Category Archives: Books

A man a dog a blog: Rocky & Gawenda

Posted on 13 August 2010 | 2 comments

Michael Gawenda, Rocky & Gawenda: The story of a man & his mutt (MUP 2009)

Rocky & Gawenda began life as a blog on the Crikey website. The transition from blog to book is a subject that niggles at the ambition bone of at least some of us bloggers and there’s much to be learned from examples like this.

Rocky & Gawenda is a no-frills conversion: a foreword by a friend and former colleague of the author is followed by the entries from the blog’s first five months – February to June 2009, to be precise – stripped of dates, comments and occasional time-sensitive bits and pieces. Then a postscript by another former colleague gives some back story. From a very quick comparison between book and blog, it seems that little has been changed in the posts themselves beyond a quick copy edit (the dog Rocky now yelps on the man Gawenda’s lap whereas on the blog he whelped, though the copy edit wasn’t all that thorough, as my very quick look showed me Rocky lying prone1 on his back more than once, ‘Giuseppe’ misspelled twice, and the blog’s image ‘Rocky pre–separation anxiety’ re-captioned ‘Post-separation anxiety Rocky’ on page 54). The book, then, is the blog repackaged with minimal fuss.

What is it like to read a blog in book form? A blog entry is a thing of the moment. It invites comment, elaboration, argument from readers. It may be passionate, incisive or profound, but it makes no claim to be the writer’s final words on a subject. There’s no overarching structure to a blog: frivolity can follow hard on the heels of passionate discourse; you can tell the same anecdote a number of times, expecting readers to have forgotten the previous tellings as surely as you have. These things feel completely natural when fed to you by RSS. Encountered in a book, especially with dates removed, they can be disorientating.

These considerations probably account for my rocky start with Rocky & Gawenda. It’s probably also true that the blogger takes a little time to hit his stride. But once Gawenda’s persona had gelled in my mind and I’d understood that the book is a captured blog – something like a mix of diary entries, short essays and memoirs –  the book was a delight.

Michael Gawenda is in the first years of retirement after a career in journalism that culminated in his being editor of the Melbourne Age. He hasn’t quite relinquished the mindset of the driven, dedicated journalist, but in his blog, and this book, he allows his mind and his typing hands to relax away from the disciplines of his trade and explore other ways of writing:

This ‘Rocky and Gawenda’ serial – for that’s how I have come to regard it – which has a beginning but, as far as I know, has no middle or end, is written with no readers in mind. After forty years in journalism, that is a relief and a liberation.

Every morning very early he sets out in his T-shirt and Essendon cap with his ‘mutt’ Rocky and walks on the beach and through the suburbs of St Kilda and Elwood. Rocky’s company allows him to live in the moment, to notice the sky, the sea, the weather, people, dogs. It also allows his mind to wander. A rumination on Kevin Rudd’s way of speaking is interrupted by Rocky chasing after some black swans. An argument about the limiting effects of identity politics is waylaid by a memory of using a heated hacksaw blade as a hair curler. A childhood reminiscence is told three times. We don’t mind. The joy of the book is in its enactment of a mind set free, a benign and fruitful version of retirement.

Michael Gawenda was born in a Displaced Persons’ camp in Austria after the Second World War and came to Australia when very young; he spent his childhood in the Jewish community of St Kilda and then in culturally diverse working-class Fitzroy, was mentored by a bundist friend of his father, aspired to a kind of Easy Rider creativity in his young adulthood, became a journalist and rose to the top of his profession, married and had two children with whom he regrets spending less time than he would wish. All of this I  have gleaned from the book – which incidentally includes a couple of affectionate blog posts from his son and daughter – so you have some small idea of the interesting and emotionally engaging ground that’s covered.

The book ends suddenly, for no apparent reason other than that the requisite number of pages had been filled. The blog, I checked, continued for another five months or so, then it too finished. The post for 17 September 2009, before proceeding to a story from a Displaced Persons’ camp,  intimated that the end of the blog was nigh, and went on:

The writing has taken me in a new and unexpected direction, where memory and imagination meet. I am not sure where this will go, this mixture of memory and imagination, where `facts’ and fictions are intertwined. The `house of facts’ as a friend described them, will remain, but within the house, my imagination will be let loose.

That sounds as if the blog/this book was a bridge. Gawenda intimates that he has wanted to write at some length about Melbourne’s postwar Jewish community. His sketches of those times – a misery-producing children’s camp, pickles and kosher sausages, argumentative old men – are perhaps the most engaging parts of this book. Perhaps that’s where the bridge has taken him.  I look forward to reading whatever lies on the far shore.

