2017: My Year of Writing

Even workaholics need to have fallow years if they are to continue functioning well. 2017 was such a year for me, as I needed to pull back after nearly killing myself in 2016 (when I hadn’t even properly recovered from 2015). I finally finished my memoir while I was on hols in Croatia, and while I might still have to do one more draft, it’s been a huge load off my shoulders. I was still unwell for most of the year, but the colds & flu weren’t as intense. And now, after a few weeks off over Xmas, I’m full of beans again. Long may it last! Below is a list of my literary doings over the past year.

Cockies on the Gold Coast

Publications

I had more academic work than creative pieces published this year, which makes sense as all my time is taken up by being an academic. If I do write fiction, it’s on the weekends, or bashed out the night before my writing group’s deadline.

At the beginning of the year, my essay on the craft of Georgiana Molloy’s writing was published in Claiming Space: Australian Women’s Writing. I started writing this essay in Rome at the end of 2014! This was followed in October by an essay on eco-memoir in Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, in which I compared Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me with Tim Winton’s Island Home.

Just before Christmas, the Journal for the Association of Australian Studies published my essay on John Molloy’s (Georgiana’s husband) involvement in a massacre against Wardandi Noongars, and the subsequent papering over of this in later accounts. Writing this paper was hard work: it took hours to piece together a timeline of what had happened, as well as the debate over the events that resurfaced in later histories, and to attend to the language that was used in covering up what had happened. I was glad when it was finished.

In each of these volumes or issues, my work sat alongside that of other wonderful scholars, and I am really grateful to the editors for publishing my work.

In August I was Southerly journal’s monthly blogger, publishing four posts (one each week) about writing, deafness and environment. You can read them all via the links on this page. In October my eight-word story was featured on a billboard courtesy of the Queensland Writers Centre. That was pretty exciting!

I was pretty dismayed, once I got to the end of the year, to realise I hadn’t published any creative work (aside from said billboard), but then I remembered I’d finished my memoir. Fingers crossed that it gets somewhere this year.

UQ Ferry

Awards/Funding

I was longlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize again, this time for ‘Depths Exceeded’, which is a small part of my mermaid book. I’m still trying to find a home for it; I’ll get there eventually.

I continued with my study on vernacular criticism, for which I received funding at the end of last year, and will have this written up by March. It turned out to be a much bigger project than I anticipated and is eating up a bit of time. While it’s something that engages me intellectually, it isn’t a topic I’m downright passionate about, which is problematic. I remember one of my supervisors telling me that when you choose a PhD topic, it has to be something you’re obsessed with if your interest is going to carry you over three years. The same holds, it seems, for any kind of project. Still, it’s a good short-term study, and I’m finding I’m applying some of the research methods I learnt as a research assistant at Autism Queensland, which is a boon.

Gum blossoms!

Teaching

In the second half of the year, I was course convener for Women Writers, the subject I tutored in last year. This was a very steep learning curve – a little hairy at times – but it was ultimately very rewarding. The books I set were: Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Joyce Carol Oate’s Foxfire, Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Gillian Mear’s Foal’s Bread, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Helen Oyeymi’s White is for Witching. The students responded well to all these books except for The Golden Notebook (and some were a bit mystified by The Lesbian Body). Although The Golden Notebook was revolutionary when it came out, it held little meaning for them now. I wonder how or why that matters; Jane Eyre is poles apart from the experience of women in the 21st century but readers are still enraptured by it. Perhaps it was the form of the novel, which made it hard to digest, whereas Jane Eyre is a fairly conventional romance. Aside from this it was really heartening when students told me they enjoyed the books because they were works they wouldn’t usually encounter.

I tutored a class alongside the lectures, and as with last year I loved my students – they were confident, intelligent and outspoken. But by the end of the year I was in my usual haze of fatigue because of the toll of straining to listen and to lecture (every lecture is a performance). I think most people are knackered by the end of the year anyway, and the holidays straightened me out.

As well as the lectures for Women Writers, I also delivered one on Position Doubtful for the third-year Australian studies course. This year I’ll be lecturing on James Bradley’s Clade and Tim Winton’s Island Home for this same course, but I won’t be doing any other teaching as I need to devote myself to finishing my ecobiography.

Flowers at Kew Gardens

Conferences and Supervision

In February I presented on Liptrot’s The Outrun at a conference on excess and desire at The University of Queensland. In London in June, I presented on a digital example of ecobiography, Queensland artist Pat Hoffie’s ground trothing. In retrospect this was not a great example of ecobiography but I was trying to align it with the conference’s focus on digital life writing narratives. Still, I enjoyed being back in London, thought the conference was absolutely fantastic, and met some great Aussie writers and academics, including Ellena Savage and Nicole Matthews, who presented a very memorable paper on hearing air reviews.

From England I flew to Croatia and presented at the European Society for Environmental History conference in Zagreb (preceded by a field trip to Kornati National Park near Zadar). This was the first history conference I had ever been to. I presented a similar paper to that which I’d delivered in Perth the year before, on ecotones, but my paper, I found after some rather harrowing comments from the audience, was not up to scratch (no one likes getting criticism, but having to receive it in a public forum is way worse). Once I recovered from that experience and was able to examine the comments with equanimity, I realised they were constructive. I’m intending to present at the environmental history conference in Canberra this year and to do a better job.

