Before the meeting: we had enjoyed Robbie Arnott’s previous novel, Limberlost, so Dusk was a promising choice.
It’s set in a place very like nineteenth century Tasmania. Iris and Floyd Renshaw, the twin children of notorious outlaws, travel to the highlands and aim to kill a puma named Dusk that has been ravaging the region, killing livestock and people. A bounty has been offered by the graziers, and the twins see it as a chance to move away from their life at the margins. The story of their encounters with graziers and other hunters, and with a community of people who lived there before the settlers arrived, is full of elegant twists and moral dilemmas. There are moments of sheer horror, and moments of great tenderness. The writing is consistently vivid – you can tell that Robbie Arnott has visited the landscape even while he adds surreal elements like giant bones protruding from the ground; and the twins’ physical ordeals are viscerally real.
Even as I recognised all these qualities, I had trouble engaging. From about page 100, when the twins and their companions come close to Dusk, I started to care, and where a couple of pages are blacked out after a dramatic moment, what might have seemed a bit of cleverdickery had me on the edge of my seat. But then I got lost again and the final pages left me, as the song says, wondering why.
At page 78*, the twins have just arrived in a small town full of men who are hunting the killer beast. She – Dusk, the puma – has killed the son of a wealthy grazier, whom the twins have encountered grieving extravagantly in the street. For the first time since they came to the highlands, Iris finds herself confronting what they may be up against, ‘the probability of being ripped into death, faster than blinking’. Now, ‘starkly aware of the softness of her flesh, the smallness of her body, the stumbling clumsiness of her humanity’, she encounters for the second time Patrick Lees, a man who stands out from the crowd of hunters. On page 77 he has proposed that the twins join him to help track down the beast. Floyd, characteristically, stays more or less silent.
‘So you are chasing the bounty,’ said Iris, annoyance bending her voice. Lees contemplated his pipe before slipping it back between his lips and speaking around it. ‘Maybe I’m just endlessly curious.’ Iris clenched her teeth, holding her irritation in. Floyd kept rubbing his chin, seeming to take in Lees’ words without making any effort to respond. All of it was maddening to Iris – Floyd’s stupid performance, the sudden appearance of Patrick Lees, the unmoored feeling she had while being near him, his casual offer, his playful duplicity – and she wanted to get away from both of them and from herself, so she tugged at the collar of her coat and touched her hat. ‘We’ll think about it.’ Lees nodded. ‘Of course.’ He indicated a lemon-gold building that rose above the stable. ‘I’m staying at the inn. I’ll be leaving at first light.’ Another little smile. ‘I hope to see you then.’
They left Patrick Lees breathing smoke at the plains and walked back through the stable to the street.
The main thing on display in this passage is Robbie Arnott’s deft use of tropes from romance novels. Iris is irritated by a suave, superior man, while having an ‘unmoored feeling’ while she’s near him. It’s no spoiler that Iris can’t resist the offer to go on the hunt with him, or that they do spend a night together. But as in the romance genre, there is every indication here that Lees is a cad: his little smile is surely a red flag, and while Iris may be uneasy, the reader can be reasonably certain that someone who breathes smoke is dangerous. You leave this page with a subliminal sense that Lees may not be just a romance-genre cad, but a horror-genre monster.
There’s a lot to admire in this book. There’s a lot to discuss. The surreal elements of the landscape read as both hamfisted metaphor and strategy for including First Nations characters who won’t be mistaken for actual palawa. But I was unconvinced. Even the basic set-up didn’t work for me, even if someone were to tell me that pumas were once introduced to Tasmania / lutruwita. I enjoyed some parts but never got on its wavelength
After the meeting: I couldn’t go to this meeting, and though I missed the people, I wasn’t sorry not to discuss the book. The WhatsApp report painted a picture of a very convivial evening, where everyone liked the book, some more than others. Evidently one person liked it more as the evening wore on – maybe I would have joined him in that movement. Maybe not.
I have written this blog post near what was once luxuriant wetland, in Gadigal and Wangal country. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Radio National’s Top 100 Books of the 21st Century vote has concluded. You can read all about it at this link.
I didn’t vote, mainly because I generally think that the book I’m currently reading is the best or worst of all time. I’ve read 36 of the ones that made the cut. Some of them are terrific, some I wouldn’t give the time of day to in the street. Here are the books that I’ve read, with links to my blog post where they were published after about 2004, plus the 13 books I haven’t read but have seen a TV or movie version of, without links. I almost scored 50 percent.
[This was originally posted in my now defunct blog Family Life, on 2 August 2006. I’m retrieving it today because it includes some comments on Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, which recently came in at number 20 in Radio National’s Top 100 Books of the 21st Century.]
Books I bought in July: Robert Charles Wilson, Spin (Tor Books 2005)
Books read: Poppy Z. Brite,Liquor (Three Rivers Press 2004) and Prime (Three Rivers Press 2005) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Virago 2006) Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist (Little Brown 2006) Jared Diamond, Collapse (Penguin 2005) (finished) Kate Grenville, The Secret River (Test 2005) Philippe Geluck, Le Chat (Casterman 2002)
As this month has been spent travelling, I’ve laid aside a couple of books only partly finished, and mostly started on a whole new swag
I read Poppy C Brite’s Liquor and most of Gilead on the plane to Europe. It’s hard to think of a greater contrast, one about heavy-drinking chefs in pre-Katrina New Orleans, the other an elegiac look at three generations of austere men of religion. Both of them were infinitely preferable to trying to watch a movie in those circumstances (I gave up when an announcement about duty-free shopping interrupted the opening scene of Candy). Poppy C. Brite’s book strikes me as a thinly disguised love song – love for her city (New Orleans, pronounced with the emphasis on the middle syllable), for the world of restaurant work and I presume for her chef husband, and for lovely bits of the English language. The plot is functional, but that’s not where the interest lies.
