Tag Archives: Richard Fidler

Michael Winkler’s Griefdogg at the Book Group

Posted on 17 Jun 2026 | 4 comments

Michael Winkler, Griefdogg (Text Publishing 2026)

Before the meeting: Many smart, thoughtful people with excellent taste love this book, so don’t take too much notice of me when I say I found it irritating, chaotic, self-indulgent, contrived, box-ticking and maybe just a little bit culturally appropriating. Also the back cover blurb gives away the two shoe drops that I didn’t know I was waiting for.

I kept reading after the first couple of pages out of devotion to the Book Group, and resolved to hold my tongue at the meeting so as to glean what other people love about the book.

My usual practice of looking at page 79 (my age) would just lead to a lot of grumpy exclamations, which would add nothing to the sum total of human knowledge, so I’ll refrain.

I did have an unexpected stab of pleasure on page 141. The narrator is indulging in one of many digressions on environmental issues, and moves on from fracking and mining to ‘the mindless introduction of pests and weeds’:

Who decided to introduce buffel grass in the 1950s? Names should be named. It is on the public record that government entomologist Reginald Mungomery was the first to bring in cane toads. Thomas Austin, the wealthy buffoon, is credited with setting loose thirteen rabbits imported from England at Winchelsea in 1859. I know a man who knows the names of the brothers who released the Boolarra strain of European carp in pondage near Merbein in 1964, after which they swam into the Murray River and wrecked the ecology forever. Induct them all into a hall of shame for ecological and waterway degradation. Let us piff rotten fruit at them.

Reg Mungomery was a relative of mine, a cousin several times removed. He visited us once when I was a child. He wasn’t proud of the cane toads. I’m thrilled enough when the town I come from is mentioned in Literature. But this is actually a Family Member! I almost decided to like the book. But only almost.

I expect I’ll look like an idiot when it’s shortlisted for every pretigious award.

The meeting; I didn’t manage to hold my tongue, partly because I’d said something blunt on the pre-meeting WhatsApp chat. Once we’d sat down to our usual excellent bring-something dinner and canvassed the state of architecture in Sydney (are developers running the show or are they weeping with frustration?), theatre (David Wenham is brilliant in An Iliad), they made me vent my spleen. Reluctantly at first but increasingly enjoying myself I complied. I happened to be sitting at one end of the table. Then, brilliantly, the man sitting at the other end spoke eloquently and at length about why he loved the book. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a conversation more.

I’m a firm believer that the perspective of someone who loves a book will be more interesting than that of a hater, so I’ll try to summarise what the lover said – and refrain from verbalising my different take.

In the previous week, he had started on a number of books that adhere to contemporary norms (a number of points of view presented turn by turn, etc.), and couldn’t finish any of them. He picked up Griefdogg and was delighted from the start that he didn’t know what was happening or where it was going. It felt like a brave book. It’s messy, throws a lot of stuff into the mix and sometimes it doesn’t work, but how much better to have something that tries and occasionally fails than something that plays safe the whole time.

Specifically, he loved the masculinity theme. There’s a sex scene near the start that makes comedy from a focus on performance, and the main plot line asks what happens if you radically reject the expectation that men will be over-responsible and over-worked.

The treatment of place is brilliant: Mildura as a small rural community where everyone knows everyone’s business, but everyone has secret griefs. At one point the main character’s adult child comes home from a time in Melbourne and names the way the city is ignorant and uncaring about rural realities – the book as a whole addresses that ignorance.

There’s a lot of hydrology, much of it highly technical, which provides a metaphorical underpinning.

Towards the end the main character creates a piece of public art, which my Book Group friend described in wonderful lyrical language.

The respectful treatment of Aboriginal issues in a book with only one peripheral Aboriginal character is impressive. In particular there’s a dig at urban pieties that turn out to be lethally uncaring when push comes to shove

As I was typing this, I received a text that began ‘A last ditch attempt to influence your blog.’ I’d love to quote the whole text, but I want to avoid spoilers (and if you want to avoid them, don’t read the back cover blurb). I’ll just quote this:

We have a new male hero created from a vey different story arc. A sometimes clumsy and overwritten one, but one that places the man’s newfound awareness squarely and beneficially in his community.

