Review of 'The Whispering Wall' by Patricia Carlon

Over at The Australian Legend, my Austlit pal Bill is hosting his annual focus on Australian women writers. He’s been progressing through the decades, and this year’s focus is on what he defines as Gen 4 - women writers from the 60s, 70s and 80s. That means trends of feminism & postmodernism.

Last year I planned to write on disability in The Harp in the South for Gen 3 and failed completely, because I was in the midst of packing to move to Adelaide. This year I got halfway through Glenda Adams’ Miles Franklin winning novel Dancing on Coral, but the characters were so painful – even though I’ve read it before –  that I gave it up (admittedly I was also battling the plague) for something more engaging – Patricia Carlon’s The Whispering Wall. Ironically, Adams’ book fits the characteristics of Gen 4 better than Carlon’s, with its biting tone, satire of awful male university students pawing at women, and the naïve female protagonist’s journey to independence. Hopefully, if my fatigue (newly exacerbated by Covid! fun times) & powers of procrastination don’t get in the way, I’ll finish the thing & write up some thoughts. Adams was my creative writing teacher at UTS, and I think the tone of Dancing on Coral might be influenced by her years in America.

However, it was a happy result that I downloaded The Whispering Wall, because it was an excellent book. I came across Patricia Carlon (1927 – 2002) when putting together the Writing Disability in Australia database – Catriona Mills, now Acting Director of Austlit, pointed it out to me. Carlon wrote fourteen novels between 1961 and 1970 (often 2 in one year! I’m averaging one every 6 years), and after her death it became known that she had been profoundly deaf since age 11.

In Deaf writer Fi Murphy’s The Shape of Sound, Fi has a chapter on the weight of secrets. Until I read her book, I wasn’t aware of how much secret-keeping I did myself – keeping the secret, that is, of one’s deafness (I do try to be more assertive & open about it these days, but old habits die hard). Carlon, too, kept her deafness a secret, refusing interviews and communicating with her publishers by letter.

The protagonist of The Whispering Wall also keeps secrets because she is disabled. Sarah Oatland, a widow, has had a stroke, and although completely immobilised, she can still see and hear. This means that Sarah has to submit to the patronising comments of her nurse, including the observation to the doctor, ‘Do you think she hears? She’s laid out like a fish on a slab, with as much life to her, poor dear.’ Six weeks after Sarah’s stroke, her mercenary niece Gwenyth announces that she is letting out parts of the house to tenants to raise money for Sarah’s care. Four people subsequently move in to different parts of the house: a mother with her daughter, Rose, and Mr and Mrs Phipps, a married couple who want to stay only a few months before finding a place to live.

One of Sarah’s secrets is that, with her bed against the chimney wall, she can hear voices travelling from the sitting room below. Initially she liked to hear the voices to assuage her boredom and loneliness following her husband’s death, but once she is immobilised, the wall ‘opened a lifeline of reality in the midst of confusion, because the doctors, though sure she couldn’t hear, had nevertheless spoken in front of her guardedly, and she hadn’t had the voice to question and demand intelligent, forthright answers to her questions.’ Sarah dislikes Phipps on sight, and soon resents him even more for ‘taking from her the one link with frank knowledge about her condition, and he made her feel unreasonably afraid.’

Except it transpires that her fear isn’t unreasonable. Firstly she hears, from arguments between Phipps and his wife, that they despise one another, and are only staying together because Phipps’ inheritance depends on it. Then she hears that Phipps intends to murder his father-in-law so that he can obtain said inheritance.

Meanwhile, Rose, a clever and inquisitive girl, prompts Sarah to start communicating with her by blinking once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no’. Sarah had tried to talk to Braggs, her nurse, like this, but she was slow because of her stroke, and Braggs never waited for a blink. The conversations with Rose become another secret. Other visitors arrive, including the father-in-law. Through various communications - not only the blinking but also a Scrabble board - the secrets come tumbling out, including the fact that Sarah has overheard the Phipps’s machinations. She realises that not only is the father-in-law’s life in danger, but so is her own. This is the most traumatic part of the book: the reader is locked in with Sarah in a passive state, awaiting the direction of the author. It’s a clever way of compelling a reader to understand what it might be like to experience a stroke.

