Monthly Archives: June 2017

The Book Group at Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane

Posted on 23 June 2017 | Leave a comment

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane (Vintage 2011)

bohane.jpgBefore the Book Group’s meeting: At its last meeting, which I didn’t get to, the Book Group discussed a book about the parlous state of the human species. I imagine this one was chosen as our next title, if not as light relief, then as a source of stylistic delight. It’s a dystopian world, the world of Bohane, a ruthless world of gang warfare on the west coast of Ireland, possibly in some post-catastrophic future – not terribly unlike the world of A Clockwork Orange, The Threepenny Opera or maybe The Sopranos, for the violence and sexual exploitation, and also for the creative energy in the writing.

Here’s a paragraph picked pretty much at random before I had to return my copy to the library:

Tipping seventy, Ol’ Boy dresses much younger. He wore low-rider strides, high-top boots with the heels clicker’d, a velveteen waistcoat and an old-style yard hat set at a frisky, pimpish angle. Ol’ Boy had connections all over the city – he was the Bohane go-between. He was as comfortable sitting for a powwow in the drawing room of a Beauvista manse as he was making a rendezvous at a Rises flatblock. Divil a bit stirred at the Trace that he didn’t know about, nor across the Smoketown footbridge. He was on jivey, fist-bumping terms with the suits of the business district – those blithe and lardy boys who worked Endeavour Avenue down in the Bohane New Town – and he could chew the fat equably with the most ignorant of Big Nothin’ spud-aters. The Mannion voicebox was an instrument of wonder. It mimicked precisely the tones and cadence of whoever he was speaking to, while retaining always a warm and reassuring note.

I was enthralled by the language and by the twisting intrigue until the very last movement. Oddly, the last 40 pages fell flat. Maybe Kevin Barry could feel the end approaching and simply didn’t have to stomach to make it happen with the same gusto as everything that had come before.

After the meeting: Well, there was an attempt to drum up some controversy, but in fact we all love loved the linguistic play of this, except for one who just found it hard going, and of course the two out of nine who hadn’t read the book. Some complained that it was just good fun (of a bloodthirsty sort) and didn’t give any hint of how the world had come to such a state, but others (me included) didn’t see why it needed to do that.

We wondered about the geography. Is there any western Ireland city that matches the description of Bohane? One of the better travelled among us said that the Portuguese city of Porto fitted exactly, and others agreed. An interesting possibility, since at least one of the characters (Macu, short for Immaculata) comes from Portugal. In general we liked the regular moments when the narrative stops for a description of what a character is wearing.

After a brief engagement with the book, conversation ranged wide: travellers’ tales, a Rodney Rude joke, one man’s prostate cancer saga (mostly a good luck story), paternal boasting, one empty-nest-after-30+-years announcement, the excellence of The Necks, an impersonation of Bundaberg farmers deciding whether to burn the cane, reports from the Sydney Film Festival (Young Marx, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail and Citizen Jane good; Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves to be avoided). And we ate roast chicken and salads – the latecomer missed out on the chickpeas.

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Cathy McLennan’s Saltwater

Posted on 11 June 2017 | 8 comments

Cathy McLennan, Saltwater (UQP 2016)

saltwater.jpegDon’t be misled by the sales pitch on the front cover of Saltwater: ‘An epic fight for justice in the tropics.’ It’s not exactly false, but in so far as it suggests a grand fictional narrative, it’s certainly misleading. This is Cathy McLennan’s account of the first months of her employment as a brand new barrister. A non-disclaimer after the title page begins, ‘This book is a personal account based upon real events, real crimes, real people and real court cases.’

I was predisposed to like it because it mentions my niece Paula Shaw’s Seven Seasons in Aurukun in its acknowledgements. It turns out that it has a lot in common with Paula’s book. Paula went as a teacher to Aurukun, where she was confronted daily with the failure of the education system to meet the needs of the Aboriginal community; Cathy McLennan worked for the Townsville and Districts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Corporation for Legal Aid Services, and was confronted by the even greater, more tragic failure of the legal system.

The central narrative involves four young Aboriginal men who are accused of murdering an older white man, a case that landed on McLennan’s desk in her first days on the job. She is inexperienced, but the service is underfunded and understaffed, so she is given responsibility for the case. At first she is convinced of the innocence of the four, and it looks as if a standard TV episode narrative of vindication of the clients will unfold. This story, being real, is both more interesting and complex than that, and also much grimmer.

In this, and the other stories, particularly that of an appallingly abused eleven-year-old girl who meets with half-hearted good intentions from Children’s Services and peremptory punitiveness from the court system, the book forces its readers to look directly at the level of damage being done to children in places like Palm Island. She doesn’t spend time analysing the causes. She doesn’t need to. At every turn, Aboriginal people are struggling to do right by the young ones, but their efforts are thwarted by the result of the damage they have suffered and by indifferent, even hostile government bodies. Nor does she propose solutions: this is an account from the front line of a non-Aboriginal person trying to be of use, and coming hard up against the horrors (not too strong a word) of some Aboriginal lives, not a political tract.