There were six of us, and we were pretty evenly divided. Of the two non-finishers, one had tried a number of times and failed to get enough traction to take him past the 7 percent mark. The other was still partway through the first of the three sections and quite enjoying it. Of the other two, one liked the book, and particularly found the ending wonderful (I can’t hold back completely – I loathed the ending, even more after he said why he loved it). The other was pretty much in my camp. He compared it to the work of theatre directors like Barry Kotsky – always drawing attention to themselves rather than to the work: it needed a couple more revisions, he said.

There were some points of agreement. We all enjoyed the high-quality dad jokes that are scattered through the text. A favourite was: ‘Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?’ You can find the answer on the interwebs.

A final thought: I’ve recently listened to Zac Seidler talking to Richard Fidler on ABC’s Conversations (you can hear it at this link). He talks about the limited opportunities in our society for men to talk about meaningful things. It made me realise all over again what a terrific thing this Book Group is.

The Book Group members are all men of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2024: My day four

Posted on 29 May 2024 | 3 comments

I had just two sessions on the last day of the Festival. The Emerging Artist came down with a heavy cold, but I was ruthless enough to leave her languishing at home today. One pleasant surprise was that, even thugh the SWF website says there is a no-refunds policy they are happy to give a credit – so we have prepaid for three sessions of next year’s festival (she also missed out on Sebastian Barry on Saturday night – rewatching some of Derry Girls from her sickbed.)

Sunday 26 May

12.30: Fragile Democracy

This was one of those panels where I’m interested not so much in the books written by the participants as in what they have to say about the world. As the Festival program put it:

Donald Trump and his attacks on the US electoral system have raised red flags about the strength of American democracy. But in an age of disinformation and civic decline, signs of fragility are visible elsewhere and Australia is no exception.

Former host of ABC’s Insiders Barrie Cassidy chaired this discussion. The formidable participants were:

  • Bruce Wolpe (Trump’s Australia), Senior Fellow at the United States Studies Centre who has worked with the Democrats in Congress during Obama’s first term and on the staff of PM Julia Gillard
  • Rosalind Dixon, Professor of Law at UNSW and co-author of perhaps the least easily spoken title of any book at the Festival, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy
  • Nick Bryant (When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present), who has a 30 year career in journalism, much of it as a foreign correspondent for the BBC.

The panellists were pretty much in furious agreement that there is currently a wold wide battle between autocracy and democracy. Naturally, most of the tie was spent on how this battle is being fought in the USA. ‘The beacon of democracy,’ Nick Bryant said, ‘is looking like a dumpster fire.’

We were reminded that the authoritarian tendency in the USA isn’t new – FDR, correctly seen as progressive and, in US terms, ‘liberal’, was applauded when he said in his inauguration speech: ‘ I may have to bend the rules of the Constitution to what I want to do.’

There was some discussion of the possibility of civil war in the US if Trump loses the election. It wouldn’t be like the last one, but even if there is no civil war, there won’t be civil peace.

All the panellists agreed that Australia’s institutions are strong: compulsory voting, preferential voting, ease of voting (there were some horror stories about how hard it can be to vote in the US), an independent Electoral Commission, and courts that aren’t as subject to political pressure. But we still need to be vigilant: for instance, Peter Dutton recently tried to introduce voter ID processes to make voting harder.

Someone said, ‘Australian democracy is a lot stronger than its politics.’

1.30: David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything

Richard Fidler was in conversation with David Wengrow, co-author with the late David Graeber of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2022). David Graeber was an anthropologist who played a leading role in the Occupy movement. When he and Wengrow, a British archaeologist met during the Occupy movement they had long conversations, not about politics but about archaeology. As Wengrow told him about current state of knowledge of the ancient past, he kept asking, ‘Why don’t I know this? Why isn’t this being taught?’

They decided to write a pamphlet, something without footnotes and scholarly paraphernalia, presenting current knowledge in a readable, integrated form. It turned out that this was harder than they thought, partly because of the extreme specialisation of archaeology: experts in ancient rock art don’t know what experts in ancient stone tools are doing or finding out. In the end, they had to write a substantial book.

The conversation touched on the opposing views of human history put forward by Rousseau (early humans were blissfully innocent, perhaps slightly imbecilic creatures who were corrupted by the formation of societies) and Hobbes (the war of all against all constrained by civilisation). wengrow observed that both these narratives are fantasies in which the early humans aren’t like any humans we know anything about. Likewise, he says archaeological findings disprove the narrative of Sapiens, which he assumed we have all read but I haven’t, and of Steven Pinker.