Gilead is also a love letter, with a lot less disguise: it’s in the form of a letter written from a dying man to his seven-year-old son, in the expectation that the son will be an adult by the time he reads it. The narrator is deeply in love with his little son; Marilynne Robinson clearly loves her narrator, probably the last of a line of passionate preachers in the US midwest. He is a man of profound faith, saturated in bible-awareness, but also acquainted with other intellectual traditions. He is writing the boy’s ‘begats’ – that is to say, he tells the story of his own grandfather, a wild, pistol-wielding preacher called by a vision to fight slavery, of his father, an equally single-minded man of peace, and of himself, struggling with a world where his kind of faith is more and more under attack – by secularism on the one hand and television evangelism on the other. It’s a book full of grace and wisdom.
In Amsterdam I moved on to The Undercover Economist. I’d heard Tim Harford speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and been taken as much by his Tin-Tin quiff as by his talking sense about economics. I feel as a result of reading this that I now have a basic grasp of classic market economics, and it was more or less fun to read.
Prime is a sequel to Liquor, and like that book it abounds in glorious descriptions of the joys of cooking and eating. The book gained extra piquancy for me from being read in Ireland, where we had some difficulty finding palatable food (we gave a special award to the lightly spiced salmon patties served up in a posh-looking hotel dining-room and called Thai fish cakes).
In London, I finished Collapse. Again, this was appropriate, not because it’s a great escapist holiday read (it’s anything but), but because it cast a sharp light on the experience of London’s hottest summer days ever: this wasn’t just a frivolous news story about Poms not knowing how to build cool houses; it was a harbinger of major things to come for all of us. It was good to read his chapter on Australia in London as well, because he argues that our persistent identification with British traditions is one of the things preventing us from choosing environmentally sound directions. I was struck by his articulation of one of the key challenges facing the world:
the challenge of deciding which of a society’s deeply held core beliefs are compatible with the society’s survival, and which ones instead have to be given up.
Before leaving the brick of a book behind on the train to Gatwick (to avoid excess baggage charges), I copied out this from his final section, where he talks about what anyone can do about the current crisis:
an individual should not expect to make a difference through a single action, or even through a series of actions that will be completed within three weeks. If you do want to make a difference, plan to commit yourself to a consistent policy of actions over the duration of your life.
I moved on to The Secret River with high expectations. But whereas recent readings, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy and Seamus Heaney’s ‘District and Circle’, had both evoked London localities so vividly that I was constantly being reminded of moments from that novel and that poem during my stay there, I was disappointed that this book’s London remained pretty bodiless. Once the hero, Will Thornhill, arrived on the Hawkesbury with his family, however, my disappointment disappeared: there the book’s true subject emerged, and at the same time the physical world became powerfully present:
When Thornhill jumped over the bow the mud gripped his feet. He tried to take a step and it sucked him in deeper. With a huge effort he dragged one foot out and looked for a place to set it down between the spiky mango roots. Lurched forward into even deeper mud, pulled his other leg up with a squelch, feeling the foot stretch against the ankle, and floundered towards the bank. He put his head down and butted blindly through a screen of bushes, bursting out at last onto dry land. Beyond the river-oaks the ground opened onto a flat place covered with tender green growth and studded with yellow daisies.
His own. His own, by virtue of his foot standing on it.
Will’s first real encounter with one of the people he is dispossessing in this moment occurs within pages, and the book becomes as gripping as the Hawkesbury mud – in which I have no doubt Kate Grenville has had her feet stuck.
Le chat was my one book in French, a bande dessinée whose measure I found very hard to take. It consists the Steven-Wright-ish monologues of a large, cool, besuited cat. For example:
Le mot ‘long’ est plus court que le mot ‘court’. C’est dingue, non?
And now I return to Romanesque churches and ancient Cathar towers.
Posted on20 Oct 2025|Comments Off on Bookblog #51: Book Club Xmas presents
[This was originally posted in my now defunct blog Family Life, on 14 January 2009. I’m retrieving it today because it includes some comments on Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap, which recently came in at number 37 in Radio National’s Top 100 Books of the 21st Century.]
Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant (Text Publishing 2008) Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap (Allen & Unwin 2008)
These were Penny’s and my presents from the Book Club Secret Santa/Kris Kringle in December. They’re both novels we’d been planning to read, both much praised in the press.
The Lieutenant was mine, and I was delighted to receive it. My interest had been piqued by hearing Kate Grenville talk charmingly – and passionately – about it at Gleebooks and then again on the Book Show. I think, though, that when I came to read it, I suffered from having heard too much, and the story remained for too long something I was being told about rather than something that was happening for me as I read. I was disorientated by the policy of renaming historical characters. I suppose the reason for this was to avoid being taken to task by grumpy old historians. You know, if someone were to say, ‘But the evidence is clear that Arthur Phillip was not an authoritarian, culturally blinkered careerist,’ the novelist could reply, ‘But this is a fictional first Governor of New South Wales called Gilbert, not the historical Phillip at all.’ The trouble is, given that the pithy core of the book is an actual document, which Kate Grenville has been careful to tell us provides every word of the conversation between her lieutenant hero and the young Aboriginal woman who befriends him, the novel is clearly meant to be an imagining of the actual early colony, and such arguments would be so much blown smoke.
The result is a kind of roman à clef effect: is Silk actually Watkin Tench? which of the Aboriginal men is Bennelong? etc. Now that I’m dropping in bits of French, I might as well say that there’s also something of the roman à thèse about the book, in the sense that one feels that the characters are there not so much for their own sake as for what they can show us about the meeting of cultures in Port Jackson in 1788. When I wrote in this blog about Kate Grenville’s previous book, I used the word ‘bodiless’. There’s something un-fleshed about this one too. All the same, it’s about one of the most interesting subjects I can imagine: the meeting of two mutually uncomprehending cultures in the form of two people establishing a delicate intimacy, against the odds and ephemeral. That it is tightly based on Lieutenant Dawes’s actual notebook on the Gadigal language gives it enormous moral force. By the end I was weeping.