With a deft knitting of action, Carlon pulls all the characters (who are so much more engaging than those in Dancing on Coral) and their relationships together, and at the crisis danger is (just) averted. To save her life, Sarah is forced to call out, signalling that her body may yet move again.

As a deaf reader, there were various elements that I identified with in this novel, even though it’s not about deafness. When Rose, seeking to cheer Sarah up, suggests that she brings roses into the room, Sarah thinks to herself, “‘You’re the rose I want most, my dear,’ and knew again the frustration of not being able to make any real contact with anyone.” If Carlon was profoundly deaf, she would have had very little, if any, hearing, so communication would have been difficult. She would have had to come up with inventive ways of carrying out conversations – as Sarah does through the Scrabble board.

It’s amazing to me that the novel is full of sound, and that sound is what drives the plot. Even though Sarah is immobilised, her hearing and intelligence make her marvellously adept. I wonder if Carlon felt a sense of expansiveness in writing this novel, and imagining all that Sarah was capable of.  

I’ve promised a colleague an essay on Carlon by April, and I’m glad that Bill’s Gen 4 has kickstarted my reading. I reckon everyone else should be reading Carlon’s under-appreciated novels too.

Review of 'The Yield' by Tara June Winch

In her Barry Andrews address at the recent Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference, Wiradjuri writer and scholar Professor Anita Heiss exhorted academics who teach and write about Aboriginal literature to commit to raising awareness about Aboriginal literacy and languages in their work. She also suggested donating to or fundraising for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation which, among other things, produces and publishes books by Indigenous people for Indigenous people.

Professor Anita Heiss’s call to action.

I started reading Aboriginal literature at university. My education expanded exponentially when I started reading and reviewing for the Australian Women Writers Challenge (proving that you don’t have to go to uni to read Aboriginal peoples’ writing!). So although of late I have wondered whether it is apposite to apply the tools of literary criticism, which have a European lineage, to Aboriginal texts (particularly given the colonial baggage of those tools), I still think it’s really important for non-Aboriginal readers to engage with Aboriginal literature to educate ourselves about Australian history, Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal languages. 

Although it has been postponed this year due to Covid, this past week was due to be NAIDOC week. During this week, Lisa of ANZLitLovers encourages litbloggers to read and engage with Indigenous literature across the world. As this is an online initiative, it didn’t have to be cancelled! Over the past few years I have been too overworked and exhausted to do any reviews, but due to my Covid-19 reboot I’ve read and thought about Tara June Winch’s The Yield (which we also did in bookclub at Avid Reader).

The Yield, Winch’s third work and first novel, is a book about words, particularly Ngurambang, ‘the word for country in the old language, the first language’ (1). The book begins and ends with this word, signalling the continuation of country because, as Albert Gondiwindi, a collector of Wiradjuri words, signals, he’s writing about ‘deep time. This is a big, big story. The big stuff goes forever, time ropes and loops and is never straight, that the real story of time’ (2).

The story is made up of three narratives: Albert Gondiwindi’s first person narrative and dictionary entries in Wiradjuri and English; the third-person story of August Gondiwindi, Albert’s granddaughter, who returns to Australia from England following Albert’s death and who is haunted by the loss of her sister; and a long letter written by Reverend Ferndinand Greenleaf in 1915, describing his attempts at creating a missionary for the Gondiwindi people. These three stories knit together at the book’s close, in which the action speeds up dramatically in a protest against a tin mine to be opened on Ngurambang.

A major theme in the book is the body, with which Ngurambang is bound. As Albert  writes, ‘If you say [Ngurambang] right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words’ (1). He also observes that his country ‘had a plan for me, already mapped in my veins since before I was born’ (1). The blood is in the word, which is in the veins, in the body, in the land.

