One of the aspects of getting older that’s a bit eerie, is finding that part of your life has become ‘the olden days’. Initially, my idea of ‘the olden days’ was that era when my parents were children and young adults, a time that they would evoke with nostalgia (or otherwise). Then, emerging with self-mockery but solidifying into nostalgia (or not), ‘the olden days’ become the years of my own child- and young adulthood. But what’s really spooky is when the years of The Offspring’s child-and young adulthood have become ‘the olden days’.
Though they’ll enjoy it just as much, I suspect that the generation after mine will read Stephen Orr’s new autobiographical novel somewhat differently to me. This Excellent Machine was a revelation, because The Offspring was (just like his parents) immune to popular culture. So whereas most parents were dragged into 1980s culture by their children, I wasn’t. Orr’s book is a ‘foreign country‘ to me. It’s like reading about a tourist attraction you missed seeing while you were on a once-in-a-lifetime trip.
Orr is one of my favourite authors: I’ve read all but one of his seven novels, and he is a genius with characterisation and setting. In This Excellent Machine Clem Whelan is the central character, trapped in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 and wondering what to do with his life. When he quizzes his mother once again about his long-absent, best-forgotten father, he knows the script even before they start, and eventually he recognises the pattern:
I’d had enough. She was like a mower starting on a very big paddock. (p.85)
*Ouch!*
There is a conspiracy of silence about this absent father. Clem lives in a close-knit street in a working-class suburb of Adelaide. (Only, most people are not working, except in backyard ventures or casual, pointless jobs. The 1980s was when people started to find out what globalisation really meant). Everyone knows everyone else, and people rarely move away so the neighbours remember Clem’s birth and early childhood. And they remember his father, but they keep schtum about it too. Clem has reached the age where he needs to know, mainly because he is in search of a mentor to guide him through his difficult last year at school. He’s not sure it’s going to be worth it, and his teachers, ground down because of the hopelessness of their students’ future, aren’t much help. Pop’s advice is to knuckle down but Clem thinks it might be too late:
It seemed stupid to reduce life to a tertiary entrance ranking, but that’s how it was. Your brain produced a number, the number got you into university, this got you a good or boring job. There were more of the latter than the former, so you had to work hard and take advantage of every opportunity. (p.282)
He likes the art teacher, Nick, but Nick doesn’t last because his anarchic attitudes get him on the carpet in the principal’s office, just like any naughty schoolboy. OTOH Mrs Masharin believes in Clem’s talent as a writer but his judgement of her is harsh:
Mrs Masharin was our own commissar, Soviet discipline made word in the Gleneagles Steppes. Short skirt and unforgiving pantyhose, knee-high boots (always polished) and an industrious shirt; hair up (bun narrowly avoided) and a slight accent that could’ve been anything European, but we were so white-bread we didn’t know. She looked at me and said, ‘Nice big voice.’ Each word separate, in her usual permafrost accent. (p.357)
The occasion for using a ‘nice big voice’ is when Clem’s writing is featured in a broadcast on the school’s radio station (known not so affectionately as Radio Bogan).
The new radio station (Mr de Weerd’s idea) had started broadcasting across the school grounds every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at recess and lunch. Light classics, mainly, courtesy of Ms Field’s expansive Comoesque record collection, but the powers that be had conceded, allowing a pop segment (Spandau Ballet, Boy George), an electronic music corner (there were other Kraftwerk fans) and Mrs Masharin’s literature salon. (p.357)
Even the minor characters are vivid portraits of humanity:
Dwayne Schuit had been made producer. He sat in a control desk outside the studio. Dwayne of the Komputer Klub (‘Fun Programming in Basic’), debating and chess club. Dwayne, who’d missed out on a private education, but wore a tie and jacket to school anyway. Quoting Python ten years before anyone else; topping Year Eleven Latin (narrowly beating Curtis) and Classics, making it clear he wanted to study arts. (p.358)
Alas, the radio program also features an aggrieved ex-girlfriend. Clem’s best mate Curtis had, in a romantic moment, given this girl a photograph of his backside, 500 copies of which she has previously plastered all over the school ground. (Remember those instant photo booths?) Tracey has reason to be very angry with Curtis, and she isn’t finished yet. When Mrs Masharin asks her to talk on air about the book she’s been reading, her voice rings out all over the schoolyard and beyond, with her summation of a book called ‘Glory Days’… about a young girl, and she stupidly falls for a boy called Curtis. Invited to say more, Tracey continues” ‘In today’s world a girl needs to be careful. As this book shows, many boys care only for one thing. Curtis Durell is such a boy.’ You can guess the rest…
So there are laugh-out-loud moments, but also poignant sequences where Clem learns that his initial judgements of people aren’t always fair, and that sometimes there are heart-rending reasons why people do rather odd things such as knitting 17 identical jumpers in all different sizes.
I really enjoyed losing myself in the pages of this book. Because Clem’s been shielded from the kind of world his father represents, anticipation propels the reader along as the quest to learn about his father intensifies. But it’s his plans to help his ageing Pop find Lasseter’s Reef that are most compelling…
Pop, a backyard mechanic who’s supported the family throughout Clem’s lifetime, is succumbing to dementia. He’s struggling to remember the sequence of car parts for the repairs he does, he goes wandering and gets lost, and he fumbles for words he known all his life. But Pop’s fixation on finding the reef, his insistence on keeping the search secret, and his growing inability to foresee consequences is what really ramps up the narrative tension. Even if you haven’t read T.G.H. Strehlow’s harrowing Journey to Horseshoe Bend, which Pop references to inspire Clem into similar loyalty, the idea of this teenage boy (who keeps failing his driving test) and his grandfather setting out into the harsh South Australian outback in an ageing Datsun 120Y makes for a page-turning experience.