As soon as I arrived back in Brisbane I turned around and went down to the Gold Coast to present on Molloy and ecobiography at a conference on Literary Environments. This was not a very smart move as I was shattered from jetlag, but I couldn’t bear to miss it because Ursuala Heise gave a keynote and a workshop, both of which were amazing.

I capped off the year with a paper on Georgiana Molloy’s participation in botanical connoisseurship – the rage for exotics collected by Europeans and grown in their gardens – for a conference on the Nature and Spaces of Enlightenment. I really enjoyed this conference as well but I was completely wrung out from the year, so I couldn’t make it to all the sessions.

Throughout the year I also took on the supervision of four creative writing students, three doing MPhils and one a PhD. I found this unexpectedly rewarding, as I could chat to them about their ideas and help them with their critical essays. I also supervised a wonderful third-year student who wrote a brilliant essay on young adult novels and their representation of deafness. Aside from my research, supervision is one of the satisfying parts of my job.

Kornati National Park, Croatia

Research

I used my funding to fly to the UK and comb through the archives relating to Mangles and his contemporaries. This was a great trip but it was jam-packed and involved zig-zagging up the country from south to north. I like travelling and the distances didn’t faze me, but I could have done with a more leisurely pace. My next big task over this month and next is to collate and transcribe everything so that I’m ready to write in March, as well as writing up the rest of my trip (it's happening, but v.e.r.y s.l.o.w.l.y).

V cool plants in the UNESCO Stari Grad Plains, Croatia

The Australian Women Writers Challenge

I put the ball for AWW on the shelf last year as I had too much going on, but managed to co-ordinate guest posts from lesbian/queer authors (Kelly Gardiner; Eden S. French; Jess Davidson; and my own thoughts on the themes that have appeared in guest posts by lesbian/queer women writers), and authors with disability (Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench, editors of Defying Doomsday; and Anna Spargo-Ryan). This year I’m picking up the baton from Marisa Wikramanayake and am going back to bi-monthly roundups, as well as the usual guest posts. This year, the theme for NAIDOC is ‘Because of her, we can!’ so I really want to feature more posts from Indigenous women writers.

BrisVegas rainforest

The Year Ahead

I have tried not to take on too much this year as I need to focus on finishing my ecobiography, but already there are quite a few pots on the stove. Aside from the two lectures which I need to write and present, and my vernacular criticism study to complete and write up, I’m co-ordinating, with Clare-Archer Lean from the University of the Sunshine Coast, two panels on the interface between science and literature at the annual literature conference in Canberra in July, as well as subsequent publication of these papers in the Australian Humanities Review. I'm also giving a workshop on Writing Animals and Their Worlds for the Queensland Writers Centre on Saturday 28th April.

On top of this I need to prepare a fellowship application for gainful employment next year, as my contract ends in January 2019. I think I had pretty much better say ‘no’ to anything else that comes into my inbox this year.

Health-wise I am determined to start running again, with the aim of doing a half-marathon in August, and of getting out of the city into bush more often. Exercise and the environment will help ameliorate my stress. I’m also casting about for some kind of hobby, instead of working all through the weekend. I think dancing, drawing and going to the movies are back on the cards. Well, time to dive into 2018!

Everything is going to be ok if there are peonies in the world.

Australian Women Writers Challenge – Completed!

Ok so it's kind of eleventh hour (the story of my life in 2016), but I got my ten reviews done for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and I read 36 books by Australian women writers altogether (I’ll list these in a later post when I sum up my reading for 2016).

Here are the books I reviewed:

1.     Comfort Food, Ellen van Neerven

2.     Defying Doomsday, Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench

3.     Fishing in the Devonian, Carol Jenkins

4.     Not Just Black and White, Lesley and Tammy Williams

5.     Painting Red Orchids, Eileen Chong

6.     Cloudwish, Fiona Wood

7.     Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, Anita Heiss

8.     Everywhere I Look, Helen Garner

9.     The Soul of Countess Adrian, Rosa Praed

10.  Close to Home, Robin Barker

With three Indigenous authors, two editors with disability and one author from a migrant background, this list is happily much more diverse than last year’s.

Over at the AWW challenge, I arranged a focus on Australian women writers with disability in April which featured guest posts by Gaele Sobott and Amanda Tink, as well as my own thoughts on why we need diverse books. In October I organised a focus on Australian women writers of migrant heritage, with posts from Eileen Chong, Lee Kofman and Michelle Cahill. And in July I interviewed Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko as part of a celebration of NAIDOC week

Sadly, this is the last year of my role as diversity editor. What with working full time and trying to do my creative writing in my spare time, my life has become completely overloaded and I need to try and balance things better. I’ll continue to arrange the guest posts (and am going to try to include more by Indigenous writers), but the roundups will be done by the excellent and capable Marisa Wikramanayake.

I’ll sign up for the challenge next year, but I won’t set myself a target (part the trying to minimise strain business). It’s a wonderful and valuable initiative, and it’s introduced me to a new way of thinking about discussing books. In fact I’ve found this so interesting that I successfully applied for an internal grant at UQ to study vernacular criticism in more detail.

I don’t know if my reading habits have changed that much over the past five years, as the reason why I gravitated towards the challenge in the first place was because I naturally read a lot of books by women. However it has definitely raised my awareness of gender bias and I’ve started having conversations with other people about the books they and their children read (my sister, for example, is now actively getting her son to read books with female protagonists). I'm really grateful, too, to the challenge creator Elizabeth Lhuede for approaching me five years ago after she read a post I'd written on Eva Hornung's Dog Boy and disability. It's made me far more aware of the representations of disability in literature, and given me an opportunity to be part of sorely-needed conversations in Australia about diversity.

