Australian Women Writers: Lesbia Harford

Posted on 13 Oct 2022 | Leave a comment

This blog post was first published on the Australian Women Writers blog on 11 October 2022, at this link.

Lesbia Harford is far from forgotten or overlooked. You could even argue that, for an Australian woman poet, she has received a lot of attention. H M Green’s monumental History of Australian Literature, Volume II (1961) devoted four pages to her, but a decade later she was completely absent from Harry Heseltine’s Penguin Book of Australian Verse (1972). These days, she is dependably included in historical anthologies, and her poems turn up on sites like allpoetry.com and poemhunter.com. Yet it’s unlikely that many readers of this blog will be familiar with her work. And that’s a shame.

Lesbia Harford, nee Keogh (1891–1927) was born into a middle-class Melbourne family that fell on hard times when her alcoholic father deserted them. She suffered from a congenital heart condition that meant her health was always an issue. She was an active and much-loved part of Melbourne’s small intellectual circle. At university in 1914 she often engaged in heated debate with the young Robert Menzies. She had a passionate, life-long relationship with Kate Lush, a Philosophy lecturer at Melbourne University. She had a close friendship with Communist Guido Baracchi (the subject of Jeff Sparrow’s Communism, A Love Story), and for a time they were lovers. She was a unionist , and joined the International Workers of the World – the Wobblies. Despite her physical frailty she decided on ethical grounds to work for years as a machinist in a clothing factory. In her brief marriage to a socialist activist and artist, she endured domestic violence. She tutored students in English literature. She completed a law degree, a rare achievement for a woman at that time, intending to use it to work for social justice, but she died before she could fully qualify as a lawyer. She was an intellectual, an ex-Catholic, a factory worker, an activist, a free spirit, a lover, a tutor and a student: all of these fed her poetry.

When she died in her mid thirties, she had published very little poetry. Three collections have been published since, in 1941, 1885 and 2014, each containing more poems than the previous one, and roughly 200 more of her poems exist only in notebooks held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. (Her novel, The Invaluable Mystery, which was published in 1987 by McPhee Gribble with a foreword by Helen Garner, must wait for another blog post.)

Harford’s increased profile is probably due in part to a general shift in the culture. For example, when a lecturer on Australian modernist painting recently failed to mention any women artists, their student audience was scathingly vocal. There are good grounds for hope that a similar response would today meet an anthologist who, like Heseltine, included Peter Hopegood (Peter who? I hear you ask) but not Lesbia Harford. The general change was made particular in Harford’s case by work done by Marjorie Pizer over many years, culminating in the publication of Poems of Lesbia Harford (Sirius Books 1985), which she edited with Drusilla Modjeska. The book includes a number of photos, and Modjeska’s introduction gives a lively account of Harford’s life and work. If you can find a copy (no easy task), I recommend it.

Over the decades since her death, Harford has been viewed through many lenses.

In 1942, an anonymous, probably male reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote what was meant to be dismissive, but these days reads like praise:

There is … an absence of what one would call poetry. Moments of perceptions are recorded in her verse, crystallisations of feeling, but rarely in ‘words that burn’. In fact, the book reads rather like a rhymed diary.

‘Poet from the Past‘, Sydney Morning Herald 2 May 1942, page 6

In 1961, H M Green wrote that she was ‘a pure lyrist’ and went on:

Almost half her collected poems deal with love; in a sense indeed they all do, for she differs from many other social reformers in that the motive of her enthusiasm was love, in its largest sense.

in 1985, Drusilla Modjeska wrote:

Her voice, unmistakably her own, speaks as part of the multiplicity of voices speaking about social injustice, hope for revolution and the contradictory experiences of women … The radicalism of her verse did not rely on polemic but on the power of the female voice that does not apologise.

In 2014, Les Murray, presumably without intending the compliment to be backhanded, pronounced:

I consider Ms Harford … as one of the two finest female poets so far seen in Australia.

In the same year, Jeff Sparrow echoed the anonymous 1942 reviewer’s ‘rhymed diary’ comment, but with a completely different implied judgement (one that I agree with):

She often wrote about – and occasionally to – her friends and associates, referencing both public events and personal triumphs and sorrows. Like other private documents, the poems demand to be read in context – a context that, in Harford’s case, is not always obvious, both because the biographical record remains sketchy and, perhaps more importantly, because our historical moment is so different.

Sydney Review of Books 16 September 2014

Sparrow’s comment is reinforced by the way the poems have reached us. In all three published collections, as in Harford’s notebooks, they are organised in chronological order (though the most recent and largest of them, Oliver Dennis’s 2014 edition, doesn’t give dates). So it’s tempting, often appropriate, and even necessary to read the books as elliptical autobiographies or memoirs that touch on world events as well as intimate ones. My own experience of the poems bears this out: read in isolation in anthologies or on poetry websites, they have little of the power they have when read together, in order.

Readers so far might get the impression that reading Lesbia Harford is like visiting the Poetry Museum. My aim in the rest of this blog post is to demonstrate that it’s not like that at all, by showing some small examples. Here’s the first of her poems that I read: 

People sometimes tease me, saying
I have lovers many.
If I lack the one I sigh for,
What's the good of any?

I will never have a lover,
Though I am so bonny.
Love could only hurt that showed me
What I miss from Johnny.

Like many or even most of Harford’s poems, this looks and at first feels like light verse. It starts out as a jaunty, even frivolous rhyme. Then the tone deepens: the poem moves from a lively social circle, to reflecting on the relative value of good-time companionship and true love, to a rejection of the idea of having a lover at all, and then in the final lines, so calmly that it could be missed altogether, a bereavement is revealed. Read without context, it’s subtle and moving. If you read it as a poem from the home front of the First World War, it has a kind of devastating whiplash effect.