As I mentioned earlier, The Slap accounted for exactly half of the books in the Secret Santa/Kris Kringle. Clearly, sight unseen, we’d all decided it was worth a read. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to The Lieutenant. While we are told that Kate Grenville’s hero has an active sex life, it happens discreetly offstage. The Slap treats us in great detail to any number of sexual encounters, or perhaps I should say events, since ‘encounter’ implies a meeting of some kind. (Actually the sex in this book reminded me my childhood curiosity about characters in books going to the toilet. It’s as if this book decides it’s going to show the sexual things that are usually glossed over, but the result is mostly unconvincing.)
I read the first third or so aloud to Penny on three longish car trips. At a certain point she refused to have me read any more, not just because of the sex and the tediously undifferentiated obscenity of much of the dialogue, but because she just didn’t want to go where the plot was signalling its intention of taking us. I read on, mostly out of a sense of duty, and it turned out the signals were misleading. I can’t say it was a pleasant read, but in the end it was an impressive one.
In case anyone reading this doesn’t know, the story deals with an interwoven group of family and friends in suburban Melbourne. A man slaps a child at a barbecue: the man is Greek, the child’s parents are ‘Skip’ and embedded in victim identities. Though the back cover blurb says that the book is about ‘the slap and its consequences’, I read it more as using the slap as a device that provided a slender unifying narrative thread to the novel’s eight parts, each of which is told from the point of view of a different person who was at the fateful barbecue. A young girl gets plastered with her friends at an end-of-school party; an old man confronts his own mortality at the funeral of an old friend; several marriages are revealed as built on compromise – variously generous, self-sacrificing, resentful. There are lies about sex, half-truthful confessions of infidelity, a shocking betrayal of trust. For me, perhaps the finest thing is the tender–tough revelation of what drives the neurotic and vicious mother of the child who is slapped, so that we move from loathing and despising her to recognising her tragedy. The writing is pretty rough at times, and I think that people who say it’s wonderful to have a book with such a compelling plot for a change haven’t read much children’s or young adult writing.
I’m not rushing out to find all Christos’ other books, but my sense of what it is to be alive, human and suburban Australian has been expanded.
[This was originally posted in my now defunct blog Family Life, on 1 March 2008. I’m retrieving it today because it includes some comments on Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book, which recently came in at number 89 in Radio National’s Top 100 Books of the 21st Century.]
To the qualities I attributed last month to Raewyn Connell, author of Southern Theory, add humility. At several points in the book, she acknowledges her difficulty in understanding one of the texts under discussion, even her inability to do so. But this humility is a long way from an admission of inadequacy; in fact, it’s kind of exemplary, as in: This important material has been ignored by social scientists of the West/North/centre/metropole (SSWNCM); we need to approach it knowing that our grasp of it will be imperfect.
When I was about halfway through the book, reading while walking the dog, I met Raewyn down at the corner postbox. ‘You’ve been my walking companion for the last couple of days,’ I said, ‘and you’re excellent company. Of course,’ I went on, ‘given how much I know about social science theory ,,,’ She finished my sentence, ‘… I could be telling a big pile of whoppers.’ Well, if that’s what she’s doing, she’s certainly doing it with gravitas and grace. Having described the way the SSWNCM have generally managed to ignore the East/South/periphery as a source of theory in the social sciences, she discusses a small number of the thinkers who have been ignored or marginalised – from Africa, Muslim Iran, Latin America, India, Indigenous Australia; and drawing the threads together beautifully without claiming to arrive at a synthesis, she outlines key places where the North can learn from the South.
She mentions that one prominent social scientist of the North Atlantic referred to an earlier version of the argument as a ‘guilt trip’, but it reads to me much more as a judicious and impassioned call for a broadening of horizons, or more precisely an acknowledgement of horizons and of other features of particular locations: that is, one of her central points is that social theory of the Metropole takes place in terra nullius, and recognition of the importance of place is something that the theory from elsewhere has to offer. (She has some beautiful paragraphs on the sandstone country where she and I both live.) Though I’m a social scientist only in the sense that we all are – I live in a society, think about it and try to live well in it and/or in struggle with it – I found the book not just accessible (even on pages that were full of references familiar to the book’s ideal reader and completely unknown to me), but exhilarating.
I’m pleased to report that, unlike Mr Punch, the collaboration from Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean that I read before this, Signal to Noise isn’t packaged as a children’s book. Perhaps an account of the death of an artist is more obviously adult than tales of the effect on a young boy of witnessing half-understood scenes of sex and violence. It’s a terrific book.
I’m not generally in love with Dave McKean’s art work, except when he’s working for children – The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls are both brilliant. His grown-up (as opposed to ‘adult’) work tends to be too fractured, dark and postmodern-incoherent for my taste. I started this book with a sinking feeling, as the first couple of pages are given over to a piece written as well as illustrated by McKean. About this piece the less said by me the better. Then there’s a spread of a series of poems about walls by Gaiman, and suddenly the illustrative style works, as it continues to do for main feature: the moody, hard-to-read images combine with the elegant text to spectacular effect, including a couple of sharply poignant moments (if you’ll excuse the tautology). Neil Gaiman, the new Man in Black, has a lot to say about death.