The challenge is still going strong and Elizabeth has new volunteers helping out and looking over stats. I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens in 2017!

Review of Close to Home

I met and became friends with Robin Barker when we were doing an MA in Writing course at the University of Technology, Sydney. Robin was famous because she had published two books of advice on babies, Baby Love and The Mighty Toddler. I was a twenty-three year old who loved nineteenth-century fiction and wanted to write my first novel and didn’t have a clue about babies in any shape or form. Somehow we hit it off. I’ve always enjoyed the company of older women – they’re more interesting and emotionally complex than younger women and, having done more, they often have good stories too. I’m not sure why Rob was interested in me, unless it was that she recognised my ambition and wanted to help, which she certainly did. When I later won a mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors, she introduced me to her editor Julia Stiles, who in turn helped me with my manuscript and introduced me to some agents, and then A Curious Intimacy finally found its feet.

Rob has been working on the stories in Close to Home since that time (I discovered I still had a draft of one in my writing box) and it was fantastic to see them in print, particularly the stories I knew she was struggling with, as all writers do. Plus the cover is gorgeous. I read the book a while back, leaving it in a tequila bar when I took everything out of my handbag to find my wallet. To my relief, the bartender still had it when I went back the following week.

Of all the stories, the one that’s stayed with me is ‘Josephine’s Face’. A fairly long, meandering story in the second person, it doesn’t have a great deal of tension, but it achieves nuance and complexity through the use of hindsight. The narrator, posted to America with her army husband and kids, befriends an African-American mother in the park attached to the military’s housing complex. As the narrator comes to know her, it slowly becomes apparent to her how race is entwined with class. Where the white women make their menfolk lunch and listen to their day, Josephine goes out to work. Young and naïve, the narrator comments how ‘It didn’t take long for Don and me to be drawn into a welcoming circle of officers and wives, which I soon noticed you and AJ weren’t part of. It didn’t seem to be because you were deliberately excluded, and nor did you ever give me that impression. At the time I presumed it was because you were working shifts in that hospital in Alexandria’. Subtlety, the use of ‘at that time’ shows it wasn’t this reason at all. The accounts of subtle racism continue in conversations at dinner parties or at shops. There are tiny, dropped words that, on their own, are hard to pick out, but when they’re laid in a line with the benefit of hindsight, they accumulate into something cruel. In the midst of it all is this glamorous, intelligent, accomplished woman, ignoring the insults with aplomb.

Children bind together many of these stories, illuminating the messes that adults get caught up in, and sometimes make for themselves. I loved the shifting relationships and liaisons occasioned by a couple trying to conceive in ‘First Love’, and its unexpected twists. In other stories there are complications arising from inadequate parenting, or parents wrestling over custody, but joy always wells up, from employers, babies, unexpected strangers.

The first and last stories are pieces of memoir, and they resonated with me most strongly. The last is about the complex legacy of war and its memories, and how writing can help soothe and smooth the trauma that war carries. The first, story about Rob’s two grandmothers, shows her skillful rendering of character and class. There is the fat grandmother, who vacuums in the nude and takes in an Aboriginal family when floods threaten. Meanwhile the thin grandmother, to survive, takes in boarders, ‘New Australians with broken English and glistening hair’. Later, a part of her history unexpectedly emerges, leaving her with a ‘silent, rebellious anger’. I loved this story for its clear rendition of class through dialogue and contrast, and its illustration impact of poverty upon women, and how tough they have to be to survive. It’s a good way to end my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge this year.

This is my tenth and final review for the Challenge. And here is a pic of Rob and I in 2003.

Review of The Soul of Countess Adrian

I was surprised and kind of annoyed with myself to realise that, in all of my years of reviewing for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (five of them!) I hadn’t thought to write a review of a Rosa Praed novel. Maybe it’s because I’ve written of them so often in my scholarly work (which, if you’re interested, can be found on my website).

Praed was a prolific author. From the publication of her first novel in England in 1880, she published at least one work nearly every year. She became well known in literary circles in London, becoming acquainted with writers Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, and theosophist founders Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott. Her first two novels An Australian Girl (1880) and Policy and Passion (1881) were based on her Australian experiences. After this she moved into themes of spiritualism and theosophy such as communicating with the dead, reincarnation and mesmerism, although she returned often to her memories of Australia.

The most recent Praed novel I’ve read is The Soul of Countess Adrian. I picked this up a while back but I’m revisiting her oeuvre as I do the final bit of work on my book. One of her many works dealing with spiritualist themes, this one dwells largely upon mesmerism, otherwise known as ‘animal magnetism’ or, later, ‘hypnotism’. Mesmer, who developed the idea of animal magnetism, believed that a subtle physical fluid fills the universe and forms connecting mediums between humans, the earth and heavenly bodies. Diseases form when this fluid is unevenly distributed in the body, and the person recovers when equilibrium is restored through the chanelling of the fluid to other people. Although the basis of his ideas were in fluid, they were more believably exercised through the concept of power in interpersonal relations between himself and patients, and this is how the notion manifests in The Soul of Countess Adrian.

