Tag Archives: Sebastian Barry

Sydney Writers’ Festival 2024: My day three, evening

Posted on 28 May 2024 | 5 comments

Saturday 7.30 pm: Sebastian Barry: Old God’s Time

If I’ve realised that Sebastian Barry was appearing by video link I might not have booked for this session, but that would have been a mistake. A tiny Kate Evans sat on the stage in front of a huge Sebastian Barry speaking to us from early morning in Ireland in the room where, he said, he had written the book they were discussing, Old God’s Time (link is to my blog post).

Whether it was because Barry was speaking to us from the safety of his own house, or because of a paradoxical effect of long-distance communicating, or whether it might have happened anyhow, this session had a wonderful intimacy about it. Almost everything he said enriched my understanding and enjoyment of the book.

When Kate Evans asked about the physical setting of the book, Barry answered straightforwardly and then went on to talk about the novel’s seed being planted in a brief period of his childhood when he lived in that building. I don’t know anything of his life story, but he may have been hinting that the book child’s situation – he and his mother are in hiding from his abusive father – in some way echoes his own experience.

My highlight of this session, and of the whole festival, came when Kate Evans, referring to a tirade against the Catholic Church delivered by the character Tom Kettle, asked if Tom’s rage was also Sebastian’s. (Someone read this passage out at my book group meeting – it’s a stunningly passionate piece of writing, and Evans’s question is inevitable.) Barry asked Evans if she would read the passage, and when she apparently didn’t hear his request but read out a couple of isolated phrases, he paused, as if deciding how honestly to respond and then gave a complex answer:

A) The first rule of novel writing, he said, is not to write in anger. He spoke a little about the mysterious nature of novels. The writer sits in a room and puts words on paper. After a number of processes involving many other people, someone sits in their usual reading place and reads the words. The characters who have been imagined by the novelist are imagined all over again by the reader.

B) Though Tom is an imaginary character, his anger is like that of real-life survivors. It gives voice to things that need saying, and when you make the effort of listening to it, you are receiving a gift. Barry felt that he was receiving such a gift from Tom.

C) He didn’t stop there. There was a moment in 1960, he said, when Archbishop McQuaid (a historical personage mentioned in the novel) was given evidence of child sexual abuse committed by a priest in his archdiocese. He consulted an Auxiliary Bishop, Patrick Dunne, asking him if he considered that the crime was a crimen pessimum (a crime of the worst kind). Dunne said he thought it was. McQuaid responded that he would keep it quiet anyway, because it would cause a scandal that would do great harm to the church. That moment of decision ruined the lives of thousands of children, and this was the object of Tom’s rage.

But for Barry, there is another twist: Patrick Dunne was his cousin, closely related to a man who appears honourably in one of Barry’s novels. On realising that this man was present when the decision was made, Barry felt that his own DNA had been in the room. Irrational as it may be, he felt complicit. I understood him to be speaking a difficult personal truth but also – though he didn’t spell this out – making a point about fiction-writing: clickbait outrage is easy but it doesn’t make for great fiction. Tom the character can be outraged, but the person who creates him needs to be wary of claiming the moral high ground.

Astonishingly, but necessarily, Kate Evans then moved on to the next question, and Sebastian Barry moved on with her, leaving me – and surely I wasn’t the only one – in awe at what had just been given me.

The session ended with a reading, in which Barry was transformed into Tom Kettle and his glorious language filled the room. In the passage, Tom is listening to a new friend playing Kol Nidrei, Op. 47 by Max Bruch on the cello (link is to a performance by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra). We were then treated to a performance of the piece arranged for cello and piano, performed by Melissa Barnard and Lee Dionne from the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2024: My day three, afternoon

Posted on 27 May 2024 | 16 comments

Sue from Whispering Gums respectfully suggested that I not try to squeeze a whole day of the SWF into one blog post. Day Two’s post was a marathon to write but hadn’t realised it was imposing a burden on readers as well. So, even though none of my subsequent days were as loaded as Friday, I’m taking her advice. Here are the first two of Saturday’s three sessions.

