**Australia (general thread)

This is a thread for general discussion of Australian literature. Please feel free to create other threads as desired but made sure your thread title communicates clearly what you will be discussing there.

Five Bells by Gail Jones

Briefly, Five Bells tells the story of four different people, all, at the moment the novel opens, are enroute to or through the Circular Quay (pronounced "key"), the hub of Sydney Harbor. And each person is lost in thought, preoccupied by memories. As Jones explores the backstories stories of each of the four, she deftly weaves, in her characteristic lyrical prose, threads between the four of them. There are reoccurring motifs like snow and Russian literature and the Sydney Opera House.

"It was moon-white and seemed to hold within it a great, serious stillness. The fan of its chambers leant together, inclining to the water. An unfolding thing, shutters, a sequence of sorts. Ellie marvelled that it had ever been created at all, so singular a building, so potentially faddish, or odd. And that shape of supplication, like a body bending into the abstraction of a low bow or a theological gesture. Ellie could imagine music in there, but not people somehow. It looked poised in a kind of alertness to acoustical meanings, concentrating on sound waves, opened to circuit and flow.

Yes, there it was. Leaning into the pure morning sky."

Each character sees the building differently, using a different metaphor. And here, I think, the author is using this particular exercise to illustrate how we remember, each of us remembering the same things but slightly different through the lens of who we are.

I loved revisiting Sydney through this book. Her descriptions are wonderful. The story though makes one, like her characters of Ellie, Catherine, James and Pei Xing, thoughtful, wistful. But then it is a book about memory.

I am a die-hard Gail Jones fan, and I don't think this is my favorite of her books, but it is another beautiful piece of literature.

And for a local's take on the book, I would encourage everyone to read amandameale's review of it in Belletrista. She elaborates on the book and on the poem "Five Bells" by Kenneth Slessor, quoted as an epigraph.

I read two excellent Australia books last year, both of which really used the bleak Australian landscape as part of the story:

Three Dog Night by Peter Goldsworthy

Martin has just returned to Australia - with his beloved English wife - after ten years spent in London. One of the first things they do is look up the old friend from medical school whom he has always loved and looked up to. But they find Felix dramatically changed - cynical, confrontational, unwelcoming. Despite this, Martin and Lucy try and reach out to him, and there are signs that they are getting through. But what will they need to sacrifice in the process?

I found this book almost breathtaking. Although the storyline is fairly unlikely, the quality of the writing more than makes up for it, carrying the reader along and making the wildest events seems plausible. One example of this is that although Felix is almost unforgivably rude at their first meeting, the reader can completely understand what it is about him which makes Martin and Lucy persevere. And the events of the story unfold with a sort of tragic inevitability.

Goldsworthy also handles extremely well the variations of tone within the story - the drama of the main story, with, for example, the humour and cringing embarrassment of the social occasions involving the pompous senior doctor.

Sample: Our eyes lock. My heart hammers against the bars of its cage. Standard boy-meets-girl disruptions to physiology, but I have never felt them so powerfully. I feel unstable inside, as if all my organs have shaken loose from their bony shelves and leapt out into the unknown.

Dirt Music by Tim Winton

What do you do when your luck runs out?

Some people let their lives become a bitter search for revenge. Others decide to defy fate: "Russian bloke told me once. Said we all die. But you might as well die with music. Go out big."

Georgie Jutland has lived a chequered but adventurous life, fleeing from her family's bourgeois respectability. She's been as fearless about discarding men as she has about changing continents. But one day, she concludes that her luck has run out. She has lost the tough detachment she needed for her career as a cancer nurse. She has landed, like driftwood, in a feudalistic township in the brutal landscape of Western Australia. And without the self-confidence, her defiant brashness is starting to feel like empty bravado.

The man she's currently with is Jim Buckridge, a widower and the king of his lobster-fishing town. He no longer rules with vindictive violence, as he did when he was younger and as his father did before him. They do not love each other, but they have found an equilibrium, although it gives Georgie less and less of what she needs. Then one day, in a spirit of self-destructiveness, she has a sexual encounter with a local ne'er-do-well, the polar opposite of Jim and a man seen by the townsfolk as coming from a family tainted with bad luck.

This is a fantastic, complex read, about confidence, luck and coming to terms with the past. The landscape is almost a character in the book, described with lyrical beauty but inhospitable to human life. The writing is as vivid, spare and harsh as the landscape, with sentences whose significance you only realise pages later. There is real evil present in the town, but all the main characters are, to some extent, comprehensible and therefore forgiveable (not an easy call given some of the dynamics involved).

Sample: He can't admit it to himself but the sight has jolted him. Four figures suddenly out there across the yard with its perimeter of gutted vehicles. He walks barefoot back to the house with his mind knocked out of neutral.

I finished Sarah Thornhill yesterday and gave it 3 1/2 stars. It's the sequel to Kate Grenville's excellent The Secret River, but I don't think it matters if you read this one first. I had totally forgotten what happened in The Secret River, which is pretty dopy because at the time I loved it and immediately added Kate Grenville to my favourite authors list on here. Not remembering did not detract from the book at all, and if anything made it slightly better because there was clearly a Dark Secret From The Past.