Thus I read August’s under-nourishment as synchronous with, and linked to, the gradual drying of the Murrumby River since colonisation. As Augustine writes in his entry for ‘river – bila’:

Now you know where the word billabong comes from. From us. Everything comes back to the bila – all life, and with it all time. Our songlines originate there, our lives fed from there and it’s where our spirits dwell in the end. Even the Reverend was drawn to the river, there he recited Isiah 44:3, For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring, an my blessing on your descendants. Can’t imagine how it hurts not to see that water come anymore. (106)

 Language is bound up with bodies, because language comes from country, and country nourishes the body. When the novel’s sequence of events are resolved, August is returned to her body. She listens to a tape made by Albert of the old language. It is ‘his recital, his private sermon, going through a list of words, trying as he did to work out or remember how they were pronounced’ (306). Hearing this language, ‘the smells, tastes and burdens left August. She ate again, too, she wasn’t ngarran anymore. English changed their tongues, the formation of their minds, August thought – she’d drifted in and out of herself all that time. The language was the poem she had looked for, communicating what English failed to say’ (306). This sustenance also comes from the sound of the words, as Aboriginal culture is an oral culture, although as Penny van Toorn has illustrated, Aboriginal people were very quick to pick up writing once that technology was available to them.

August and her cousin Joey print out the pages of the book for the local kids, and write in the Foreword: Maybe you are looking for a statue, or a bench by the banks of the Murrumby to honour the people who have lived by the river. Better, there is water returning, nudging what was dead. Better the burral-gang congregate here often. Better these words and better we are still here and that we speak them. (310)

I thought this was interesting in the context of the recent debates about statues. There are different ways to commemorate history, not just through cast iron figures. Cultures with oral histories, where memory is passed down by story, have different ways of remembering & commemorating to Westerners, who seem to like monuments (as for me, I am indifferent: the span of history is so long that humans are but a speck, and a statue memorialising a speck doesn’t mean much to me). This passage shows that Wiradjuri people have resisted colonisation and that they are still sustained by their country, by memory, and by language.

As was pointed out in our bookclub meeting, The Yield is a generous book. Many of the missionaries in Australia sure didn’t abide by their Christian principles, as Claire G. Coleman details in Terra Nullius, and many of the girls’ and boys’ homes in which Aboriginal children were institutionalised during the Stolen Generations (and, arguably, still are), ‘were much harsher in comparison to those depicted’ in the novel (Winch, 340). Winch shows a missionary who was influenced by the Gondiwindi people and wrote down their language. This doesn’t mean he was an entirely good person, as an exchange between August and her aunt Missy reveals:

‘He was kind, you think?’ [August asks].

‘No. He was bad in a long pattern of bad. I reckon he just thought he was doing right.’

‘He regretted it.’

‘Yeah, but only when it happened to him, aye.’ (250).

So I think it’s interesting that Winch includes the lines from Isiah in the definition of billabong. Perhaps she’s trying to use Christianity, which with white Australians might be familiar, to explain a concept from Aboriginal culture. It’s generous, because Aboriginal people shouldn’t have to do this work – there’s hundreds of books out there that folk can pick up and read to learn about Aboriginal culture.

At the same time, even if Winch doesn’t go into great details about massacres and rapes (although these are present in the book), she does canvas the casual racism that Aboriginal people experience. While standing in the fish n’ chips shop, August looks at a man’s tattoo of the Southern Cross, inked onto his shoulder.

       ‘You like that?’ he asked her, pointing to it, without waiting for an answer. ‘That’s the Southern Cross, lady. That means you don’t belong here.’

        She stood there dumbfounded, blank-faced. After a moment she wondered who he thought she was, or who exactly he thought he was. (237).

A subtle way of revealing ignorance.

My favourite part of this book is the dictionary: I loved the Wiradjuri words and the stories used to explain them, such as ‘flower, a kind of flower – babin, narranarrandyiran The banksia flower is my favourite, not just because it’s large and proud looking like the hibiscus, but because it reminds me of something bigger. See, the banksia is a tough-looking flower but it still protects itself with sharp, jagged leaves, study wood and roots. Its nectar feeds the bees, the birds and us people’ (206). A plant is always bigger than a human, because without sugar and oxygen from plants, humans can’t survive, so I liked this interpretation.

