ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

This month’s #6Degrees starts with Wolfe Island.  It’s Lucy Treloar’s stunning follow-up to her debut novel Salt Creek.  Follow the links to see why you should read them both…

I’ll take an easy leap to Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain. But although I think this novel was her best book ever, it’s not really an easy leap: I can’t go there without remembering that this was Blain’s last book before she died in 2016.  She was so young, and so brave.  Take a moment to read her obituary and the accompanying comments to see how much she meant to us all.

It’s International Women’s Day this weekend, and that leads me to courage of a different kind.  Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was a work of great courage, which while it changed so many lives, also brought ridicule in the media, and insults from men who derided her because they said she ‘couldn’t make it’.  To those women I saw featured on 7.30 this week, and the fatuous ABC producers of the segment about ‘still being sexy at 50’, I can do no better than to quote Germaine whose idea of empowerment is a very different one:

Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.

So, now, to a woman who refused to give in to a different kind of destructive force …

I am reading, oh, *sigh* so slowly and in infuriating short bursts till my eyes complain, Subhash Jaireth’s new book Spinoza’s Overcoat, Travels with Writers and Poets (Transit Lounge, 2020). I will, in due course, write a proper review of this exquisite book, (update, here’s my review) but today I want to pay tribute to Marina Tsvetaeva, who is the subject of his second chapter, ‘Tsvetaeva’s Garden’.

Marina Tsvetaeva (Wikipedia*)

Marina Tsvetaeva was a Russian Soviet poet, said by many to be the preeminent poet of 20th century Russia. Jaireth pays homage to this extraordinary woman with a pilgrimage to the house she lived in during her exile from Stalinist Russia in the 1930s. You can read about her tragic life at Wikipedia but what Jaireth brings to life is her anguish, for which she beseeches God to send her a garden:

The trying conditions in which the poem made its appearance can be imagined by reading Marina’s letters […]. ‘The house was cold because there was no gas for heating.  ‘I write with my hands trembling,’ she notes in one of the letters, and this is ‘either because I am old or perhaps it is too cold in the house.’

Here are the first four lines of the poem:

Za etot ad (For this hell)
Za etot Bred (For this delirium)
Poshli mne sad (Send me a garden)
Na straroch let (In my ageing years).

The hellish conditions of her existence are announced emphatically, but she wants to be compensated for the nightmare she has been forced to endure. She wants her God to send her a garden so that she can have some respite in her ‘old age’.

A garden as solace…

The concept of a garden as solace is one that is explored in one of the most beautiful books I have: Remembered Gardens by Holly Kerr Forsyth. She profiles women and the gardens they created, telling the stories of pioneer women creating gardens as a form of solace in their loneliness and grief, and as a creative and intellectual activity. Yes, they were often women of privilege but they endured the loss of friends and family left behind in England, and like many women of the 19th century often suffered the loss of their children as well. They had no gardening guides to tell them what would grow and what wouldn’t, so they had to use trial-and-error and experimentation with their plantings. The author tells their stories with empathy and compassion, but also with admiration for their achievements.

Gardens are not the only debt we owe to women.  In Jane Jose’s book Places Women Make, I learned about the mostly unacknowledged contributions of women to our urban landscapes.

Cities are much more than collections of buildings; they are places where people gather for art, culture and commerce.  Cultural places are places we often visit alone but where we don’t feel alone.  We share what we see and experience with others, and we feel a sense of belonging and connection, even if we don’t know or don’t talk to the others participating in the cultural event.  Cultural places fulfil a need to gather, to share, to learn and to experience something unexpected, or beautiful, or challenging.

Culture can nurture us, and the women who give us cultural places to share art and ideas change the lives of others. (p.131)

As I said in my review:

Philanthropic women have made a huge contribution to the nation’s cultural life.  Notable examples of women whose interest in the arts has prompted the development of galleries and cultural spaces include Janet Holmes à Court, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, Dame Roma Mitchell and Yasuko Myer.  Perhaps less well-known are Goldie Sternberg who donated her collection of Chinese art to the Art Gallery of NSW; and Ulrike Klein whose foundation funded a purpose-built concert space for chamber music just outside Adelaide.  Women in administration who have made a difference include Kate Brennan, the first CEO of Melbourne’s Federation Square; and Joan Masterman who was the driving force of the Freycinet Walks and Friendly Beaches Lodge on the stunning east coast of Tasmania.  And then there’s Tess Brady who was a key driver for the creation of Australia’s first book town: Clunes Booktown; and Stephanie Alexander who has been a huge influence on the community and school gardens movement.

That brings me nicely to concluding with one of the books from our cookbook collection: Cooking and Travelling in South-West France by Stephanie Alexander. Not just a woman who has transformed domestic cooking but also an inspirational writer as well, Alexander is also the author of The Cook’s Companion.  Our guests never cease to compliment the home-made ice-cream I serve, which comes from the section on lemons.  It is so easy, and so delicious, and adaptable when the limes are in season too.  No photo can convey how scrumptious this ice-cream is, you just have to make it yourself, and then you will never buy store-bought ice-cream again.

Citrus syrup cakes served with lime ice cream and a choc-orange garnish

*Image credit:

• Portrait of Marina Tsvetaeva: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=370584

So that’s my #6Degrees: from a dystopian novel about climate change, to a cookbook that celebrates the simple pleasure of cooking well.

Next month’s book is Anna Funder’s ‘classic on tyranny and resistance’ – Stasiland. And yes, I’ve read it!! (If you haven’t, and IMO every thinking adult should, Fishpond has a second-hand copy today for $15: Stasiland).

Thanks to Kate at Books are my Favourite and Best for hosting:)