As to what those findings are: they are rich and complex, much more so than anyone has ever though was the case with early humans.

He argued that the luminaries of the enlightenment – Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau – were influenced by what they heard from Indigenous people from colonised nations who visited Paris and were sharply critical of teh inequalities and other manifestations of monarchy that they saw there. He spoke respectfully of Bruce Pascoe’s work, but seemed to be unaware that Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were buried with ritual elements tens of thousands of years ago – which as I understand it only reinforces his argument.

This session was recorded for the ABC’s Conversations program. I plan to listen when it’s broadcast as there were a lot of specifics to his argument that I know I’ll get wrong if I try to write them now. [Added later: The Conversations program is already online at this link.]

The festival is over for another year. What little I saw of it was terrific.

The booking system means that there are no longer terrible queues for the sessions with no guarantee of getting through the door.

There is a new approach to questions: you go to a website and put your question there. This has the great advantage of stopping people from getting up to tell their life story or promote their own world view. I think there may have a disadvantage: sometimes if the person on stage can actually see the questioner they can tailor their answer appropriately – as for example if the questioner is a young person.

I do wish there was more than one place selling coffee, as even though I’m not a coffee drinker I was pained to see the apparently permanent size of the queue.

And most of all I wish there was more poetry. Just one whose drawing power depends on his published prose isn’t enough. Surely there is a small room somewhere at Carriageworks that could be devoted to poetry – one where an event doesn’t need a big crowd to justify itself. There are at least half a dozen places in Sydney that organise regular poetry readings, there ar e a number of small publishers who specialise in poetry, and there are any number of fine poets who live locally.

But long live the SWF. I’ve come away with a swag of actual books and a list of others.

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Audio Books, sadly

Posted on 10 Jan 2020 | 10 comments

When the Emerging Artist and I were much younger, I used to read to her on long car trips. For quite a while now, my voice has given out after an alarmingly short time, and we have turned to other entertainments. Audio books we’ve enjoyed are Magda Szubanski’s reading of her memoir Reckoning, and Bruce Kerr and Helen Morse’s reading of Donald and Myfanwy Horne’s Dying: A Memoir, though we only listened to half of the latter. We couldn’t stand David Tredinnick’s actorly reading of Tim Winton’s Island Home, though we could tell the book itself was interesting.

This blog post reports on two more experiments on Audio books on car drives from Sydney to Aireys Inlet in Victoria.

Richard Fidler & Kári Gíslason, Saga Land (2017, audible.com 2018)

This is an introduction to the Icelandic sagas embedded in a travel book. It includes Kári Gíslason’s personal story of claiming his Icelandic identity – he was born in Iceland to an Australian mother, but his Icelandic father wasn’t acknowledged on his birth certificate, or at all until he went looking for him as a young adult. It also tells about the friendship between travelling companions Fidler and Gíslason. They wrote alternate chapters and each reads his own chapters in the audio book.

I loved the tellings of the Icelandic sagas – both for their own sakes and for the light they cast on books like Independent People and movies like Rams, and TV shows like Trapped. A year later, my mind has indelibly retained a chilling moment from one of the sagas where a woman exacts revenge for what would now be called an act of domestic violence. And Fidler and Gíslason were excellent company.

Either my ageing ears or our feeble car radio meant that Richard Fidler’s tendency to fade away at the end of sentences made his sections of the book hard to follow at times. But this was a minor blemish compared to readers of other books (see below).

Our car trip, in January last year, ended before the book did, and I didn’t blog about it immediately because I intended to read the rest of it to myself. But as more than a year has now passed, I have to admit that I’ll never get around to it. That is to say, it was a pleasant, instructive read, but not compelling enough to make me go to any trouble to finish it.

Evie Wyld, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (Bolinda Publishing 2011, read by David Tredinnick)

In spite of my having wanted to throw Evie Wyld’s more recent novel All the Birds, Singing across the room, we’d both enjoyed it enough to expect to enjoy this.

We didn’t. In spite of the pleasures provided to this North Queensland boy by a sugarcane-field setting, we gave up after three of the ten discs, partly because its two narrative strands were going to meet in fairly predictable ways, partly because in one of them the characters felts utterly contrived, especially a weirdly taciturn little girl, and partly because David Tredinnick’s ‘do the police in different voices’, though probably objectively excellent, got on our nerves. For my taste, his reading injects too much actorly interpretation between the writing and me, and I find myself fighting with him over the characters when I’d rather be lost in the story.

