry almond tart from Pierrick Boyer at Le Petit Gateau in Little Collins St, and
a chocolate bread and butter pudding that I am going to persuade The Spouse to cook for our next dinner party, from Self Preservation at the Parliament end of Bourke St.
An unusual feature of this coffee-table book is the ‘green not glossy’ paper, which suits the style and content perfectly.
Time to stop! Masterchef starts in 10 minutes and The Spouse wants me to proof-read his paper for uni before it starts!!
Designed by Jonette George & Daniele Wilton with photography by Brad Hill (no relation)
Title: Flavours of Melbourne,Favourite restaurants and bars in Melbourne’s laneways and rooftops Publisher: Smudge Publishing, 2012
ISBN: 9780980789188
Source: Review copy courtesy of Quikmark Media
I am reading Closer to Stone, Simon Cleary’s new novel, and successor to The Comfort of Figs, but I had to stop to share this arresting image with you. The young man is making his first trip overseas to find Jack, his brother, a peace-keeper who’s gone missing somewhere in Africa…
I lay exhausted until dawn was surely not too far off. Then a new sound, entirely foreign, broke open the night. It was a wail, neither strong nor delicate. Even whether it was near or far I couldn’t tell, the sound distorted by whatever distance it had to travel, an inconstancy on the gusting ocean winds. My first thought was of a rabid dog losing itslf in fever. But there was no agitation in the whining. It was more like the sound of dingoes beyond a campfire, flat and controlled. Then, from another compass point, a second wailing began, as if in answer to the first, and I understood they were not dogs, but men calling into the night. Two men, droning away in the dark. And then a third voice, and a fourth, perhaps more. Some ritual was taking place out there. I imagined Aborigines chanting through the darkness around the tentative encampments of The Springs’ first settlers,unsettling them. The stories our father told Jack and me when we were kids.
I crept from my bed, lifted the hanging blanket, and peered sideways through the slats at the faded stars and all that lay beyond. Now the chanting was like warrior calling warrior out there in the night, warning the city of an intruder, planning their assault. Because on that first night I was just a boy, a country child who knew nothing of Muslim calls to prayer. Wide-eyed, I listened to the wailing city, my cheek pressed against the cold plaster of the wall. The moon, visible near the roof-line at the end of the street, was many days from full, a mere sliver of crescent. In time the last echoes of wailing stopped, there was silence, and I crawled back to bed, curled tight, and waited.
(Simon Cleary, Closer to Stone, UQP 2012, p 8-9)
Oh, how that perfectly realised scene reminds me of my first night in Yogyakarta, startled out of my sleep by that mystic wailing!
Well, the news is out now: I am pleased to announce ANZ LitLovers has won the 2012 Best Australian Blogs competition in the ‘Words’ category. I still can’t quite believe it!
When in 2008 I started this blog, I had no idea how rewarding it would become. Reading is no longer a solitary occupation: with every book I read I now happily anticipate chatting about it here with my friends. I love that.
But I also love the opportunity this blog presents for me to share my love of Australian literature, to promote our authors and to introduce the best in our books to readers from all over the world. This award isn’t just a win for me, it’s a win for Australian books and writing, and the authors, editors and publishers who bring our unique stories to life.
Thank you to my guest bloggers; to visitors and contributors to the conversation on the blog; to fellow Shadow jurors; to my behind-the-scenes mentors and support team, Kevin from Canada and Sue from Whispering Gums; to authors who contribute to Meet an Aussie Author and to the publicists who have supported this blog in a variety of ways. If you’d like to read more about these wonderful supporters, please see my previous post where I expressed my gratitude in more detail.
Thank you to my dear friend Jenny who nominated me, to all of you who have sent lovely messages of support here, on Twitter and on Facebook and of course f2f; to the judge of the Words category Angela Meyer, and to everyone at the Sydney Writers Centre, especially Rose Powell who rang me with the exciting news! And a big (yes, mushy) thank you to The Spouse, who kick-started my writing from the time we first met and encouraged my first forays into publication.
