ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

It’s Sunday morning in Sorrento and I am hastily journalling yesterday’s events before we depart our accommodation for breakfast somewhere. Sorrento Lodge is a strange setup… very modern, very clean, comfy beds, but a-hem very cosy, and minimalist.  No hair dryer.  No shampoo.  (But two TVs.  How does that work?) No kettle in the room, or cups for a pre-breakfast cuppa.  Kitchen facilities at the end of the corridor are shared and not a pretty sight in the morning. And though they have a curfew of 10pm for the comfort of other guests, it is most certainly not observed or enforced, not even after midnight.

Which is why I was so tired yesterday that I abandoned my third session to come back and sleep the afternoon away.

Update, at home later on Sunday: I looked up reviews of Sorrento Lodge, and discovered that our discomforts, which were admittedly minimal, were entirely our fault.  In error, we had booked a place that is meant for employees, i.e. inexpensive, self-catering, bring most of your own gear.  It’s for the army of hospo staff who turn up for the holiday season and weekends, and it actually says in its FAQs that it’s not meant for holidaymakers or weekend stays.   #meaCulpa…

Edited 29/4/24 to add information about panellists and links to my review of their books.

My first session was terrific.  It was called Unpacking Australian Literature, and though it didn’t do that because the moderator’s questions went elsewhere, it was very interesting.

The panel consisted of Tony Birch, Jock Serong and Charlotte Wood, with Sarah L’Estrange as panel chair.

• Tony Birch was the first Dr Bruce McGuiness Indigenous Research Fellowship in 2015, and is the award-winning author of five novels, five short fiction collections and two poetry books.  I profiled him in Meet an Aussie Author: Tony Birch way back in 2012, and I’ve read and reviewed Blood (2011),  Ghost River (2015),  Common People (2017),  and (my favourite) The White Girl (2019).  (I have Dark as Last Night (2021); Father’s Day (2009) and Women and Children (2023) on the TBR, and I will soon have a copy of his monograph on Kim Scott from Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series).

• Jock Serong is the award-winning author of six novels.  He came to world attention with his third novel On the Java Ridge (2017), because it won the (alas, short-lived) Staunch Award for a thriller without violence against women.  The second of his Furneaux Islands trilogy won the Historical Novel Prize: Preservation #1 (2018); The Burning Island #2, 2020),  and The Settlement #3, 2022), and I have  his backlist on the TBR, i.e. The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2017), and Quota (2015).

• Charlotte Wood is the award winning author of  seven novels – Pieces of a Girl (1999, see Kim’s review at Reading Matters), The Submerged Cathedral (2004), The Children (2007), Animal People (2011), The Natural Way of Things (2015); The Weekend (2019) and Stone Yard Devotional (2023).   Her list of awards is too long to list here, (see Wikipedia instead) suffice to say that every book she writes is An Event, and she is one of our most thoughtful thinkers whose books interrogate the zeitgeist in sophisticated ways.

Tony Birch talked about his childhood in inner city Melbourne.  He told a lovely story about the first time he saw the sea, and it reminded me of the late Peter Cundall of Gardening Australia fame talking about the first time he went into a library, got sent home to wash his hands, and then came back to enter what he thought was heaven.  Birch reminded us that inner city housing doesn’t have backyards big enough to play ball games, so the street was where the kids played cricket and footy.

Asked why he was drawn to writing about children in his fiction, Birch said that childhood is formative for everyone and is often related to the places we love, especially in a childhood like his where the kids got away from their parents and were allowed to do their own thing.

Charlotte Wood grew up on the Monaro (and told us how to pronounce it, not like the car).  South of Canberra, it’s a bare landscape but she had a childhood full of freedom, roaming around on bikes, free to do whatever she wanted.  There were bigger families then, so she always had someone to play with.  And children had privacy, and a private world.

Food for thought, eh?

Jock Serong talked about writing.  When we read, (in English, that is) he said, we  read L to R, up to down.  But when writing, it happens in a spiral, bringing parts together and moving them apart.  So what is the role of Australian literature in questioning the narratives we tell ourselves?