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1 I have a theory that this misuse of ‘prone’ stems from Stokely Carmichael’s famous reflection on sexism in the Black Liberation movement. When asked what position women had in the SNCC, he reportedly said, ‘Prone,’ and the word was flipped over onto its back for a whole generation.

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Election clerihews

Posted on 12 August 2010 | Leave a comment

First, as a reminder of past glories, here’s a version of a clerihew I wrote in November 2007:

Kevin Michael Rudd
may turn out to be a dud
but at least we’ll no longer be showered
with the duplicitous spittle of Howard.

The present Labor Prime Minister (long may she reign) presents a considerably greater challenge to the aspiring clerihewer, I don’t want to wait until election night, so here you are, the best I’ve been able to manage:

Julia Eileen Gillard
could star in a remake of Willard,
not as a rat or their misfit trainer
but the love-interest trying for something saner

And this:

Anthony John Abbott
has a habit
when playing for high stakes
of saying whatever it takes.

Go on, do better.

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Words words words

Posted on 9 August 2010 | 4 comments

Ammon Shea, Reading the OED: One man, one year, 21,730 pages (Viking 2008)

Ammon Shea set himself the task of reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary – those thousands of pages mentioned in the subtitle – over a year, and writing a book about it. He spent between eight and ten hours a day for most days of a year in the basement of a library on the actual reading, ruining his eyesight, not doing his health much good, wreaking havoc with his social life. I hope for his sake the resulting book earned out its advance, but I’m sorry to report that I just didn’t find it very interesting. Perhaps inevitably, the actual story of the reading lacks drama, especially as Shea conscientiously avoids distractions, including anything other than dictionaries that might cast light on his reading. The interspersed short essays on things dictionary-related have their nuggets of shiny information, but are generally Lexis Ultra Lite.

What might have been the book’s sustaining backbone is the annotated listing of words that took Shea’s fancy. But the vast bulk of his chosen words are of the polysyllabic latinate or hellenic variety – mataeotechny, materteral, matrisate, matutinal, mediocrist, microphily, micturient, to cite all but one of the words on a spread opened at random. Such words have a scholarly aroma to them, which doesn’t make them uninteresting (though matutinal and micturient are pretty pedestrian), but it does make them same-ish, and many of them show the workings of their construction. The remaining word on that spread is mawworm, meaning ‘a hypocrite with pretensions of sanctity’, and it too smells of the midnight oil: it’s a literary invention (a dead eponym from a forgotten 1768 play by the largely forgotten Sir Isaac Bickerstaffe). If the words themselves are mostly less than enthralling, the comments tend to forgettable persiflage, often of an unpleasantly misanthropic hue. Mediocrist, defined (by Shea) as ‘A person of mediocre talents’, gets this: ‘Nobody wants to be mediocre, but someone has to be. In fact, by definition, most people are.’ H. L. Mencken he ain’t. As the book progresses, in fact, the misanthropy comes to seem less like failed wit and more like confession of a deep malaise in the writer. There’s definitely a sour taste to comments such as this on xenium (‘a gift given to a guest’): ‘Unless you are one of those unbalanced individuals who actually enjoys company, I would recommend giving a xenium such as a pair of used socks, something that says, “Here is a gift – please go away.”‘

Given that one of the appeals of the OED is that it meticulously notes the point at which each word entered the language and the way its meaning changes and develops, it is particularly disappointing that Reading the OED mostly refrains from giving us that sort of information, even giving Shea’s own definitions rather than those of the dictionary. All the same, I was still in there trying to enjoy the book until I reached the chapter on N , which begins, ‘One of the things that has been painfully apparent as I read through the enormity of the English language is just how very little I know of it.’ He’d read the OED but doesn’t know the meaning of enormity. I wish I could believe the irony of that sentence was deliberate. I did finish the book, but with little pleasure.

By sheer chance I started on this book just after reading ‘Infinite Anthology‘, the 2010 British Poetry Society’s annual lecture delivered by Les Murray in May and reprinted in the August Monthly (reprinted, I note grumpily, without any apparent editing to acknowledge that Monthly readers are by and large Australian, as distinct from the lecture’s original audience). Like Ammon Shea, Les Murray describe himself as a collector of words, but when Les talks about words, you can hear his passion for language as a window opening onto truths about class, regionality, history … the whole of humanity. His pleasure in any given word is bound up with where it comes from, what it’s used for, who used it. He’s not impressed by latinate constructions – give me his doosra, camel toe and deadly (meaning ‘excellent’) any day in preference to quisquilious, quomodocunquize or supervacaneous.