Penny and I had a long car drive in the middle of the month, and as is our custom I read to her for a good bit of the trip both ways. It’s a fun way to travel and a sociable way to read, which we’ve done with books as diverse as Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and Clive James’s Falling Towards England. This time we chose People of the Book for our driving entertainment. We made it through the first 110 pages, and it was fun, but I’m not sure I’ll read the rest. When you read a book aloud, you tend to notice things that otherwise you might skim over, and then they start to drag at your attention. For instance, when I reached this bit on page 54 I had to stop to vent a little:
Lola had begun to lead an exhausting double life. Hashomer met two nights a week. On those nights she went to bed early, with her little sister. Sometimes, when she had worked very hard, it took an immense effort of will to keep herself awake, listening to the gentle, even breathing of Dora’s little body next to her. But mostly her anticipation made it easy to feign sleep until her parents’ snores told her it was safe to leave. Then she would creep out, scrambling into her clothes on the landing and hoping no neighbours came out of their doors to notice.
There’s nothing bad about that writing, but did the parents snore in unison? wouldn’t one have started first, and one been louder than the other? (Later in the chapter it turns out that the mother wasn’t asleep at all, so surely she wouldn’t have been snoring?). Why did Lola have to feign sleep when her little sister was already asleep and her parents were in another room? If you walked out at night onto your landing where a young woman was getting dressed, would you ‘notice’ it, with the implication that you might somehow have missed it? These nitpicking questions actually arise, I think, from the passage’s lack of imaginative engagement with the situation. It’s as if the story is being hurried along. And that would be fine, if it was being hurried along to a sharply realised scene. But this kind of thing goes on for page after page: in the debates about Israel among the young Jews of Sarajevo in 1942, you can feel the points being ticked off rather than any kind of life in the disputants (compare, say, the political arguments in that Ken Loach movie about the Spanish Civil War); even in the parts where Hanna the book conservator is going about her business, what fascinates is the wealth of material that Geraldine Brooks has found in her research, and the elegance with which she performs her info dump, rather than any engagement with the characters or the action
I was glad when the sex scene in the first chapter happened during a paragraph break, but then I wondered if the fact that it wasn’t described might be symptomatic of the narration’s failure to engage – to show rather than tell. There are poignant and dramatic moments, and Geraldine Brooks turns a beautiful sentence, but life may be too short for me to read any more of this one. If I’m making a serious mistake, please say so in the comments.
If a book of poetry is like a forest, I often seem to have trouble seeing any given tree for the woods. Some of the individual poems in The Cinnamon Peeler speak to me, and there are any number of memorable lines and images, but generally I feel as if I’m eavesdropping on a discontinuous commentary on things I know nothing about. Ondaatje is originally from Sri Lanka: knowing that, I can tell that the tropical references have childhood resonances. I can guess that he has a son named Skyler (‘Late Movies with Skyler’ is terrific). But for an awful lot of the book I was struggling to make sense of the scraps I was overhearing. Maybe I need to discover poets one poem at a time (with Langston Hughes, for example, it was ‘Mother to Son’; Hopkins, weirdly enough, the sonnet that starts ‘Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous … stupendous’), and I may be getting things barse-ackwards here, wanting to have a sense of a whole book when I should be happy to have a dozen poems that speak to me (which I do) and just allow to pass by those that don’t. For the record, the ones I do get tend to celebrate friendship, and are mostly towards the end of the book.
I don’t understand why the Fair Dinkum Histories haven’t been universally greeted with drum rolls and fanfares. These are the fourth and fifth books in the series, and like their predecessors they are lively and unpatronising accounts of parts of Australian history. They provide what the former Prime Minister demanded of history: a narrative thread. I don’t know what he would make of their attention to the dispossession of Aboriginal people, to class and cultural diversity, to the role of women and children, and so on, but they’ll do me.
Gold, Graves and Glory tells the story from 1850 to 1880, and as you’d expect from the title and the cover, is about goldrushes and bushrangers. There’s also quite a bit about explorers. What you might be surprised by are the account of Chinese miners on the goldfields, including the racism they endured, the attention to Aboriginal dispossession, the detail about underpaid ‘Afghan’ camel handlers who accompanied the explorers, and the expansion of the story beyond the south-east of the mainland, including the beginnings of the sugar industry in Queensland. On an idiosyncratically personal note, it was nice to see Edward John Eyre’s Journals of Expeditions of Discovery in the Recommended Reading list – Eyre’s story doesn’t feature in the narrative, so presumably it’s there because Jackie French recognises it’s a good yarn. My aborted MA thesis in the 1970s was to have made that point at great length.
A Nation of Swaggies & Diggers is harder going than any of the others in the series so far: covering the period 1880–1920, it deals with things I remember as being acutely boring in my primary school days – the importance of gold and wool to the developing economy, the conferences leading up to Federation, the Depression of the 90s – and it doesn’t entirely manage to break that childhood curse. The mandatory thumbnail sketches of the first prime ministers don’t help. And even the account of Australians going to war is somehow flat – perhaps because of the unresolved contradiction between horror at what actually happened and the role the glorifying/sentimentalising myth has played.
But even here Jackie French’s text and Peter Sheehan’s cartoons maintain a light tone (the latter mostly with satisfyingly groan-worthy puns) without resorting to bum jokes. The account of how domestic life was changing, complete with recipes, is particularly delightful. And suddenly in the first years of the last century I was recognising things from my own childhood: the mint at the back steps, the lemon tree in the yard, sponge cake and lamingtons, blocks of ice wrapped in hessian for the ice chest. [Full disclosure: my copies of both these books were given to me by Peter Sheehan, who is a friend of mine; and the series was originally commissioned for Scholastic by Margrete Lamond, also a friend.]