Birch talked about his recent book which is about Kim Scott, in the Black Inc Writers on Writers series.  He talked about challenging existing narratives but in an open and inclusive way.  Kim Scott asks us to understand Australian history in a different way, and to open up the discussion.  His writing is provocative, but it’s a gentle challenge.

Birch’s prize winning book The White Girl is about the Stolen Generations made accessible to readers who are inevitably going to be mostly white. The White Girl is a love story and it’s about the universal love within families. (See my review).

The book, he said, has had a good after life, it’s taught at Year 11 to engage young people.  Birch says he doesn’t want to write alienating stories,  and he wants to write about Aboriginal women who have agency.  There is domestic violence but it’s off stage, and the reader sees an act of love instead: Ruby washing her auntie’s wounds after an assault.

I caught a glimpse of Jock Serong’s latest book but it’s not in the shops yet so he talked about his trilogy.  (See my reviews of the Furneaux Islands trilogy). He recapped the activities of George Augustus Robinson, and says that fiction can pay respect to indigenous people when history (i.e. Robinson’s diary) doesn’t.  And fiction has staying power.  We know what we know of the Elizabethan era from Shakespeare not from history books!

The topic moved on to ‘writing from a sense of rage’ which brought up Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, but though she said rage was a fuel for the book, she didn’t want to stay there.  It was quite interesting the way that the moderator Sarah L’Estrange wanted to explore rage (by which I think she meant women’s rage) and the writers didn’t.  Birch, who by any estimation had a rough childhood, said he wasn’t traumatised by it, and though he doesn’t want his grandchildren to witness what he did, his demeanour — and his books that I’ve read — are testament to that.  He wants to write about men who are ok.

This was a most enjoyable session, but there were questions I wanted these writers to explore.  Why do Australian authors write so much about old wars, crime and selective bits of history?  Why don’t they write about class, for example?

My next session was Gail Jones in conversation with Fiona Gruber.  Jones is an academic and the author of ten novels.  I regret that I did not get on with her earlier works, but I kept on buying her books one after the other because I knew I would want to read them one day.  I began with Our Shadows (2020); then I read and loved the award-winning Salonika Burning (2022), then The Death of Noah Glass (2018), and now her most recent novel One Another (2024). Others waiting patiently on the TBR are A Guide to Berlin (2015), Combined Reviews and Five Bells (2011).

Fiona was brilliant at asking an open-ended question and just letting Gail talk.  She talked about the circuitous way that One Another (see my review) was sparked by seeing the wreck of Joseph Conrad’s boat, the invasion of Ukraine and her memories of feeling dissonance when in the UK where everyone was obsessed with Princess Di and Thatcher but in Australia there was Mabo which was momentous.

*chuckle* And she wanted her story to have characters who didn’t have Google and mobile phones!

There was an interesting diversion into talking about literary criticism.  I was so interested, I took only scrappy notes, but the gist of it was, that criticism now focusses on identity and emoting and placing the self into the text.

#NoteToSelf: Don’t do it!!

The conversation moved on to journeys, and the characters in One Another floundering and feeling out of place.  Joseph Conrad’s life was endlessly journeying, from his childhood through to his voyages, so it was a life where he was always ‘out of place’ even when he finally settled in the UK because his thick accent placed him always as an outsider.

Jones’ novel is structured in these waves of events, it’s not chronological  because she wanted to write about why we become so interested in the people whose books we read.  She picks up on moments of intensification, and symbolic moments. So no, she’s not a planner.  She has an image, and a sort of concept, and she writes intuitively.

She’s interested in words — what they can and can’t do, and images likewise — what they can and can’t do.

There was an audible intake of breath when she told us how quickly she writes her books, but that writing comes after a very long time of thinking and composing mentally.

Oh, and just at the end, she said a very interesting thing: she thinks that though we talk about postmodernism, most of us are modernists. We believe in deep time, and in symbols, and we read to complicate ourselves.

I wanted to know more about that, but it was time to move on.

