Ok, now we’re getting into the tricky stuff.  In chapter 7, otherwise known as Aeolus, Leopold Bloom is in a newspaper office, trying unsuccesfully to lodge an advert.  He’s an advertising man, remember, though he really doesn’t fit the mould of the ad men we see in American sitcoms.  Indeed, it’s really hard to imagine an adman at the turn of the century, when you remember those dreary old newspapers, solid with text in long columns, punctuated only occasionally with quaint ads for corsets or quack medicines.  We can hear the constant clack of the presses and the narrative is presented in abrupt slabs of text under newspaper headlines.  It’s not a bit like the preceding chapters and the reader’s first reaction is total confusion.  (Probably more so back in 1922 when Ulysses was first launched on an unsuspecting public.)

This jolt into modernism is a precursor to other parodies of text styles later on in the novel.  From my previous reading I recall that Joyce later parodies the Catholic Catechism, for example, and here the text parodies a newspaper.   I’m not very familiar with journalism of the period, but it seems to me that the ‘headlines’ wouldn’t get past an editor today: they’re too long-winded.  To get the joke, you need to identify the motifs of the winds, which brings me to….

So how does this relate to Homer’s Odyssey, eh?

Well, it’s the winds…as in Book 10…

For in Book 10 Odysseus breaks his journey in Aeolia, where Aeolus is Warden of the Winds.  He gives Odysseus a hand by trapping the unfavourable winds in a bag, but alas, when Odysseus nods off at the tiller, his men, who are a bit dim and should know better by now, open the bag and let the winds out because they think the cap’n is holding out on them and has some treasure in the bag.  Blown back to Aeolus, Odysseus gets no more help from the Warden, who is understandably not very impressed.

You have to be wide awake (or have crib notes left in the margins from your university days) to notice the way gusts of wind  blow into the newspaper office, but it’s not hard to pick up on the hot air of gossip, innuendo and nostalgic Irish blarney.  (Not quite the same thing, I agree, but foul winds of a different sort and let’s not quibble.) 

They always build one door opposite another for the wind to.  Way in.  Way out. (p119)

There’s paper strewn by the wind (p120); wind to get off Bloom’s chest (p123) and reminiscent of Odysseus’s boat blown back by the winds, words go backwards, not just those of the typesetters, (p124) but also in palindromes  (p138).  Scent moves on the air (p124), there are zephyrs on p 125, and cheques written on gale days (of which there are plenty in Dublin). Money worries are in the wind (p126) and debts of honour reaping the whirlwind (p127). Newspapermen ‘veer about when they get wind of a new opening‘; and Mr Dedalus ‘gives vent to a hopeless groan’ as he impatiently blows out his moustache. (p127). On p129 there’s a hurricane blowing (except there probably isn’t, so this is an example of hot air too), and a mocking kite on the breeze (p131).

Ok, we’ve got the point about the wind, and being blown back to where you were before i.e. nowhere.  What else happens?  The first ‘meeting’ of Leo Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, that’s what, and this is mighty significant because this is a father/son relationship as in Odysseus and Telemachus, even though they only pass each other by at this stage.  Stephen hands over Deasy’s letter from Chapter 2 so the schoolmaster gets to pontificate in the press, and they want Stephen to write for them.  Why? Does he represent the fresh winds of change, eh? And (let’s play amateur shrink for a moment) if there are autobiographical aspects to the characterisation of Stephen, is this respect from the elders something Mr J would have liked for himself? Having abandoned the moribund literary scene of Dublin for Paris, is Mr J satirising its old fogies and the windy rubbish they produce?

There are keys too.  Remember how Mulligan took the key in Chapter 1 and Bloom left his key behind when he went down to get his kidneys back in (um) Chapter 4?  In Aeolus, Bloom fancies a symbol for his client Alexander Keyes: it’s two crossed keys which also represents home rule for Ireland. But there’s a problem with the design and Bloom goes off to the library to find what he’s looking for, and everyone else goes to the pub.  He is indeed an outsider, isn’t he?

