[Because the older version of this blog has become unreachable, I am retrieving at least occasional posts from it that I see people trying to click on. This is one from January 2009.]
As you may recall, a cheerfully apologetic sign in the window promised wistfully that our corner shop would be opened for Christmas. The sign is still there, and though there has been much progress on ‘the residence’ out the back, there has been no grand opening, indeed no sign of progress in the shop itself. The same sign is there, and cobwebs, dead leaves and dust have accumulated on the window sill.
(Published 7 January 2009, retrieved 30 July 2021.)
When I was an impressionable undergraduate at Sydney University in the 1960s, the student newspaper Honi Soit published an article by an academic philosopher – it may have been George Molnar — explaining that science fiction was worth reading because in it writers imagined alternative ways of organising society. I wasn’t by any means a hard core science fiction fan, but I had read some. Far from being grateful for a magisterial endorsement of my occasional pleasures, I remember feeling a sneaking contempt for the philosopher who (I thought) had missed the point completely: to argue for the usefulness of science fiction seemed to deny the sheer enjoyment of imagined worlds. I mention the article now because, if I remember correctly, it focused on The Left Hand of Darkness and other Ursula Le Guin books, and may have been responsible for my not having read anything by her until the 1990s when the magical Catwings series came my way professionally and I discovered that she was a lot of fun. (I had read one of the later books in the Earthsea cycle before that, but for a value of ‘read’ that amounts to ascertaining that it expected the reader to know what had happened previously, and further ascertaining that references to menstruation made it unsuitable for most 10 or 11 year olds.) So here I am at last, thanks to my discovery of BookMooch, engaging with her most famous children’s books.
I don’t have much to say about them, beyond that I found the story completely engrossing, and her manner of telling it magisterial. It’s fascinating to see elements of so many more recent books here. This story is a little like Hamlet – full of quotes. I have resolved never to see the recent TV version, which notoriously made all the characters white (the producers announced proudly that they were colo[u]r blind). It’s not that there’s any kind of profound statement about racism in the book, but the play with skin colour is nonetheless a lovely feature of the characterisation and world building. And one other thing: where did that middle-initial K come from between the first book and the second?
I was going to make this an entry about the whole trilogy, but Penny’s old copy of the third volume of the trilogy managed to go wandering after sitting prominently on the shelf in the spare room for decades, so this is just a note about the first two books, and a promise that I will read and write something about the third. The long wait for the final book of a trilogy, painful though it may be, is after all intrinsic to the experience of reading it. I think of the interminable gaps between The Subtle Knife and The Golden Compass, The Golem’s Eye and Ptolemy’s Gate, Inkheart and Inkdeath (now published but I haven’t seen it), Deep Water and Full Circle (for which the wait has barely begun – Pamela Freeman’s website informs us that the first draft is now with the editor). So I’ll wait until the mage-winds of BookMooch bring me to The Farthest Shore.
[Because the older version of this blog has become unreachable, I am retrieving at least occasional posts from it that I see people trying to click on. This is one from November 2008.]
Many besa bricks are being assembled into walls in the back yard of the coming corner shop, to be part of the residence. Meanwhile, the shop itself remains opaque to the passerby. This morning an A4 sheet of paper had been wedged into the frame of the boarded-up window:
Today’s Sydney Morning Herald published Nicolas José’s address at the NSW Premier’s History Awards. It’s an interesting address, worth reading in its entirety. My reason for blogging is that José begins with this:
When the landmark Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature appears next year, it will include, among many other things, an extract from an early Chinese Australian memoir, My Life and Work by Taam Sze Pui, first published in a bilingual edition in Innisfail in 1925.
Taam tells how he journeyed from southern China to North Queensland in the 1870s to search for gold. When he failed as a prospector, he opened a store to meet the daily needs of those in the far-flung district. Later a wife came from China to join him and their family grew with a business that was still flourishing in family hands a century later.
He goes on to describe the influence of Taam Sze Pui’s book on later artists, such as William Yang and Tony Ayres.
The work has been revalued retrospectively, given new meaning and life in a way that subtly reconfigures our understanding of Australian literary history. It forms a connective tissue between past and present that also points forward.
Innisfail exerts its powerful influence on the world of letters once again.