My next session was The Life and Legacy of Miles Franklin, featuring Kgshak Akec, Amy Brown, Monique di Mattina, Clare Wright and Fiona Sweet.  It was lovely to hear Kgshak Akec in the flesh, and she had a brief moment to talk about how being nominated for the MF for her 2022 debut novel Hopeless Kingdom (see my review) had changed her life, but the chair was head honcho of the Stella Prize and it was more of a Stella Prize love-in than I was interested in. I was so very, very tired that I shot through and spent the afternoon asleep in bed.  Sorrento Lodge is quiet as the grave in mid-afternoon.  It’s only at night that you can’t get any sleep…

So that’s it, for the 2024 Sorrento Writers Festival.  Congratulations to everyone involved, especially the volunteers without whom it would not happen.  The hospo folks were marvellous too, they were run off their feet with the festival coinciding with a long weekend, but the service was always friendly and professional and if things went awry they were quick to apologise.

PS The Spouse went to lots of interesting NF sessions and I will try to pick his brains on the journey home so that I can add in some of his thoughts too.

Time to pack up now, will chat in comments when I get home!

Greetings from Sorrento, where I have had a lovely day listening to some very interesting sessions!

This has to be quick, we are booked in for an early dinner at The Baths, and I am starving because there was no time for lunch… so these are just quick summaries, sorry!

(I will fix up misspellings of authors names or those whose names I didn’t catch… later. And I will add in the names of the authors’ books too. )

Update 29/4/24 Edited to add extra details.

First up, I went to the second of three sessions on Modernism.  (I missed the first one which was yesterday.)  This one was about how modernism changed architecture, and the speakers were Fiona Austin of Beaumaris Modern Fame; Leonie Gruber, Greer Honeywill and Patricia Callan.

Fiona Austin is the author of Beaumaris Modern, (2018) which I wrote about here after I went to the launch; Dr Greer Honeywill is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher and curator;  Patricia Callan is the founder of Modernist Australia and the author of The New Modernist House; and Fiona Gruber writes on arts and culture and is an ABC radio arts presenter.

Modernism, as we know, is a movement that began in Europe in the early C20th century, most notably by the Bauhaus in 1919, and is became influential in a very short time but Australia was late to the party for various reasons and nothing very exciting happened in architecture here until the postwar era.  That is when we began to see the whole point of architecture, which is to make life better.

Domestic housing is made better by having light-filled spaces, by building the house to the orientation of the sun, by the use of local materials, by integrating the outside with interior spaces, by designing free-flowing spaces and by the use of colour.  The speakers were adamant that making houses bigger does not make them better, and nor does the current fad for beige, beige and more beige because people always have an eye on resale value now.

There were slides of some lovely modernist houses, especially in Beaumaris which is where in the postwar period artists and architects formed a mecca for creativity.  The houses were modest because there was a shortage of materials and tradesmen, but they worked well, and today, updated with modern appliances etc, they still do.

Modernist houses, they said, were great for women, because kitchens were no longer isolated from the rest of the house.   (LH: Of course, it’s even better if she gets out of the kitchen because others are sharing the cooking but that was a topic for another day.)

Not all modernist houses can be preserved with heritage listings, but if more people valued them, they would get updated instead of building some horrible monstrosity instead.  (They didn’t use the word monstrosity, that’s my word.)

My next session was Modernism #3, which I enjoyed even more because it was about modernist art in Australia.  The speakers were Rodney James, whose book Letters to a Critic (2023) I reviewed here; Lesley Harding, director of the Heidi Museum of Modern Art; and Kendrah Morgan who is a curator at Heide.  Harding and Morgan co-authored Mirka and Georges (2020);  Modern Love, the lives of John and Sunday Reed (2015); Sunday’s Garden (2013) and Sunday’s Kitchen (2011); and Harding is also author of Margaret Preston, recipes for food and art, (2016) which we have on our shelves with our other art books. The panel chair was Charlotte Guest who is a bookseller and publisher.

The discussion led off with Rodney James talking about the art critic Alan McCulloch, which was an excellent launching pad for talking about the famous Herald Art Show in 1939 which brought all kinds of wonderful modernist art to Australians who’d never seen it before.  The whole collection got stranded here because of the war, and so the artworks were offered for sale, but *deep sigh* the stuffy old NGV passed up the opportunity to buy a Picasso and what they did buy was not very exciting.