One word – petrichor – is mentioned by both writers. Murray’s lecture opened with a list of sixteen words he has submitted to the Macquarie Dictionary over the last couple of years. The list ends:

Petrichor – aggregate of natural oils and terpenes on dry ground; gives off an exhilarating loamy smell when wetted by rain. Said to trigger reproductive cycle in aquatic creatures, fish etc. Discovered by Drs Joy Beard and RG Thomas at the Australian National University in 1964.

Evidently the OED beat the Macquarie to the punch on this one. Shea’s entry, longer and more personal than most, reads:

Petrichor (n.) The pleasant loamy smell of rain on the ground, especially after a long dry spell.
Petrichor is a fairly recent word, having been coined by Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas for an article they wrote in 1964. I first came across this some six or seven years ago, thought to myself, ‘What a lovely word,’ and then promptly forgot what it was. I have spent far too much time since then wondering vainly what it was. When I found it there, buried in the midst of P, it was as if a kink in my lower back that had been plaguing me for years suddenly went away.
also see: impluvious

For Shea, petrichor is memorable because it is ‘lovely’, whatever its meaning. For Murray, it’s a word – that is, to call it lovely without reference to its meaning would be absurd. Shea is fairly slapdash in his definition, and goes on to talk about himself; Murray is more precise, and gives us the part of the world the word illuminates, throwing in a pinch of national pride and a dollop of ‘look-it-up’ non-condescension (definitions of terpenes abound elsewhere, after all). It’s worth mentioning that Shea got the second scientist’s name right – it’s Bear, not Beard. On the other hand it seems that Dr Bear is generally known as Joy rather than Isabel Joy, so Murray gets a point for that. Les Murray’s error indicates, it seems to me, that he is writing, not from a written source, but from the extraordinary reservoir of knowledge he holds in his head. (It may also indicate that his editor at The Monthly was less on the ball than the people at Viking.)

Back to Shea: he concludes his introductory section, ‘I have read the OED so that you don’t have to.’ Well, heroic his reading may have been, but that sentence is salesman’s bulldust.

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Bony Emily?

Posted on 7 August 2010 | Leave a comment

Adrian Hyland, Diamond Dove (©2006, Text Publishing 2010)

Detective Napoleon Bonaparte, known as ‘Bony’, had one white and one Aboriginal parent. He appeared in most of the 29 novels written by Arthur Upfield between 1922 and 1996 (the last being finished by other people and published two years after Upfield’s death). Upfield was a bushman himself, who knew what he was talking about when he described life in the outback, and the books’ respectful approach to Aboriginal lore probably played a role over the years in softening mainstream Australian culture’s dismissive racism. My cane-farmer father was a fan. I have read only one of the novels, and that was many years ago, but its title alone – The Bone is Pointed – indicates how the books have dated, how their inevitable racism now stands out and may well overshadow their virtues. If I remember correctly, Aboriginal culture was essentialised (part of Bony’s nature, in tension with his white nature) and generalised (no distinctions are made among the many different Aboriginal cultures and languages).

Adrian Hyand’s Emily Tempest books, of which Diamond Dove (Moonlight Downs in the US and Outback Bastard in Germany) is the first, have a similar set-up. Emily, the university educated daughter of a traditional Aboriginal woman and a white man, belongs like Bony in both worlds and in neither. But we’re definitely in the 21st century: Emily’s mother comes from a particular people, the fictional Wantiya mob, and Emily herself grew up as a kind of foster daughter to the similarly fictional Warlpuju mob; there are Native Title land claims, unscrupulous miners, post-Papunya-Tula art, and complex sexual scenarios.

This is genre fiction. Where else would you find a passage like this:

A maniac, it seemed then, was the only logical solution,and a convenient maniac was what we had in the turbulent, rolling-eyed Blakie. Everything pointed to the crazy bastard. it had to be him.
Why, then, was I beginning to feel the first little pricks of doubt?

The only possible answer to that question is, ‘Because you’re in a detective story, Emily.’ That is to say, we’re not being asked to take this book seriously as a work of social or political analysis. It’s meant to be fun, and it is. Emily herself is gutsy, witty in a hardboiled way, the most engaging detective hero I’ve encountered in a long time.

Talking on The Book Show recently on the occasion of her 90th birthday, P D James reflected on the murder mystery novel:

The classical detective story is … popular in times of anxiety, times of strife, times of war and dangers of war, times of depression. That’s when its comfort is so necessary because at these times one can feel that there are problems facing communities, facing countries, facing the world generally, which really are insoluble, however much money and however much effort you pour into them. Here you have a form of popular fiction with a puzzle at its heart and by the end of the book it will be solved, not by divine intervention or good luck but by a human being, by courage and perseverance and intelligence. So it rather confirms our belief, which I still think we have, that we live in a rational and moral universe.