I also want to congratulate again the other four finalists. If you have visited their blogs, you know just how good they are. I am especially pleased that this competition has enabled my new friendship with Katy McDevitt – who just yesterday generously contributed a guest post to ANZ LitLovers about the editing process. This is what’s best about this Best Australian Blogs competition: it brings attention to blogs that will become part of your reading life on the web so make sure you visit:
PS: There has been a small downside to making the finals. It will come as no surprise to anyone that I follow Angela Meyer’s Literary Minded blog but because she was the judge of the competition, it was obviously inappropriate for me to comment on her blog for the duration of the competition. So I wasn’t able to post congratulations on the five-year anniversary of her blog earlier this week. Sorry Angela, please accept my belated congratulations now!
The novel is only indirectly about Russia: it’s about the Krasnansky family emigrating from the Soviet Union, and their sojourn in Rome. The story is set in the 1970s when, in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, there was a sharp increase in Jewish emigration from the pro-Arab Soviet Union. Yet inevitably they bring their memories with them and as their back stories are revealed, we see the impact of Russia’s turbulent history. The patriarch Samuil has childhood memories of his father’s and grandfather’s murder in the Civil War between the Reds and the Whites (1918-1920). His beloved brother Reuven was killed by a bomb during WW2 and his cousin ‘disappeared’ during the postwar Communist reprisals. Yet Samuil is resilient. A Red Army veteran and staunch Communist, he has survived all these travails and the shabby deprivations of Soviet life aren’t enough to make him want to leave. It is only because in his cantankerous old age, that his sons have ceased to take any notice of him, that he capitulates…
The Krasnansky family comprises three generations of Russian secular Jews. There is Samuil and his stoic wife Emma; their elder son, Karl, an opportunist married to Rosa, and their two children; and ‘laddish’ Alec with his new wife Polina. They are in limbo in Rome, as they wait to find a country that will accept them. They have few choices: Israel, with the welcome mat out for Jews but surrounded by hostile Arabs and the threat of war, or Canada, America or Australia, all of which require circuitous paperwork and delays.
In The Passport Herta Müller wrote movingly about the hurdles faced by Rumanians in pursuit of an exit visa, and no doubt there was similar corruption in other parts of the Soviet Union. Emigration was made extraordinarily difficult for Russian Jews because the Soviets (with justification) feared a brain-drain. So despite the reservations of old Samuil, the relief with which the family gets out is palpable. Notwithstanding the difficulties of relocating an extended family, they are hopeful and ambitious, but also naïve. Misled by optimistic reports from other friends and family, and hampered at every turn by the bureaucracy, they do not realise that relocation will become dislocation…
The irony of the title soon becomes obvious. Nothing in the Free World is free. Things are not only costly in terms of money, but are also costly in time, inconvenience, relationships and personal integrity. From Vienna where the story opens they are ‘free’ to go to Israel, but Alec knows he wouldn’t be free there: he would have to serve in the army, a prospect he evaded in the USSR and isn’t keen to undertake now that life (he thinks) is finally looking up. From Rome, as their case worker advises them, they are not free to go anywhere until the bureaucratic hoops have been jumped.
Bezmozgis conveys a catalogue of woes and worries economically and without labouring the point. For example, in transit in Rome, they have to make their way to an international call centre to make phone calls. While they queue, they overhear a man shouting in Russian:
I can’t hear you well. Can you hear me? The furs? The furs? Hello? Mentka, you hear me? Yosik wrote you what? Your furs? He was with us at the border. He’s a liar. He saw with his own eyes that the furs were confiscated.
In these vivid lines of dialogue the reader can see the frustration and anxiety of being far from home, when the duplicity of others is already straining relationships left behind. The call centre is a place where dreams are broken too: it is here that Emma learns that their sponsorship in Chicago has fallen through, after they had already shipped their furniture there. Her habitual reserve breaks down in the face of this disappointment and she cries openly, no comfort coming from her overbearing husband Samuil who reacts with his typical bluff grandstanding.