The writing in the dictionary section is much more alive and vibrant than that of the Reverend’s letters, which came across as flat and two-dimensional. Perhaps that was the point, but I skimmed a lot of those letters – he didn’t seem real to me.

A few other thoughts: there were bits that made me laugh. When August asks her Aunt Missy, ‘You think you’ll go to heaven, Aunty?’, Missy replies, ‘Nah! I’ll be back as a tree or something that doesn’t move. I just want to chill out and not have to go hunting for food, you know?’ (249). I agree: trees are something to aspire to. I also wondered if this book was a shout out to Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, with the name of the towns Prosperous and Massacre Plains echoing Wright’s Desperance, and the gathering of activists at the end of The Yield also mirroring the blowing up of the mine in Carpentaria. I dunno, but I liked the use of allegory.

When Black Lives Matter exploded in America, and people marched against inaction over Deaths in Custody in Australia (437 deaths since 1991 and not a single conviction! It’s staggering), readers rushed to bookshops to buy books by Aboriginal writers. I find that really heartening, but there also needs to be concrete action - for example we should, as Anita Heiss stresses, we should amplify Aboriginal peoples’ voices. So don’t just read this (rather hamfisted) review - go out and buy the book.

Review of Rosa Praed's 'Sister Sorrow'

Over at The Australian Legend, Bill has been hosting a Gen2 Week to draw attention to what he defines as the second generation of Australia’s white women writers, who were writing from 1890 – 1918. Last year he hosted a Gen1 week for the first generation of white women writers, who wrote in the period 1788 – 1890. Ever a last-minuter, I managed to scrape in with a review of Georgiana Molloy’s letters. I’d wanted to do one on Rosa Praed as well but as usual I ran out of time.

However, Praed’s oeuvre stretches from 1880 to 1931, so she slots easily into Gen2. In the late 80s and early 90s she was at the height of her fame, but I’ve chosen her penultimate novel to review, because I need to revisit her works ahead of the edits for my book. However this review has turned into a minor essay full of spoilers, so if you plan to read the novel, you might want to shelve this until afterwards.

Sister Sorrow was published in 1916, and after that there wasn’t a novel until 1931, with Soul of Nyria: The Memory of a Past Life in Ancient Rome. Rosa’s companion Nancy, whom she met in 1899 through theosophist friends Alfred Sinnett and Arthur Conan Doyle (who was friends with Nancy’s father), had the capacity to go into a trance and take on the persona of a German princess who was abducted and made a slave in ancient Rome. As Nancy spoke as the princess Nyria, Rosa wrote down the story and turned it into a novel, Nyria, published in 1904.

Nancy died in 1927 and Rosa was heartbroken. To assuage her grief, she consulted a famous medium, Hester Dowden, so that she could continue talking to Nancy. Rosa believed that when people died, they continued to live on the astral plane, which she called ‘The Memory of the Great Whole’, described in a letter to her sister as ‘‘a sort of “Talking Film” region in space where everything that ever has been is preserved.’ She thought that she could use a medium to reach Nancy in this region after Nancy had died. She also believed that she and Nancy were reincarnations of people who had lived since Atlantis, and that one of their incarnations were as Nyria and the woman she adored, Valeria.

A few years after Nancy died Rosa hired an historian (and former editor of the Occult Review), Ralph Shirley, to prove that the events in Nyria were true and that Nancy couldn’t have made them up. Eventually they came to blows because Shirley was being pedantic, which suggests that he couldn’t verify everything in the book. Rosa was by this stage nearly 80 and the amount of effort she spent on the book was extraordinary for a woman her age. It illuminates how much she missed Nancy and longed to be with her again. It seems to me that Rosa believed if she could prove Nyria was real, then the reincarnations were also real, and she and Nancy would be together again in the future in another incarnation.

It’s an amazing love story, but I do think that Rosa was off her scone and that Nyria is fiction (and that Nancy was acting to please Rosa, or because she enjoyed it), but Rosa firmly believed that Nyria’s story was true (hence her attempts at verifications). In his excellent and exhaustive bibliography of her work, Chris Tiffin has listed Soul of Nyria under non-fiction.