The novel features the stock Praed characters of a young, vulnerable, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman and a strong-willed, potentially dangerous older woman who exerts her influence over the younger woman. The former is Miss Beatrice Brett, a performer, and the latter is Countess Adrian, who ‘was far too large, too tall, too bounteously made for beauty. But then, how perfectly she was proportioned, and what a graceful snake-like way she had of moving, and what a grand carriage of head and magnificence of bust! Her eyes were too close together. But the eyes! Surely they might have illustrated Professor Viall's theory of Magnetic Dynamics. They were all pupil and yellow light. When the pupil dilated, there was nothing else; when it contracted, the iris showed queer golden gleams, like those the eyes of some savage animal … And who cared that the rich red lips, parted so as to show a double row of small glistening teeth, were so red and so ripe as to suggest sense rather than soul? Soul somehow was the last attribute one would associate with Countess Adrian’ (35-6).

By contrast, Beatrice had a soul which, Lenton muses, ‘might be likened, as in Dryden's metaphor, to a rare and well-tempered blade fretting its too delicate scabbard, so frail was her physique, so ethereal her look’ (10).

Beatrice is known as an ‘Improvisatrice’, traditionally a female poet who performs verse, but in this novel she acts out plays without a script. She performs as a compulsion, not as a desire, explainign to her admirer Lenton, ‘I can’t think of anything now, but what I am going to do. I don’t know why I want to do it, but I can’t help it; it’s been in me all day, making me so restless’ (34).

In other words, she is a medium, a woman who channels spirits. Her uncle refers to her ‘genuis’ as ‘the unconscious power of access to the highest influences of the past … It’s the open door through which these bodiless beings from the other side can enter into our world again – the body by which they can vent their unsatisfied cravings and pen-up aspirations’ (43).

Both women love Lenton, who adores the purity of Beatrice. When the countess discovers that Lenton is engaged to Beatrice, she mesmerises the young girl and, in a vampiric kiss, transfers her soul to Beatrice, then dies. Beatrice is left unconscious, but when she finally wakes she has undergone a personality change. Acting as the Duchess in The Duchess of Malfi, Lenton observes how ‘With her eyes and her voice and her gesture, she stood the embodied lust of the flesh’ (179). No longer shy and shrinking, her form ‘seemed more luxuriantly moulded than before her illness, and her lips and eyes had acquired a peculiar and voluptuous expression’ (181). However, through the intervention of a mystic, this new, sexualised personality is exorcised and the previous Beatrice returns.

It’s interesting that Beatrice is a performer, as it was through mediumship that women were able to gain authority in a culture in which they were terribly circumscribed. Some such as Katie King became famous, although they were later exposed as frauds. What I’ve always found peculiar in Praed’s novels is her representation of these passionate, sexual women who exert a mesmerising force that must be removed. Praed was a terrifically strong woman (although she didn’t much like sex), and perhaps these novels express her awareness that her personality was too powerful for the culture in which she lived.

As far as Praed novels go, this was one was fairly simply. Others, such as Policy and Passion are more complex and interesting. For those who are interested in reading more (and you can always be guaranteed of a good plot in a Praed novel), some of her works are available on Project Gutenberg.

This is my ninth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Everywhere I Look

I’m gearing up to do the last lot of work on my book, which involves, as it always does, reading other writers to work out how to fix things and make it better. A friend told me to pick up Helen Garner’s Everywhere I Look so I could figure out how to tighten my prose. It was good advice.

These are gorgeous pieces, shaped and buffed into brilliant little stones, bristling with an electricity that comes from Garner’s quickness, pique and furtive passions. It’s there in ‘Whisper and Hum’ when, despite an unappealing holiday on Vanuatu which coalesced in a repugnance for ‘a certain parasitic creeper that flourished aggressively, bowing the treetops down and binding them to each other in a dense, undifferentiated mat of choking foliage’, Garner comes across a Melanesian man ‘playing a tiny stringed instrument … just to keep himself company’. Inspired, she buys a ukulele and instruction book when she gets home, but ‘put them in a cupboard under a pile of blankets and said nothing about them to anyone’. Her joy in the instrument is subterranean from by a fear of mockery and, later, marriage to a ‘severe modernist’ but it rises to the surface in her admission, ‘I love it as I would any harmless little creature. I love to hear it whisper and hum’. As it does when, hearing ‘the faintest, airiest twanging sound’, she realises that ‘a breeze coming up the hill from Bondi was puffing over the windowsill and drawing the hem of the calico curtain back and forth over the open strings’. And people overlook the domestic in fiction because they think it’s dull!

On that note, this is a book about places and houses, unsurprisingly, for Garner moved house twenty-six times she writes in ‘White Paint and Calico’. There is a paean to Monee Ponds in ‘Suburbia’; the use of a table as a metaphor for a body at a somewhat settled stage of life; the labour of packing, which is likened to childbirth. And children run in and out of the houses. They call for Nanny; act out cowboys; discuss farts; crawl into her bed after a bad dream and sleep diagonally, cramming her into a corner and causing her to complain, ‘God damn it, I think at 5 a.m., this is worse than being married’. It’s endearing.

When I read This House of Grief, I admired Garner’s refusal to commit to a black-and-white version of events. There is always another side to the story, and she strove to render this with humanity. I don’t doubt it was hard, exhausting work (writing a book requires huge emotional labour at the best of times, let alone trying to negotiate the complexities of a court case), but Garner’s wry humour still prevailed. Two of the jurors were young fellows who became chummy as the case went on:

‘He and another languid youth became inseparable. They entered and left the court together, exchanging whispered comments, and muffling their amusement. It was a bromance. Much later, when the journalists were herded into their dismal office so the deliberating jurors could take the air, these two romped together in the sunny yard like puppies’.