The trouble is, there’s a lot that just doesn’t make sense.  Those crazy rhymes in Italian under the headline ‘RHYMES AND REASONS’  on p139, for example,  - something to do with wind (vento), but what, and to what purpose? All of a sudden there are references to people and characters we don’t know (though we might, maybe, if we were Irish in the 1920s) and a lot of word play. This is obviously one of those chapters that will turn out to have hidden signifiances, but I need to read on to find out what they are.

Or maybe not.  Maybe I need to re-read it and skulk around online a bit to find out who some of those characters are.  Knowing Mr J as I do by now, I suspect that some of that talk and gossip in the newspaper office must be about writers or politicians or historical figures. I shall dip into it again before starting next month’s chapter, and will be back if I discover anything else worth noting. ..

As before, I refer serious readers of this chapter to Notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses  written by Gerry Carlin & Mair Evans; Wandering Rocks and if desperate,  Ulysses for Dummies. (Thanks to Brendan at the JoycePortal for this.)

Page references are to my battered old copy of the Penguin Ulysses, 1979 (which uses the 1960 Bodley Head edition, which was the 10th edition and has different page numbers to its predecessors.)

I don’t know why I haven’t read more of Thomas Keneally - he’s one of Australia’s more notable living authors and he’s prolific. I have two of his Miles Franklin winning novels on the TBR (Bring Larks and Heroes, 1967, and Three Cheers for the Paraclete, 1968) but haven’t got round to reading them yet. I read Schindler’s Ark when it won the Booker back in 1982, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) before that, probably when I did HSC. I admit I wasn’t much impressed by The Tyrant’s Novel (2003), but Keneally’s not the only author to focus on the vexed and troubling issues of our time at the expense of writing a good novel, and his heart was in the right place.  When I heard him speak at the Melbourne Writers Festival, I bought the first of what will be his three volume history Australians, Origins to Eureka and began reading it on the train on the way home, (only to have The Spouse whisk it away to read as soon as I got home). 

I had forgotten that The Widow and her Hero was longlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2008 when I saw the audio book at the library. I just liked the cover image, and the title was appealing.  It turned out to be rivetting, which is just what I needed for the daily commute.  It’s been a depressing week at work, with more mind-numbing  paperwork imposed by bureaucrats so far removed from the real world of schools that they have forgotten just how busy we are in term 4.   I set off for work feeling grumpy about it, and came home from work feeling fed up, but as soon as the CD player kicked in with this story, I forgot all about the annual implementation plan and the professional development plan and and amending the strategic plan with its ink barely dry because now there is a student engagement policy and program to write by the end of the term and a school performance report and we have to Be The Revolution  too – 88 pages! and that’s just reading about it! –  not to mention finishing my student reports and proof reading other teachers’ reports and staff reviews and the library stocktake and trying to find some time to plan and correct library lessons for the 18 classes I like to teach every week *sigh*.  (Who’s got time for punctuation? Not me!)  All this mumbo-jumbo vanished as I turned out of the schoolyard and I became lost instead in the heart-wrenching story of Grace and Leo Waterhouse, and her never-ending journey to come to terms with her widowhood.

Improbable as it seems, soldiers’ remains are still being found.   There’s to be a new WW1 memorial in French field somewhere, and a search in Vietnam led to the repatriation of some remains last year.  I remember watching something about this on TV, and felt for all those involved: the veterans who conducted the search, tormented at leaving their mates behind;  the other family who so desperately wanted their man back home on Australian soil; and the family that wanted their man left in peace where he lay.   Keneally explores something of this family’s reluctance to re-engage with their loss in his book, for over her long, long lifetime, Grace is confronted again and again with revelations about how her husband came to lose his life.

Leo Waterhouse was one of a unit led by the charismatic Charlie Doucette who commanded covert operations against the Japanese in World War II.    The first, placing limpet mines on enemy shipping in Singapore Harbour was a success, but they were captured when they tried a second time.  While most of the book is narrated by Grace, (who wants to set the record straight in a memoir for her niece), when Leo’s secret diary comes to light it tells the horrific truth about what happened to the men in captivity.  Much and all as we know about Japanese atrocities, it’s still appalling to be reminded of it, even as Leo minimises the barbarity for his wife’s sake.  