Rosa was a woman born out of time, because she was full of contradictions. She loved Nancy but couldn’t admit she was a lesbian; she thought her husband was a brute (and from her novels I expect there was some domestic violence) and wrote a bestselling feminist novel (The Bonds of Wedlock) about the dud deal women got in marriage, but still she refused to divorce him; she expressed some sympathy for Aboriginal people and their treatment by white people but is almost uniformly derogatory in her descriptions of them.

Sister Sorrow returns to Rosa’s love for Nancy, but not just in the garb in which she usually clads it ie a spiritual connection, although this makes its usual appearance. Rather, she renders it in terms of sisterly love. The novel, though published in 1916, is set a few years after Tess of the D’Ubervilles was published in 1891 (the protagonist Agatha mentions reading this with the governess Dolores), which places it around the mid-1890s. There are some mentions of contemporary (ie. 1910s) life for women, in that girls have nursing training, and in the opening, in response to some male burliness, Praed writes of the protagonist, Agatha: ‘My whole Australian soul determined upon asserting its feminine rights’ (11). Robert Dixon has described the healthy fortitude of Praed’s Australian girls in Writing the Colonial Adventure, but the mention of ‘rights’ is new I think.

The story opens in a hotel in Liechardt’s Town, Praed’s name for Brisbane (her father travelled with the explorer to Moreton Bay in 1843; she always spelled the name without the extra ‘h’). In the dining room, Agatha encounters two men, and speaks to one of them, a Mr Phil Wilkins, while the other remains mysterious and makes an exit. When Agatha’s stepmother, stepsisters and their governess, Dolores (named thus because her mother died giving birth to her), join her, Dolores is immediately bewitched by Mr Wilkins. Agatha’s father, a parliamentarian, also appears & meets Mr Wilkins.

The family then move to a classic Praed setting - a house at Emu Point (ie Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point; she called Rockhampton ‘Stonehampton’ … you get the drift) – which they had rented out for the summer. I always love Praed’s descriptions of Brisbane, as they show what it was like before it was urbanised. I also used to live at East Brisbane, which is not far from Kangaroo Point, so I know the area well. Sitting on a cane chair on the verandah by moonlight, Agatha describes:

The moon, close on the full, was shining over the river, making a broad, slanting road of milky light. Along the opposite shore, lay strange-shaped blotches of shadow where clumps of bamboos and a few tall gum-trees were eerily reflected so that they looked like monstrous creatures floating on the water. The lights of river-craft and their reflections seemed double red stars dropped into the stream. The humped shapes of cida retusa and lantarna [sic] shrubs which grew in the little paddock between our garden and the river, made me think of heraldic, couchant beasts. In the garden were more ghostly shapes of trees and blossoms – the black pyramids of bunyas: the pale oleanders: the spectral sheaves of white yucca, and a datura, shaking great creamy bells. A wind from the river, drove before it a blend of strong odours, and as the gusts went sweeping through the broad banana-fronds in the plantation, they made strange sibilant noises, tearing the great leaf-banners into tatters.

            Except for the wind in the leaves, everything was still. Only, every now and then, a boatman’s call, the long musical “O-O-O-ver” of the ferryman starting to cross the river (31-32).

Kangaroo Point is heavily built up now with apartment blocks, and a patch of park at the point, so to think of it with lush vegetation & terraced gardens (as well as the period before it was shaped by colonists) is remarkable.

Mr Wilkins comes for dinner, invited by Agatha’s father so they can talk business. Dolores continues to be mesmerised by Wilkins, explaining to Agatha that she had seen him in a dream and she was powerless to resist. He is invited to stay overnight, as the ship taking him back to his home is leaving early the next morning.

Dolores is despatched to attend to his room. Agatha is irritated by the sway Wilkins has over Dolores and, in a clear moment of sexual jealousy, drags Dolores from his room. Meanwhile the mysterious other from the hotel, Torvald Helsing, is also invited to stay because he’s heading back on the same boat as Wilkins – it transpires that they inhabit the same island.