I laughed with delight when I read this, and I laughed throughout Everywhere I Look as well. Often that laughter was prompted by the brutal honesty of children, as in ‘Lift-Rat’.

‘Last week I had my hair cut. I was pleased, in the limited way one dares to be at this age. The next day my five-year-old granddaughter came home from kinder. She studied me up and down, and said with a crooked smile, ‘I don’t like your haircut, Nanna. You look like Luke Skywalker. It’s dumb at the sides.’

I sobered up as I read on. The essay segued into an elaboration of Garner’s correspondence and friendship with Elizabeth Jolley, but the wry tone was held throughout, appearing, like a punctuation mark, at the end:

‘[i]t was too late for me to say goodbye, or to thank [Jolley] for the last sentence of The Orchard Thieves, where an old woman points out comfortingly to her daughter that the difference between a bad haircut and a good one is only a week’.

I met Garner at an ASAL mini-conference in Armidale. This was one of the loveliest conferences I’ve ever been to. I’d had two guiltily homesick months writing in Rome and I was glad to see my parents again. It was a beautiful summer, in the way New England summers are – cool, with long, low light in the evenings. An Australian friend whom I’d met at another conference in Prato, who now lives in Oxford, was also unexpectedly there, and it was lovely to see her. Amidst the presentations, we jumped in a bus for a tour of places significant to Judith Wright, including the home in which she was born. ‘In a homestead of deep, flowering verandahs,’ Garner writes, ‘we were welcomed by female relatives with the long legs and quiet authority of horsewomen, not to mention the ability to knock up an airy sponge’. Afterwards there was tea from a giant teapot (used for tennis parties) beneath a shady tree and a visit to the tiny local church.

Off to have a look at the church at Jeogla.

Always sensitive to people’s body language (necessary for someone who is deaf), I was wary of the forcefield radiating from Garner tight shoulders, resolute refusal of eye contact and endlessly moving hands. It seemed to me that this was a women who didn’t want to be spoken to. If I was famous, I reasoned, I’d probably be tired of groupies too. I was grateful, then, when my friend’s mother introduced me to Garner and I was able to express my admiration for This House of Grief and to tell her of my research on Rosa Praed and Maud. She suggested that I read Far from the Tree, which I did, and enjoyed.

There’s much more of which I could write of this collection: Garner’s surprising finding about her primary school teacher; her relationships with other writers, both tentative and fierce; her brilliant essay on ageing, but really, you should pick up the book yourself and explore and savour it. In the meantime, it’s time to start the last bit of my book, and to try and make my sentences ping.

This is my eighth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms

Anita Heiss’s latest novel opens with a man running from a prison: the Japanese internment camp of Cowra in 1944. Hiroshi finds safety with an Aboriginal family, who hide and care for him. Gradually, a romance develops between Hiroshi and Mary Williams, the young Aboriginal woman who takes him food.

Heiss writes what she calls ‘choc-lit’ – or chick lit with an Aboriginal focus – but you would foolish to dismiss this as fluff. Her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, is always firmly focused on educating audiences about Aboriginal culture and the ongoing effects of colonialism and racism. She’s a smart woman: popular fiction is one of the most widely read genres, and by inserting her themes into her popular novels she aims to inform a wide range of readers.

This is a difficult road to take, as readers of this genre pick up books expecting to be entertained. If there’s a whiff of anything otherwise, they don’t care for it. I don’t think that will be a problem for readers of Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, for in this work Heiss blends popular fiction and politics beautifully. 

There are two main techniques she uses to achieve this. The first is Hiroshi’s point of view. By using a character who knows nothing of Aboriginal culture, who is initially ‘suspicious as to why these dark people are helping him and where they actually come from’ but who grows to love them deeply, Heiss articulates how race is a construct and that hunger, kindness, fear, homesickness and desire are qualities that belong to us all.

The second technique is the use of metaphor, specifically that of imprisonment. The prison from which Hiroshi escapes represents not only the physical camp for internees, but also the camps on which Aboriginal people were forced to live – the mission stations and reserves – when their land was taken from them. As Banjo, Mary’s father, says, ‘We are treated like prisoners too, at Erambie. We shouldn’t be on rations. We should all be paid the same for the same work and have enough money to buy food for our families – not just flour, tea and sugar rations and whatever we can hunt or manage to grow. It’s not fair for anyone. The prisoners of war are just like us’.

Heiss also addresses contemporary concerns, such as negative representations of Aboriginal people in the media. Merv, a singer and football player, makes a name for himself in Sydney and is written up in the paper. Mary, who reads the article about him out to the family, comments ‘At least this is a positive article about Aboriginal people. You’re always saying what they write about us is bad, Mum.’ And in Mary’s family itself there is much to be proud of. The Williams take in a stranger and scrimp to find food for him, as many Aboriginal people did for Europeans they were shipwrecked on Australia’s coasts. They take an interest in Hiroshi and his culture, as Noongars did in whalers and the first colonists when they arrived in south west Western Australia (Kim Scott writes about this beautifully in That Deadman Dance). At the same time they aren’t saints, for no one is. Through Kevin, who is jealous and has a temper, Heiss shows that every family has its arguments, and that different viewpoints need to be aired before one can arrive at a resolution. 