In the Fair Dinkum Histories, the story of the coming of independence and democracy to the Australia colonies is largely a matter of dates, and where the debates can’t be avoided, as in the lead-up to Federation, they are described in a chapter entitled ‘The Great Yack Attack’. And that’s fair enough: compared with exploration, slaughter, discovery of gold, romantic uprisings, and the struggles of Indigenous Australians, Chinese and women, questions of governance don’t obviously rate high on the child-friendly scale. Colonial Ambition was published too late to be useful in Jackie French’s research. Had the timing been different, she might well have found her way to delight child readers with the mid 19th century struggles conducted by a cast of extraordinary characters over the form of government that would prevail in the colonies. Peter Cochrane has certainly achieved that for adult readers.
It’s not bang-bang-kiss-kiss; it’s not bloodshed on a foreign strand; but it’s a great story full of comedy and heroism, big ideas and petty point-scoring, opportunism and integrity, and eloquence, eloquence, eloquence. In those days people didn’t watch sound-bites on the telly after dinner; they wandered up to Macquarie Street to see if here were any good speeches in the Legislative Council. In 1846 more than 3000 people met at Homebush Racecourse to protest against a proposal to reintroduce convict transportation; a year or so later more than 2000 met in the Royal Victoria Theatre in Haymarket to oppose a new constitution being foisted on the colony by Earl Grey. They gathered, they cheered the speakers, they prevailed. In the absence of universal suffrage, the ‘multitude out-of-doors’ did make its voices heard; in the absence of votes for women, a Ladies’ Petition was a significant political event.
The Art Student read this before me, and read great slabs of it aloud. It’s that kind of book: among other characters, it’s got a fiercely eloquent albino dandy, a faux-rustic oligarch with a chip on his shoulder, a dapper Regency blade who is devastated when he kills his wife in a carriage accident, a rocking-horse maker who becomes known as the Father of Federation. The committee advising John w Howard on the inaugural Prime Minister’s History Prize recommended this book for the prize. The then PM only partly accepted the recommendation, and decided the prize should be shared with Les Carlyon’s history of the First World War. One result of this decision is that the two books are placed side by side as alternative foundation narratives: Australia achieved true nationhood when thousands of its young men were slaughtered in a European war (and did some killing of their own), or Australia achieved nationhood through the less glamorous but arduous business of arguing, rallying, orating, lobbying, writing, imagining, organising … thinking. There was very little violence, and though Peter Cochrane uses the metaphor of war and his characters refer frequently to the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, there was no war.
On 30 March 1858 Charles ‘Slippery Charlie’ Cowper introduced a bill to amend the Electoral Law in New South Wales, the bill that was to establish manhood suffrage and make the colony a ‘democracy for men’ (Cochrane’s phrase) and who even remembers that date? ‘The introduction of democracy in New South Wales,’ says Cochrane, ‘ was as matter-of-fact as a handbook for a customs clerk.’ But of course, that quiet moment came as the culmination of years of struggle.
Separation Blues is a selection of poems from Nathanael O’Reilly’s nine previous books, published over 30 years. Each of those books had its own coherence of theme and manner, but this book mostly hangs together beautifully. There’s a bit of whiplash when eight Covid lockdown poems from boulevard (Downingfield Press 2024) are followed by four from Selected Poems of Ned Kelly (also Downingfield Press 2024), which mimic the semi-literate style of the famous Jerilderie letter. But I’m not complaining.
I’m currently reading Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Something she writes (on page 53) seems relevant to these poems:
Maybe it’s best to leave some things un-understood, mysterious. I’m all for the unclimbed mountain. The unconquered moon. I’m weary of endless theories and explanations. I think I have begun to prefer descriptions.
Most of the poems in this collection avoid theories and explanations, or overt expressions of emotion. Most of them describe. Many are structured as lists – of things, people and thoughts encountered while travelling; youthful escapades; political events witnessed. There are a couple of dramatic narratives – a poem’s speaker faints at a service station, and in a different poem he catches fire at a backyard barbecue – but they too have a laconic descriptive air. Even the love poems and elegies, of which there are quite a few, mostly leave their emotional heft to be implied, hovering in the silence around the poem.
Page 78* is the second page of the poem ‘Greek Summer’.
This is one of five poems in the book with the dedication To Tricia. Some of the others are travel poems featuring ‘we’. ‘Côte dAzur (1905)’, for example, begins ‘During our last childless summer / we lay on the beach at Eze’. In ‘Greek Summer’ the poet travels alone. The first two stanzas on page 77 begin, respectively, ‘On the road from Patras to Corinth’ and ‘In Delphi’, and in the third he is again in Delphi. In those stanzas, he eats, drinks ouzo, performs bodily functions, chats with the locals, notices things – including the strong Australian accents of some taxi drivers, and American college kids who ‘grind on each other’. He ends the third stanza pondering his ageing soul. It’s an impressionistic travel diary.
On Page 78 our solitary poet visits two more islands, and arrives at Athens on the mainland.
First there’s Aegina:
On Aegina I rent a Vespa, gorge myself on olives, tempt fate in board shorts. At Sarpas, Athena unleashes her hair, bares brown breasts, knocks back another Mythos, submerges in the Saronic.
More eating and drinking and mild intercultural discomfort – are board shorts acceptable? At Sarpas Beach, there’s a little poetic playfulness: this is the land of the Ancient Olympians, so when a woman goes topless on the beach, he imagines her as an avatar of Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom, and suggests (punning on Mythos, the name of a local beer) that by letting down her hair and baring her breasts she’s knocking back the myth that she, Athena, is aloof, dignified and virginal. He’s enacting the male gaze all right, but not full-on lasciviously. He doesn’t imagine the woman as Aphrodite goddess of love, and the detail of her breasts being brown suggests that his interest is at least partly sociological: this is her usual behaviour at the beach. His gaze is detached, touristic, the erotic element quietly backgrounded.