You may not read it that way, and it’s a strength of these poems that they don’t insist on a particular reading. The fairly early poem, ‘My mission in the world’ is explicit:

No marble meaning’s mine
Fixed for a school,

My singing ecstasy
Winged for the flight,
Each will hear differently
And hear aright.

That idea sounds awfully modern, even while it’s framed in pre-modern rhyming verse. Yet, even while the poems don’t insist on a single reading, they draw much of their power from their truthfulness. This tiny enigmatic offering is an example:

I have three loves who are all most dear.
Each one has cost me many a tear.
The one who is dead yet lives in me.
I were too poor had I less than three.

We don’t have to know names and dates to believe this is based in experience. It’s not naive: but while it defies what these days we would call something like monogamous heteronormativity (other poems make it clear that one of the loves is a woman), it still reads as a simple, fresh statement of an emotional reality.

There are surprisingly explicit poems about menstruation, ‘Periodicity’ I, II and III. This is the first of them:

Each month I go
Fathoms deep, ocean-whelmed, in woe.
Then agony, hopelessness roll
Wave-deep over body and soul,
Then pain's my familiar, darkness my friend,
And Time has no end.

Yet once again
I rise born anew from my pain.
Soul, body take radiant form.
Aphrodite-like out of the storm
I emerge. In their issue are blest
Those waves without rest

When I read that to my partner, she didn’t respond as if the poem was a hundred years old. She said, ‘She’s got endometriosis.’

A little poem about rowdy factory girls on the way home from work, snippets of conversation between machinists at work, a rhyme about missing a lover, a narrative of going for a swim just before dawn, a note on the weather – any one of these will draw the reader in, then turn at the last moment without breaking a sweat and leave you gasping or, sometimes, wondering if you just imagined that the poem did what you think it did.

References:

The Poems of Lesbia Harford, edited by Nettie Palmer (Angus & Robertson 1941)
Poems of Lesbia Harford, edited by Marjorie Pizer and Drusilla Modjeska (Sirius Press 1985; link is to an Open Access book at Sydney University Press)
Collected Poems: Lesbia Harford, edited by Oliver Dennis with a foreword by Les Murray (UWAP 2014)

H M Green, A History of Australian Literature: Volume II, 1923–1950 (Angus & Robertson 1961), pages 951–955
Gary Catalano, ‘Lesbia Harford’, Quadrant, December 1998, p. 53
Jeff Sparrow, Communism, a Love Story (MUP 2007), especially pages 67–93
Jeff Sparrow, ‘Render it barely: Collected Poems: Lesbia Harford‘, Sydney Review of Books,16 September 2014

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Starting Middlemarch

Posted on 10 Oct 2022 | 9 comments

George Eliot, Middlemarch: A study of provincial life (George Eliot, 1871–1872; Trident Press International Classic Romance 2001)

There’s been a gap in my waking-up ritual since I finished my slow-read of the Iliad more than a fortnight ago. Maybe I should have decided to reread The Odyssey – after all, I read it in a bit of a hurry the first time. Or I could have picked one of the classics that have so far stayed unread by me – Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, the Confessions of Saint Augustine, there are plenty to choose from. But it’s Middlemarch that has been mentioned regularly in my social media feed, more than once nominated as the best English novel ever written.

A mention that stands out is something Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his blog more than 10 years ago. His blog seems to have disappeared without trace so I can’t give you an exact quote, but he focused on one of George Eliot’s sentences, showing how the beats fell, how it veered off in unexpected directions, comparing it to hip-hop music that he loved. (In December 2011 The Atlantic published what may be a shorter version of that blog post, which you can read here. He had two other Middlemarch pieces in The Atlantic at about the same time, here and here.) Even though that was more than 10 years ago, it was probably Ta-Nehisi Coates who made the prospect of rereading this book attractive, if somewhat daunting.

Last year I read and blogged about Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s In Love with George Eliot (blog post here) and the comments on that blog post made rereading seem less daunting and even more attractive, and here I am.

I didn’t have a copy, so I trekked to the nearest second-hand bookshop (Goulds in King Street Newtown, if you’re interested). The one copy on their shelves was this Classic Romance edition. If romance readers can deal with such tiny type, it shouldn’t be impossible for me, but if I stumble across an edition that’s kinder to my septuagenarian eyes, I’ll switch and let you know.

I’m starting out with the aim of reading four pages a day, to finish some time next April, but if that turns out to be frustratingly slow, I’ll increase the quota. As with past slow reads, my aim is to give you a monthly progress report.

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Antigone Kefala’s Late Journals

Posted on 7 Oct 2022 | 2 comments

Antigone Kefala, Late Journals: Reflections 2000–2020 (Giramondo 2022)

I’ve come late to Antigone Kefala’s work, having previously read only her 2016 book of poetry, Fragments. When I blogged about that book (here), I responded to a comment Kefala had made elsewhere that she was always seen as an ‘ethnic’ writer, ‘constantly being compared to other ethnics, but not to Australian writers’, by comparing one of her poems to one of Les Murray’s. A little later I actually met her at a poetry reading. It felt a little like being presented to royalty, but she was all modest grace, called me ‘Mr Shaw’, and was amused that I had taken her challenge so literally.

Appearing six years after that encounter, Late Journals is full of that same modesty and grace. It’s a collection of fragments from a life, organised into six years divided into months. Given that the book’s subtitle tells us it covers 11 years, it’s evident that the book isn’t literally a diary, and attempts to tie entries down to specific dates will likely as not be thwarted.