At the heart of the novel is an important emotion: empathy. Romance is definitely important too, not least because it drives the plot, but without empathy, romance can’t happen. Empathy often takes some work – intellectual as well as emotional. As Banjo exhorts his brother Kevin, ‘What if our brother escaped from a POW camp like this bloke? Wouldn’t you want someone to look after him and treat him like a human being?’ And this is what the novel does, as all good literature should do: it takes us out of our everyday lives and into a new world, where we become invested in and learn to care for its people. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who argues for the importance of including emotion in philosophy, writes in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995), novels invite us to ‘concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own’ (xvi). And this in turn is a precondition for respect for human dignity (xvi).

So if you’re reading this book by the beach (and I hope you are!), you’ll not only enjoy the plot and characters (perhaps woven with the smell of salt and sunscreen and the sounds of kids yelling), but you’ll also quietly exercise your heart as well.

This is my seventh review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Cloudwish

I picked up this YA novel as it kept popping up in reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and my mum read it & enjoyed it, and we usually like the same things. I wasn’t disappointed – Cloudwish was a lovely post-Christmas couch read.

Vân Uớc, whose name means ‘Cloudwish’, is an Australian-born Vietnamese scholarship student at a private school. She has a gigantic crush on the most popular and attractive boy in her year and, like all shy and insecure girls, she thinks her chances of attracting him are dismal, until Billy inexplicably begins to pay attention to her.

I loved this novel for its sweetness. I guess most girls’ first crush is emblazoned in their memory, & who knows how many of them worked out – it was nice that this one did. It reminded me of the film Get Real about a romance between a nerdy boy and the most popular fellow at school, and then I wondered how many romances there are about popular girls and less socially adept boys? I haven’t come across any, though I sure would like to.

The novel blends poverty and privilege in a believable, illuminating way. Van’s council housing apartment is described in detail, with the ‘stained concrete floor’ on the way to the lift, the ‘low ceiling and exposed pipes of the hallway’. It’s also contrasted with the lusciousness of Billy’s expansive house with its coterie of staff, and reminded me of Alice Pung’s excellent essay for AWW on race and class.

The weight of parental expectation is also explored. Billy is cramped by his father’s assumption that he’ll become a brilliant rower and study overseas, and his mother’s desire for a girlfriend of the right social éclat. Van is weighed down by the guilt of her parents’ experiences as boat people and their belief that she ought to become a doctor, when she really wants to be an artist. 

I enjoyed Van’s skillful negotiation of her relationship with her parents, for whom she is spokesperson as her mother only speaks ‘survival English’, so as to snatchsome freedom with Billy. I also liked watching her confidence grow through her relationship with Billy. Initially a quiet girl who doesn’t want to draw attention to herself, with Billy’s attentions Van becomes outspoken, much like her role model Jane Eyre. People who dismiss romance as frippery also overlook how it can create valuable emotions: security, confidence, and a willingness to change.

Some of the work seemed staged: the creative writing exercise in which Van expresses her fantasy that Billy would pay attention to her, and Billy’s sudden interest in Van. It wasn’t until Billy became three-dimensional, revealed as a boy who was as cramped by his parents’ expectations as Van was by hers, that I began to believe in his attraction Van. A big part of me was also sceptical that a seventeen year old boy could be so romantically-minded and thoughtful, but then I stopped being critical and gave myself up for the ride.

And having said that, there are plenty of other beautiful details throughout: a grove of scented orange trees, the ‘bright-beaten pieces of silver [coins], half buried in the blue-black asphalt’, and the kindness of a community that looks out for and takes care of its young people. What a lovely, rewarding book. 

This is my sixth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Painting Red Orchids

I came across Eileen Chong via Jon Shaw, a participant in the Australian Women Writers Challenge, when I was putting together a roundup on books featuring diversity. Eileen has published three volumes of poetry: Burning Rice, Peony and Paining Red Orchids. The latter two contain poems about plants, and as I’m interested in botanical writing, my interest was piqued.

A while later, I asked Eileen if she’d be interested in writing a guest post for a focus on Australian women writers of ethnic heritage, and to my delight she agreed. She wrote about how, although English was the language of commerce, education and law in Singapore, where she lived for twenty years before moving to Australia, her qualifications and education in English were not recognised here because

This was a frustrating set of circumstances but, happily, it led her to poetry.

Painting Red Orchids has been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and when you read it, you can see why. The first poem, the titular ‘Painting Red Orchids’, dips back and forth between animal, plant and human, reminding us of their interconnectedness and how this manifests as art: ‘My wife has made/this paper with mulberry from our gardens. I lift/my brush, pull back my sleeve and saturate the hairs.’ These hairs come from animals – weasel, wolf, mink and leopard – showing us how art binds us to the natural world. Yet art not only needs the labour of growing mulberries, it also needs emotion. This, too, is bound up with environment. The artist’s inkstone ‘was my father’s: slate/quarried from the lake where my great-grandfather/drowned himself one spring night’. The loss of breath returns, though, in the final stanza, to suggest renewal:

One stroke, one breath: leaves give way to blossom.

More water – rain and cloud above the trees.

Cochineal paste, jade seal – red orchid bloom on white.

It’s a beautifully crafted poem, carrying on conversations within itself.

Other poems about plants follow, slow, quiet and complex pieces. In ‘Fern’ each frond is ‘a sister/to another, so many fingers and hands/learning to flourish on the underside/of things’, a suggestion not only of how the plant grows in the understory, but also how it steadily, unshowily, grows, ‘unafraid/of the dark, pushing through stem, bark/growing vein by stubborn vein through morning dew and winter rain’.