Saturday 25 May

1 pm: Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood: Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra

This session is a variation on my standard session: two people talking about one book with one other person.

Bruce Pascoe’s most recent book, Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra, shares authorship with his wife, Lyn Harwood. They chatted with veteran journalist Kerry O’Brien about their project at Yumburra, their relationship, the devastating bushfires of 2019–2020, the impact of Pascoe’s book Dark Emu (my blog post here) and the subsequent backlash, and related matters.

After Dark Emu‘s success, Pascoe decided to put his newfound wealth to good use. Aware of a new enthusiasm for native foods –  he didn’t use the phrase ‘bush tucker’ – he was concerned that there was little consideration for benefit to Aboriginal people. So he bought the farm at Yumburra to grow food, employ Aboriginal people and make a declaration of Aboriginal sovereignty.

I didn’t get a clear sense of the book Black Duck, but I gather it’s in effect a diary of a year spent at the farm. Lyn Harwood spoke eloquently about the effect of writing things down. You spend most of the time dealing with things as they arise, just doing the work. it’s not until you stop to write it down that life, ‘especially the sensuousness of life’, is properly imprinted. The process of writing the diaries was a way of attending to what was happening on the land – not just the work, but the effects of the changing seasons.

Kerry O’Brien, excellent journalist that he is, gave Pascoe opportunities to address the various fronts on which he has been attacked.

On this subject of his Aboriginal identity, he described some of the cultural work he had to do. There was an occasion when he said something stupid and an Aunty said, ‘You know nothing. You know nothing. You go back to the library.’ She may have been speaking metaphorically, but he took her literally and went back to the library to research the history he had got wrong. His Aboriginal identity is contentious among some people, but not among his local mob. ‘I have a very small connection and I admit to it,’ he said. But I identify with it.’ These questions of identity, he said, are a distraction from what matters: when he offered a non-Aboriginal shopkeeper some vanilla lily bulbs he had grown on the farm, her first response was not to consider the possibilities being offered to her but to as, ‘What proportion Aboriginal are you?’ The gasps from the audience demonstrated that he had made his point.

On the validity of the argument of Black Emu, he cited the work of archaeologist Michael Westaway: with the assistance of the Gorringe family, he set out to test Dark Emu‘s hypothesis about pre-settlement history in Mithaka country in Queensland, and found ample evidence that here had been substantial ‘town life’ there.

My main takeaway from the session was the reiteration of the key message of Dark Emu: Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people have a shared history. One of Pascoe’s mentors, commenting on Dark Emu, said: ‘If I’m going to keep my culture, I have to give it away.’ If non-Aboriginal people aren’t invited in, they (we) remain angry, unsettled spirits. Over millennia, Aboriginal people had a continent where there were no wars over land: each group has responsibility for their own Country. If your neighbour is weak or in trouble, you can help them out, but you cannot take their land.

Pascoe says that, in spite of the Referendum result, he thinks there’s a big change coming, as people come to realise that the future of Aboriginal people is the future of all Australians. Just as his work at Yuburra is offering possibilities for agriculture, a future is being offered to us in many ways as a gift with an embrace.

3 pm: Bringing the Past to Life

Ah! A proper panel: three people talking about one book each to one other person. The writers were Francesca de Tores (Saltblood), Mirandi Riwoe (Sunbirds) and Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water). Abraham Verghese had Covid, so appeared on a giant screen behind the others. The fourth person was Kate Evans of the ABC’s Bookshelf. The session was most satisfactory.

I hadn’t read any of the books, though I had read Mirandi Riwoe’s earlier novel Stone Sky Gold Mountain (link is to my blog post).