Equally horrific are the betrayals, official and unofficial, that underlie events.   Grace begins the journey of her widowhood wanting to know how the failure to rescue the men occurred, but official denials, secrets, and finally fresh revelations bring only a renewed sense of anger, confusion and loss.  The story of her husband’s death becomes ‘history’ to others, a subject for books and television programs; there is also an emotionally draining parade of confessional visits from those who wish to unload their guilt before they die. 

In the initial pain of loss, Grace is bewildered by the suddenness of her transformation from war-bride to a new status as war widow.  But over time she begins to judge the notion of wartime heroism, and finds it wanting.  While not denying bravery and sacrifice, she wearies of what she calls the ‘Boys Own Adventure’ aspects of it and resists its glorification.   She fears that Leo might be revealed as less of a hero than thought, and is discomfited to realise that she has come to resent her husband’s loyalty to Doucette.  In her old age, she achieves a kind of reconciliation to events, but it seems tentative.  ‘Enough, enough’ she says, because it’s time, but one wonders what might happen if the Official Secrets Act unburdened yet more to torment her.

James Ley, at The Age condemned The Widow and her Hero as middlebrow. Barry Oakley at The Australian damned it with faint praise: ‘patchwork, but readable’. Penelope Lively at The Guardian found it clever and compelling while Adair Jones at The Courier Mail thought its ambiguities significant:

Keneally’s skill as one of Australia’s most versatile and interesting literary figures rests in such ambiguities. The author questions our need for heroes and the price we all pay for needing them. For the generation of Australians who lived through the terrible war and survived, men and women like Grace who are now past 80, this novel acknowledges the awful price they paid and gives us a glimpse into the cold shadow of a war that has never quite disappeared.

I liked it because it made me think about Australia’s preoccupation with military history from a different perspective.  

Bolinda Audio seems to have the knack of casting just the right narrator for their audio books:  Beverley Dunn is superb as Grace, and David Tredinnick is an utterly convincing Leo.

Author: Thomas Keneally

Title: The Widow and her Hero (audio book read by Beverley Dunn and David Tredinnick)

Publisher: Bolinda Audio Books 2007

ISBN: 9781921334498 BAB 071079

8 CDs, running time approx 9 hr, 30 mins.)

Source: Casey-Cardinia Library

I learned from the pages of The Age today that Beverley Farmer has won the Patrick White Award for 2009.   She’s not a prolific writer, but has published two collections of short stories and three novels

• Alone (1980) ;
• The Seal Woman (1992) ; and
• The House in the Light (1995) which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award.

The themes and style of her writing are discussed by Laurie Clancy and Perry Middlemiss has a synopsis and opening lines from The House in the Light at his old Middlemiss website (still a great source for anyone interested in Australian Literature).

Let’s hope that the award encourages someone to do a reprint of one of her novels.

Trap, by Peter Mathers won the Miles Franklin in 1966.  It’s out-of-print, but you can get a copy, print on demand from Sydney University Press.* 

The blurb on the dustjacket tells me that it’s the story of Jack Trap, of English, Irish,  Aboriginal and Tierra del Fuegan descent.  Admired, hated, needed by everyone, and a symbol of different aspects of an oppressive society. Peter Mathers deals gently with the underdog, reserving his most vitriolic satire for the affluent conformists.  His original style and humour make TRAP a biting, very funny novel.

It was regarded as a subversive choice when it won the MF.  Have I read it yet? No, but it sounds most intriguing and there are only four in the MF winners TBR ahead of it.  (Unless I give in to temptation and buy the titles missing from my collection, that is).

 The novel actually begins with a page making the claim that it’s David David’s last diary, followed by a page asserting that it’s a work of fiction, followed by a long list of major characters. After that, these are the opening lines:

1 May

So Trap is definitely to travel north.  A lot of good the trip will do him – and Naraki Mission.  His so-called pilgrimage will become a holiday or a catastrophe.  He is quite unable to co-operate with people.  He is still the lone man.