On to the next stanza and the next island:
On Hydra I drink ouzo with the ghosts of Johnston, Clift and Cohen, walk in Winton's footsteps, follow donkeys through alleys, fantasize about checking out, staying on to write novels.
More drinking. Here, he is a literary tourist, wearing his Australianness on his sleeve. Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston famously did a lot of writing, drinking and fighting on Hydra in the 1960s, some of it in the company of young Leonard Cohen. Tim Winton’s novel The Riders has a sequence on Hydra, in which, if I remember correctly, he rides a donkey on a winding hillside path searching for his wife who has done a runner (and whom he never finds).
As a matter of nerdy interest, this poem appeared in O’Reilly’s 2017 book, Preparations for Departure (UAP Press), before the current resurgence of interest in Charmian Clift and the time Leonard Cohen spent on Hydra. See Nick Broomfield’s Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love (2019), the 2024 Norwegian TV series So Long, Marianne, Nadia Wheatley’s selection of Charmian Clift’s newspaper columns, Sneaky Little Revolutions, or Suzanne Chick’s memoir, Searching for Charmian.
The poet’s fantasy of checking out ‘to write novels’ has the same detached feel as his gaze at ‘Athena’ earlier.
The tourist narrative continues:
Drinking before dawn on a Plaka rooftop with new friends ten years younger
Without breaking a sweat, threads come together. He’s in the Plaka, a neighbourhood near the Parthenon, the ruined temple of Athena, who is now an abstraction, no longer topless with her hair down. Earlier he has watched young people and felt his age, he now drinks through the night with them, but his mention of the age difference here reinforces rather than contradicts his sense of having an ‘ageing soul’.
I miss your presence, wish you could share the view, the wine, my bed.
And boom! The poem reveals itself to be a love poem. It’s not a travel diary after all, but a letter home. The details that make up his narrative have been selected with the letter’s addressee in mind. I see young people grinding (and I think of you). I see Athena letting her hair down at the beach (and I think of you). I think of George and Charmian’s relationship (and I think of you), of The Riders (and I think of you).
Many of the poems in this book have similarly unflashy appearances. I don’t know if they all repay close, careful reading as much as this one. I do know that some made me cry. One or two made me gasp. More than one left me pondering a surprising word.
I was searching for a way to finish this blog post, when I came across Anne Casey’s speech launching the book, in the Rochford Street Review (at this link), which includes this:
Here, you will learn of his great loves – gained, lost, and those most closely held. There are elegant elegies – to cherished friends, family, places and times; hymns to eroding ecology and loss of innocence; casually dropped epiphanies; and searing sociopolitical commentary. Small moments provide windows into worlds, slipping through the decades of Nat’s life and his many travels. In this book, he also visits with ghosts of Australia’s troubled settler history.
All true, especially the bit about small moments providing windows into worlds.
I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where I saw two sleek crows enjoying the brilliant sunlight this morning. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Rod Goodbun and Edwina Shaw (editors), Queersland (AndAlso Press 2025)
Disclosure: Edwina Shaw, co-editor of Queersland, is my niece. The anthology includes a personal essay by her in which I am mentioned, as well as my mother, my brother and other close family members. Members of my extended family make cameo appearances in other essays, with some names changed.
Queersland‘s back cover describes it as made up of ‘stories from queer Queensland writers spanning 80 years of dynamic social histories, as varied as the landscape itself’. True, there is a story of covert male homosexuality during World War Two, a poignant tale of secret love between men in a 1960s country town, and a couple of 21st century pieces dealing with gender-fluidity. But the book’s main subject is the extraordinary flourishing of the queer activism, creativity and community in south-east Queensland under the ‘corrupt, repressive, authoritarian, anti-feminist, anti-queer’ government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen in the 1980s (the adjectives are from ‘Imagine Living in a World …’ by Chantal Eastwell and Karin Cheyne) and the tentative easing of anti-queer laws under his successor as premier, Wayne Goss, in the early 1990s.
Drug-fuelled teenage ‘naughtiness’ on the dance floor, flamboyant costumes, demonstrations, police brutality, the AIDS epidemic, a world of music, intergenerational tensions, First Nations voices, Inkahoots screen-printing company, censorship, the Brisbane Pride Collective, coming-out stories that still feel raw more than 40 years after the event, the Women’s House rape crisis line, intersectionality, tragedy, exhilaration, the growing awareness of gender issues: this is an amazing piece of social history told by a multitude of voices (roughly 40, to be literal) with passion, humour, and above all a sense of community.
A dozen illustrations capture both the flamboyance and the seriousness of the stories. Though I’m a committed lover of books-as-objects, I am sorry this one couldn’t include videos. Several mentions of Lance Leopard sent me searching for the new romantic synthpop band the Megamen – and I found a magnificent, blurred video of ‘Designed for Living‘ from 1983 that makes a beautiful exo-illustration of the book.
I have come to Queersland as a rank outsider. Almost all its cultural references drew blanks with me, and not just the pop music ones. There’s a foreword by Darren Hayes. It’s an elegant and pointed coming-out story, but I couldn’t see why it was featured as a foreword – which I would have seen, of course, if I’d heard of Savage Garden. I know of Kris Kneen, have heard them speak and read reviews of their work, even clapped eyes on them at Brisbane’s Avid Reader bookshop, but ‘Something Other’, the most literary piece in the book, and w-a-a-a-y too much information in any other context, is my introduction to their writing. The other familiar name is Steve MinOn, whose novel First Name Second Name I blogged about recently: his memories of watching a John Travolta movie (Ah, a reference I did recognise!) in Proserpine in ‘Saturday Night Poofta’ confirm my suspicion that the zombie hero of his novel might share some of his own history.
The story of LGBTQI+ communities in Australia often focuses on Sydney and the 1978 Mardi Gras. The Queensland history is just as interesting. This book tells it beautifully.