Kate Evans ruled with a rod of iron, asking a series of questions, and making sure that the writers had roughly equal amount of time in response to each question: setting, characters, plots, dark matter. No butting in or dominating. (I’m embarrassed to say it, but perhaps it helped that the only man was a person of colour.) As a result, even without being read to, we got a good sense of each of the novels.

Saltblood is set in the Caribbean in the 1720s, towards the end of the golden age of piracy, and is based on the historical women Mary Read and Anne Bonny. De Tores said that she was happy to call Mary Read a woman, although her gender identity was complex – she was raised as a boy and spent most of her life as a pirate dressed as a man. There’s an early book about pirates – I didn’t catch its name but it is evidently the main if not the only source of everything we think we know about pirates from that time. In that book, the lurid potential of women pirates was played up, and in its second edition the illustrations showed them swashbuckling with breasts exposed. Saltblood sounds like fun, but focuses on more interesting things than bare boobs.

Sunbirds features an Indonesian family in Western Java in 1941. The family and their servants deal with issues related to Dutch colonisation and nationalist resistance, and imminent invasion by Japan. A Dutch pilot is wooing the daughter of the family, who is torn between loyalty to her family and the attractions of life in the Netherlands. Meanwhile a servant of the family has a brother who is part of the resistance. Miranda Riwoe described herself as Eurasian, and so drawn to the plight of the daughter.

The Covenant of Water draws on Abraham Verghese’s own family background in Kerala (he was born and raised in South Arica, but Kerala was always in the background). The story covers three generations in the first half of the 20th century. There is a child bride. Verghese said he was playing against stereotype by giving her a happy marriage. He is a doctor specialising in infectious disease (he pointed out the irony that he was attending on screen because of a coronavirus), and the novel pays attention to advances made in medical science in the period it covers.

So, three interesting books for the TBR shelf.

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Sebastian Barrry’s Old God’s Time at the book group, page 77

Posted on 14 March 2024 | 2 comments

Sebastian Barry, Old God’s Time (Faber and Faber 2023)

Before the meeting: Tom Kettle is a nine-months retired Irish policeman, living quietly suicidal in an annexe of a castle in Dalkey, on the coast outside Dublin. Two young coppers from his old unit come knocking on his door with a request that he read the file of an old case he is particularly suited to help with. The conversation is oblique, but we understand that the case has to do with child sexual abuse by Catholic priests.

It’s the set-up for a Cincinnatus story: the hero is summoned out of retirement to do battle with the forces of evil. The reader settles down for a yarn whose shape is familiar, and whose subject is also, horribly, familiar: the terrible history of sexual abuse of children by Irish clergy.

From the beginning, however, Sebastian Barry is in no great hurry to get that story under way. Tom gives the young coppers shelter from a storm overnight, but barely looks at their file. He is still grieving the death of his wife some years earlier, and is missing his two adult children. The visit from the young men and then a couple of days later from their boss, his own former boss, stirs up memories of his terrible childhood in an institution, and the sexual abuse inflicted on his wife by a priest when she was a child in another institution. This is no longer a straightforward police procedural featuring a heroic retired copper. It becomes something much more elusive than that: part ghost story, part psychological thriller, part fictional misery memoir, part dramatisation of the long tail of child abuse, part revenge tragedy. And part, perhaps, a portrait of a mind in the early stages of dementia.

Bit by bit a tale of horror emerges. At times it seems that only Sebastian Barry’s brilliantly musical prose and the presence of the land, sea and town are all that stand between us and the abyss. At the same time, it is a deeply humane book that features a gallery of odd characters (odd in the sense of interesting and surprising), and wonderfully memorable dialogue.

There are so many twists that I’m reluctant to say more about the plot. I was gripped, and I trusted the truthfulness of the story, though (no spoilers) I was not completely convinced by the main event of the final act: too much hinges on ‘an expression of pure depravity‘, italics in the original.

The emotional spine of the novel is Tom’s love for his wife, June. They gave each other the possibility of decent lives after the desolation of their childhoods. On page 77, he is remembering their early days together.