Naraki, five thousand square miles, is to be developed by the Steelcyl – Astrominerals – Mayor Investment – Gospel Enterprises – Holy Spirit Trust – Megopolis consortium.  They have undertaken to build a deep-sea port, two hundred miles of railway, a dam and a town to house a population of a thousand plus.  The ore is almost on the surface and Japanese mills will take every ton.  Naraki has slept for sixty years.  The glorious awakening is at hand.  Useful habits and trades will be acquired by its inhabitants – provided Trap and his current mockery, fair shares! – be kept out.

The inhabitants are alleged to feel betrayed, that the Church and government have sold them out.  Of course this is nonsense.  The consortium will make a great deal of money but this can only be for the common good. (p3)

(‘Don’t you worry about that’, I thought straight away when I read these lines, but no, Joh Bjelke Peterson wasn’t in government till 1968).

One of the pleasure of having a first edition complete with dustcover, is reading the blurb.  It tells me that:

Peter Mathers was born in 1931 of poor, but honest immigrant parents.  Reared in Sydney, he spent several years in Melbourne and travelled all over Australia.  Gainful employment eluded him.  He has lived in a cork forest in France and attics and basements in London.  He hopes to return soon to Australia with his wife and daughter.

Someone at Cassells had a sense of humour.  How droll, compared to the blurb from the SUP website : 

Trap (1966) won the Miles Franklin Literary Award when it was published. Its comic and satiric elements and use of several narrative voices provide revealing interpretations of cross-cultural relations, bureaucracy and politics in Australia.

Peter Mathers was born in England in 1931 and came to Australia with his family as a child. From 1964 and 1967 he worked in Britain and Europe as a researcher. His first writing appeared in the early 1960s, with his novels being published in the 1960s and 1970s.

*Please note: I have been the recipient of six free copies of publications for review from SUP in 2009.  However, I am providing this link not because I have anything to gain by it, but because I suspect that many may not be aware that out-of-print titles are available in this way, and I’d like to see more of Australia’s literary heritage being read.  Trap made it onto the Australian Society of Authors favourites list but not the Top 20 .  Well, how could it ever be a favourite if it was out-of-print and nobody knew where to get a copy?

Author: Peter Mathers

Title: Trap

Publisher: Cassell, hardback, first edition, 1966

Source: Personal library

Nice to see so many Aussies in the IMPAC Longlist, just announced. It’s also good to see the inclusion of quite a few from beyond the English speaking world, available through translation.

Those on the list that I’ve read (with links to my reviews) include:

Australian titles

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (alas, I read this in March 08, before I set up this blog.)

The Trout Opera by Matt Condon (I’m barracking for this one because it has been unjustly overlooked.)

Wanting by Richard Flanagan

The Spare Room by Helen Garner 

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Breath by Tim Winton

International titles

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

Sea of Poppies by Amritav Ghosh

The Believers by Zoe Heller

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic

 The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by Edgar Wroblewski (really??)

Many of the longlisted books have been reviewed at the Complete Review.

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced. 

2009 Fiction winner

The Boat by Nam Le

 The judging panel was impressed by the daring scope and excellence of its execution, the generous breadth of its emotional and social traverse and the excitement generated by every story*.

 2009 Non-Fiction winners

House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann by Evelyn Juers

Drawing the Global Colour Line by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds

Both books explore important racial, moral and political issues of Australia’s past. The Non-Fiction judging panel said “With great intellectual authority and international research Evelyn Juers, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds tell their stories magnificently.”*

 For more information, see the PM’s Award site.

* Source: notification email from  pmlitawardsinfo@environment.gov.au

I bought House of Exile when it was shortlisted for the 2009 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction, not knowing anything about its subject matter except that it was indirectly something to do with  Thomas Mann.  He is one of those writers I’ve heard of, but never got round to reading.  It turns out that he was the brother of Heinrich Mann, the primary subject of House of Exile.  (When I realised this I toyed with the idea of reading Death in Venice online but the translation is so awkward I gave up after a page or two.) 