We shifted to podcasts – Kermode and Mayo’s film reviews and This American Life. Maybe if I go blind I’ll reconcile myself to audio books, and I’m not ruling out getting another one from the library if we do that drive again. But for now, I’m not an audio book fan.

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NSWPLA dinner

Posted on 18 May 2010 | 1 comment

There’s a quote from James Tiptree Jr I’ve been wanting to sneak into my blog for some time. When an editor asked her to write an afterword to her short story, ‘The Milk of Paradise’ she wrote that some authors are ‘walkie-talkie writers … who are named Mailer and Wolfe when they are good’ and went on:

But the rest of us, poor carnivores whose innards meagrely condense into speech. Only at intervals when the moon, perhaps, opens our throats do we clamber up on the rocks and emit our peculiar streams of sound to the sky. Good, bad, we do not know. When it is over we are finished, our glands have changed. Push microphones at us and you get only grumbles about the prevalence of fleas and the scarcity of rabbits.1

That, in short, is why I’ve become a dedicated paying guest at the annual  NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Dinner. I love to see those poor carnivores clamber up onto the podium to be honoured, even the ones who can’t manage any more than ‘Thank you’.

I nearly didn’t go this year, fearing that the dreaded PowerPoint’s incursion, begun at the shortlist announcement, would continue. I was also trying to think like a grown-up about the expense, and then there was the Dîner des Refusés precipitated by the nul prize for a playscript. But here I am again, home from the Art Gallery, out of pocket but flush with the inside dope, even though the on-the-spot tweeters and newspapers (with self-promoting or surprise-upset hooks) have beaten me to publication.

It turned out, no surprise, to be a pleasant evening. The company was convivial, the setting brilliant, the food excellent. There was no PowerPoint as such, but sadly the dinner has become an Event, the creation of Events Organisers, with glossily impersonal results. There was a would-be witty typewriter centrepiece on each table. Two huge television screens told us who was talking to us at any given moment, threatening but thankfully not quite managing to distract us from the mere humans on the stage between them. And the pause between the announcement of each winner’s name and their arrival at the microphone – that is, the time it took them to reach the stage, be photographed kissing the Premier and cross to the mike – was now filled, not just with applause and a buzz of conversation, but with a blast of fanfare from the sound system. I hope someone whispers to the Organisers that this isn’t the Oscars, still less the Logies.

Auntie Sylvia Scott welcomed us to country. As last year, she told us she was an avid reader, and revealed that though Nathan Rees had promised her a pile of books, she never saw any. As she left the stage Carol Mills, Director General of Communities NSW and MC for the evening, promised her a pile this year. She was gracious enough not to look sceptical.

Richard Fidler gave the address. He was funny, and with enough meat to be satisfying, with quotes ranging from Neil Gaiman (about the joys of being a writer), by way of Stalin (writers are the ‘engineers of the soul’) to the unnamed Bush aide (‘probably Karl Rove’) who derided the ‘reality based community’. He advise women in quest of a man to look to their bookshelves – men don’t care so much about appearances, it’s the books that count: ‘Ladies, if we see a copy of a book by Deepak Chopra or Erich von Daniken, we’re out of there.’ He recommended The Moth podcast, and inveighed against Twitter as the ruination of literature – all those writers being witty in 140 characters instead of being at work: ‘Get back to your desks you Gen Y bastards!’ (At that point I saw my Baby Boomer friend misrule discreetly tweeting.)

On to the awards:

The UTS Glenda Adams Prize for new writing: Andrew Croome – Document Z
I started to read this a while back but couldn’t bear to read yet another book on the subject. Perhaps seduced by the sub-Oscaresque music that accompanied him to the mike, Andrew Croome gave a straightforward thank you speech, an example followed by most of the award recipients. In particular he acknowledged his debt to University creative writing courses. The book started out as a PhD – ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s boring.’

The Community Relations Commission Award: Abbas El Zein – Leave to Remain: A Memoir
A lovely book. He said, ‘I never thought I’d shake hands with the Premier and be paid for it,’ introducing another recurring motif of writers responding to Kristina Keneally’s physical presence.