Here’s the paragraph that fills the page –’those things’ in the first sentence is the June’s childhood spent in an orphanage (no details), and the only other things that may need explaining are that June is working as a waitress in a Wimpy bar, and that she has been fostered by a prim and moralistic woman, Mrs Carr:

For so long she was quiet and never spoke about those things. They’d been going out for a whole month, him fairly killing himself to get out on the bus or the train to her, from his lousy digs in Glasnevin, or his work in Harcourt Street. He tried to see her every day. If only the old train station there had still been open, oh bejesus, but he had to gallop all the way across Dublin, through the Green, down Grafton Street, skirt the college, stampede up Abbey Street and onto Talbot, and go like the clappers to Connolly station for the 5.30 to Bray. He was younger then and fit but it was summer all the same and he was obliged to change into a spare shirt in the tiny jacks as noisy as a drumkit, and wash the sweat off his chest and arms into the bargain. After a month of this he might have qualified for the Irish team at the Olympics. A whole month, a fortune in train fares. Couples might be expected to talk through their life stories the first night – not June. She liked to tell him all that had happened that day at the café, maybe in just a little too much detail, but he could bear it. He liked her in the aftermath of her work, weary but not bone-weary, her feet aching. She’d have thrown on her jeans and grabbed a jacket. Her lovely denim jacket, the very height of hippy fashion. The jeans she had worn into the bath as instructed by the label, and let shrink on her legs, skin-tight. She would never meet him in her digs, of course, because it was some kind of religious gaff for the protection of Catholic girls – Mrs goddamn Carr lived in Stillorgan, far away from the Wimpy. Not that he even knew about Mrs Carr then. He knew nothing. She loved to natter on but she never talked. He supposed that was it, that was how she was. In a way he was relieved she didn’t go serious on him, because he was the guardian of his own silences, had been all his life.

It’s so alive, carrying the reader along with sheer vitality – the vivid evocation of first love remembered in old age, and details like the tiny jacks (that’s a toilet to non-Irish speakers, not the only one in the book), the word-map of Dublin. Then, after a little joke about the Olympics and a wry complaint about the expense, the paragraph turns to June: her work, her fashionable clothes, her chattiness, her home, and, crucially, her silence about her past. Then the key sentence, so deftly placed that you might almost miss it, ‘She loved to natter on but she never talked,’ and his version of himself as ‘the guardian of his own silences.’

Is it a particularly Irish thing, this ability to ‘natter on’ without talking? It certainly feels familiar to me from my own Irish-heritage background. Almost all the conversations in this novel are elliptical, from the first visit of the young gardaí to the climactic revelations about June’s death – we can mostly guess at what isn’t being said, but we have to work at it.

After the meeting:
There were seven of us, excellent food, a friendly dog under the table who one suspected was more interested in the food than in us, glass walls open to a garden on a gorgeous early-autumn Sydney night. Once we had sat down to eat, and a number of book-group-relevant announcements had been made – the long aftermath of an injury sustained at a much earlier meeting, the imminent sale of the ouse where we were meeting, my own modest act of self-publication – the evening took an unaccustomed turn. One man decided to take on a smilingly stern facilitator role and proposed that we each take an initial turn of two minutes to give a quick first response to the book, and then stomped cheerfully on anyone who attempted to speak out of turn. This is probably standard practice in other book groups, and if so I can see why. That first round was rich. Here are some highlights (as they survive in my poor memory):