Ramona Koval interviewed Juers on the RN Book Show and like me, she began with an interest in Thomas Mann because he’s the famous brother, and the one who won the Nobel Prize.  Juers explained that she became interested instead in his older brother Heinrich because he is underrated as a writer, and dismissed as insignificant because of his brother’s pre-eminence .  His wife Nelly was ridiculed for being coarse and vulgar (she had a drinking problem) but she was actually a very courageous woman, tested to the limit when the couple had to flee Nazi Germany because of Heinrich’s criticism of the regime.  Considering Heinrich’s patronising attitude towards her as a writer, her extraordinary efforts to support him seem all the more remarkable, but I suppose they were of their own time and it was not uncommon for men to suppress women’s writing, not at all…

It’s not, however, a straightforward biography.  In the Afterword Juers calls it a collective biography set in an age of fragmentation and flux.  To depict this reality she has tried to recreate the lives of a group of German intellectuals around Heinrich Mann, all of whom lived a life of exile during and after the War.  As Hoffman explains so eloquently in After Such Knowledge, many of those who escaped the Nazi regime could not bring themselves to return  to Germany thereafter.  The idea of knowingly or unknowingly encountering the perpetrators of mass horror could not be countenanced, and the initial flight to safety thus became a diaspora to America, Australia, Israel and elsewhere.  This post-war self-imposed exile diffused the support they might have been able to offer one another had they been together as a community.

The Mann family, however, had its share of tragedy even prior to World War 1.  In 1910, Heinrich’s sister Carla suicided over a love affair; like Nelly, she suffered because her social position was judged not good enough and so she used the cyanide she’d been hoarding for years.  Juers suggests that Thomas, a rather unlikeable man it seems, was bothered by the social impact of her suicide rather than by grief, and considered it a selfish act.  He seems to have been a man who viewed events as they affected him.  It took him quite a while to get round to denouncing German atrocities in the 1930s, compared to his heroic brother.  In America he refused to extend financial help to his brother’s wife because he found her embarrassing.

Heinrich seems to have been more far-seeing. In the prewar period, in 1911, Heinrich was writing essays warning that ‘without democracy, people would seek salvation from their leaders, would believe in supermen , while their own development would remain dangerously stunted‘. (p68) He was appalled by the declaration of war in 1914 while Thomas on the other hand was in favour of it, leading to conflict between the brothers, expressed by Heinrich in anti-war essays which Thomas rejected as a personal attack.  (Both were conveniently exempted from military service.) This rift lasted till well after the Great War.

All this is interesting enough, but it’s not exactly compelling reading. Unlike Brenda Niall’s brilliant biography The Boyds which I could not put down, House of Exile didn’t really pique my interest in these people or their doings.  Perhaps if I had been familiar with the work of more of the intellectuals surveyed, it might have been different; after all, The Boyds is about Australia’s preeminent artistic family, and I am especially fond of Martin Boyd’s Langton Quartet.  Maybe I was predisposed to enjoy The Boyds, but it still seems to me that there is a jerkiness about Juers’ writing and a strange reserve about her subjects which is in contrast to Niall’s accomplished style.  There are times when Juers’ writing seems disjointed, with references to writers such as Kafka and Virginia Woolf having no apparent connection to the family story, other than to remind us that they were contemporaries.  Yet at other times I found the author’s voice intrusive and wished for a little less detail.  Who cares if the author has a coffee with someone she’s interviewing?  Who cares if Virginia Woolf lost a glove or ate bread with honey?

The beginning of Points of Origin is bewildering:

‘I was born on June 20, 1887 in Hanover.  As a child I had a little garden with roses and strawberries’.  Hanover and Hannover, one hen in English, two hens in German, a clever teacher could have told young Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters – what a name – who lived with his parents in Veitchenstrasse.  Violetland he called it, and called himself Kuwitter, Ku for short, for Kurt of course, but also Kuh a cow, and wittern a foreboding in the cow’s nostrils, Wetter wittern a change in the weather, things to come.  When Kurt wet himself as a child he was locked in the bathroom.  When he watched other boys destroy his garden, a hill he’d made, a pond, the roses, the strawberries, he was so upset that he had an epileptic fit.  He was sick for two  years.  In 1919 Herwarth Walden published Schwitter’s ‘Anna Blume’ in the magazine Der Sturm: a poem about an ordinary girl, ungezahltes Frauenzimmer, uncounted, untold, Anna-anonymous, who is like a flower. She wears her hat on her feet and walks about on her hands, she has a pet bird, the poet loves her.  A heroine.  A hero. (p73)