As the evening proceeds, Wilkins becomes increasingly drunk and relates the story of a robbery in America. Dolores, executing her prescience (akin to Nancy’s), makes some observations about the robbery which she couldn’t possibly have known. The next day, Dolores and Wilkins announce their engagement, and both men travel back upriver to the island on the Princess Maud, named after Praed’s daughter Maud, who was by the book’s publication 42 years old and in a mental asylum at Canford Cliffs.

When Dolores joins her new husband on Orunga Island, she stops writing to Agatha, despite Agatha sending a number of letters. In two years, Agatha only receives two letters in return, one with a hastily penned footnote expressing a wish that Agatha would visit. At last, Agatha does.

Orguna Island is modeled on Curtis Island, to which Praed was moved soon after her marriage to Campbell Praed. The move, geographically and emotionally, was a shock and the island appears often in Praed’s writing, including her first novel, An Australian Heroine (1880). Campbell was often away on business (including affairs with women), leaving his wife on her own with a small baby, Maud. Rosa was persecuted by mosquitoes and the barren environment must have mirrored her feelings. In Sister Sorrow, Wilkins disappears as Campbell used to, leaving Agatha with Dolores, whom she finds greatly changed – thin, nervous, and mentally unstable. At one point, Agatha snaps, ‘He had no right to marry a delicate, highly-strung woman and bring her to this desolate place. And then to leave her alone as he has done! No wonder she has been driven into a nervous fever’ (253). It’s hard not to read this – for Praed unfailingly drew on either her own or others’ lives – as a complaint about her young self.

At this point in the novel, the pace shifts and becomes much slower, cataloguing Dolores’ poor mental health. The women are trapped, for Dolores doesn’t like riding and Agatha has no horse, until she persuades one of Wilkins’ workers to give her one. Without physical movement she becomes entirely focussed on Dolores’ health and the narrative becomes claustrophobic.

While doing my research on Maud, I lost all sympathy for Praed because she abandoned her child in an asylum, even as I understood that she was abiding by the conventions of the time. However when I read the descriptions of Agatha caring for Dolores, I realised that Rosa was describing the same techniques she must have used to bring Maud back from her place of wildness – giving her needlework to do, and reminding her of the past before she became unwell. When I read, ‘If you have ever had the feeling I had then, of literally clutching back a soul which was slipping over into the Abyss, you will understand what I mean’ (272) I nearly cried.

Eventually Agatha manages to establish contact with Helsing, conveniently located at the other end of the island. Cast as the ‘St George of Australia’ (Praed longed for the historical weight of a white cultural lineage, never recognising the even longer cultural lineage of Aboriginal Australia), he helps rescue Dolores who is now near death. However there is one final stoush when Wilkins, who has been revealed to be a shady character as well as the robber in America, and who has perpetrated much else besides in Australia, comes back to claim his wife. It transpires he claimed her in the first instance to stop her seeing, with her clairvoyant qualities, more of his unsavoury side than he wanted, and that he was slowly poisoning her (and that he was a bigamist with another wife whom he had also transfixed). Dolores nearly drowns, but is saved by Helsing, who drags her unconscious onto the shore, then collapses. Agatha, who loves him as well as Dolores, leaves the latter without checking that she’s alive, and kisses Hesling, whereupon he comes back to life. Later, she is ashamed that she left Dolores unconscious on the shore, and it occurred to me that perhaps this was an expression of shame that Rosa had chosen Nancy over her daughter, which surely she must have felt. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it (‘Sometimes,’ b/f says, ‘a train going into a tunnel is just a train going into a tunnel’. Clearly he knows nothing of literary criticism).