‘Orchidaceae: Vanda ‘Miss Joaquin’ is named for Ashkhen Hovakimian, who bred the hybrid orchid, now Singapore’s national flower. The flower’s back is ‘turned to front, violet frills — blooms/like bruises along a curving spine’, a mingling of human and plant that reappears in ‘her petal skin calling to attention/the minute hairs on my thighs’, and which aptly mirrors the fact that the woman is now the plant, as it was named after her. However, as the spelling wasn’t accurate, ‘The heart of the flower/is the misnamed woman’ who is now ‘forced to live on always’.

Not all the poems in Painting Red Orchids are about plants. Many of them circle around the domestic: the friends, lovers, music and food, all contained within houses, or gardens, as Leike is in ‘Elegy’. A cat that was once ‘sinuous, pliant, a wound/spring’, he is no longer ‘among the violets or seeking shade/in the agapanthus, but buried. Dirt/covering honey, amber eyes now glassed’. The line breaks emphasise energy —wound, with its double meaning of tightness and loss — and bluntness — the finality of soil, which covers the loveliness of honey. The poem shunts back and forth between beauty, comfort and loss, summarising life in a way.

In ‘Revisit’ the narrator visits her grandmother who ‘forgets that she has made the tea./She boils water again, and forgets the leaves./Yet my grandmother has not forgotten me’. The rhyme in the poem – tea, leaves, me – mirrors the repetitiveness of trying to remember, and forgetting, and remembering again.

What I love about these poems is their simplicity. They’re so pared back that they are like plinths, holding up their images. Each of her books, too, are beautiful, and I like taking them out, looking at them and reading them. You can check them out at Pitt Street Poetry or on Eileen’s website.

This is my fifth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Not Just Black and White

In February this year, on another balmy Brisbane evening, I went off to Avid Reader to listen to a panel discussion, ‘Indigenous Women Writing Their Stories’ presented by The Stella Prize and black&write. The courtyard was packed, the stars were out, the wine was cold and the panelists were fantastic.

Ellen van Neerven, author of the wonderful Heat and Light, hosted the session, which included Lesley and Tammy Williams, winners of the 2014 David Unaipon award for Not Just Black and White; Melissa Lucashenko, author (most recently) of Mullumbimby; and black&write intern Yasmin Smith. It was a wonderful, stimulating evening. Tammy told a joke about how their book was mistaken for one by the Williams sisters (of tennis fame) in a store (obviously not Avid!).

At the end of the evening, I stepped onto the bus with a copy of Not Just Black and White and started to read. The authors are a mother-daughter duo, and their stories are braided together into a dialogue. The work opens with Lesley’s narrative, which highlights the centrality of place to her identity: ‘The sound of water droplets hitting the geranium leaves brought back childhood memories of rain beating down on the tin roof back home in Cherbourg’ (1). Cherbourg was the Aboriginal settlement in Queensland in which she grew up. The opening passage also provides what was to become one of Lesley’s (and therefore the work’s) driving forces – the search for Aboriginal people’s missing wages and savings that were held in ‘trust’ by the government.

The book is subtitled A conversation between a mother and daughter, and Lesley’s account is in conversation with her daughter Tammy. Lesley began telling her story to Tammy when Tammy was a teenager. She initially spoke into a tape recorder because she would ‘always clam up whenever it came time to put pen to paper’ (3) and thought this was due to her limited education but, as Tammy explains, it was also because Aboriginal culture is an oral culture and Aboriginal people of Lesley's generation were more accustomed to passing stories and memories down through recollection and speech. In the book, Tammy responds to each of her mother’s sections, bringing in her insights as she grows up and becomes a lawyer. Her mother’s personal story, she says, ‘was as entwined in mine as mine was in hers’ (4).

Lesley describes growing up in Cherbourg, the closeness of her family and how they often used humour to survive; her growing awareness of the divisions between races and how this was tied to class; how she went out to work as a domestic servant in the country and in Brisbane and worked hard for no pay, except maybe a ticket to the movies; her evening as a debutante in a lovely dress; her marriage to a man who was initially very good and kind but suffered from depression, which killed him. Lesley then needed to work even harder to support her family, but she was tough and determined. She became an Aboriginal teacher’s aide and she showed Tammy that a girl could be anything she wanted.

Although Tammy also worked hard, she ‘hardly ever saw Indigenous people in the kind of roles I imagined could be for me’ (179). Michael Jackson, however, was one of the first images of a successful black person that she saw. In the Cosby show, she found that the wife of Dr Huxtable was a lawyer. ‘It seemed irrelevant,’ Tammy writes, ‘that the Huxtables were a different kind of black people in a different country. I identified more with this fictitious black family living on the other side of the world that the people I saw regularly on the local streets’ (181). And in this way she had ‘a clear image of at least one professional black woman I wanted to be like’.

Tammy was teased at school, while her mother was continued her fight for stolen wages. Needing to express the continuing injustice she experienced and witnessed, Tammy wrote an essay about racism and the need for role models, which she submitted to a competition run by Michael Jackson’s Heal the World Foundation, and won! She and Lesley travelled to a conference at Neverland and then around America, before attending the World Summit of Children in San Francisco. While travelling, they also learned of similarities between the experiences of Indigenous Australians and ethnic Americans, who were also dispossessed of their land. On their return to Australia, Tammy and Lesley were invited to speak at the United Nations Human Rights Council Headquarters in Geneva, and their community rallied around to help them finance the trip.