I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where I have been privileged to live for decades, though I did live on the outskirts of Meanjin, on Turrbal land, for two years. I acknowledge Elders of those countries past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925, Penguin Classics 2020)
I was listening to Christopher Lydon’s Open Source podcast when he interviewed Merve Emre, editor of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (Ms Emre is from the US, so her book adds a period to the novel’s name). Their enthusiasm for Woolf’s book made me realise it would be ideal one of my slow reads of the classics.
My introduction to the book was Stephen Daldry’s movie The Hours, which is based on Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same name and stars Nicole Kidman with a prosthetic nose. I’ve vaguely wanted to read Mrs Dalloway ever since, but been just as vaguely reluctant because of a general impression that the writing was beautiful but difficult.
So here goes. At three pages a day, it will probably take about two months. I don’t intend to delve into annotations and footnotes. Mercifully the copy I have from the library doesn’t have a learned introduction. Bearing in mind someone’s description of a classic as a work you cannot encounter for the first time, I’ll inevitably bring preconceptions to it, but I’ll try to read it as if it’s just a novel.
At this stage, six pages in, I’m loving it. I’m also glad I’m reading a few pages at a time, because – so far at least – I’d hate to be rushing it.
Albert Camus, L’étranger (1942, Methuen Educational 1970)
A month ago I announced that I was resuming my practice of reading a couple of pages from a classic text first thing each morning, starting with Camus’ L’étranger. The first book I did this with was Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, which took nearly two years. L’étranger has taken a single month.
In some ways, Camus is the anti-Proust. Look at their first sentences. Proust’s vast novel opens with his narrator yearning for his mother to come and say goodnight and then, famously, goes on marathons of introspection; Camus’ Meursault doesn’t make a big deal of his relationship with his mother, he resolutely refuses to perform emotions, and in the end pays a significant price for it. Here are their opening sentences:
Proust: Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure. (A long time ago I went to bed early.)
Camus: Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. (Today Mum died.)
It’s not hard to imagine that Camus had Proust’s work in mind, and deliberately did the opposite.
L’étranger is a classic, so I came to it already knowing a version of the plot. Meursault, a white man living in Algeria, shoots an Arab and when put on trial is unable to give a reason for doing it. In the trial much is made of the fact that he didn’t weep or give any sign of emotional upset at his mother’s death just a day earlier, and he is sentenced to death.
What surprised me on actually reading the text is that the murder isn’t completely arbitrary. Somehow I’d got the idea that he just pushes the man off a moving train, but it’s much more complex than that: in fact the shooting is the culmination of a series of encounters.
For me, more shocking than the murder, and more shocking than the fact that Meursault doesn’t weep at his mother’s vigil and funeral, is the way he takes it in his stride when his neighbour brutally beats a woman, and goes on an outing with the neighbour the next day as if nothing has happened.
Meursault’s lack of emotion is mystifying. We don’t like him, or empathise with him, but when his defence lawyer asks the court if he is being condemned to death for killing a man or for not weeping at his mother’s funeral we know that he’s naming something real.
I might have thought this was unrealistic, an existentialist fable, but the memory of Lindy Chamberlain told me otherwise. If not in the courtroom (and that’s debatable), then certainly in the press, she was widely condemned for not having what was deemed an appropriate display of emotion when her baby daughter went missing. Camus would have understood.
In the final moments of the book, when Meursault faces the prospect of the guillotine, he has a conversation with the prison chaplain. After Meursault has monosyllabically rejected the chaplain’s attempts to discuss the after-life, the priest says Meursault has a blind heart, and promises to pray for him. Meursault snaps. His deadpan manner is shattered, and leaping about with rage and joy he declares that nothing matters, that there is no meaning to life. In my reading the key moment comes after the outburst, when calm has been restored:
Comme si cette grande colère m’avait purgé du mal, vidé d’espoir, devant cette nuit chargée de signes et d’étoiles, je m’ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde. [As if that great burst of anger had purged me of evil, emptied me of hope, faced with this night laden with signs and stars, I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world.]
‘The tender indifference of the world’. The absence of hope does not necessarily produce despair, but an openness to reality. And then, in case we feel that we can welcome Meursault back into the fold of people who behave ‘properly’, his final wish is that there will be a good crowd at his execution who will greet him with cries of hate – that way he will feel less alone.
I have no idea what it would have been like to read this as part of high school French. Would it have vanished from memory as surely as the book we did study, of which I remember only the title, Le drôle. The internet reveals that that is a 1933 children’s book, written by François Mauriac. I suspect that all the two books have in common is that they were written in French by Nobel laureates. Times change, probably for the better.
Be warned: the back cover blurb of this novel reveals something that the novel itself only begins to hint at at about the midpoint. Luckily I didn’t read the blurb until after I’d reached that hint – but thanks a lot, Jonathan Cape!
Before the meeting: I’ll avoid spoilers here, and just say the novel becomes something quite different from what you might expect from the first hundred pages or so. But when you go back and reread the start, you find that the writer has played fair. Sharper and better-informed minds than mine may well have understood the broad shape of the story from the beginning.
As in many novels these days, each chapter takes up the story from the point of view of a different character.
There’s Louisa, whom we first meet as an intelligent, uncooperative child in a therapy session: she has lost her father, presumed drowned, a loss that hangs over the whole book.
Seok, Louisa’s father, was born in Japan just before World War 2 to Korean parents. When the war ends he is shocked to discover that he isn’t in fact Japanese. His parents emigrate to North Korea, but he refuses to join them and goes instead to the USA where, now known as Serk, he gets a job at a provincial college, marries, has a daughter (Louisa) and lives as much of the American dream as is allowed to a Korean green card holder in the 1960s and 1970s.