Taam Sze Pui’s name was not forgotten when I was a child in Innisfail, and his shop was still a significant landmark. As I remember it, he was known as Tom See Poy (which is how he’s named in the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Version), and the shop was See Poy’s, the Grace Brothers of our town. The Macquarie PEN anthology is definitely on my list of books to be acquired.
[Because the older version of this blog has become unreachable, I am retrieving at least occasional posts from it that I see people trying to click on. This is one from October 2008.]
As promised, here’s an update on the corner shop. It’s something like 21 months since it began its painfullyslow rise from the dead. Like the June deadline before it, the September deadline has come and gone.
A new bulletin has appeared in the window:
I don’t know if it’s significant, but Chie has moved to the front of the list of signatories, and she and Rod have been joined by Ron. I’ve not yet met Chie, and Ron is probably the older man I’ve seen about the place fairly regularly, though given the amount of time that’s passed, it’s quite possible that our prospective storekeepers have a baby or even two. Oddly à propos, Penny and I were talking to an old friend last night who has transformed from a leftist university student into a property developer, and he evoked for us the agonies caused by paperwork sitting for weeks, even months on a desk somewhere in a bureaucracy waiting for someone to pass it on for gazetting. It sounds as if our ever closer but never quite here corner shop may have had its share of such experiences
The back yard has been opened up and is in the process of being paved, or perhaps built on.
And here’s a bonus photo, found in my phone, of a plastic omelette as seen at Narita Airport. Mmmmm!
[Because the older version of this blog has become unreachable, I am retrieving at least occasional posts from it that I see people trying to click on. This is one from September 2008.]
We’re home from nearly four excellent weeks in Japan. As assiduous readers of this blog will realise, my blogging software (iBlog) sits on my laptop, which spent the last weeks on our kitchen table at home. Hence my blog silence except an occasional comment posted from Internet cafes. Now I’m back to a slightly changed world: the ornamental plum tree on our nature strip is in bloom, my elder son has appeared in a small speaking role in a show on national television (he speaks in series 2, episode 4, at about 6 minutes and 30 seconds), a pile of mail has accumulated, the dog is fat and healthy, the corner shop has still not re-opened for business, and the state Labor Party is in deep trouble. And I’ve told you almost nothing of my holiday.
But I don’t intend to leave the trip totally unblogged, partly because I’m an addicted blogger, and partly because I am now convinced that people need to know how fabulous Japan is to visit (unless you’re allergic to seafood, of course). Inspired by franzy’s current-sentence-a day-project, I plan to put up a post a day, reporting on the day exactly a month before — as we left on 15 August, my first travel blog entry will go up on 15 September. I’m setting a time limit for myself, so I don’t get intimidated by the task. And in the couple of days between now and the 15th I’ll post about the books I read, of which there were many, since as it turned out we hardly went out at night at all. Um, so if you were hoping for graphic tales of the famous risqué nightlife, abandon that hope now. Tomorrow: Japan books # 1.
I had credit to spend at Sappho’s bookshop, and this book leapt to my attention. It cost more than my $8 note, but I recognised Shane McCauley’s name from the ancient days when I was editor of The School Magazine. (Note: I’m not the editor any more. I refer you to the magazine’s helpful tips for manuscript submission.) There’s one beautiful poem in particular, ‘Clouds’, illustrated by Tohby Riddle (in Orbit, November 2003) with a small figure of a child, in the centre of a page filled with dark grass, looking straight up at the viewer, who is positioned as one of the eponymous clouds. I’d never read any of his poems for grown-ups (I hate that word, but adult has been co-opted), and here was a chance. The poems really are for grown-ups: to enjoy them, you need to be either alarmingly well-read or unintimidated by encountering someone who is much better read than you. I’m in the latter category. The range of reference is huge: from an aged Samurai arranging flowers to an Islamic executioner, from Ancient Greece and Rome to Chuang-tzu, from Western Australian landmarks to scientific and mythopoeic cosmology. And I trusted his references: when he attributed thoughts to La Perouse in the long ‘La Perouse to Eleanore’, I believed he had immersed himself in La Perouse’s writing enough to have got it right. I intend reading this again.