  • L– loved the Irishness of it: the way the dead were still present, the oddities of the community, the evocation of the country
  • G– was keen on the book but felt that the final movement piled things on too much
  • I– said it was a beautifully written Irish novel, but he wasn’t sure the world needed any more beautifully written irish novels. He thought it wasn’t as good as the other Sebastian Barry book we’ve read, A Long Long Way (link to my blog post)
  • D– found the prose irritating, and didn’t enjoy the experience of being inside the meandering mind of an old man – he got quite enough of that already, thanks very much (someone pointed out, later when allowed by the facilitator, that Tom is 66, a good bit younger than D– and most of the rest of us)
  • J– (that is, me) said something passable, and mentioned the, um, glibness of that ‘expression of depravity‘
  • S– said he loved and hated the book. When he started he thought, ‘Not another novel abut child sex abuse, and not another novel about the Catholic Church,’ but he read on and was often delighted and moved. He understood something very early that others of us took half the book to realise (I’m carefully avoiding spoilers).
  • N– thought that the oddities of Tom’s memory weren’t so much about cognitive decline as the way traumatic experiences can be remembered as if they happened to someone else. He reminded us of the pivotal moment when Tom, having been unsure whether some of the stories in his head were June’s experiences or his own, realises with a shock that something he had remembered as something he witnessed had actually happened to him.

Others shared my reaction to the word ‘depravity’ and the way it suggests a lack of imaginative commitment to the big events near the end. But, as often happens, we disagreed about the very ending, which I don’t think is ambiguous at all. What I hadn’t realised until the meeting is how that ending – however you interpret it – echoes key elements of the opening pages. It would be far too spoilerish to say more.

The consensus was that this was an excellent book, but something a little more cheerful might be called for next time.

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Bookblog #65: The Book Group

Posted on 19 February 2024 | 4 comments

I originally posted the following to the original version of this blog on 22 April 2004. I’m resurrecting it nearly 20 years later because my book group is currently reading another Sebastian Barry novel.

Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way (Viking 2005)

Pasted Graphic

I missed the last meeting of my book group, where they discussed, among other things, Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope and Stephen Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken. I was saved from the embarrassment of admitting that I hadn’t read either of them by an invitation I couldn’t refuse: to see Zack Snyder’s Watchmen with my sons on the giant iMax screen. But I arrived at last night’s meeting with a clear conscience. I had struggled with the first third or so of A Long Long Way.

There’s a huge field out there of First World War novels, and I know some people can’t get enough of them, but the déjà vu was a bit much for me: from Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, which I read an awfully long time ago, to Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, they all tell the same monstrous story. The fact that the cover design of my library copy of A Long Long Way uses the same photograph as one of Pat Barker’s books only added to the turn-off. And then there was Sebastian Barry’s prose: not at all a transparent vehicle for the story, but calling attention to itself by its Irish musicality, asking to be read slowly, even aloud. Here’s a random paragraph from the early pages:

Willie Dunne’s father, in the privacy of his policeman’s quarters in Dublin Castle, was of the opinion that Redmond’s speech was the speech of a scoundrel. Willie’s father was in the Masons though he was a Catholic, and on top of that he was a member of the South Wicklow Lodge. It was King and Country he said a man should go and fight for, never thinking that his son Willie would go as soon as he did.

All that repetition and inversion and balance and general quirkiness is beautiful, but when you start reading a novel that’s written in such prose, on a subject you feel may have been done to death, you’re not necessarily enthusiastic.

Resistance proved futile. The subject, I confess, is huge enough to generate a potentially infinite number of novels, each with its own urgency and richness, its own take on things, its own ability to compel. The First World War may yet turn out to be the war to end wars if we can only learn its lessons. There’s a powerful story, well told here, in the situation of the Irish who fought for the King of England in Flanders while their compatriots were battling the forces of the same king in the streets of Dublin. Worse – and I trust completely that Sebastian Barry didn’t make this up – there were Irish recruits among the army units that fired on the Easter Uprising rebels in 1916. The novel tells the story of Willie Dunne, one of those recruits.

