ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

To whet your appetite for Indigenous Literature Week, here’s my review of a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while…

If all goes well, I’ll be reading two winners of the David Unaipon Award during Indigenous Literature Week 2017.  (Click here to see others that you can buy).  It’s an important award because as well as a prize of $10,000, the winner receives a publishing contract with category sponsor University of Queensland Press (UQP).   Ellen Van Neerven won the award in 2013 for Heat and Light, and I have finally – at last! tracked down a copy of Larissa Behrendt’s Home which won in 2002.  I’ve read quite a few of the recent winners, and they’ve all been interesting reading (links go to my reviews):

• Not Just Black and White, by Lesley Williams and Tammy Williams (2014)
• Mazin Grace, by Dylan Coleman (2011)
• Purple Threads, by Jeanine Leane (2010)
• Every Secret Thing, by Marie Munkara (2008)
• Swallow the Air, by Tara June Winch (2004, originally titled Dust on  Waterglass)
• The Mish: Childhood Memories of Framlingham Aboriginal Station, by Robert Lowe (2001)
• Sweet Water, Stolen Land, by Philip McLaren (1992)

As it happens, I brought home another interesting book from Bayside Library today.  It’s called Black Writers, White Editors, Episodes of collaboration and compromise in Australian Publishing History, (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009 ISBN 9781921509063) and the author is Jennifer Jones, whose research explored the editorial relationship for three foundational Indigenous women writers, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Margaret Tucker and Monica Clare.  I’m unlikely to read it all because … a-hem… it is indeed a scholarly work, but it made me realise for the first time that the process of publishing indigenous narratives can significantly alter what is eventually published.  Jones’s analysis shows (amongst other things) that for the three authors that she researched, there were numerous alterations which were not just spelling and grammar, including

• changes that increase political impact in a passage;
• insertion of alternative colloquialisms;
• minimisation of character’s emotional expression; and
• standardisation of colloquialisms.

More importantly the editing changed the nature of the writing.  She gives an example of where editing one of Noonuccal’s stories

• made it conform to the dominant cultural viewpoint on  Aboriginality and Aboriginal sovereignty;
• messed with the structure to shift it into a Western understanding of chronology;
• recontextualised it to make it about a bygone Dreaming rather than about the consequences of contact history; and
• whitewashed some aspects of Aboriginal experience, such as scavenging in the tip or stealing, to make it palatable for the projected white mainstream readership. 

What Jones has to say about the toning down of Aboriginal perspectives in the presumed interests of marketability in the 1970s-1990s, made me wonder whether this still happens at all today, or whether these practices have faded away along with old ideas about assimilation.  I certainly hope things have changed.  I want to read the unfiltered voices of Indigenous authors, no matter what they have to say.

The catalyst for me to make this this digression about editing is the way that Ellen Van Neerven has structured her stories in Heat and Light.  Everybody is playing around with form and chronology these days, it’s just part of the contemporary writing scene.  But Van Neerven asserts a shared concept of time: in a book written in three distinct sections, the middle section called ‘Water’ has Western time in which  she projects forward into the near future with what is deemed to be progress, and this ‘progress’ is confronted by life forms ancient beyond imagining so that ordinary linear time seems irrelevant.  In the sections titled ‘Heat’ and ‘Light’ which bookend this central, (most political) part of the book, linked short stories from the near past tell us about concepts of kinship, memory and storytelling which have been fractured but remain resilient and powerful over generations.

I can’t help thinking how the short stories might have been sanitised in a past era.  Amy Kresinger initially rejects the information that her biological grandmother was a Bundjalung woman called Pearl, a woman who was gang-raped by local thugs and who abandoned her child to be brought up by her sister, Marie.  Amy’s sense of identity is rocked:

My thoughts are running wild as I drive to my place.  If I didn’t know my grandmother, then I could I know myself?  My grandmother as I had always known was Marie Kresinger, Aunty Marie to everyone.  She’s spent most of her life as a domestic.  She died from heart failure at the age of seventy-two.  People said her heart was too big.  (p.5)

Her father can’t face up to it either.  He would tell her nothing of their history, whether he knew it or not.

Yet Amy’s voice remains strong and resilient, and she grows in wisdom and confidence, discovering her sexuality along the way.  This is a lively book, where the narrators of have distinctive voices and usually a laconic sense of humour.

There was a picture of it in one of the magazines, I remember.  We’d made a stack of the mags up high in the office.  I hadn’t read them yet.  I wasn’t ready to commit to weight loss and crosswords and Sudoku. (p.150)

Heat and Light won the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize.  It was also shortlisted for The Stella Prize, the Queensland Literary Award for State Significance, and the Readings Prize.

Ellen van Neerven is a Mununjali woman from South East Queensland.   She’s an editor, mentor and advocate for First Nation writers, and she was the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Best Young Australian Novelist in 2015.

Heat and Light was my first book for Indigenous Literature Week 2017.

Author: Ellen Van Neerven
Title: Heat and Light
Publisher: UQP, (University of Queensland Press, 2014
ISBN: 9780702253218
Source: Personal library, purchased from Readings $22.95

Available from Fishpond:Heat and Light
Check out Sue’s review at Whispering Gums too.