For example, I flipped at random to page 62, the end of February of Journal III:

Nikos is having an exhibition in Vienna. He will send a catalogue, I was thinking of the early opening at Barry Stern’s.
In the silence of the gallery his fruit waited against a brooding metaphysical background. These magnificent shapes absolutely as if made of volumes of colour, colour with an amazing solidity, yet light, the two quinces, the cherries, the pears … The most amazing, rich, yet explosive colour.
A beautiful balanced group.
In spite of so many invitations sent out, only friends came. And no sales.

Characteristically, ‘Nikos’ is not further identified. Nor is the Viennese gallery or the date of either exhibition. A quick web search turns up Nikos Kypraios, who had exhibitions in Vienna in 2011 and 2012. His website has a page of paintings of fruit that were ‘made in 2010’. (I found a record of an exhibition at the Barry Stern Galleries in Sydney more in 1985/1986, but that’s probably not the one she means.) What matters isn’t the date and place. This isn’t a newspaper report, it’s a note about a friend’s achievement, and the editorial decision not to include the friend’s full name, here and in many other places, keeps the reader in the listener-in role. We are given a glimpse of how Kefala’s friendship circle, of how she responds to this work, and to its reception.

The warm appreciation of the paintings and the lament for their lack of local success are typical of much of these journals. This is sometimes about contemporary culture in general – as when she goes to see Fellini’s Ginger and Fred, and describes it as ‘baroque, magnificently funny and satirical, a total indictment of television and advertising, this listening to music while talking, the television sets everywhere’. Sometimes it’s specifically about non-Anglo-heritage artists, possibly most explicitly in this, from May in Journal VI:

Looking at the latest Companion to Australian Literature – we appear in a subsection called ETHNIC MINORITY WRITING. After so many years of writing here we are still totally outside the whole scene. Not only Ethnic, but Minority as well – a double blow.
The literary scene, as the sports scene and so on, seems to be dominated by a few names, as if written by adolescents who can only remember one name, more names in a scene impossible to sustain.

But that’s only one aspect of these journals. As Michelle De Kretser says in a back-cover blurb: ‘In poetry as in prose, Kefala has made the fragment her form.’ A single spread may include a character sketch of an unnamed woman (a journalist?), a description of a dance between the cat (Max) and a magpie, a quote from a New York Review of Books article, incisive praise for a new book of poetry, and a cutting comment on astrophysicists and theologians on TV.

From the accumulation of fragments, made readable by the diary-like presentation, there emerges a quiet self-portrait of a creative spirit, part of a creative community, immersed in the world of literature, music, drama, art, doing her bit to make sense of it all. A self portrait of a woman facing the vicissitudes of ageing and mortality. A generous sharing of self from someone who is immensely likeable.

Antigone Kefala was born in Romania in 1935 and after living in Greece and New Zealand migrated to Australia in 1960. Her first collection of poetry in English, The Alien, was published a little over a decade later. She has written three works of fiction, five poetry collections and two collections of journals. This book, which has been ominously described by its publisher as her final work, is the second of the journals.

I am grateful to Giramondo Publishing for my complimentary copy of Late Journals.

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Journal Catch-up 15

Posted on 30 Sep 2022 | Leave a comment

Here I am once again with two journals, each of which has produced another issue after the one I’m writing about.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 3 (Giramondo 2022)

I’ve just read a tweet quoting Helen Garner about Heat series three:

So slender and elegant, nothing wasted, nothing grandiose – and beautiful work.

Beautifully said!

The third issue is true to Heat‘s original goal to publish culturally diverse voices. It has a bit of a theme going:

  • ‘Australian Capital Territory’, a short story by Madeleine Watts, in which a man and a woman search in and around Canberra for somewhere to have sex, and finally succeed in a manner that is most satisfactory to them, the watching kangaroos and the reader. So, sex.
  • ‘Small Talk’ by Kenneth Chong, a very different short fiction, presented as a kind of abstract memoir, about a young man of faith dealing with troubling issues. So, sex and religion
  • ‘Cain’s Feast’, a short story by Mexican writer Aniela Rodríguez, translated by Elizabeth Bryer, in which a young woman is seduced by a priest and a young man takes revenge. So, sex, religion and violence
  • ‘Tongue Broken‘ by Kate Crowcroft, not so much an essay as a collection of disparate thing connected with the author’s research on the tongue (she has completed a PhD and has a book coming out on the subject). It does one of my least favourite things, presents a word’s etymology as if it offers a kind of magical access to the word’s inner meaning. But the rest is variously lively, unexpected and informative. Also: religion and violence
  • Five terrific poems by each of Jarad Bruinstroop and Iman Mersal, the latter translated from Arabic by Robyn Creswell. Discreet sex, but no violence.

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 245 (Summer 2021)
(Much of the content is online at overland.org.au, and I’ve included links)

Overland is always so full of interesting things that I can’t possibly name every item. Here are some things that stand out for me in this issue

Of the articles, one or two of which are too academic for my blood, the two that stand out for me are:

  • ‘Perpetrators‘ by Rachael Hambleton, about her complex relationship with her father, who spent much of his life in prison. The essay expands into profound reflections on grief, punishment, the prison system and intergenerational trauma.
  • ‘What lies beyond the vortex‘ by Mauricio Rivera Ramirez, which focuses on the novel La vorágine (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera. Though the subject may seems unpromisingly niche to a general reader, it includes fascinating insights into the colonial rubber trade in Latin America.