These remarks could hardly be more apposite. Adrian Hyland has given us a classic detective story set in the midst of the strife, anxiety and apparent insolubility of the continuing dispossession and disadvantage of Australian Aboriginal people. He lets aspects of that dire situation be seen, but offers us the comfort of a puzzle, which is solved, exactly as the Dame says, by courage and perseverance and intelligence. Hyland thanks ‘the Indigenous people of Central Australia’ in the acknowledgements, but makes it clear that his Aboriginal characters belong to a fictional language group and live in fictional country. He doesn’t claim to have anyone’s permission to tell his stories, but then Emily is is not an insider to Warlpuju culture, so there are no secrets being revealed. Hyland is a middle-aged white man who writes in the voice of a young Aboriginal woman. I know I’m another middle-aged white man, so my opinion may need to be taken with a dose of salt, but I think he’s done brilliantly.

A second Emily Tempest novel, Gunshot Road, was published earlier this year. My recommender of detective books says it’s even better.

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The Tree of Man revisited with the Book Group

Posted on 4 August 2010 | 2 comments

Patrick White, The Tree of Man (1955, Vintage 1994)

Before the group meeting:
My mother’s letters in the 1970s would occasionally report on her reading. She once transcribed a paragraph from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children because it seemed to describe the noses of our family. The other day when I read the first page of the Drought chapter of The Tree of Man, I wondered if she’d thought, as I do, that this description of Stan Parker evokes aspects of my father (allowing for the fact that Dad grew sugarcane rather than running a dairy, and was never ‘broad’):

He was respected. He was inseparable from the district, he had become a place name. His herd was small, but of good quality for the herd of a man in a small way, neither rich nor ambitious, but reliable, the cans would always reach the butter factory to the minute, without fail. He went to church too, singing the straight psalms and rounder hymns, in praise of that God which obviously did exist. Stan Parker had been told for so long that he believed, of course he did believe. He sang that praise doggedly, in a voice you would have expected of him, approaching the music honestly, without embellishing it. Standing in the pew, singing. the back of his neck was by this time quite wrinkled, and the sinews were too obvious in the flesh. But he was a broad and upright man.

I’ll never know if she made that kind of connection, but she mentioned the book in passing in a comment on Cancer Ward:

It seems queer but I think Patrick White writes much like [Solzhenitsyn], so simply. I’ve read only one of his, The Tree of Man, & really enjoyed it.

Not bad, eh? She made no claim to literary sophistication, but she picked White’s affinity with the Russians. And she found his prose simple!

The prose is simple, but it’s not easy. It’s also impossible to read fast, lacking what A D Hope believed a novelist needs: ‘a plain style, a clear easy stride, a good open texture of language to carry him [sic] to the end of his path’. But it’s certainly not ‘pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge’, as Hope famously described it. It does constantly pull you up and make you look at a particular word or image – or, if you don’t stop, leave you with an uneasy feeling that you’ve missed something. The point of view frequently moves around within a single short sentence, or rather within a grouping of words between consecutive full stops, since White is a great user of what are sometimes known in the editing trade as frags. Even the very first sentence, innocuous enough at first glance (‘A cart drove between the two big stringybarks and stopped’), has the reader slightly wrong-footed with its abrupt rhythm, its lack of a human, or even animal, subject, its slightly skewed use of articles (‘the cart drove between two big stringybarks’ would be more natural, but of course it would mean something quite different).

The book’s peculiarities, and its arrogance, intimidated me in first year university in 1967. But not this time. True, I came close to genuflecting at the first four chapters, which tell of the primal encounter of ‘the man’, ‘the woman’ and the bush. I wondered if I would be able to keep up with the intensity of the prose for the whole 480 pages. But once the narrative emerged into something resembling a social world, I was less enthralled. In fact I became increasingly irritated. I just don’t believe in the nastiness of most of the characters. I can’t stand the snobbishness of the narrative voice. The drunken Irish shenanigans (read domestic violence, despair, wretched poverty and, towards the end, dubious religion) of the O’Dowds fail to amuse me. The pretentions of the nouveaux riches Armstrongs are awkwardly unconvincing, as is almost everything about the younger Parkers. The book seems to assume that some people, inarticulate or otherwise, have an honest capacity for rich inner lives, while others (most?) don’t, and must settle at best for synthetic souls with occasional exalted glimpses. For all the towering strengths of the book – and they certainly aren’t limited to the first chapters – I became increasingly obsessed with calculating what fraction of the pages I had yet to read.