Black humour is also used to sketch the chaotic history of the Russian Revolution. When Samuil, who had his war medals confiscated by Soviet Customs, meets a war veteran at Club Kadimah, they discuss revisionism from opposite sides of the fence. Samuil thinks Josef Roidmann is a sentimental dilettante suffering from an excess of Jewish irony:
…What can I say, it’s hard to be consistent with one’s allegiances.
- For some, yes.
- It’s certainly been true of me. If I settle on an allegiance it is guaranteed that new and compromising information will emerge. I revere Lenin, I learn he’s a German agent. I venerate Stalin, Khrushchev tells me he killed Mandelstam and a few million others. I tell you, if I worshipped the sun, we’d all end up in the dark. - During a turbulent revolution some mistakes are inevitable. But Stalin was a great leader. - Believe me, I understand how you feel. It’s not my intention to start a debate. It remains a delicate subject for some people. My tongue, once it starts walking, sometimes wanders where it shouldn’t. - Criticism is easy. The young generation is quick to criticise. It is easy to criticise if you never experienced life before communism. - Of course, anything is better than a pogrom. - That is your commentary on communism? - I consider it no small compliment. In 1920, the Poles came through our shtetl and behaved like animals. You don’t think my father greeted the Red Army like liberators, even if they took our last crust of bread? (p77)
Reflecting the stasis in which the family finds itself, for much of the novel it seems as if nothing much happens. There are disappointments large and small, and apart from old Samuil who remains obdurate, individuals adapt as they must. They sell useless possessions, they take on work rather than live in boredom and idleness. But as Karl and Alec react to their frustrations in different ways things unexpectedly spiral out of control. Their only certainty, the family unit, is suddenly at risk…
A most interesting book!
Author: David Bezmozgis
Title: The Free World
Publisher: Viking (Penguin) 2011
ISBN: 0670920053
Source: Personal library, on the Kindle.
The Hum of Concrete is the debut novel of Anna Solding, originally from Sweden but now well settled in Adelaide. The novel was shortlisted for the 2010 Unpublished Manuscript Award at the Festival Awards for Literature, published this year by a new venture called Midnight Sun Publishing and launched at the Adelaide Writers Week. The book comes with endorsements from no less than Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee and from Brian Castro (who I think deserves to be a Nobel Laureate too).
The author’s style features precise and clever imagery, from the terse: ‘Thursday snails along’ (p117) to the vivid: ‘A week in the life of a butterfly is endless fluttering but a week in the life of two human beings who know they must part is shorter than the flight from one flower to the next’ (p120). The writing is at its best when realising the Swedish city of Malmö and its seasons, the parks and skating-rinks full of families and the underbelly of homelessness and exploitation. (There are gorgeous little illustrations created by the author’s husband at the beginning of each chapter, which help to bring this unfamiliar city alive too.)
Although it’s set in a city not a village, The Hum of Concrete reminded me of my recent reading of Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz because of the structure of the novel. Characters, seemingly isolated from one another, find their lives intersecting. Like the pulse of the city, the novel has a stop-start rhythm as in fleeting glimpses we meet characters who then disappear for a while with issues unresolved. This fracturing is exacerbated by the way Solding varies the narrative voice, starting with a second-person account of tobogganing in the snow. But it’s a risky technique because it relies on the reader patiently suspending expectations. I admire this authorial risk-taking, especially in a debut novel, but the timing of connections between these jigsaw pieces may not suit every reader.
The novel has a youthful feel: the dialogue of adolescents and young adults is especially vivid; their preoccupations feel authentic. Challenging any preconceived ideas about the cool, reserved Swede, events trace these preoccupations: relationships and the need to belong; status within peer groups; parents as ‘bystanders of life’; you don’t/can’t understand as a motif; and negotiating risk-taking. There is a less successful episode involving a Muslim mother discovering her adolescent son’s porn collection: her bizarre response seems inauthentic and disconnected from the rest of the story. It’s as if the author is determined to teach her character (or her readers?) a lesson about sexuality whether or not it’s consistent with that character’s nature (as established by the author). Other older characters confront dilemmas and find themselves challenged to take risks too, but there is a scantiness about the way these are resolved. This is especially true of Bodil’s determination to stay single and free. This fascinating character deserves a novel of her own!