I’m often intimidated by the poetry section in Overland, edited by the marvellous Toby Fitch. I mostly enjoy the poetry but have no idea how to talk about it. In this issue, I was delighted to find a poem by Eileen Chong, ‘Dream kitchen’ (sadly not on the Overland website at the time of writing), which narrates a dream of the poet’s grandmother’s kitchen with wonderful surrealist gusto and ends in an echo of classic Chinese poetry:

_______________________-____I knew it was only a dream,
because I was in my bed, alone. I was far from her, and home.

There are three excellent short stories:

  • ‘The first to lose‘ by Hop Dac, a story of Vietnamese-Australian family life
  • ‘Machine works‘ by Jordon Conway, a brilliant sketch of work, class, relationships and integrity in the context of forklifts, lathes and vehicle repair.
  • ‘Fontanelle‘ by Sarah Walker, an excellent companion piece to ‘Machine works’, a semi-futuristic piece about the work conditions of long-distance truck-drivers.

Then, tucked away up the back, there are the 2020 Emerging Older Poets Mentorship (one poem) and the five poems shortlisted for the 2020 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, including Claire G Coleman’s witty ‘Blame Ireland’ and the prize winner, ‘Choice cuts‘ by Mykaela Saunders, a long, fiercely anguished meditation on the commodification of Indigenous culture:

–how to hold onto my integrity
when cold neoliberal logic drills into me
and the colonial vacuum sucks the marrow from me as fodder

Next time: Heat 3, Overland 246, an issue of Australian Poetry, and – if I can overcome my reluctance to read journals online – Southerly 79:3.

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The Iliad: Progress report 10

Posted on 23 Sep 2022 | 4 comments

Homer, The Iliad (translated by Robert Fagles, ©1990, Penguin 1998)
Book 23 line 768 to Book 24 line 944 (the end)

It’s taken me nearly 10 months to read The Iliad, two pages most mornings, and it’s been a huge pleasure.

In the final pages, Hector’s body is reclaimed and given a proper funeral. The way it is reclaimed is incredibly moving. The Trojan king, Priam, goes into the Greek camp at night, alone except for one companion and the god Hermes to protect him. He pleads with Achilles to release his son’s body, begging him to think how his own father would feel in a similar situation. Achilles, the embodiment of unstoppable destructive force, begins to weep and soon the two of them are sobbing together, weeping for the parents who have lost sons including Achilles’ own father in the near future, and for the loss of beloved comrades. Then Achilles retells the story of Niobe weeping for her murdered children: in his version instead of turning immediately to stone and becoming a waterfall, she takes time off from weeping to eat a hearty meal, and that is what he and Priam now do. He tucks Priam in for the night, safe from being accidentally spotted by other Greeks.

That passage itself is enough to explain why the Iliad has such status. After all the violence of the previous thousands of lines, these two implacable enemies share a moment of common humanity. I could feel my mind – and heart – expanding as I read it.

Pretty soon after that, Hector’s funeral rites take place and the story is over. The story is over, but not the war. It’s very clear that in another day, the Greeks will resume hostilities. Troy will fall. The women will be captured. Babies will be thrown over the battlements. Achilles will be killed. It’s a standard thing that epic poems begin in medias res – in the middle of things. This one ends there too.

I’m having a breather before starting my next slow-read project. I’m thinking maybe Middlemarch.

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Edwina Preston’s Bad Art Mother

Posted on 22 Sep 2022 | 3 comments

Edwina Preston, Bad Art Mother (Wakefield Press 2022)

Owen’s mother is a poet, pretty much unrecognised in her lifetime. His father runs a restaurant, plus a charity that feeds the homeless, plus an art gallery. His guardians (it’s complicated!) are a successful, wealthy poet and his meek wife who has a knack for ikebana. The most reliable adult in his life is an aunt, a nurse who makes no claims to creativity. In most of his childhood O-yo, as he is affectionately known, rotates among the three households, each its own version of life on planet Melbourne in the 1960s.

The backbone of Bad Art Mother is Owen’s story of his childhood, culminating in the events surrounding the launch of his mother’s only book of poetry. He branches out into two other periods: the moment in the mid 1980s when his mother’s poetry is rediscovered by a feminist publisher, and his comfortable and uneventful life in the present, partnered up with the feminist publisher. Every now and then Owen’s narrative is supplemented by a batch of letters from his mother to her sister that make us privy to the mother’s inner life and to scenes that unfold in Owen’s absence.

So there are two unreliable narrators: one is a child who doesn’t understand the complexities of the adult world (though he does understand more than the adults realise), the other a woman who is increasingly unhappy, self-preoccupied and in denial about her alcohol abuse – though she can be scarifyingly honest about her own appalling behaviour. As readers we’re invited to keep our wits about us, to read between the lines.

I wanted to know what would happen to every one of the novel’s characters, and each of the women in young O-yo’s life offers a different perspective on how to succeed artistically or otherwise under patriarchy (there is a cheerful Lesbian couple), but it’s Veda Gray, poet and Bad Art Mother, whose story provides the narrative spring.

Even though you might expect that young O-yo is most at risk, Veda is really the only character who is in jeopardy. It’s the 60s. Society is getting ready for Germaine Greer and, separately, the beginnings of Women’s Liberation. Veda has read a book by an unnamed American feminist, whom we take to be Betty Friedan, but she is unable to take up the cudgels on her own behalf. She increasingly seems to spend her days at home, drinking, spending less time writing poetry than complaining about the difficulty of being a poet. Somehow she gets a contract with a small press to publish a collection of her poems, but publication, on which her survival seems to depend, is repeatedly postponed. We know it will happen, but we know from a flashforward on the opening page that something will go wrong. There is very real suspense, and the story moves along at a cracking pace to a dramatic climax.