Perhaps the most striking disappointment is the vast, gaping silence about Aboriginal Australians. When Stan’s cart stops between the stringybarks in that first sentence, it’s definitely in terra nullius. ‘Blacks’ are mentioned twice, once when young Ray refers to their arcane knowledge of how to survive in the desert, and again in the closing pages when the missionary mentions sex with black women as a sign of his youthful depravity. The phrase ‘dream time’ occurs twice. The first time, Stan and Amy have come to an ‘uneasy dream-time’. Since that probably signifies that neither of them was fully awake in relation to the other, the Aboriginal reference may be coincidental, but in the second, near the beginning of the fourth and final part, Stan looks back on his first days at the farm as ‘the dream time’. Here the phrase does refer to a time of creation, of beginnings, and it must disturbingly invoke for any Australian reader now, and surely for some in the 1950s, this continent’s history of genocide, dispossession and cultural appropriation. Invoke without acknowledging. The Irish are despised. The working class barely exist. Aboriginal people have been erased and over-written.

Then, here’s Stan, further down the first page of the Drought chapter:

There were certain corners of his property that he could not bring himself to visit, almost as if he would have discovered something he did not wish to see. […] Once he had been looking at a crop of remarkably fine sorghum that was almost ready to bring in, when he remembered that same stretch of land after he had cleared it as a young man, and on it the white chips lying that his axe had carved out of the trees, and some trees and young saplings still standing and glistening there, waiting for the axe. So that he forgot his present crop and went away disturbed, and thinking.

In a book that makes much of ‘things that are too terrible and wonderful to speak of’ is it too much to imagine that in this moment the thing Stan does not wish to see is the silenced Aboriginal history? That the dispossession on which Stan’s settlement of the land is built is almost forcing its way into the narrative? Surely it’s not just my idiosyncrasy that those white chips of wood remind me of the bones in the red earth of a massacre site in a William Yang photograph?

There may well be hundreds of learned articles about this disturbed silence, but that’s my two bob’s worth.

After the group meeting:
Tonight we met in a pub in Paddington, rather than in someone’s home. All but one of us turned up, and almost half had read all or most of he book. We had an animated discussion. Only one of us really loved the book. One, who may not have read it, considered it to be dated imperialism. The two of us who read the Vintage edition agreed that the cover was absurdly inappropriate (a horse? northern hemisphere trees?) No one shared my unease about the absence of Aboriginal characters: the consensus seemed to be that the original inhabitants of the Parkers’ land had been dispossessed long before Stan and Amy arrived, and that my reading of the white chips passage was drawing a long bow. As someone said, what’s the point of a bow that’s not long? And I still think that the general silence enacts a kind of genocide.

Whatever, unlike Anna Karenina, The Tree of Man couldn’t hold its own against the need to discuss Other Things – the sins of the ALP and the worse sins of the Coalition, our various adventures in work and education, travel and the weather. As always it was a fun evening.

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Joanna Russ’s Adventures of Alyx

Posted on 26 July 2010 | Leave a comment

Joanna Russ, The Adventures of Alyx (1976, Baen 1986)

I believe Joanna Russ carried the flag for uncompromising feminism in the science fiction/fantasy community in the 1970s. Apparently she invited James Tiptree Jr out of a fanzine symposium on women in science fiction because as a man Tiptree had no business speaking on the subject (for those who came in late, Tiptree was really Alice Sheldon lurking behind a male persona, and she responded graciously, in role, to the disinvitation). So it’s no surprise that Alyx in these stories is a strong female character. There are three short stories featuring Alyx, little more than active character sketches really, and a much longer narrative, then a final short story that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have anything to do with Alyx.

Alyx the adventuress from ancient Tyre is a marvellous character, so the sketches – in which Alyx respectively helps a young noblewoman escape a potentially lethal marriage, escapes her own marriage to take up with a pirate, and deals with a gross man who claims to have created the world – hold up well. The first two happen entirely in a version of earthly antiquity. So does the third, though the nasty patriarchal figure has the language and paraphernalia of a time traveller rather than those of a demigod. In the fourth and longest piece, ‘Picnic in Paradise’, Alyx is transported by the Polysyllabic Agency for Temporal Gobbledygook (or something like that) to a future where her skills – and her lack of knowledge of technology – equip her perfectly to shepherd a group of tourists out of a war zone. In this piece the book well and truly transcends the ‘of historical interest’ niche. It’s funny, touching, and sexy in an over the top way. It points vicious satire  at the Prozac generation before the name. Then, just as one is thinking of Alyx as a kind of moral touchstone, one who keeps her head when all around are losing theirs, a role model even, she confounds all expectations by going so far off the rails it’s hard to understand how the story manages to keep us sympathising with her. She’s a real hero, and the story brilliantly refuses to be neat.