This Schwitters is a writer, ok, and in the next paragraph we learn that he meets another writer called Doblin, but (unless I missed it – there’s no index, to check!) we never do find out anything more about him until he turns up as an artist on p333.  This and other fragments about some writers called Moses Joseph Roth and Elizabeth Schuler have been included in this chapter presumably so that the book’s structure mirrors the state of fragmentation and flux.  I found it disorienting…

I also found the speculative aspects somewhat bizarre; it was as if Juers were freely embroidering a past for Nelly because so little was known about her life.  ‘Let’s say that’s how it was’ she says on p97, alerting us to the fact that most of what we’d just read about the death of Nelly’s baby was invention because ‘we know she lost a child but not the circumstances’.   It may indeed be innovative, but I do not agree that ‘the best writing occurs on the ledge between fact and fiction’ (p169).  Yes, yes, it is a given in the 21st century that the ‘truth’ is not always to be trusted, but imaginative reconstructions leave me confused and irritated.  What is the point, other than to pad out the length of  the book?

Like Ramona Koval, I do not want my reservations about it to imply that I did not read the book.  I pressed on with it, finding Part 2 very bleak indeed.  It chronicles the passage of WW2 year by year, interspersed by a miscellany of apparently unrelated people and events in the UK, US, Europe and even Australia.  It’s as if Juers were determined to use every scrap of her painstaking research, right down to someone changing the brand of cigar he used. The overall story about the impact of exile seems to me to be at risk of drowning in the flood of detail, and Juers herself seemed to have more empathy with Virginia Woolf than with her subjects marooned in the intellectual wastelands of an America they did not understand.  (An America also deeply suspicious of them, because of Heinrich’s communist sympathies.)

The catalogue of names I didn’t know did make me realise that I haven’t read much German literature…

As to why it’s been nominated for the PM’s Award – well, it’s obviously an important book with scholarly credentials.  Giramondo specialise in this type of publication, and it has its place.  David Malouf on the back blurb says this:

A large book, both in scale and ambition, sustained by impeccable research, lightly used, full of intelligence, wit, humour, and a deep sense for the oddness of people and the mysteries of the creative life.

All true; can’t argue with a word of it.  It’s what Malouf hasn’t said that’s telling.

There’s another review of House of Exile at Reeling and Writhing.

PS 1.45pm, the very day I finish this book and blog it, it is announced as Joint Winner of the PM’s Award for Non-Fiction, along with Drawing the Global Colour Line by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds.   Which proves that you shouldn’t take any notice of anything you read on this blog!

Author: Evelyn Juers

Title: House of Exile, the Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroger-Mann

Publisher: Giramondo, 2008 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781920882440

Source: Personal copy.  Purchased at Readings. ($32.99)

Maybe it’s taking a while for reviewers to plod through the new Cambridge History of Australian Literature, or maybe interest in it has been swamped by the fuss over the PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, but it seems to me that nobody is very interested in it.  If anybody reviewed it, I can’t find it online, and there’s nothing about it in the ABR (Australian Book Review) either for September or October.

[CORRECTION 4.11.09 I've found another review online.  It's by Ian Reid from Flinders University].

I found out about it because I subscribe to newsletters about new titles at my libraries.  I reserved it, picked it up, admired the painting of Patrick White on the front cover, and opened it expecting to find something to pique my interest.  I am, as is self-evident, very keen on Australian literature and its development and I’m not at all averse to reading scholarly stuff that’s well-written and has something of interest to offer me.  Alas, the Cambridge History of Australian Literature has lain beside my keyboard here for a fortnight, where I’ve dipped into it on and off while waiting for pages and programs and updates and whatnot to load. (High-speed network?  Bring it on, Mr Rudd!) To my disappointment and dismay, I never found anything in it that’s made me want to invest any serious time in reading it.