Serk’s white wife, Anne, escapes from the thrall of a charismatic religious leader, garners an education by doing secretarial work for a literary scholar, and marries Serk. She’s dramatically unhappy in the marriage, especially when she accompanies him on a temporary posting in Japan. By the time of his disappearance at the beach, she is almost completely disabled by alienation from Japanese society and what turns out to be multiple sclerosis.
As well as those three main characters, there’s Tobias, Anne’s child by the charismatic religious leader, whom she gave up to be adopted at birth. He comes back into her life as a troubled teenager and continues to play a role over the decades. And one other character, a South Korean named Ji-hoon, has a chapter to himself late in the book.
So it’s a family story, and the family is fractious. Mother and daughter don’t have a single conversation over the decades that remains affectionate or even cordial for more than a minute. Before he disappears, Seok/Serk is abrasive both to his family and to pretty much anyone who tries to get close to him, especially other Koreans. Tobias is charming and kind, but loopy. And, the miracle of it, we like and care about them all as one small family being crushed under the weight of geopolitics.
Page 78* is in one of Serk’s chapters.
A lot is happening on this page. Serk meditates on his connection with his daughter, on her brilliance and creativity. He briefly acknowledges to himself that his bursts of rage are beyond his control.
Only five and six years old when she’d created these things; her mind was always at work, it amazed him. He was trying to make her a present as well, and nights he didn’t feel compelled to leave the house, blown on a gust that he couldn’t control, he worked on the gift in their basement, and entered a rare sort of peace from using only his hands, not his mind.
And he tackles correspondence with his sister Soonja, the only family member who has stayed in Japan. In a typically tangential way the narrative acknowledges the racism in the background of the action that happens in the USA (there is racism in Japan too, similarly backgrounded for the most part).
He had a letter in progress that he extracted, as well as the series of received letters. It bothered him that their glaringly foreign airmail sheets, outweighed by their numerous conspicuous stamps, arrived so often at his office, despite such exoticism being, as he knew, almost expected of him, as the only foreigner on the permanent teaching staff. That he was using his college letterhead and not an airmail sheet himself was pure vanity for which he’d pay with the stamps.
Then we are shown a little of the content of the correspondence. Here, late at night and alone, he is able to engage with his Korean life, of which his US family and colleagues are completely unaware.
Running his eyes over his characters, he read, where he’d left off, ‘I cannot even begin to consider this without having confirmation in hand,’ and then he had to go back to the most recent letter to refamiliarise himself with Soonja’s latest equivocation. Or perhaps it was confusion, or ill-founded conviction, or just a function of her wretched written Japanese, arrested at the level of a child; she’d never had a scientific mind in the first place, her emotionalism often caused her to misrepresent supposition as fact, and being obliged to write him in her poor Japanese because his written Korean was undeniably worse likely added resentment to the other counterfactual tendencies in her personality; they might have last seen each other almost twenty years before, but he was still her elder brother. He still remembered all her shortcomings.
‘The permits are certain, the time is not certain, it cannot be made certain until you because for just a short length so you are the problem as I said in my letter before. Should I tell our parents you say NO?’
If that doesn’t make sense to you out of context, be reassured. It’s close to incomprehensible when you do have the full context. Later, Serk meets up with Soonja in person, but we never get a clear idea of what she is asking of him. What we know is that Seok, now Serk, feels a tremendous gravitational pull of eldest-son responsibility for his family, and that he resists this pull. We can’t tell what it is that they want from him. Around about this page, I started to wonder if he didn’t drown a year or so after this scene, but somehow deserted his beloved Louisa to go to North Korea. (That’s not a spoiler, I’m not saying if I was right, just that there’s a growing sense of unease about what happened.)
After the meeting: We all enjoyed this novel. Its acknowledgements list fifteen books about Koreans in Japan and the historical events that impinge on Serk and his families. Some of us had never heard of these events (I’m in that group). Others knew of them, and so weren’t completely surprised by the revelation that arrives soon after the halfway mark. One person thought they were urban myths but she was reassured when we looked up Wikipedia.
The discussion brought to light a feature of the book that I hadn’t focused on: many narrative strands are simply not resolved. For instance, there is one other Asian staff member at Serk’s college, known as Tom. He is also Korean, though Serk does his best to keep him at arm’s length and at one stage has a blazing row with him when he believes, wrongly, that he is a North Korean sympathiser. Tom disappears and soon after so does his distraught wife. We never learn what happened to them. For another instance, Louisa as a young adult marries a young man she meets on a bus – he is unwashed and smelly, and we understand that she finds this comforting because in that way he is similar to her older half-brother Tobias who was kind to her after Serk’s disappearance. She marries him, and then he pretty much disappears from the story except as an offstage character – wealthy, entitled and abusive (though we don’t learn any details). Another: when she’s old and living as a grumpy isolate in a community of old people, Anne develops a relationship with a man named Walter. The beginnings of this connection are beautifully realised as Walter is cheerfully unfazed by Anne’s prickliness. But then, as years pass with the turn of a page, he’s not there any more. As someone pointed out, given that the book’s central event is a disappearance, it’s only right that there are many subsidiary vanishings.
Perhaps related to that, one person felt that the shift of narrative focus with each new chapter was frustrating. Balls were left in the air and by the time we came back to that person the balls had landed and the person’s life had moved on. I certainly felt a kind of whiplash, especially in the final third, when time passes quickly, but I wasn’t frustrated so much as energised.
We discussed this book along with Michelle Johnston’s The Revisionists. Both books deal with significant historical events of the past half century. Reading The Revisionists I felt like a FIFO western observer. Flashlight is more like a deeply intimate conversation.
The group met on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where I have also written this blog post. I was born on MaMu land, and spent formative years on the Gundungurra and D’harawal land. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Me fail? I fly! 