Reading The Hum of Concrete, I was reminded of the words of Alec Pillar, the English teacher who taught me always to ask myself, ‘What am I trying to say?’ and ‘How am I trying to say it?’ Well, in The Hum of Concrete, there are numerous issues explored in fragments: gender identity, immigrant angst, family breakdown and reunion, pregnancy and motherhood, and the writer’s life. But despite the often beautiful prose and engaging characterisation, there were times when I was puzzled about what the author’s intentions were and why the novel was written in this particular way.
Author: Anna Solding
Title: The Hum of Concrete Publisher: Midnight Sun Publishing 2012
ISBN: 9780987226501
Source: Review copy of Wakefield Press.
One of the best aspects of the Best Australian Blogs competition run annually by the Sydney Writers’ Centre is that it showcases a wonderful variety of blogs. For me, the best discovery that I made this year was Katy McDevitt’s PublishEd Adelaide, a blog that specialises in the art of editing. Because, while I’m sure that the expertise that Katy generously shares on her blog is valued by editors and authors alike, for me as a reader, it demystifies aspects of books and writing that I have never understood.
So you can imagine how thrilled I was when Katy took up my tentative suggestion about writing a post about the gentle art of what my mother used to call ‘pruning’. ‘Get rid of all that padding!’ she used to say (brutally) to my father who wrote erudite articles for science journals.. They’re still happily married, but I bet many relationships have been strained when authors and editors have had to confront the vexed issue of ‘how much is enough’. How does it happen that Frank Moorhouse writes a novel of 690 pages and not a word too long, and yet Chi Vu’s novella is just the perfect length at 105 pages?
These mysteries are about to be revealed. I hope you enjoy this fascinating guest post from Katy:
How do you know when enough is enough?
Knowing when you’ve written the right amount is one of the toughest calls an author faces. How much content is enough for a book? And how do you deal with a publisher who is telling you in no uncertain terms to kill your darlings?
Cutting your own work can be excruciating (I experience it every week, writing for PublishEd Adelaide, and that’s only 1000 or so words!). The Talking Squid has this to say:
William Faulkner said, “Kill your darlings.” What he meant was: if you write something that you love beyond all reason, it is wrong and should be cut from the piece.
Length is, of course, intricately related to complexity – the longer the book, the greater the risk that the content has, somehow, spiralled during writing. Jason Pettus wrote about this recently at Authonomy:
And of course we all seem to know at least one person who once wrote what was probably a decent little first novel right after college, but who has now been “tinkering” with it for a decade, adding and adding to it every weekend like one would to a model train set, until creating a Proustian mess that would never stand a chance anymore of getting published.
So what are the rules of thumb? Well, talking only about print books, maybe 200-220 pages for a monograph, 250-280(ish) for a novel. How about roughly 600-800 pages for a college textbook (not including medical and law texts)? And that’s before you get into ebooks, with their reflowable text and content percentages, which may yet force – or enable – us all to reconceptualise what goes on a page.
You’ll have noticed that I qualified everything I just said, and I did that with a purpose. Because my view is that there is no such thing as enough. What I mean is, there is no single length at which your book is complete. There is only what someone (you, your critique group, your editor) or something (the market, the sales), tells you about its length.
Whose view of length holds sway?
Ideally, decisions about what length is right for a book are agreed in good faith between the author and publisher. My experience is that word count rarely becomes an issue in the early stages of a manuscript’s development. That’s partly because the publisher wants to sign you, and partly because, in those early stages, you’re both still, frankly, getting the measure of what you’re going to write. Fair enough. We can agree a rough figure and finesse it later.
Then, on with writing. The first person whose judgement counts is, of course, the author. Most importantly, the author decides ‘yes, that’s it’, and calls it a day. The author’s first interest (unless they’re a postmodernist), is creative. Have I done everything I wanted to do? Good. Now stop. And that’s fine as long as you’re either a self-published author, or a ‘big name’ who holds sway with a trad publisher.