During my time at The School Magazine, we published Stephen Whiteside’s poems regularly. And that’s probably the only thing his poetry has in common with Shane McCauley’s. This is his second self-published book, and probably because its back cover includes a quote from this blog, he kindly sent me a copy. Most of the pieces date from the early 1980s when Stephen did a lot of performing (Aha! Another similarity: according to the flap of The Butterfly Man, Shane McCauley was a founding member of a performance poetry group on Perth. However, I doubt if he ever put on a funny hat as Stephen did.) These aren’t poems intended primarily for children, and if I’ve read any of them before it was to reject them (sorry!). They are mostly good rollicking fun with some history, some genial satire, a little bush-philosphising and a touch of melancholy. Many of them latter-day bush ballads, and as an added grace there’s a short, often affectionately deprecatory introduction to each one. You can buy a copy from www.bookstore.bookpod.com.au or, I assume, at Stephen’s readings. (One last note: I suppose I should be glad of it, but I find myself lamenting that in the featured poem about the horribly cold town Omeo, he did not stoop to ‘Omeo, Omeo, wherefore art thou, Omeo?’)
The New Yorker of 21 July features an article by Jill Lepore about ancient literary battles in the USA.
Anne Carroll Moore (1871–1961), first superintendent of the New York Public Library’s Department of Work with Children, wielded enormous power in children’s literature in the USA during the first half of the twentieth century: ‘Her verdict, not any editor’s, not any bookseller’s, sealed a book’s fate,’ Lepore writes. ‘She kept a rubber stamp at her desk that she used, liberally, while paging through publishers’ catalogues: “Not recommended for purchase by expert.” The end.’
The article tells how E B White’s first book for children, Stuart Little, brought an end to her influence. She hated the book, reportedly writing to White that it was ‘written by a sick mind’, and recommended against it. In 1945, an amazing first print run of 50 000 hit the bookshops, and though ACM’s hostility initially slowed sales down, she was helpless against the tide of its popularity. Behind these events lay a great shift in what was understood to be excellent in children’s literature. Anne Carroll Moore ‘loved what was precious, innocent, and sentimental. White [both EB and his critic–librarian wife, Katharine] found the same stuff mawkish, prudish, and daffy.’
I don’t know if the history of Australian children’s literature boasts any personalities of the magnitude of Anne Carroll Moore or E B White, but I’m feeling impelled to blog a little about some rough equivalents. The School Magazine, subtitled ‘A Magazine of Literature for our Boys and Girls’, was coming into existence at about the same time as Anne Carroll Moore was setting up the Children’s Room behind the lions at the New York Public Library and winning the right for children not only to enter the library but even to borrow books. But who remembers the name of the magazine’s first editor, Inspector Stephen Smith? Since Mr Smith kept fairly busy earning his place in history as an educational mover and shaker, setting up correspondence schools and the like, it probably makes sense to think of Doris Chadwick (1899–1979), generally acknowledged as occupying the chair from 1920 to 1960, as the real first editor.
As far as I know, no one has written much about Doris Chadwick. Yet she did wield significant influence over children’s literature in Australia during the period of Anne Carroll Moore’s dominance in the US. She decided what poems, short stories, songs would be encountered by generations of primary school students in New South Wales. She may not have made or broken careers, but she almost certainly gave thousands of people their first taste of C J Dennis, May Gibbs, Henry Lawson, Mary Gilmore, Wordsworth, Blake, Tolkien, Aesop, as well as stories with titles like ‘Fairy Twee Wee’s Adventure’ (by ‘Neelia’, 1916), which Katharine White may well have found mawkish, or ‘Two Days at a Shearing-Shed’ (W M Corrigan, 1920).
I know two artists who illustrated for Miss Chadwick’s magazine in the 1950s. By that time she was deaf, and very aware of her dignity. When the young Noela Young was ushered into her presence she was asked to wear gloves and instructed to curtsey, which she did to the best of her ability. ‘Ah, yes, I remember you,’ said Doris when introduced to a promising art student, Astra Lãcis. ‘I didn’t recognise you without your hat.’ Astra never wore hats, and this was their first meeting. By that time, without the benefit of a battle in the New York manner, the power was passing to a new generation: Noreen Shelley, assistant editor, was soon to be in charge. She published an excerpt from Stuart Little in 1961.