Then the last, short story, as far as I can tell, is not an Alyx story at all. A teenage girl in rural USA in 1925 is visited by a strange woman who turns out to be a descendant from the distant future. The young heroine (and we with her) understands only a fraction of what her strange visitor is up to. She helps her to kill another visitor from the future, but we’re left with only glimpses the relationship between the two visitors. And there’s more. It’s a tantalising narrative in which all the huge world-changing events happen offstage and/or in a language we don’t understand. Yet it’s also a satisfying coming of age story. After all, what teenager understands the world s/he finds him/herself part of.

I don’t have fond memories of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, which I read (in 1970 something) as an undisciplined scream of rage. This book suggests strongly that I may have got it wrong.

If you want a proper, informed, intelligent discussion, I recommend you have a look at Niall Harrison’s review at Torque Control.

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Every Secret Thing

Posted on 20 July 2010 | Leave a comment

Marie Munkara, Every Secret Thing (UQP 2009)

I read this immediately after The Tree of Man. I’ll wait to post about the latter until we’ve discussed it at the Book Group  – enough for now to tell you that it was Edward Said’s notion of counterpoint that prompted me to follow White’s novel with one by an Aboriginal writer.

The books have more in common that you might expect – mainly a contempt for Irish Catholics and selected white middle-class people of whatever religio-ethnic background – but where White’s contempt is accompanied by patrician amusement, attacking from on high, Maria Munkara’s, behind its veneer of cheerfully knockabout calumny, is fuelled by powerful sorrow and rage at the damage done by missionaries.

In fact, scrap the word ‘cheerful’ in that last paragraph. The opening chapters have the form of rough humour as they introduce the people of ‘the Mission’  – the ‘mission mob’ of priest, brothers and nuns and the ‘bush mob’ whom they are out to convert. But from the beginning we are told of endemic sexual abuse and corruption, and  the humour comes with such heavy sarcasm that it’s hard to find it actually funny. For example, when some boys are disobeying the nuns while their parents are standing by, the nuns have an inkling that they may be encountering deliberate resistance rather than incidental lack of cooperation, ‘but they all knew that the bush mob were God-fearing people with a deep and abiding respect for the mission and its papally sanctioned quest to strip them of every vestige of their culture so they would never be defiant now, would they?’ The whites of the Mission are mostly presented in unforgiving caricature – closed-minded, arrogantly confident of their own superiority, sexually predatory (the men) or quietly lustful (the women). The Aboriginal characters aren’t treated much more kindly. They’re rough, pragmatic, disorganised, venal, and only slightly more fleshed out than the non-Aboriginal – but there’s no doubt where the book’s sympathies lie.

The book progresses mainly in a series of skits: the children ask the visiting Bishop curly questions about Christian teachings, the old man of the bush mob helps an anthropologist fill his notebooks with misinformation, a couple of French Hippies arrive in a shipwreck, a cyclone virtually destroys the Mission when the mission mob disregard the warnings of the bush mob, and so on. It takes a while for the narrative gears to mesh, and when they do it’s not so much that the sarcastic caricaturing lets up as that a deeper current asserts itself, and we begin to understand that we are reading about an appalling spiritual tragedy. The moments where the narrative voice tells it straight are incredibly powerful, as at the point when the bush mob have been ‘dying in droves’ from a flu that has only mildly inconvenienced the missionaries, and are persuaded to convert en masse not only to Christianity but also to Western materialism, mainly in the form of cast off clothes. The narrator comes out into the open:

The almighty God that most of the bush mob now believed in was nothing more than the grim reaper of human souls with the mission mob as his helpers and the cast-offs the sad compensation for the relinquishment of their own beliefs. And even though the tenth commandment mentioned that you shouldn’t covet your neighbour’s house or wife or donkey or anything else, the church must have decided that coveting someone’s soul was an entirely different matter. And even though the eighth commandment stated quite clearly that it was very naughty to steal, the mission mob ignored this too and stole the things that were dearest to the bush mob’s heart. They stole their resistance to change and they stole their belief in themselves and they stole their children. Because each black soul that was harvested and each child that was appropriated was another rung higher up the ladder to heaven for Father and his crew and another step closer to salvation from this cesspool of earthly temptation and sin.

In a chapter where a stolen child finds her way back to the community as an adult, the tone lurches from silly farce on a crab hunt to plainspoken desolation when the narrator again intervenes. The final moments of the book are as devastating as you’re likely to read anywhere.

Every Secret Thing won the 2008 David Unaipon Award as a manuscript and then in February this year it won the Northern Territory Book of the Year Award. In an interview on Awaye in February, Marie Munkara said her story had ‘little wisps of truth and huge bits of embellishment’. The book makes no claims to be a historical record, but the truths it tells are a far cry from wispy.