But there are disturbing cross currents .

THE REST IS SPOILERISTIC

For example, there’s this moment early on. Veda is writing to her sister about her conversations with Mr Parish who, we have been told, dislikes abstract art and, presumably, modernist poetry:

We have had several lively debates, such as Ern Malley, that old chestnut, where I find him a harsh critic of MacAuley and Stuart.

(page 35)

Veda misspells both James McAuley’s and Harold Stewart’s surnames, even while claiming a bored familiarity with the Ern Malley affair. Not only that, but she seems to be under the impression that McAuley and Stewart were modernist poets of the sort Parish would abhor, whereas they are militantly on his side, and his harsh criticiism would surely have been for Max Harris, who published the poems.

At first I took these and a scattering of similar ‘mistakes’ for authorial errors that slipped past the copy editor and proofreader, but as I read on I began to think they were indications of Veda’s radical unreliability. We only ever see one of her poems, about which more in a moment. When she’s young, she does ‘second-rate readings in second-rate rooms with second-rate poets’ before giving up because she isn’t getting anywhere, and she receives many rejections from Meanjin. As time goes by though, there are no more attempts to find readers. She has no apparent contact with other poets, except the egregious Mr Parish. She quotes none of her poetry to her sister, the only correspondent we know about. She seems to be unaware that other Australian women poets exist. She does the extremely unrealistic thing of submitting a sheaf of poems to a publishing house and then resenting it when they say they need more to make a book-sized collection.

The real story being hinted at here is that Veda set out to be a poet, but gave up, partly because of sexism but probably because she wasn’t willing to work at it in a sustained way, and wasn’t much good. She settled to a life of posing as a poet (the word ‘posing’ occurs a lot), while sinking into alcoholic chaos, blaming everyone but herself for her lack of success. When, improbably, the book is about to be published, she decides to strike a blow against the establishment by [SERIOUS SPOILER ALERT] altering its opening sonnet so that the first letters of each line spell out a fourteen-letter obscenity. The world comes crashing down around her: the book is pulped, her career as a poet is finished, and her life is over.

An end note informs the reader of the famous occasion when Gwen Harwood slipped a similar sonnet past the editor of the Bulletin in 1961, and quotes from a letter Harwood wrote to a friend. There are two ways of reading this, depending whether you think Gwen Harwood’s exists in the world of the novel. If she doesn’t, then the incident has been transposed – unconvincingly to my mind – to a decade later. If she does, then Veda’s stunt is a mere imitation of a notorious scandal. I’m leaning to the latter reading, partly because the Ern Malley hoax exists so why not Gwen Harwood as well, and partly because Veda’s sonnet is clumsy and stodgy. If it’s typical of her poetry, her rediscovery in the mid 1980s starts to look like a bit of opportunistic pretend-feminist marketing rather than the equivalent of, say, the rediscovery of Lesbia Harford at about the same time.

So this is a book with a hidden narrative, like the cross-dressing story in Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life. The title of the book doesn’t signify an art-mother who is bad, but a mother who makes bad art. Veda’s story is even more tragic than it seems at first.

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Reading with the Grandies 31: Roald Dahl, Grug and the Bus Book

Posted on 20 Sep 2022 | 6 comments

In the months since I last posted about Ruby’s reading, she has discovered Roald Dahl, and her little brother has started asking to be read to from what he calls the ‘Bus Book’.

Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach (© 1961, illustrations © Quentin Blake 1995, Penguin Random House 2016)
—–, Fantastic Mr Fox (© 1970, illustrations © Quentin Blake 1996, Penguin Random House 2016)
—–. The BFG (© 1982, illustrations © Quentin Blake 1982, Puffin 1985)

Whatever else you might think about Roald Dahl (and I know there are people would keep him away from young children because of what they see as cruelty), his sentences are a joy to read aloud, and evidently a joy to hear, while his plots are full to bursting with vividly imagined incidents. We’ve read James and the Giant Peach more than once, a couple of pages at a time. We’ve reached page 54 or so of The BFG, in one sitting, but will probably take a while to return to it because something about it is too scary.

Fantastic Mr Fox has been an amazing success. Currently we see Ruby for a couple of hours in the afternoon two days a week. On half a dozen successive Nanna-and-Poppa afternoons, she has asked for Fantastic Mr Fox, and listened to the whole book in a single sitting. Once or twice she has agreed to have something else as an appetiser, but this is the book she wants, and she wants it all. At first, she would cover her ears to mute the bits she found scary, but by the most recent reading she stayed for everything. As the non-reading grandparent, it’s wonderful to watch her absorption in the story, and her intent study of Quentin Blake’s illustrations.

I hope we can keep Wes Andersen’s travesty of a film out of the picture until it’s too late for it to spoil anything. And I expect Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I loathe for its, well, cruelty as well as its racism and gooiness, can’t be too far away. But for now, we’re having a ball.

Ted Prior, Grug and the Big Red Apple (1979)
Daria Solak, Big Wide Words in the Neighbourhood (Hardie Grant 2022)
Claire Laties-Davis (text), Kazia Dudziuk (illustrations), Britannica’s First 150 Words (Britannica Books 2021)

As Charlie’s second birthday approaches, his interest in story isn’t as intense as his big sister’s. He loves spreads where we name an object and he finds it. The pages he comes back to again and again, and then is reluctant to leave, have pictures of buses, cars and especially TRUCKS. These two books, with illustrations by Daria Solak and Kazia Dudziuk respectively, stand out for their surprising choices of words, and unconventional illustrations.