In the last week and a bit I’ve been to a workshop in the US, which involved large slabs of time in planes and airports and close to 24 hours in a Golf Country Club in Taiwan, the latter because my Taipei–Sydney flight had vanished from the schedule. I’ve had lots of bloggable adventures, but for now, here is What I Read:
Sydney–Taipei: I first met When the Sergeant Came Marching Home years ago in the form of four short stories submitted to The School Magazine. We published them with the series title, ‘Scenes from a Canadian Childhood’, and reprinted them more than once. Now, in hard covers and with an overall narrative arc, they’re still a joy: two boys come to terms with their father’s return from killing Nazis and almost immediately uprooting them and their mother from their suburban lives to take on the life of a struggling farmer. For the book, someone has decided to transplant the farm from rural Canada to US-book-buyer-friendly Montana, but other than that the stories are as fresh, their ironic comedy as laugh-out-loud as ever. (The mother is called ‘Mum’ once, and it’s a rare case of a proofing error – if it is one – that gave me pleasure, providing as it does an archaeological trace of the family’s past life as Canadians.)
Taipei–Los Angeles, Los Angeles–Boston:The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was recommended to me as ideal plane reading. It’s a Closed Island Murder Mystery that morphs on its way to a predicable surprise ending into a Hunt for a Serial Killer. The original Swedish title translates literally as something like ‘Men Who Hate Women’, which as you might expect reveals a good bit of the plot. The English title has the virtue of focusing the reader’s attention on the novel’s most interesting character; sadly, the alluringly feminine Quercus paperback cover gives a radically false impression of her. But spiky hair, piercings, and a hint of the sociopath probably wouldn’t have sold as many books. It’s the first of three books, will almost certainly be made into a movie, and was in fact perfect plane fare, and the right length for this trip. I finished it soon after arriving in Boston.
Boston, then Boston–Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City– Los Angeles: I also packed two slim vols of poetry, which also turned out to be perfect travel fare: taking up hardly any room, they provided satisfyingly complete short reads before sleeping the sleep of the sleep-deprived and jetlagged; they were excellent for quelling panic when I turned out to have been booked on a non-existent flight with nothing to do but wait for my name to be called on the hastily found alternative; and when on this flight and in Taiwan I found myself bookless, they bore rereading.
So I consider myself in Jacob G. Rosenberg and joanne burns’s debt, even though many of the former’s poems, despite giving the initial impression that they are a sonnet sequence, read like fairly prosaic notes on the way to his wonderful memoirs East of Time and Sunrise West(as if the gruelling subject matter made attention to anything much more than bald narration seem pernickety), and I read a number of the latter’s offerings with bemused incomprehension. Inspired by Jeanette Winterson on The Book Show, however, I spent a good bit of this leg of my travels memorising poems, and they richly repaid the effort. For the record, I can recite number xii of jb’s ‘diversions’ (beginning ‘The wall longs to be rubble’) and her lovely elegaic ‘ecce’. From JGR’s book, I have taken possession of ‘My Sister Pola’, one of the Holocaust poems.
Los Angeles–Taipei: I don’t suppose Los Angeles Airport is anyone’s favourite place in the whole world, but it’s just moved down a peg or two in my affections. After queuing for maybe a total of an hour to check in, to have my check-in baggage x-rayed, to pass through immigration and to submit to a shoeless personal security check, I discovered that if I wanted a book to read over the next 25 or possibly (and as it happened, factually) 49 hours, I had a grand total of 16 books to choose from. The spanking new collection of David Sedaris essays was the only one that beckoned to me, and it proved to be a diverting read. Sedaris’s charming self deprecation and irony sometimes makes it hard to hear his more serious voice, but it is there, and the book offers meditations on death and lyrical celebrations of his beloved partner Hugh without becoming unreadably earnest. The long section on giving up smoking while holidaying/vacationing in Tokyo is full of delights. I decided two things, however: if possible, I’ll take any future Sedaris aurally, because he’s much funnier and more moving that way; and I’ll read some essays by Montaigne, originator and master of the form.
Taipei: The search for something to read continued in my enforced 24 hour layover: nothing but golf magazines and a 14 year old tourist booklet in the Miramar Golf Country Club, which was also miles from the nearest shop of any kind, let alone English-language bookshop. An anguished email home (thank heavens there was an Internet nook) gave rise to much merriment.