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Prime Minister’s Literary Awards short lists

Posted on 15 July 2010 | Leave a comment

The shortlist for the fourth Prime Minister’s Literary Awards has just been published.

On the Book Show on 12 July, Hilary McPhee said, ‘Once you’ve published someone and like their work, you stick with them and read them and see what they’re doing with themselves.’ That’s true of me in my own small way. So I’m thrilled to see on the children’s and young adults’ lists a number of people whose work graced the pages of The School Magazine during my stewardship.

On the Young Adult Fiction shortlist:
Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God, Bill Condon (32 items in SM, between 1992 and 2005, including poems, stories and plays)
The Museum of Mary Child, Cassandra Golds (incalculable contributions to the magazine as member of editorial staff)

On the Children’s Fiction shortlist:
The Terrible Plop, Ursula Dubosarsky and illustrated by Andrew Joyner (mainly excerpts from Ursula’s books in my time, but after I left she joined editorial staff and Andrew became a regular illustrator)
Star Jumps, Lorraine Marwood (42 poems between 1998 and 2005)
Harry and Hopper, Margaret Wild and illustrated by Freya Blackwood

Thinking about it, I can’t claim to have published Margaret Wild, but she’s an Annandalean, so I’m thrilled to see her there too.

I hope they all win.

There are also awards for general fiction (with names like Malouf and Coetzee shortlisted) and non-fiction (with contenders ranging from the extreme lyricism of Mark Tredinnick to what the judges describe unpromisingly as ‘monumental history’ and ‘prescient analysis’ by John Keane).

Previous decisions on these awards have been eccentric, so the winners are anyone’s bet. I won’t even hazard a guess. Unlike, say, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, they’re not arms-length decisions: the judging panels recommend but the Prime Minister decides, and in the first year of the awards, John w Howard did in fact overrule the judges to make sure the Anzac myth got a boost. Let’s see if whoever is Prime Minister when these winners are announced (I can’t find a date on the site) has enough grace to refrain from bending the prize to her (please!) or his ideological agenda.

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Reading while walking, episode 732

Posted on 4 July 2010 | 2 comments

Reading a book while walking is different from walking while wearing earphones. A little moment from yesterday illustrates:

I was walking the dog home from the Orange Grove markets reading the Patrick White novel that we’ll be discussing at our next Book Group meeting.

A voice from behind me called out, ‘Is that The Tree of Man?’ It was Dancer1, one of the men from the Group, behind the wheel of his car emerging from the side street I’d just crossed. ‘Where are you up to? The flood or the fire?’

‘Finished the flood,’ I called back. ‘Still waiting for the fire.’

‘I’m loving it.’

‘Me too. I was completely bowled over by the first four chapters.’

‘Yes, I kept saying to my wife, “Listen to this bit!”‘

Go on, have a conversation like that with someone listening to their iPod.

—–
1This inaugurates a policy of giving the chaps from the Book Group noms de blog.

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Coming into the Country

Posted on 29 June 2010 | 3 comments

John McPhee, Coming into the Country (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1977, 1991)

I had no obvious reason to read this book. It’s about Alaska, after all, written more than 30 years ago, originally as three articles spread over eight issues of The New Yorker and dealing with such historical dead ducks as the vote to move the state capital from Juneau to somewhere more accessible1: more than 400 pages of dated journalism about a distant, cold place.  But a discerning friend gave it to me a while back with the implication that it was something I’d enjoy. It turns out he was right.

On a recent Book Show, Philip Gourevitch – himself among other things a writer for The New Yorker – described McPhee as having a ‘wonderfully informative, wonderfully vivid way of conveying knowledge as pleasure rather than as sort of eat-your-vegetables data.’ That’s spot-on: history, politics, geology, geography, climatology, anthropology, zoology – these pages offer a a huge diversity of knowledge for pleasurable absorption. The explorer Roald Amundsen rides into the book as naturally as he rode into the town of Eagle in 1905. The ‘winter bear’ phenomenon, in which a bear gains an armour of ice that makes it invulnerable to spears or even guns (shades of Iorek Byrnison) is mentioned almost in passing. There are helpful hints about how to leave a log cabin in the woods so as to minimise any damage by curious bears – not that you or I will ever need such hints, but reason not the need. The third essay in particular, which gives the book its title and accounts for more than half the pages, explores the intricacies of life in and around the tiny ‘city’ of Eagle, on the Yukon River, near the Canadian border, entirely through McPhee’s relationships with people there, interspersed with forays into history and an occasional string of quotes from the judgemental gossip that thrives there as in any small community. Eagle is divisible into the Christians, the bootleggers, the ‘river people’ (who live, illegally, out in the bush) and the Indians (who mostly live in Eagle Village, a couple of miles down the river). There’s plenty of animosity between these groups, but McPhee seems to have developed strong, trusting relationships in all groups – and the reader is invited to sympathise with them all as well.