It’s not just that the font is absurdly small, though it’s tiresome to need my reading glasses and a magnifying light.  It’s the near-universal pomposity of its tone.  I read all of the Introduction, and a bit of the first chapter ‘Britain’s Australia’  and moved on without a great deal of enthusiasm…

My main interest is the novel, but oh dear! the two chapters focussing on the novel since 1950 are hard work.  Here’s the introduction to ‘The novel, the implicated reader and Australian literary cultures, 1950-2008′:

The origins of the novel and the settlement of Australia may both be located within the historical convergence of European industrialisation, colonisation and the Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries.  It is uncertain what novels might first have been carried on board the tall ships with their human cargoes of convict workers and gaolers or how these were read within an Australian context , but it is clear that the exiles possessed higher average levels of literacy than the general population of Britain at this time. (p517)

Oh, ok.  Quite how this is clear from an interview with a 12-year-old child in a Marcus Clarke novel, and why anyone would assume that there was near universal literacy because of the 1848 education acts when the indicator of literacy at that time was the mere ability to write one’s name, I do not know.  The footnote at the bottom doesn’t seem any too convincing to me, with the title ‘Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past’  but the author goes on anyway to declare that

An Australian reading public was thereby established early, as the imaginative interaction between texts and contexts made its first tentative gestures towards creative writing and ultimately literature.  (p517)

These tentative gestures are none too clear to me either, since the author then leaps from the first ‘Australian novel’ in 1831 to the 1960s when ‘an increasing number of novels by indigenous Australians have been published.’   Well, maybe if I waded through the previous 500-odd pages it wouldn’t be quite such a mystery to me, but surely a text like this is not meant to be read sequentially?  I’ve had the Pelican Guide to English Literature on my shelves since I was at university, and I still dip into it every now and again, but I’ve certainly never read the whole series and don’t intend to either.

I know, I know, it’s a bit cheeky of me to categorise this post as a review when I freely admit that I haven’t really read the book.  I made myself read all of ‘The novel, the implicated reader and Australian literary cultures, 1950-2008′ with its graphs and lists and meandering ideas,  but after a page or two I decided to skip The Challenge of the Novel, Australian Fiction since 1950′.  I don’t know who this ‘history’ is written for, but it failed to engage me altogether. 

At about $140 , I recommend you borrow it and make up your own mind before you invest in your own copy.

Editor: Peter Pierce

Title: The Cambridge History of Australian Literature

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2009

ISBN: 9780521881654

Source: Casey-Cardinia Library.

I borrowed The Place for a Village from the library, started reading it but got distracted by other things – and now Library Elf tells me it’s due back and I can’t renew it because someone else has reserved it. Bother, bother, bother!

Or, maybe this is the Fates telling me that I need to buy this fascinating book? 

It begins by explaining that the long gone Batman’s Hill is a metaphor for how this city of mine has been shaped by its landscape and how it altered that landscape beyond recognition.  The earliest explorers in January 1803 used it as a point of reconnaissance, but Batman was the settler who forged an infamous ‘treaty’ with the unsuspecting indigenous people in 1835 and set the processes of change in motion.  Naturally he chose the best bit of land, and built his eight-roomed house on top of the hill.  He fenced off the south and east slopes for his farm, a pattern of development in the east and southeast that persists to this day.  Anyone who’s been out west on a scorcher with a hot northerly wind knows why, but Presland promises a more sophisticated analysis based on the characteristics of the competing environments.

What little I learned of Australian history at school was mostly about its exploration rather than its development, and of course there was a lot about politics.  One year at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival I discovered Robyn Annear’s wonderful Bearbrass which re-imagines early Melbourne with amusing anecdotes and all sorts of intriguing information, and I also have The Encyclopedia of Melbourne but The Place for a Village is different because it focusses on its natural history.

Natural history, first described by Aristotle, (384-322 BCE) was the precursor to the range of sciences which exist today.  Presland cites the original OED definition: the systematic study of all natural objects, animal, vegetable and mineral; now restricted to animal life, usually in a popular manner’ (p9), an allusion to the 18th and 19th century interest in natural history as a hobby for those that had the leisure to indulge it. Charles Darwin is the best known of these, and representative of their great achievements in geography, zoology, botany and geology.  For Presland,  the challenge is to somehow reconstruct the lost landscapes of our city from historical sources, artwork and contemporary knowledge of the natural sciences to fill the gap.