Taipei–Sydney: It was a relief on arriving at Taipei International Airport to discover there was a bookshop, even though it had only a couple more English-language books than LAX: the choice boiled down to The Kite Runner for 530 new Taiwan dollars or Inkspellfor 350. I opted for the children’s book, sequel to the marvellous Inkheart. I’ll write about it when I’ve read more than 50 pages (because, yes, I slept, and even watched a movie).
[I originally posted this on 10 June 2008. I’m making it public now as it’s relevant to a piece I’m writing about the Voice Referendum. 31 August 2023]
OK, I’ve seen the light. Instead of a marathon post at the end of each month about the books I’ve been reading, the plan is now to post entries much more frequently – which reflects more accurately the way those longer posts (20 of them by my count) were composed. I don’t know whether I’ll do a post for every book I read, or a weekly post, or something more idiosyncratic, but the posts will be shorter and more frequent. They won’t be reviews, though if I I feel the urge to write a review I won’t necessarily resist it. My aim, as with the longer posts, is to keep some kind of record of my reading. If I was commenting on paintings visited, I hope I would be doing something less like an art gallery audio-guide and more like the Dear Art Please Touch Me project I heard described on Radio National’s Artworks recently. That project, created by two young artists, Danielle Freakley and Elizabeth McGechie, is an audio tour of the National Gallery of Victoria in which you hear a soundscape of ordinary people giving their idiosyncratic responses to the art. In my case, I do hope you’ll add your own comments, idiosyncratic or otherwise.
I’m kicking off the new regime with Kay Anderson’s Race and the Crisis of Humanism (Routledge 2007), winner of the 2008 Gleebooks Prize, one of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. I wouldn’t have noticed the book if I hadn’t been pointed at it by the awards. I wouldn’t have bought it and started reading it if I hadn’t been so taken with Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory earlier this year, and consequently been interested in the impact of early European–Aboriginal encounter on European theorising, which is pretty much the concern of this book. And I wouldn’t have persisted with its dense academic prose, which fairly bristles with learned referencesand also with the proofreading oversights and chaotic use of commas that seem to be inevitable in such publications, if there wasn’t a promise of fresh insight into the nature of racism.
I’m glad I read it, because it introduced me to apparently vast scholarly conversations about race and racism, and about the history of people’s understanding of what a human being is, among other things. Its central argument is something like: let’s agree that the concept of innate differences between people of different ‘races’ was developed over the last couple of hundred years, and had the function of rationalising the genocidal brutality of nineteenth century colonialism; but describing its function isn’t a full explanation of where it came from; European thinkers took their own specific society to be a universal human condition, and as they encountered different-looking and differently organised peoples their understanding of what it means to be human was challenged; rather than change that understanding they found a series of ‘scientific’ ways to define the new people as lesser versions of human. Something like that – but a lot more carefully argued, and more interesting. Kay Anderson brings a coldly analytic eye to some fairly monstrous pieces of writing, all the more monstrous because I recognise in a lot of them a kind of full-blown, explicit version of ideas that still float around today, some that were presented as simple fact in my childhood education.
At some points in the book, I felt an almost physical pain at the absence of Aboriginal voices. As the European scholars – few of whom had ever visited Australia – argued back and forth about the status of ‘the Tasmanians’ and ‘the Australians’, collecting their skulls and measuring them obsessively, it was almost impossible not to think of the deep satisfaction of a man and woman in a recent Awaye program describing sleeping in the same room as ancestral remains reclaimed from a European museum before loading them onto a homeward-bound plane. As the scholars pontificated about the inevitable ‘extinction’ of the Tasmanian Aboriginals, I recalled James Boyce’s account in Van Diemen’s Land of the machinations, negotiations, lies and evasions of the British Governors who oversaw the massacres. As they rabbited on about the ‘unimproveability’ of the Australians, I was glad to have read Inga Clendinnen’s meticulous attempts to retrieve from the colonisers’ own records an account of the first years of contact in New South Wales from the point of view of the invaded. And once or twice, when something felt personal about someone I know, I almost shouted out loud, ‘Shut up! Just shut up!’ Kay Anderson has a much stronger stomach that I do: she actually goes in and tries to understand where the vile stuff comes from.
I had credit to spend at Sappho’s bookshop, and this book leapt to my attention. It cost more than my $8 note, but I recognised Shane McCauley’s name from the ancient days when I was editor of The School Magazine. (Note: I’m not the editor any more. I refer you to the magazine’s helpful 
Me fail? I fly! 