Gourevitch said on The Book Show:

Coming into the  Country remains one of the two or three essential books about the nature of Alaska, and by that I mean its character, the people who are there, why they’re there, what it means to be Alaskan, what the state is in America.

I was surprised to read that only a thousand people voted in the 1974 Alaskan gubernatorial elections. Suddenly Sarah Palin’s governorship looks a lot less impressive. Likewise, having shot a moose is less of a feat when you consider that if you live in one of the larger population centres you have to be very well off to be able to afford to go hunting, and we can be fairly sure that the Palins weren’t among the people who choose the extremes of life ‘in the country’, where moose is a staple food.

McPhee evidently lived in Alaska for months if not years on the way to this book, long enough to get to know some of its people well, to learn the peculiarities of language as spoken there, to develop a deep feel for the country, to amass a vast store of fact and anecdote, to ferret out first-person accounts of incidents that had become legendary. This is journalism that’s not so much embedded as immersed.

There’s some wonderful nature writing, combining lyrical description with other perspectives as in this, from a much longer account of Mt McKinley:

The Alaskan Range elevates with a rapidity rare in the world. Its top is about two-thirds as high as the top of the Himalayas, but the Himalayan uplift is broad and extensive. if you were looking toward Mount Everest from forty miles away, you would lift your gaze only slightly to note the highest in a sea of peaks. Forty miles from McKinley you can stand at a bench mark of three hundred and climb with your eyes the other twenty thousand feet. The difference – between your altitude near sea level and the height of that flying white mountain – is much too great to be merely overwhelming. The mountain is a sky of rock, seemingly all above you, looming. Until it takes itself away, you watch it as you might watch a hearth fire or a show in colour of aurorean light. […] The Athapascans are not much impressed that a young Princeton graduate on a prospecting adventure in the Susitna Valley in 1896 happened to learn, on his way out of the wilderness, that William McKinley had become the Republican nominee for President of the United States. In this haphazard way, the mountain got the name it would carry for at least the better part of a century, notwithstanding that it already had a name, for uncounted centuries had had a name, which in translation had been written, variously as The Great one, The Mighty One, The High One. The Indians in their reverence had called it Denali. Toponymically, that was the mountain’s proper name.

Possibly my single favourite passage is about fifty-five-gallon drums:

A fifty-five-gallon steel drum is thirty-four and three-quarters inches high and twenty-three inches in diameter, and is sometimes called the Alaska State Flower. Hundreds of them lie around wherever people have settled. I once considered them ugly. They seemed disappointing, somehow, and I wished they would go away. There is a change that affects what one sees here. Just as on a wilderness trip a change occurs after a time and you cross a line into another world, a change occurs with these drums. Gradually, they become tolerable, and then more and more attractive. Eventually, they almost bloom. Fifty-five-gallon drums are used as rain barrels, roof jacks, bathtubs. fish smokers, dog pots, doghouses. They are testing basins for outboard motors. They are the honeypots of biffies, the floats of rafts. A threat has been made to use one as a bomb. Dick Cook, who despises aircraft of all types, told a helicopter pilot he would shoot at him if he ever came near his home. The pilot has warned Cook that if he so much as points a rifle at the chopper the pilot will fill a fifty-five-gallon drum with water and drop it on the roof of Cook’s cabin. Fifty-five-gallon drums make heat stoves, cookstoves, flower planters, bearproof caches, wood boxes, well casings, watering troughs, culverts, runway markers, water tanks, solar showers. They are used as rollers for moving cabins, rollers to smooth snow or dirt. Sliced on the diagonal, they are the bodies of wheelbarrows. Scavenged everywhere, they are looked upon as gold.

By the time I reached the end I could almost understand what some people find attractive about living in a place that gets to 40 below zero (Farenheit) and stays there for a good part of the year.
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1 When the book was first published, the quest for a new capital was still under way, and supplied the backbone for the second essay, ‘What They Were Hunting For’: I had to look up Wikipedia to discover by what chicanery the vote was overturned.

Later: WordPress’s automatic link to possibly related blog posts went to Wickersham’s Conscience,, in which an Alaskan blogger echoes Philip Gourevich’s evaluation:

If you want to try to understand Alaska, its people, its politics and why I live here, this book is the best place to start. This book is a great writer’s greatest book.

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