There was no controversy at the group. The book had touched us all. Someone said that books such as this were very important to counter the nationalistic garbage that comes at us in Australia as Anzac day approaches, obscuring the reality of modern wars. One guy arrived late, having read the wrong book, Birdsong by the wrong Sebastian, surname Faulks. Apart from giving rise to much merriment, this threw a different light on my déjà vu response: we would mention some detail from ‘our’ book, and he would exclaim, ‘That’s in this one too!’

As an added extra, someone had recently rediscovered a cache of his childhood reading, and gave each of us a comic from the early 1960s. Here’s mine:

war006

Different war, different propaganda.

Posted: Wed – April 22, 2009 at 08:01 AM

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End of year lists 2012

Posted on 26 December 2012 | 3 comments

As if it isn’t enough to be shopping and wrapping and cooking and unwrapping and eating and searching for lost dogs and blocking our ears to keep out the piped carols, it’s the season for drawing up Best-Of lists.

The Art Student’s best five movies (with links to the movies’ IMDb pages):

A Separation (Asghar Farhadi 2011): ‘Definitely the best movie this year. We got to see how complex it all is for secular Muslims in Iran.’

Lore (Cate Shortland 2012): ‘Up there with A Separation. You don’t believe you can watch yet another film about Jews and Nazis, yet here it was, original and fresh. I hope it wins an Oscar. I liked Somersault too.’

The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar 2011): ‘Creepy,’ she said, ‘but good.’

This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino 2011): ‘I loved the great humour, the art, the spectacular musical event.”

The Sessions (Ben Lewin 2012): ‘I liked having nudity and sex without it being voyeuristic.’

My best five movies, chosen fairly arbitrarily (with arbitrary reason given) from a short list of 19 that included all five of the Art Student’s picks:

Liberal Arts (Josh Radnor 2012) features a main character who walks around the city reading. I identified. It also reminded me of the pleasures of Eric Rohmer movies.

Sing Me the Songs that Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle (Lian Lunson 2012) pips The Sapphires (Wayne Blair 2012) at the post for my musical of the year. It’s a concert movie that invites us into extraordinary intimacy with a brilliantly musical family. Martha Wainwright sings ‘First Born’, which her mother wrote for her brother, and which we played a lot when our firstborn son was being ‘the first to crawl’.

Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki 2011) made me feel irrationally pleased with myself or recognizing the oddly deadpan directorial style from Drifting Clouds, which I saw and loved decades ago.

The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius 2011) was a moderately enjoyable film until the final moment, which resolved a plot point I had been half-awarely worrying over, and vastly expanded the movie’s meaning.

Weekend (Andrew Haigh 2011): In spite of the phenomenal consumption of alcohol and other drugs, which would normally be enough to put me right off, I loved the unsentimental, unprurient portrayal of two characters who are completely taken with each other, including sexually.

The worst movie: We both picked Sophie Lellouche’s bland, self-indulgent Paris–Manhattan. But don’t take this as a solid judgement on the film as it might have miraculously picked up after the first hour, which is all we could bear. If we had to name a movie we stayed the course for, the Art Student would pick Skyfall, which she just plain hated, and I might have to pick Bernie, because Jack Black’s creepiness and the creepiness of the subject matter were from different universes.

The Art Student’s best books (she wouldn’t be limited to five), listed here in no particular order, with links to my blog entries or the book’s LibraryThing page:

1bmMartin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney (2011): ‘Full of surprises and delights, about the way an artist sees the world.’

090787181XIrfan Orga, Portrait of a Turkish Family (©1950, Eland & Galeri Kayseri 2004): ‘Compellingly tells of the transition from a feudal society to modernity as a result of war. Also wonderful was the insider child’s view of life under the veil.’

20120704-175516.jpgHilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012): ‘I’m glad it won the Booker. I’m completely hooked on the story, and looking forward to the third book, although having fallen in love with Cromwell I’m not looking forward to his death.’

1920898581Heather Goodall, From Invasion to Embassy (1996): ‘A must-read for all Australians, especially those who think the dispossession of Aboriginal people all happened in the distant past.’