My sense is that this is a book that should be widely read, especially by non-Indigenous Australians, but that it should be read along with any number of other books, because read alone, even though there are many strong, smart Aboriginal people in its pages, it could easily be read as preaching despair. But read alongside, say, books by Aboorignal people like Lesley and Tammy Williams’ Not Just Black and White, or Stan Grant’s Talking to My Country, or by other non-Aboriginal people who work with remote Aboriginal communities, like Andrew Stojanowski’s Dog Ear Cafe or (added later, thanks to Jim Kable in the comments) Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful, it’s a powerful addition to the knowledge pool.

aww2017.jpgSaltwater is the fifth book I’ve read for the 2017 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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Posted on 4 June 2017 | 5 comments

I’ve just come back from visiting Tokkōtai, an exhibition of work by contemporary Australian and Japanese artists to mark the 75th anniversary of the so-called Battle of Sydney Harbour. If you’re in Sydney, I recommend you try to get to see it before it closes on 12 June. It’s in the T5 Camouflage Fuel Tank in Georges Heights, Mosman.

On the night of 31 May 1942, three Japanese midget submarines made a surprise attack on Sydney Harbour. Twenty-one Australian naval personnel and six Japanese submariners were killed. Though the exhibition program says the episode ‘left an indelible mark on Australian identity and the course of our history’, really it has been swallowed up by the Great Australian Amnesia except for an occasional newspaper mention, its meaning unarticulated and its impact unresolved. In this exhibition there’s a sense of that night being dragged back into awareness, and not so much as a key event in Australian history as a point of departure for cross-cultural understanding.

Ken Done’s series of paintings, Attack – Japanese Midget Submarines in Sydney Harbour, is the big surprise. It’s as far from the Sydney Harbour prints that he’s famous for as you could imagine. In fifteen paintings he tells the story of the Japanese men on the subs, from their inculcation into the ethos of self-sacrifice to their burial with full military honours in Sydney in 1942.

There are two pieces of video art. Jennie Feyen’s Sakura and Steel features dancer Kei Ikeda. Miku Sato’s Not the Yellow Submarines is accompanied by a tiny model of a submarine floating in the air, bathed in yellowish light that creates an underwater feel.

For me, Michelle Belgiorno’s A Thousand Stitches of Hope and Sue Pedley’s Orange-Net-Work are the real guts of the show. Each of these involved the participation of hundreds of people, and gained a huge emotional impact from that.

Belgiorno’s work consists of 75 senninbari belts – belts that were traditionally good luck tokens given to soldiers before they went to war. The beautiful belts in the exhibition were made in a series of sewing workshops where Japanese and Australian women ‘of all ages’ sewed together ‘while discussing reconciliation and Australian–Japanese history.

The centrepiece of Pedley’s work is a huge orange net that was made for another artwork some years ago by volunteers in a small fishing village in the Japanese Inland Sea. Repurposed here, and hung around the four great pillars of the Fuel Tank, enclosing chunks of rock, it creates a shrine-like space that has one thinking of traditional Japanese life, zen gardens, and the underwater net that was lethal to two of the six submariners. A wall of ghostlike rubbings from clothing from the fishing village and a military museum completes this very powerful work.

Unfortunately, the remaining work, Gary Warner’s Orange-Net-Work-Soundings, a soundscape that accompanied Sue Pedley’s work, was inaudible when I was there, drowned out by the soundtrack of the videos.

It’s a terrific exhibition. Photos don’t do any part of it justice, but here’s what I could come up with.

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Saga 7

Posted on 1 June 2017 | 1 comment

Fiona Staples (artist) and Brian K Vaughan (writer), Saga volume seven (Image Comics 2017)

saga7.jpegThe adventures of Hazel, now at least five years old, and her two-species family continue.

This time she has a little brother on the way. At least, one of the cute meerkat-like creatures who temporarily join the family when they land to refuel on war-torn comet Phang is sure it will be a brother. A page-high image of an erect penis on page 3 is adequate warning that this volume is not suitable for children or for reading at work. (The Explicit Material in the first volume passed me by; this lot is unmissable.) And there’s not just (mostly joyful or comic) sex, but also (mostly swashbuckling or spectacular) violence. War continues between the horns and the wings, with vast collateral damage. Both sides, and a growing number of individuals, are still out to kill Hazel and her family. Our little crew is on a mission to rescue the Robot prince’s son. Hazel’s father, Marko, struggles to maintain his principled pacifism in the face of necessity and his remembered joy in violence.

A delightful new development is the television-headed Robot entertaining the young ones with cartoons on his screen ‘face’, and then their sneaking into his room to watch his dreams play across the screen:

Kurti: This is a creepy one.
Hazel: His dreams are always creepy, Kurti.
Kurti: I suppose. Least they’re not as boring as reading sacred scrolls with my cousins.

And in the following frames, as Kurti and Hazel lose interest and discuss the pressing matter of who will look after the baby when it arrives, we see the rest of the Prince’s nightmare play out on his screen in the background.

The juxtaposition of Hazel’s text narrative, which sometimes could almost be from a Wonder Years script, with the action taking place in the images makes brilliant use of the comics medium. For example, an image of Hazel’s mother kneeling between the prone, possibly dead bodies of Marko and the Robot prince is accompanied by the hand lettered text: ‘By the time they’re out of preschool, most children have seen thousands of acts of violence.’ Turn the page, and Hazel is playing hide and seek with her new friend Kurti, while the hand-lettered narrative continues, ‘Granted, for the average kid, these acts are mostly fictional … and unlike the real deal, fictional violence is cool as shit.’ And the last frame of the opposite page shows Kurti looking with terror into the faces (sic) of an assassin.

Most of this volume is spent in one place. At the end, we are on the move again, but the situation is, literally and graphically, very dark.

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