In retrospect, it is astonishing really how quickly Melbourne developed.  After Batman died in 1839 that hill was taken over by the government, and his house was used by Governor LaTrobe till something more splendid was built.   There were vague plans for it to be used for a 50 acre Botanic Gardens but it ended up as a site for a slaughterhouse instead, until the advent of the railways, financed by money from the Gold Rush in the 1850s.  Batman’s Hill, a mere 16 years after his arrival was the site of the first railway station, a remarkable development considering that the locomotives had to imported from Britain in sailing ships.  (You can see Locomotive no 1 at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, but I think Melbourne scrapped our first one.)

The significance of Melbourne’s early rail is that by 1892 Batman’s Hill was completely flattened so that the track between Spencer St and Flinders St stations could be laid.  Click here for before and after views. Every time I take the train into the city I travel over this lost landscape, with only Bunjil brooding over Wurundjeri Way to remind me that there is an even older Aboriginal landscape stretching back for tens of thousands of years, and a pre-human natural history before that.

I have reports to write so even reading Chapter 2 is self-indulgence but the story of Melbourne’s geological history is fascinating.  Now I know why I need a brolly so much more often at work in the foothills of Melbourne than I do at home on its coastal plain! The illustrations of early Melbourne (most of which I’ve seen before in various galleries and the State Library) mean so much more when they are linked to Presland’s clear and intriguing explanations about our topography.   Click here, for example, to see Charles Bennett’s 1883 painting of ‘Falls Bridge’ – now the Queen Street Bridge.  The engraving shows the rocky ledge underneath the bridge that the earliest settlers used as stepping stones across the Yarra when they walked to town from the port at Sandridge, saving the price of a ticket for the punt across the river. The Falls, now long gone, were the dividing line between fresh and salt water, and fresh water upstream was what determined the site for the settlement.   The picture that really took me aback was the photograph of the Mordialloc Creek in 1880 which so clearly shows the way in which this landscape has been utterly transformed by swamp drainage and other works.

This is a beautiful, fascinating, wonderful book with chapters covering Melbourne’s climate, its streams and wetlands, pre-European vegetation and animal life, and the influence of nature on our culture.  I can’t wait to read the rest of it….

The Age reviewed The Place for a Village properly  – I wish they’d sent me a nice copy to review!

Author: Dr Gary Presland

Title: The Place for a Village, How Nature Has Shaped the City of Melbourne

Publisher: Museum Victoria 2008

ISBN:9780980381368

Source: Casey-Cardinia Library

 Thea Astley won her first Miles Franklin Award in 1962 with The Well Dressed Explorer , but she had to share it with George Turner for The Cupboard Under the Stairs.)

She won her second Miles Franklin, in her own right, with The Slow Natives in 1965.  These are the opening lines:

He’d first begun to steal when he was eleven.

No, they had both said, surprisingly in agreement, no, you may not have a six-stitcher.

He’d got a bit sick of arguing that October.  The heat was terrible,  The Terrace was a dried-up strip of sticky tar-paper.  Okay, he had said.  And he had gone into town and taken one from a city counter.  It was so easy there wasn’t even much fun in it.  And of course he couldn’t even use the ball but had to keep it hidden at the bottom of his play-box.  Fondling it in bed after his light was out, once he had dropped off to sleep with it against the pillow and when it had been discovered in the morning he became involved in a series of lies he was unable to sustain.  They kept on hoping for a long time that he had borrowed it from a schoolmate as he had insisted, but each knew that glossy red globe was bright with its own guilt, and he became so tired of their upset and accusing eyes he had walked down to the park near the ferry one afternoon and chucked it straight back into the river where it went bobbing off down the tide.  ‘I gave it back’, he announced at tea.  ‘Satisfied?’      (Penguin Books, 1990 p1 )

Author: Thea Astley

Title: The Slow Natives

Publisher: Penguin paperback

Year 1990

ISBN 9780140134117

Source: Personal Library