But what if you’re working with a publisher who expresses concern about the amount you promised versus the amount you’ve delivered? Often, your creative plans for your book may feel at odds with what a publisher tells you. It’s understandably difficult to let go; the author may open up the material, thinking ‘just another few words, a couple of pages, one more chapter…’ – and before you know it, the book has expanded beyond the limits of a publisher’s tolerance. I think – hope! – that many publishers are generous about word limits, realising that writing can never be a boilerplate exercise. It’s organic. It grows in all sorts of ways when it’s developing, its length being only one measure of how far it’s come. Publishers know all of this is true. But they will inevitably have other things on their mind, more pragmatic than aesthetic.
The editor as gatekeeper
If you do have a serious problem meeting the agreed length and submit it without discussing the issue first, you’ll almost certainly get a query on short order from your editor. The commissioning editor is the gatekeeper of the works they have signed up – so, if the book comes in significantly north of its target word count, it may not even make it even to the copy-editing stage. It’s as simple and as serious as that. To business: no editor wants to overcommit their editorial, production, and print budget (an almost-always smaller pot than they first hoped for, honed through endless editorial committees) to extra pages that don’t earn their place. So, if you feel strongly – as you should – that the pages do earn their place, why not talk it through with your editor while you’re still drafting? He or she will appreciate the heads-up and may be more likely to push for the additional spending your book needs later, if it comes to it.
When it comes to how much content is right, your editor is likely to go on their personal judgement, but only so far. They may not use the ‘M word’ to you in conversation, since it’s a big switch-off, but what they are also thinking about when they talk about cutting length is the market.
Cuts may sound more reasonable when the publisher can back them up with unarguable information from the market: customer viewpoints, expert feedback, or past sales figures. So, if you know that your last book came in 100 pages too long and the publisher wasn’t thrilled with the resulting sales, you may be in for a repeat conversation this time around. But if your track record speaks for itself, if you’re a previously unpublished author, or if you simply feel that your book just isn’t complete without an extra chapter, a little more detail here, or some more exposition there, keep talking until you’ve put your case.
Don’t trip over the last-minute length issue
One more insider viewpoint, which authors may not factor in. Thankfully this doesn’t happen all the time – but it can and does happen. Books can be hamstrung by serious length issues even as they’re going to press. Final print-run approval rests with steely publishing directors and not your passionately committed book editor. When the director sees the financial paperwork for the last time, he or she decides the print run is extravagant and slashes it. If, at the same time, the production and print spending has blown out because the book is 25% longer than planned, what’s the result? I can only see one: the price of the book goes up. Unless the extra content you wrote genuinely has pushed the material into unassailable greatness, you’ll feel the effect of that price hike. Better to assess length with publisher’s spectacles on, if you can bear it; and if you can’t, feel free to ask him or her for thoughts.
Finally… have faith!
I see the job of publishers as helping authors to achieve a complete piece of work, where every word is in the right place. And, to be complete, the book may need to be longer (however you measure it) than anyone originally planned, just as your book idea grows during writing. Have faith. Your publisher believes enough in your work to have championed your work through all the ins and outs of editorial committees, sales and marketing meetings, and production planning sessions. They will, most likely, believe enough to go the extra pages. Good luck!
How nice it is hear about the ’passionately committed book editor’ steering the work towards the books that grace our shelves! Thank you so much for sharing this perspective with us, Katy:)
Dr Katy McDevitt is a publisher and editor with a decade of in-house and freelance experience in academic, educational, and professional publishing. Educated at the University of Oxford, where she earned first-class honours, a master’s degree, and a doctorate in English, Katy went on to commission books and resources at some of the world’s best-known publishers in their fields, including Cambridge University Press, Routledge, and Pearson Education. She now works as an editor in the South Australian public sector. Katy is a full member of the Society of Editors (South Australia), affiliated with the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd).
Kate blogs at PublishEd Adelaide and is a finalist in the 2012 Best Australian Blogs competition (Words category). You still have time to vote for her (and lots of other beaut blogs too), if you are quick. Click here for details.
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