The NSW Premier’s Prize for Literary Scholarship: Philip Mead – Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry
I hope to read this hefty volume some day. The very tall Philip Mead (nickname ‘Tiny’) commented that it was lovely to stand next to someone of normal height. The Premier leaned over to his mike and said it was lovely to stand next to someone who was taller than her. He went on to thank, among others, independent Australian publishers, who are like tussocks: ‘we do everything we can to destroy them and they keep coming back.’

The Play Award: Controversially not awarded

The Script Writing Award: shared by Jane Campion for Bright Star and Aviva Ziegler for Fairweather Man
Jane is abroad. In accepting the award for her, the film’s producer Jan Chapman threw us the pleasing tidbit that in the absence of any letters from Fanny Bryce to Keats, Jane looked for inspiration on her character to her own teenage daughter. Aviva spoke about the ways writing a documentary is of its nature so much more a collaboration than other forms of writing.

The Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry: Jordie Albiston – The Sonnet According to ‘M’
I bought the last copy of this on my way home.

At this point in the evening, the main meal was served. I was the only one at my table vulgar enough to want to trade fish for meat. One of my fellow guests was gracious enough to do so. The steak and mushroom and mashed potato was delicious, though it didn’t look a bit like the way my mother used to do it. Then on with the show:

The Ethel Turner Prize for young people:Pamela Rushby – When the Hipchicks Went to War
Pamela Rushby wins the Me fail? I fly! award for the best acceptance speech. She may have been the only recipient who began with the formal ‘Distinguished guests’, but she recovered from that slightly distancing moment by telling us she had pitched the book to publishers as Apocalypse Now meets A Chorus Line. Apart from giving us some little known information about young women who went to the Vietnam War as entertainers, she thanked her family, ‘without whose support the book would have been finished in half the time’.

The Patricia Wrightson Prize for a children’s book: Allan Baillie – Krakatoa Lighthouse
Allan writes with remarkable precision, but he speaks with difficulty – so he can be difficult to follow. I thought he said that on this project his wife had to endure more than most writers’ wives because he’d been carrying on with an orang utan. I probably misheard, but he does have an unsettling sense of humour. He definitely did say that his wife climbed Son of Krakatoa with him.

The Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction: Paul McGeough – Kill Khalid: Mossad’s failed Hit … and the Rise of Hammas
‘Madame Premier, Ms Premier?’ ‘Kristine.’ He mainly thanked his editors, and said very little about the book.

The Christina Stead Prize for fiction: J.M. Coetzee – Summertime
Unsurprisingly JMC wasn’t there. Meredith Purnell (?) from Random House read a brief note: ‘Whether I deserve to hold my head up with the esteemed previous winners is something only time will tell.’ So Summertime!

The People’s Choice Award: Cate Kennedy – The World Beneath
‘I can’t believe my luck that all this has come about from just telling stories.’

Book of the Year: Paul McGeough – Kill Khalid
This time, without notes, he spoke about the vulnerability of writers in these late-capitalist times (my term), and daringly drew a parallel with the Taliban, a ragtag collection of warriors holding at bay the great technological firepower of the USA, the closest the evening came to ‘the prevalence of fleas and the scarcity of rabbits’.

The Special Award: The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature
This may have been an inevitable award, but it was sad that we didn’t get to honour an ageing lion, who would have responded memorably.

I didn’t realise until this morning how many of the writers receiving awards were born and partly educated outside Australia: Abbas El Zein of course, but also Jane Campion, Aviva Ziegler (I’m guessing from her accent), Allan Baillie, Paul McGeough and J M Coetzee. That’s at least six out of eleven. Does this mean, as a friend of mine insists, that Australians can’t write? I don’t think so. Does it mean anything at all? I don’t know.

The main pleasure of the evening for me, and I suspect others, was catching up with friends. I was sitting with people I didn’t know well, and that was another pleasure, especially as the three people I could talk to most easily were judges who managed to be gloriously indiscreet about some of this year’s processes. It’s often said that literary awards are given to compromise candidates, books that are no one’s favourites but that no one objects to. It seems this was not the case with these awards. There were sharp divisions of opinion over a couple of them, and my impression is some of the uncontroversial decisions had their share of anguish.
——
1From the collection, Meet Me at Infinity, edited by Jeffrey D Smith, 2000, p 238

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