Grug and the Big Red Apple, on the other hand, is a story that does the trick. The introductory bits where Grug, the mysteriously animate scrap of Australian flora, finds the apple, and the bit where Clara the carpet snake coils around the apple in order to move it – all that’s well and good, but we all love the last few spreads where the apple looms larger and larger in the foreground while Grug looks hungrier and hungrier beside it, and then, turn the page and all that’s left is a tiny core and a sated Grug. Yay for story!

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Hugh White’s Sleepwalk to War

Posted on 11 Sep 2022 | 2 comments

Hugh White, Sleepwalk to War: Australia’s unthinking alliance with America (Quarterly Essay 86, 2022)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 87

The title of this Quarterly Essay says it all: Australia’s foreign policy has had us in lockstep with the USA, and we’re heading for an inevitable war with China if the USA continues on its current trajectory and we stay blindly following. The people making key policy decisions, the title implies and indeed the essay states explicitly, are not living in the real world.

Specifically, our governments talk and act as if the USA is an unchallengeable world power both generally and in our region. In reality, China’s GDP is now greater than that of the USA (one of many assertions challenged by correspondents in Nº 87); it is a nuclear power intent on establishing a sphere of influence in the India Pacific; the USA has no compelling reason to challenge that intention, and there’s no way it will go to war, let alone risk a nuclear war, to do so. Australia and the USA should stop pretending they will defend Taiwan should China decide to retake it – which it inevitably will do. We should be working out how reconcile ourselves to living within a Chinese sphere of influence in a multipolar world where the USA and China are only two of several great powers.

Hugh White presents his argument cogently, and when he is dealing with the absurd sabre-rattling of Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison, his thesis looks like sweet reason. Nancy Pelosi’s weirdly provocative visit to Taiwan happened after the essay and its follow-up correspondence were published, making it very timely indeed in retrospect.

As usual, I delayed reading this Quarterly Essay until the next one came out so that I could read it along with whatever responses the series editor (still Chris Feik) chooses to publish. Unusually this time, politicians criticised in the essay have a say. Not Scott Morrison or Peter Dutton – it’s hard to image either of them meeting argument with argument rather than bluster. But Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd turn up to defend their records. They and other correspondents take issue with White’s thesis just about as vigorously as possible within the bounds of civil discourse.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull:

White has strayed into sweeping generalisations and, frankly, ‘alternative facts’ to embellish his argument. I was disappointed that a scholar of his standing would do so.
White’s description of Australian foreign policy is simply wrong

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:

A skilled political operator, White adduces selective facts and little reason in reaching [his] conclusion, but happily smears as ‘unthinking’ anyone who challenges his word as self-appointed prophet of both the anti-American far left and the ‘never upset Beijing’ Rio Tinto far right.

Michael J. Green, formerly the senior Asia policy official on the National Security Council in the White House:

Kudos to Hugh for shaking things up as always. There is urgency, as he notes. There are also many big and hard decisions ahead. But the basic consensus behind current Australian and American grand strategy is founded on a more nuanced and realistic assessment of the international system and the relative balance of power than offered in the polemical pages of Sleepwalk to War.

Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University:

I’ve admired my ANU colleague Professor Hugh White for decades: his singular intellectual style, public profile (such that many mistakenly assume he speaks for Australia), unorthodox career, generous mentorship of next-generation thinkers, sharp good humour, even his zeal. He is a past master of the strategic analysis game. But he insists on playing it just one narrow way – his own, derived from his training in philosophy and winner-takes-all Oxford debating. And, sadly, his new Quarterly Essay maintains the cage.

Not all the correspondents take issue with the essay as sharply as those, but Rory Medcalf’s gibe about Oxford debating rings true when Hugh White emerges bloody but unbowed to reply to correspondents, barely acknowledging the many instances where he allegedly got the facts wrong.

In the end, the discussion hasn’t left me any wiser about Australia’s relationships with the USA and China. My evaluation of Dutton and Morrison’s provocations has been endorsed. My sense that things are complicated has been strengthened. My anxiety about the possibility of nuclear war in my lifetime remains on a low simmer. I’m glad there are people who can think about these issues and are taking about them. I hope cool and wise heads prevail on all sides.

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The Book Group and George Haddad’s Losing Face

Posted on 7 Sep 2022 | 8 comments

George Haddad, Losing Face (UQP 2022)

Before the meeting: This book is part of the wealth of interesting new writing to come from culturally complex Western Sydney over recent decades. I’ve blogged about some of it, including poetry by Maryam Hazam, Eunice Andrada and Sara M Saleh, and fiction by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Luke Carman, Felicity Castagna and Suneeta Peres da Costa. I have mentioned George Haddad at least once in this blog, for his short story ‘Broken Zippers‘ in Overland 237. This is his first novel.

Joey is in his late teenage years, part of a Christian Lebanese community in Western Sydney, working in a supermarket and pretty aimless. He’s friendly with Emma, who (I think) is an ‘Aussie’, which in this context means of British or Irish heritage. Joey’s Aussie father has been absent for most of his life. He gets on well with his mother, and their mostly amiable bickering is a key pleasure in the first chapters. Joey’s younger brother occasionally looks up from his phone to join the conversation. Tayta Elaine, Joey’s grandmother and the family matriarch, completes the portrait of a warm, supportive, noisy family.