Agatha describes her ‘romantic devotion’ (37) for Dolores as ‘strangely and inextricably bound up with those closer ties of flesh and spirit. Indeed, sometimes it has later seemed to me that my feeling for Dolores in later phases had spiritual potencies which no other love has equaled. As time and conditions developed the bond, bringing into it some of the higher elements, and as my own mind grew more receptive of world-old truths, I was brought to the belief that there could be no such recent starting-point for an association like ours. It seemed far more reasonable to conclude that it had existed in past lives and that our attraction towards each other in this one, was the result of subconscious recognition’ (37). This is a pretty standard description of Praed’s belief in the union of souls across time. Towards the end of the novel, however, when Dolores recovers, Agatha is ‘overswept by a wave of emotion that … made me put my arms round her and kiss her with my whole heart in the kiss’ (354). The two women then declare they love each other ‘like sisters’. A pash between women is unusual in Praed parlance, particularly when it isn’t motivated by some sort of spiritual possession. Perhaps, after nearly twenty years with Nancy, Rosa was starting to accept her sexuality.

One aspect of the novel which was new and interesting to me was a mention of the White Australia Policy. In conversation with Helsing, Agatha’s father says ‘And then the Chinese— and all this talk about White Australia; and the blacks going wrong with opium’ (64). One of my students is writing a biography of artist Fiona Foley, a large component of whose work (including the installations in the State Library of Queensland) explores the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and 1901. It was ostensibly to protect Aboriginal people by banning opium, as Aboriginal workers were paid in opium so that they were compliant, but it became the first piece of legislation enacted to control Aboriginal people’s lives. It was also used to outlaw sexual contact between Aboriginal and Asian people.

Interestingly, Helsing employs Malay and Chinese labour in his extensive garden on Orunga Island, of which Agatha’s uncle disapproves, ‘he being one of the most fiery advocates of a “white Australia”’ (135). Moreover, one of the gardeners has an Aboriginal wife, who tends to Dolores with sophisticated medical expertise, and Helsing is very interested in Aboriginal knowledge and customs. The descriptions of Helsing’s extensive garden were also fascinating, but I have gone on far too long with this review, and if I begin a botanical digression now else it will never end.

Rosa Praed, Sister Sorrow: a story of Australian life. London : Hutchinson, 1916.

Hathi Trust Digital Library. Accessed via University of Queensland Library.

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 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.

Review of Fishing in the Devonian

O’er November we leapt, and I didn’t get any blog posts down as I was madly tying things up before going travelling for a month for conferences, a writers festival & research. And now that I’m back I find that Christmas is less than a fortnight away and I have some nine reviews to write to meet the challenge I set myself for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. So, as usual, yours truly is hitting the panic button which will lead to an outpouring of creativity & thence a collapse in front of the Christmas tree, where the dog will find me and lick my face.

The festival was Quantum Words, a science writing festival organised by Jane McCredie, who also edited this year’s Best Australian Science Writing 2016 (a jolly good Christmas present for anyone still scratching their heads). I was on a panel titled How Science Made Me a Better Writer alongside poet Carol Jenkins and playwright James Saunders, chaired by the lovely novelist & journalist Ashley Hay. I spoke about the ecobiography I’m writing and how Georgiana Molloy was probably not only Western Australia’s first female scientist, but also its first female science writer. And I described how science makes me a better writer because it gives me fresh ideas and encourages precision and collaboration.

James described the TV programme he’s making about scientists and consciousness, which was fascinating (keep an eye out for it!) and Carol read out some of her poems. When I heard the latter, my toes began to tingle. Writing poems about science, she said, is way more interesting than writing about one’s cat or one’s ex. I agreed, and after the session I bought her second book of poems, Xn, and when I got home I ordered the first, Fishing in the Devonian.

The Devonian is a period of 60 million years, beginning at the end of the Silurian period some 400 million years ago. It’s named after Devon, in England, where the rocks from this period were first studied. It was an exciting period: plants began to stretch across land and grow into forests, evolving leaves and roots; the first seed-bearing plants appeared; the fins of the ancestors of tetrapods (four-legged creatures) evolved into legs and they began to walk on land; the oceans were increasingly populated with primitive sharks and placoderms (fish with armoured plates and pelvic fins, which gave rise to the limbs of the tetrapods) dominated watery environments. Fish in general became very diverse and the era was dubbed the ‘Age of Fish’.