From there the talk (with accompanying slide show) moved on to Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker, art patrons John and Sunday Reed, Mirka Mora and Joy Hester.  It also segued to our famous Angry Penguins Literary Hoax which made a stunning appearance in Stephen Orr’s Sincerely, Ethel Malley (2021, see my review) – a good scandal is always fun at a festival.

Next up was The Legacy of Holocaust Literature, and the speakers were Leah Kaminsky, Michael Gawenda and Rachel Unreich.

Leah Kaminsky is the author of The Waiting Room (2015, see here); The Hollow Bones, and Doll’s Eye (2023, see here); Michael Gawenda is the former editor-in-chief of The Age and the author of My Life as a Jew (2023, which The Spouse is currently reading. See here.) Rachel Unreich is a journalist whose book A Brilliant Life (2023) is about her mother who survived the Holocaust.

The first question was why?  Why is there still such huge interest in the histories, memoirs, testimonies, novels, poetry, documentaries and films by and about survivors and the generation that came after them?

Michael Gawenda noted that at first there was a great silence followed by an outpouring in the 1960s and 70s.   That writing, he said, took place because it was part of the European tradition of literature, and because Jews were central to European civilisation.  OTOH There isn’t much about the Armenian genocide because it was not in their tradition to write about it and also there isn’t much in the way of documentary evidence in the way that there is for the Holocaust.

[LH: He didn’t say that acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide has been suppressed by the Turkish government for decades and that it famously tried to prosecute the Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk for raising the issue.   I’ve read a couple of recent novels that tell this important story, both of them by Australians: Katerina Cosgrove’s Bone Ash Sky (2013, see my review here) and Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s award-winning My Name is Revenge (2018, see here).

Leah Kaminsky talked about her most recent book Doll’s Eye which explores the role of doctors and medical scientists during the years of Hitler’s rise to power.  Their research was garbage, but it became influential because it wasn’t challenged.  She also talked about her previous book The Hollow Bones, which was about her mother who committed suicide when Kaminsky was 21.

By contrast, Rachel Unreich’s book was about how her mother, who had experienced unspeakable horrors, had somehow managed to have a ‘joyful’ life in spite of it.  Gawenda demurred on this because, he says, for survivors there never was a happy ending.  FWIW I think they are both right.  In the Holocaust Museum here in Melbourne I met survivors who were laughing and gossiping in a place that I associated with the gravitas of deep mourning.  But, they told me, they had rebuilt a good life here in Australia with children and grandchildren in a thriving community and for them to live well was the best answer to what had happened to them.  But I don’t doubt that there were deep scars within.

Which is where the current crop of commercial Holocaust fiction is so wrong.  Gawenda says that he was not traumatised by the DP camp he was born in, but books which romanticise the Holocaust are appalling, exploitative, cynical and untrue. Redemption stories are a lie.  People were scarred and horribly traumatised, even if they masked their feelings for their children’s sake.

It was a sobering session.

Next up was Charlotte Wood in conversation with Ramona Koval and it was the highlight of my day.  She talked about the genesis of Stone Yard Devotional (See my review) which coincided with traumatising events in her personal life, and Covid.

She talked about the appeal of ‘deep silence’ and how she’s valued a couple of writing retreats she’s done, because it’s a way of getting away from an overwhelming life.  We’re not made to absorb the violence and catastrophe that comes from the media because we can’t do anything about it, and it’s everywhere.  But the ethical question raised by the book is: when is it ok to withdraw? Though the novel doesn’t really resolve this, it shows that the narrator’s life has all been action, which has achieved nothing, and she comes to realise that the nuns, ‘doing nothing’ except praying is actually doing no harm because they are not endlessly consuming.

Amongst other interesting things in a very interesting session was the idea that a writer must please the reader, but must also please herself.  Sometimes that means leaving things open-ended.

They concluded with a droll commentary about how much contemporary publishing is about people emoting instead of thinking.  Amen to that!

See more about Charlotte Wood in Sunday’s post.

My last session was political: former ABC radio presenter John Faine with journalist Greg Sheridan from The Australian and Director of the Lowy Institute Think Tank Sam Roggaveen about Australia’s place in the world.  The consensus was that AUKUS is a waste of money, and that China might/might not be as scary as we’re being led to think, but I was too tired to take notes and don’t want to misquote anybody.

More tomorrow!