You can read an extract here.
Image credit: Datsun 120Y (Sunny B210), Markmastro, public domain, Wikipedia
Author: Stephen Orr
Title: This Excellent Machine
Publisher: Wakefield Press, 2019, 482 pages
ISBN: 9781743056134
Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press
Available from Fishpond (This Excellent Machine); direct from the publisher and all good bookstores.
Saga Land by Richard Fidler & Kári Gíslason, see 
The Australian poet Les Murray AO died today, aged 80.
The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1985 edition) devotes almost two entire pages to Murray. The entry reveals that he was born in the small town of Nabiac on the north coast of NSW and grew up on his father’s dairy farm. He left the University of Sydney in 1960 without a degree, going on to work in 1963 as a translator of foreign scholarly and technical material at the ANU. [Frustratingly, the entry doesn’t give the language in which he was sufficiently fluent to do this.] However, after attending a poetry festival in Cardiff, he gave up this translating position, lived in England and Europe for a year, and then resumed university, graduating in 1969. [The Companion also doesn’t say what sort of degree it was. I assume it was a BA).
For people who are concerned about Australia’s place in our region, the current issue of the Australian Foreign Affairs journal could be an interesting one, but I confess to a little weariness about the topic, Are We Asian Yet? History vs Geography. Individually and collectively, the writers of the four essays have thoughtful ideas to contribute but I have heard most of it before. (Not because I’m any kind of expert, but because this issue of Australia’s place in Asia is a perennial).
Carl Shuker’s fifth novel A Mistake, is a confronting novel, one that makes the reader think deeply about human fallibility and the impulse to blame.
I bought Sofia Petrovna after reading Judith Armstrong’s article ‘
Thanks to Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings for hosting the 1965 club!
The (Orange/Bailey’s) Women’s Prize for Fiction can be a bit uneven but there’s always something appealing to add to the shelves from the longlist. I’ve read two from the 2018 nominees, (
The image on the cover of Gerald Murnane’s A Season on Earth is immediately recognisable to Melburnians of a certain age. A quick Google search reveals 
As Murnane explains in the introduction, A Season on Earth has history. It was originally published in 1976 as A Lifetime on Clouds by Heinemann – in truncated form with just two of the four sections from the original manuscript. Indeed this the form in which I bought the 2013 Text Classics edition at the Boyd Community Library in Southbank. I had gone to hear Murnane in conversation with Andy Griffith, who wrote the introduction. (Although the book is now available in its entirety, I shan’t be jettisoning A Lifetime on Clouds because I like the introduction. And I wish I’d asked Murnane to autograph it when I had the chance!)
The sequence in which the young Adrian is dazzled by the pageantry of the coronation in 1953 and works it into his fantasy with Lauren and Rita and Linda in the Bluegrass Country of Kentucky is laugh-out-loud hilarious. They plan a little surprise for him and Lauren and Linda emerge from behind the bushes in brief two-piece bathing suits that dazzled him. The fabric was cloth-of-gold studded with semi-precious copies of all the emeralds and rubies and diamonds in the crown jewels. 
I’ve never thought about it before, but my cookbook shelves are a glimpse into the way I’ve lived my life. The oldest ones are recipe books for a beginner cook wanting to do it well: they include the CWA cookbook and Mastering the Art of French Cooking, plus Margaret Fulton and the Women’s Weekly Cookbooks. Recipe books from the 80s reflect my ‘earth mother’ phase, when I made everything from scratch. They also represent a long period of time when I was a vegetarian, mainly because I was (still am) opposed to factory farming. This phase led me to branch out into recipes from all over the world with recipes for Italian, Chinese and Asian cooking, and when The Spouse came into my life and we began to travel overseas, things became more adventurous so that now there are books of Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese and Middle Eastern cuisine. The recipes became more complex too, influenced in part by MasterChef, but also by the restaurant scene here in Melbourne. You can see this in some of 
At first glance, Magic Little Meals belongs back in my ‘1980s earth mother’ phase. It’s not a glossy ‘food-porn’ book. It’s only 200m square, and although it’s profusely illustrated, the stylist has concentrated on the food and the ingredients rather than the décor. But it’s actually a profoundly contemporary book because it addresses a concern that so many of us have…
I discovered the English author 
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Set in 1942, the novel begins with eleven-year-old Angel adjusting to a new life as an unwanted addition to a boarding house run by the parsimonious Missus Potts. Her mother has just died, and her paternal aunts don’t want her because they believe her mother was responsible for their brother’s death in a car accident. Although Stead’s book is fiction, the poignant plight of this unwanted child reminded me of Alva’s Boy, an Unsentimental Memoir by Alan Collins’. This memoir, recalling Collins’ wretched childhood in Sydney in about the same era, is the remarkable personal story on which his novels were based. 
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The Spice Islands Voyage, in Search of Wallace is the June choice for our Indonesian bookgroup but I’m reading it early because it’s hard to source and we need to circulate the library copy as best we can.
Congratulations to all the authors, editors and publishers! (I shall be barracking for Elizabeth Macarthur, of course, and not because it’s the only one I’ve read. It’s because I loved it.)
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