Trouble starts for Joey elsewhere. He goes to a music festival with Emma, his best friend Kyri, and Boxer, who’s a bit of a bully from school days. The drug-infused euphoria of that event takes a dark turn when Boxer and Emma start to make out, but the real trouble comes a couple of weeks later when Joey and Kyri again go out with Boxer and an even worse bully: the four of them pick up a young woman, Lisa, on the train, drugs are involved, and they sexually assault her. What had been charming and engaging sketch of life in a particular community now coheres into a narrative charged with moral jeopardy.

The story is plainly told. In particular, the story of what happens with Lisa is given without evasive language. Joey is not a witness to the worst parts of what happens, and we are given all the mitigating circumstances, but we do see how he participated in precise detail, including the moment soon after the event when he apologises and she acknowledges his apology. But she goes to the police the next day, and Joey and the others are charged sexual offences. Joey’s friends’ and family’s disappointment and anger leave him isolated, and the approaching trial becomes the focus of the narrative. As readers we see a lot of nuance, but though we feel for Joey, the question of accountability hangs heavy over the story – so that the outcome of the trial becomes a secondary consideration. It’s beautifully done.

Meanwhile, Tayta Elaine’s story unrolls in alternate chapters. Apart from being a widowed matriarch, she is addicted to gambling, and much of her sections is taken up with her internal self-negotiations in which she justifies feeding far too much of her pension into poker machines and committing mild frauds to stay afloat. These sections are much less convincing. I feel they were there as necessary ballast to Joey’s story: his generation isn’t the only one to be morally compromised. But this narrative doesn’t grab with nearly the same force.

While thinking about this blog post, I read a short review of the book by Bri Lee in The Monthly. My impression that she is uncomfortable at being asked to empathise at all with a character involved in sexual violence, but she’s too polite to repudiate the project outright:

Joey believes his part in the crime wasn’t as bad as others. What’s often excruciating for a post-MeToo reader is to try to divine whether or not the author believes in outdated ideas or if it’s just the characters who do. Losing Face walks this very old tightrope: what is the difference between re-presenting the problem and actually critiquing the problem?

This is quite misleading. It’s not just Joey who sees his ‘part in the crime’ that way. Lisa doesn’t want him charged, and police charge him with a lesser crime. This is not to say he’s blameless or that he sees himself as blameless. He’s racked with guilt and doesn’t know what to do. There’s very little resource around for him. Bri Lee concludes her review, ‘Elaine is looking at herself in the mirror at the end of the book. Joey is not.’ We must have read different books. In my reading Elaine has gone even further down the path of addiction and bad stuff has happened to her, but she has little or no insight into her own responsibility for her misadventures (not that we blame her, given her tragic back story): she sees only that men are bastards. Joey, by contrast, has decided to change his life.

I hope it’s not a spoiler to give you part of the book’s final conversation between Joey and Tayta. If a mirror is involved, Tayta may be holding it up, but it’s Joey who is looking at himself:

‘I tell you something, Joey. Deep in the mind, any man from all time, no matter what they like to fuck – women, other men, goats – deep in the mind, they still believe woman is weaker than man.’

She stood up. Joey was empty.

She walked towards the garden and kicked with her slipper at a weed growing from a crack in the concrete until it dislodged. ‘And this is why that shit happen to the young girl in the car park with you and them kleb.’ She sounded like she was swallowing her tears. She bent over, picked up the weed and flung it into the garden. ‘And this is why, all around the world, men always doing shit to women in car parks.’

Joey’s anxiety had indeed lifted like magic earlier, and it turned like magic too.

(Page 256)

Just before the meeting I reread the book’s Prologue, which I had forgotten. It’s in the form of an Arab folktale about a terrorising djinn who agrees to leave the women of a camp alone if they gave her the manhood of all their boys. The women do so, and when the little boys grow up, they don’t grow beards, have no gusto for work and must be led, confused, through the desert.

I went into the meeting wondering what to make of that, and wondering what anyone else had made of Bri Lee’s review.

The meeting: This was the first time many of us had been together in person for a long time. We marvelled at the excellence of the bring-a-plate meal, and the luxury of sitting maskless around a table to eat it.

It took us a while to get to Losing Face. Our host was fresh from a battle with a government department in his local area, and there was much experience-based lamentation about bureaucracies. I was able to relay some wise words passed on to me by an employee of that department who had heard it from an old man when he was young: ‘Always remember that the department has no heart to break and no arse to kick.’

We all liked the book. In the process of discussing it, we came to appreciate the way our sympathies and expectations were managed. At first, the sexual assault scene feels like a nasty incident that may well turn out to be one of a sequence. Joey does his best to reassure himself that he’s a decent person, and as we go along with him, or not, we’re uneasy about the moral universe of the novel. When the police knock on Joey’s door it comes as a surprise, and we’re ambivalent: we’re apprehensive for Joey, who has our sympathy, but relieved that this is not going to be a novel in which the main character descends into callous depravity.

I’ll avoid spoilers, but will say that for such a short novel, Losing Face includes a lot of complexity about moral responsibility and the workings of the law. I’d forgotten some of the surprise twists of the legal proceedings.

Joey’s Aussie father – who turns up when Joey is in trouble – struck a chord with our gathering of mostly Aussie-fathers. A little paradoxically, the Western Sydney setting felt familiar and somehow comfortable to us inner-western Sydney types. There’s a queer dimension to the story, which someone felt was a bit tacked on, but someone with relevant experience said his gaydar went off very early in the book. Someone asked, ‘What will Joey do next?’ and we realised that the ending is wide open. I think we all felt that he’s in the process of changing his life, that he’s not going to just shrug off the whole episode, but we had a number of scenarios.