Aptly, then, the first poem in the book is the titular ‘Fishing in the Devonian’ and aptly, Carol writes, ‘There is a lot/to think about in fishing in the Devonian’, including the contemplation of these life forms. You can sit in your boat and watch Tiktaalik rosae tempted by ‘the attractive ooze of mudflats/with morsels of scorpions and millipedes … trying its best to get out’ like its fellow fish, which ‘throng/up and over the shore on their lobed fins’. But, she humorously adds, be careful of the boat you use, for ‘spongey Devonian wood’ doesn’t have much by the way of ‘secondary thickening/through a stout source of carbon’ – the trees haven’t yet evolved to be strong enough!

It’s a charming poem to open with, and the poems that follow are similarly captivating. ‘A Life in Fridges’ describes fifteen fridges, capturing the arc of the narrator’s life from childhood to adulthood. As a child, she spent some time ‘opening the door to feel the engagement/and disengagement of the catch./ The term shut the door comes into/common parlance’. What child hasn’t been day absorbed in a fridge seal like this, especially on a summer’s day when the gust of cool air from the interior is so much more satisfying that a fan stirring hot air, and your mother tells you to stop wasting electricity? When she leaves home ‘someone’s old beer fridge/is dragged dripping, like adulthood/into the kitchen of McEvoy Ave’. This fridge is old and animated, it ‘coughs mechanically, a late/night shudder, as if dreaming it forgot how/to breathe and then the motor kicks back in/and gets on with it’. Then there is a baby and ‘the magnets come/the first twenty six/are the bloody alphabet which I pick up/about a thousand times a week’ and, finally, the markers of comfortable middle-age: ‘three kinds of yoghurt, five chutneys,/six varieties of soft cheese, a Tardis trail through dark matter,/time and meals’. It’s a clever way of telling a life; taking a quotidian object we never think about and investing it with personality, memory and attachment. The ending is so superb, and characteristically funny, that it’s worth quoting in full:

            Outside is a public demonstration of family life;

of the inside, I say to visitors, don’t open that fridge,

it’s like my unconscious, there are good things in there

and some things you will not want to know.

To illustrate this, and that the term vegetable crisper

is an oxymoron, I gently lever up a liquid zucchini,

fizzing slightly yellow, photograph it and post this on the door. (51)

 So yes, not all the poems are about science. Many are about childhood and growing up, sex, romance and women, one whom ‘throws herself/ – perfect body, less one breast – /off the cliff onto the rocks’ (How Much, p. 40) – and all of them, whether muted or bold – carry sensory detail that pulls the reader into another moment, then releases them.

I found only one poem to be clunky – ‘Kulin Seasons’ – a braiding of descriptions of the seasons described by the Kulin people and a series of events throughout the year advertising sales in stores. While some of the descriptions are delicate and gorgeous – witness ‘In kangaroo-apple season/you can watch small bats/harvesting insects from twilight’ – the author’s intent was too obvious, and it unsettled me.

And my favourite? Too hard to pick, but I loved these few lines from ‘Disorders of Belief’: ‘She wanted to believe in bone, muscle, blood,/skin and pheromones but ran into the anaesthetic/of romance, the predisposition to delusional/sexually receptive states’ (11), for what is romance but the swish of chemicals? And what are clouds, but symbols of inexpressibility, viz.:

I am photographing clouds, they are so hard

to talk to, carrying in an elegiac mass all the words

I didn’t say that were perfect for when we weren’t

lying together on a paisley cotton quilt, that

your great aunt, who bred silkworms, didn’t make. (‘Fifteen Tangents, p. 69).

Are clouds all that isn’t there? At any rate they are good metaphors for poems – we study their shapes and try to decode their meaning.

All this year I’ve been buying poetry books to compel myself to start writing poetry again, but I’ve been so busy & tired that I haven’t had time to do anything except get to the end of my nonfiction book, Hearing Maud. However, 2017 awaits, and Carol is such a marvelous writer that she has persuaded me, when gaps of time open, to plug them with poetry.

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