1ccStephen Gilchrist, editor, Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art (2012): ‘I’m only half way through this but it’s a great, accessible introduction to the complexity of Australian Indigenous art.’

Edwina Shaw, Thrill Seekers (2012): ‘I read this in one sitting. I couldn’t put it down even though a lot was uncomfortable.’

0007149530Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (2008): ‘Fascinating portraits of scientists in the late 18th century, when science and romanticism were closely joined. Particularly good on Banks and the Herschels.’

0670033804Sebastian Barry, The Long Way Home (2005) and On Canaan’s Side (2011): ‘Two completely absorbing novels. The first is probably the best novel of the First World War I’ve read, and the second extends the story to Irish immigration to the USA, and the past catching up with you, written convincingly in the voice of an 80 year old woman.’

My best books, which I’ve kept down to just five by declaring the AS’s list off limits:

20120224-180529Fàbio Moon & Gabriel Bà, Daytripper (2011): A gem of a comic book by twin brothers from Brazil, this is a string of connected short stories that celebrates a human life as a miracle of survival.

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (2008): A story of colonial India that manages to be a gripping romance at the same time as blasting any romantic nostalgia for the Raj to oblivion.

Yalata and Oak Valley Communities with Christobel Mattingley, Maralinga, the Anangu Story (2009): it was a toss-up between this and Tohby Riddle’s miraculous Unforgotten for my picture book of the year. This is a different kind of miracle from Tohby’s – it opens a space for a multitude of voices to speak about the lethal indifference to Indigenous Australians on the part of he British atomic test at Maralinga, and about the resilience of the Anangu people.

Ross Gibson, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002): I choose this over Gibson’s brilliant 26 Views of the Starburst World, which was published this year, because the earlier book made me understand something of the colonisation of my North Queensland home that I had read about previously but managed not to grasp.

Jennifer Maiden, Liquid Nitrogen (2012): I read quite a bit of poetry this year. Possibly the major revelation was Byron’s Don Juan, but I haven’t finished reading that, and I might have chosen Liquid Nitrogen anyway, as I feel that Jennifer Maiden’s stories, meditations and dialogues help me to live in the modern world.

A note on the gender balance front: I would have thought my reading was fairly every spread between male and female writers, but numbers don’t cater to wishful thinking. According to my blog statistics, I read 34 books by men and 22 by women.

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SWF 2012: Poetry, prose, performance

Posted on 20 May 2012 | 3 comments

Here it is, Sunday already and this is my blog on Friday at the Writers’ Festival. Sorry! All this talking to people takes up good blogging time.

After a morning spent catching up on email and keeping the neglected dog company, I bussed back to the Wharf for what Kate Lilley called the Mum Show: Dorothy Hewett Remembered.

It’s ten years since Dorothy died and this Monday would have been her 89th birthday. The room was full of fans, friends, fellow poets and family, including my former employer Katharine Brisbane, founder of Currency Press. The elderly woman sitting beside me told me that when she was a Communist in Melbourne in the 1950s, someone from the Party had said to her, ‘There’s a young woman Party Member who’s just come over from Perth. She doesn’t know anyone yet and has a very sick baby. Would you go and visit her?’ The young woman was Dorothy and her friendship with my new acquaintance endured.

I expect that half the people in the room could have shared Dorothy Hewett / Merv Lilley stories (Merv, as larger-than-life as Dorothy, is her widower, whose health is too fragile to allow him to attend). On this occasion, fittingly, Dorothy was celebrated almost entirely through her own words: ‘I used to ride with Clancy’, ‘On Moncur Street’, ‘The Dark Fires Burn in Many Rooms’, other poems, excerpts from memoir and a conference paper.

Kate Lilley was joined by her sister Rozanna Lilley and their brother Joe Flood, as well as Fiona Morrison (editor), Gig Ryan (poet), Rosie Scott (novelist). As a finale we were invited to sing along with Dorothy’s song ‘Weevils in the Flour’, which Joe described as ‘synonymous with the Depression in Australia’:

Dole bread is bitter bread
Bitter bread and sour
There's grief in the taste of it
And weevils in the flour.