This month’s Chooser was one of the two who couldn’t make it to the meeting. Sadly he had to bask remotely in the glory of having chosen well.

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Tony Butler’s Hermitage in the South

Posted on 6 Sep 2022 | 9 comments

Tony Butler, A Hermitage in the South: A history of Marist Brothers Mittagong 1906–2006 (Marist Brothers 2006)

This is a chronicle of a place that has played an important part in the Australian story of the Marist Brothers, a Catholic religious order. It’s very much an in-house production, which I’d expect will be read from cover to cover by a pretty circumscribed group of people. I am one of that group.

From 1905 until the mid 1980s, the property at Mittagong in the southern highlands of New South Wales was the key training place for new members of the Marist Brothers in Australia. Since then, it has served a number of functions connected with the Brothers’ work in religious education. The buildings are still there, extended, redesigned and surrounded by vineyards, but still recognisable, with a strong Marist Brothers presence.

I spent half my teenage years there in the 1960s – the last two years of secondary school in what was called the Juniorate, and then eighteen months up the hill in the Novitiate. Though I went home to my family for a couple of weeks at the end of the first two years, it was a time spent almost entirely in the company of other young men about my own age. We cooked, cleaned and gardened. We chopped wood, cleaned grease traps, and shovelled sawdust for heating. We studied, sang and did religious ceremonies. Each day we rose early to pray and spent long periods in would-be contemplative silence. We got chilblains in the bitter Mittagong winters (especially bitter for those of us who came from tropical north Queensland). We played vigorous soccer, hockey, cricket and handball (though the unsporty ones like me tried to minimise those activities). We had no radio. Newspapers, Super 8 movies and TV were curated by our teachers, and in the novitiate were almost completely absent (once or twice a news item about Vietnam was read to us at meals, before the other pious readings). We went on long bush walks.

We prepared ourselves for lives in religious community. We were said to be in formation, and though many of us dropped out along the way, and most of us left the order, some within years, some after decades of our time in Mittagong (three years in my case), they were definitely – for good and bad – formative years.

Our relationships weren’t all sweetness and light, but there was an underlying sense that we were all there because we wanted to do good in the world – we wanted to be good. I don’t remember any violence or threats of violence, which I gather is pretty unusual among groups of adolescent boys. We saw ourselves as heading for lives of celibacy, and the only women we saw while at Mittagong were family who came on the sparse visiting days, so our sexual acculturation was a long way from typical.

The book doesn’t go deeply into such matters. But as well as drawing on dry documentation about things like building extensions and deliberations among the order’s leadership, it includes personal reminiscences from every stage of the history, and there are reflective passages like this:

Both juniorate and novitiate emphasised the community rather than the individual, for the cultivation of singularity was to be avoided. Everything was done in community, whether it was praying or working, studying or eating, playing or walking. Sometimes a junior could be carried along by the tide without having a sense of who he was as an individual, an issue to be faced in his later years.

So yes, there was that.

In my days at the juniorate there were two very old brothers. Brother Gerard was my Latin teacher, who would interrupt his intensely scholarly lessons to quote a couplet from Pope, compare something a scientist had said in the news to a line from Lucretius, or exclaim that he’d just seen a fox running up the hill opposite our classroom. Brother Eusebius had retired from teaching, and spent most of his days, as far as we could see, pottering about the flower gardens with his secateurs and drinking tea with Gerard. He had a favourite Brother/Dad joke. ‘I’m Brother Eusebius,’ he’d say, then take off his glasses and wave them in front of his face. ‘You see be us.’ One of the rewards of reading this whole book was to discover that when three Brothers walked from Sydney to Mittagong in 1905 to take possession of the property, Eusebius was one of them. I don’t think any of us had a sense that this sweet old codger had a story to tell.

Broader issues are either mentioned in passing or glossed over. There is no mention of the pre-invasion history of the land, though if it were written today it would probably include an acknowlegement of Gundungurra and Dharawal people as the traditional owners. The seismic changes in the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council are deeply embedded in the narrative, perhaps, with no need to spell them out. And you would search in vain for any light cast on the child sexual assault scandals that had already rocked the Marist Brothers for some time before the book’s publication, though at least two of the men named in its pages had been convicted and, I believe, done time in prison.

In my own time at Mittagong, there was a moment which indicates a path that might have been taken.

During our time in the novitiate, one of the older Brothers spent an evening telling us his life story. The way the book tells it, the novices were enthralled by the rich and varied life he led before joining the order. That’s probably accurate, but only thing I remember from that evening is his explanation for why he was at Mittagong rather than teaching in a school.

He told us he had found himself attracted to a young boy, and immediately told the head of his community, who organised for him to be transferred to another school. It happened again, and this time it was agreed that he should be completely removed from proximity to young boys. He spent the rest of his life in charge of the dairy at Mittagong, admired and loved by successive generations of adolescents.

The message was clear: first, as a Brother you can have unexpected desires/impulses/temptations; second, you can and should immediately take steps to get you the fuck away from where you might do harm. Secrecy, denial and concealment would lead to serious trouble.

I think I understand why that version of the evening didn’t get into this book. But I think of that man as a hero. I don’t know how many groups of young men he told his story to, facing possible humiliation each time. We certainly weren’t the only one. Nor do I know how many children were spared from predatory Brothers by his cautionary example – not enough, but I hope there were some.

So thanks, Tony Butler, for the labour of love in compiling this chronicle. It brought back vivid memories, and stirred a good bit of thinking.

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