In Geneva, Lesley gathered her courage and spoke to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on this trip about Indigenous people’s stolen wages. After this, she figured she could speak to anyone, including the Queensland premier. On her return to Australia, she continued her fight, working with researchers who estimated the amount of the lost wages. She compiled media kits; and organised rallies and community meetings amidst some hostility from white people (Pauline Hanson was enjoying her first flush of power) and from some of the Indigenous community as well. She accessed the government records relating to her family, but the documents she needed most were ‘noticeably missing’ (306). Finally, with the help of an Indigenous woman, Kerrie Tim, the executive director of the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy, and her policy advisor, Lesley obtained the passbook showing her savings. It had been held in a safe that had belonged to the former director of Native Affairs. Even despite this evidence, the Queensland government was prepared to fight Lesley in court - the racism that confined Indigenous people in settlements such as Cherbourg was clearly continuing. Eventually, however, the government offered an apology and compensation not just to Lesley, but also to individual claimants.

This was a great book to read. I found Lesley’s account more gripping, perhaps because her recollections were more detailed and descriptive, and her tenacity, intelligence and lateral thinking were incredible. That the passbook was kept locked in a safe also speaks volumes, as does the government's reticence to redress injustice. But Tammy’s account showed how the past moulds the future, and that the qualities parents learn shape their children too. I was glad that this book not only won the David Unaipon award, which meant it could be published, but also the Queensland Premier's award for a Work of State Significance in this year’s Queensland Literary Awards – it means that, although we still have a long way to go, representations of Queensland’s history are finally becoming more inclusive.

This is my fourth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Defying Doomsday

When I worked at Autism Queensland, where my job was to inform employees about the latest research in autism, I read an article about the experiences of young people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) immediately following the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake in Italy. People with autism often rely on routine and sometimes process sensory information differently to typically developing folk. Unsurprisingly, the study found that the adaptive functioning (ie the skills they use to adapt to everyday life) of the young people with ASD declined after the earthquake.

I thought of this study as I read Defying Doomsday earlier this year. This collection of short stories was edited by AWW’s own Tsana Dolchiva and Holly Kench, who noticed that there was a lack of characters with disability or chronic illness in fiction about the apocalypse. Likewise, this study mentioned that there was no research on the impact of natural disasters upon people with autism. There is clearly a sore need, in both our real and imagined worlds, for contemplation of disability and apocalypse.

And this seems strange, for people with disability, as Robert Hoge writes in his introduction to the stories, ‘live in a post-apocalyptic world. Stairs remain at stubborn right angles. Communications can wash over us, unheard, unseen. Some social interactions elude—a millimetre away, a mile away … So much of our world is a not-made-for-us space that disaster may as well have already struck. And that’s exactly what makes the stories in this anthology so crunchy and interesting—we are already fighting and thriving in interesting and diverse ways. When the apocalypse comes, we’ve got a head start.’

It’s a great note to begin with – people assume that when the world falls apart, people with disabilities will be a burden, but these stories challenge that idea. There is a character with autism – Holly – who keeps herself alive through precise measurements of when the lethal rains will arrive, and by methodically sealing of her clothes with tape before she sets outside (‘Something in the Rain’, Seanan McGuire). Most of the neurotypical people she knows, by contrast, are caught by the rain, and dissolve.

The story I enjoyed most was Tansy Rayner Roberts’ ‘Did We Break the End of the World?’, not only because it had deaf protagonists but because it was very well crafted, with a twist that related to the characters’ hearing. The characters have personality and verve, with different degrees of deafness – Jin can sign and also uses hearing aids, and takes them out when he needs some peace or when he’s pissed off and wants to ignore someone – I found it a very good representation.

I also liked ‘Octavia Cade’s ‘Portabello Blind’, which follows a blind, fourteen year old girl deserted in a research lab in Dunedin. Anna knows the layout of the buildings, but when it comes to catching food such as fish, things get difficult. The sensory detail is pronounced, as it is for most people who lose a sense – their brain compensates by finding extra information through their other senses. In Cade’s story, this adds a richness and precision to the writing: ‘There were life jackets in the shed. She put one on and it smelled of salt and rubber, of plastic. The life jacket had a whistle attached: a sharp, high sound like a gull.’ And ‘Anna could smell the tides, knew when they were out. The soft-sweet scent of mud was a dead giveaway.’ Although it’s a muted story, the reader identifies with Anna’s sense of achievement at learning to survive. This, I think, is the best thing about fiction - it puts readers in other people's shoes and helps them to imagine what life is like for those who have disabilities.

The stories are set in towns, cities and outer space, but there isn’t a whole lot of nature throughout, which I thought was strange. Even in an apocalypse, nature persists, and can be the cause of apocalypses too (as with the Italian earthquake). The protagonists are also all fairly young. This is no bad thing, particularly as there’s a lack of positive young adult literature about people with disabilities in general, as I wrote in a post for a focus on Australian women writers with disability at AWW in March. However, disability affects people of all ages, and I was left wondering what it would be like for parents or grandparents with disability, for example, who needed to care for their families in an apocalypse.

These are minor quibbles, though, in an anthology that shows people with disability negotiating difficult circumstances with ingenuity, stoicism, and a sense of humour – the qualities that get us through our everyday lives in the 21st century.

This is my third review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.