I had a ticket for my next session, so no need to queue, and could spend some time catching up with old friends, one of whom I didn’t recognise until we were introduced – embarrassingly, we had chatted as strangers the day before.

Then I crossed the road to the Sydney Theatre for some prose in The Big Reading. This is as much a tradition as Thursday’s pitching session, but this one has been on my must-see list for years. I love being read to, and I’ve been introduced to some fabulous writers. I also tend to nod off – though not deliberately: my sleep mechanism has a mind of its own and is unyielding in its judgement. This year’s sleep-inducers will not be identified.

As always, the writers were wonderfully diverse in age, gender, nationality, and reading style.

Emily Perkins, from New Zealand, played a straight bat with an excerpt from her most recent novel Forest. Geoff Dyer’s comic tale of cultural difference and queue jumping from Geoff in Venice, Death in Varanasi struck a chord – pertinent for me as I’d just seen a man who could have been from Varanasi blithely bypass the previous session’s sluggishly moving queue.

Riikka Pulkkinen read her quiet, introspective piece in Finnish first ‘so you get the idea’, a great way of educating us in how to listen to someone whose English is a little unsteady. Jesmyn Ward’s Katrina piece would have been the highlight of the evening if she hadn’t been followed by Sebastian Barry, who began and ended in resonant song and filled the space with the music of his narrative, from The Other Side of Canaan.

Then we hopped in the car, stopped off at home to feed the aforementioned dog, picked up some friends and drove to Bankstown for the not-to-be-missed BYDS and Westside Publications event, this year entitled Moving People.

With Ivor Indyk as tutelary deity and Michael Mohammed Ahmad as inspired energiser, these events are always strikingly staged. This year there was a microphone and a lectern on a bare stage, backed by a screen. Each of the fourteen participating writers in turn strode out from the wings and read to us without introduction, explanation or by your leave. This created a tremendous sense of connection between each reader and the audience – there was nowhere to hide. Unlike at the rest of the Festival, there was no veil of celebrity, no established persona to speak through. The exceptions test but don’t demolish the rule: Luke Carman has appeared in the pages of Heat and in This Is the Penguin Plays Rough Book of Short Stories, about which I’ll blog when I’ve finished reading it; Fiona Wright, also with Heat connections, published Knuckle, her first book of poetry, last year; Michael Mohammed Ahmad himself appeared recently in Roslyn Oades’s brilliant I’m Your Man Downstairs at Belvoir Street. Their pieces – respectively an oddly dissociative tale of male, twenty-something aspiring inner-city writers, a memoir of a stint as a young female journalist in Sri Lanka, and a riproaring cautionary tale about young Lebanese men, cars and drugs – were given no special treatment, simply taking their places as part of the evening’s tapestry. Benny Ngo did some spectacular break dancing while his recorded words played. Nitin Vengurlekar had a nice turn reading absurd short poems from crumpled pages found in his jacket pockets. A smooth essay on getting the dress codes wrong in Indonesia, a dramatic monologue from a supermarket security guard, traveller’s tales, the chronicle of a shared house experience, a young Muslim woman’s story of getting a tattoo and her family’s unexpected response (this one sounded like autobiography, but the writer’s family were in the row in front of us and their attitude was not at all that of the story’s family): it occurred to me that part of the reason that I was less enthusiastic than many people about Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap may be partly that his treatment of multicultural suburbia doesn’t seem so very groundbreaking if you’ve been following the creations of this group.

And they gave us pizza!

[Added on Wednesday: Kevin Jackson, theatre blogger, was at Moving People too. You can read his excellent account of it here. And the Australian Bookshelf blogged it here.]

I’ll write about the weekend tomorrow.

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