Sarah Thornhill is the youngest of 5 children in the Thornhill family. Her father, William, and her mother Meg were English convicts who were sent to Australia. William is now well-off, remarried to a very unlikable woman, and doing a pretty good job at being upright and respectable. Sarah talks about the "taint" of being an ex-convict though, which is still there. Grenville does a great job again at making you feel like you are back in Australia 200 years ago, up the Hawkesbury River. Sarah grows up and falls in love with Jack Langland, from one of the other farming families in their community. Jack's mother was an Aborigine woman but he's been brought up in the Langland family as one of them, but only up to a point. Jack's best friend is Will, Sarah's oldest brother, and they work on the sealing boats that go to New Zealand. There's a strong New Zealand strand to the story (but I don't want to give away the plot).

As you'd expect in a book set in early Australia the main themes are race and class and the different attitudes of the immigrants to the Aborigines. Mostly though this reads like a straightforward good story of Sarah and how she falls in love with a boy who's not good enough for her parents. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't blow me away like the Secret River did at the time.

For those who are interested, The University of Western Australia is offering a free course through Coursera.org in March 2015 on Australian Literature.

This course is a short introduction to the rich and distinctive world of Australian literature, a world of ancient and modern forms of writing about a vast and varied continent. Explore the work of writers who have responded imaginatively to the unique landscapes of Australia and to its remarkable human history.

Read more about it here.

The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood, 2015 (published outside of Australia in 2016)


Cover comments: I think this Europa Editions cover is great.

Comments: Two women, Verla and Yolanda, wake up from a drugged sleep to find themselves captives at a dilapidated sheep station in the Australian Outback. They are wearing 19th century style clothes, and upon waking, their heads are shaved. There are eight other young women there in the same situation, but information is scarce as they are brutally beaten if they speak or ask questions. Slowly they settle in to their bleak existence under the ever-watchful eye of their jailors, the creepy Bonsor, the dreadlocked yogi Teddy, and the crazy pseudo-nurse, Nancy. The whole lot of them are held inside the vast property by a powerful electric fence.

Eventually, the young women figure out that the one thing they share is that they were all involved in a public scandal—one that included powerful men. For example, Barb was an Olympic hopeful until she went public about the sexual assault by her swim coach.

Things go from bad to worse. It appears they are abandoned in this prison, they begin to starve and both the captives and the jailors begin to go insane. Different women try different approaches to survive, and Yolanda and Verla gain agency by learning to use the nature surrounding their jail. This is one aspect of the title The Natural Way of Things. The title has a double meaning, as it also refers to the misogynistic order of the world.

I’ve read that The Natural Way of Things is a combination of Lord of the Flies, The Handmaid’s Tale, and “Mad Max.” I can see that, but it’s also very different from all of those. And I’d further add that it’s also just a little bit like “Orange is the New Black,” and also “Rabbit Proof Fence.”

The writing is sparse and beautiful, especially the way the author uses the nature of the Outback. It’s structured in short chapters, which makes the novel highly readable. I would like to hear more from Charlotte Woods, but I’m not sure if her earlier novels are published outside of Australia.

The Natural Way of Things won the 2016 Stella Award (for Australia women writers), was nominated for the Miles Franklin Award, and has been optioned for a film. It was inspired by true events that happened in the 1960s (now I’m off to learn about that hidden Australian history).

Rating: Definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year, but I can’t quite give it 5 stars because

1. It took me about 40 pages to get into it (5 star books have to grab me right away)
2. I’d have liked more information on the faceless corporation that took the women captive. I think the anonymity and lack of details is most likely purposeful because it’s irrelevant, but I find the concept interesting and want to know more
3. I’d have loved more detail on each of the women’s background stories. I was looking forward to a short chapter, or even a page, on how each of them ended up there, but it was all just too vague and I think a missed opportunity
4. I wanted to know the background story and motivation of the three jailors—their lives were no picnic either

Recommended for: everyone

Why I Read This Now: I bought it right after hearing about it on The Readers podcast this summer, but it flew to the top of Mnt TBR when I got tickets to see the author at the Vancouver Writer’s Festival later this week.

Great review, this really makes me want to read this book.

Posting to “undormant” the group, and to mention a few less known Australian writers I’ve come across lately:

On strenuous wings : a half-century of selected writings from the works of Katharine Susannah Prichard (1965) by Katharine Susannah Prichard (Australia, 1883-1969), edited by Joan Williams

  

Katherine Susannah Prichard, the child of Australian journalists, who was born in Fiji but lived most of her life in Greenmount, Western Australia, was a founder-member of the Australian Communist Party, a lifelong campaigner for left-wing causes and the subject of neurotic police surveillance, frequently accused of spying for the Soviet Union. She wrote twelve novels and a number of short-story collections, all firmly in the great Australian tradition of working-class realism. Judging by numbers of copies on LT, her most notable work seems to be the 1929 novel Coonardoo, which was controversial at the time because of the way it dealt with a relationship between an Aboriginal woman and a white farmer from the woman's point of view. Also relatively well-known is the Goldfields trilogy of the late forties (The roaring nineties, Golden miles, Winged seeds).

(After reading this “greatest hits” compilation, I got hold of a copy of Coonardoo, which is still on the TBR shelf.)

—-

Big Red (1965; Seven Seas edition 1967) by Leslie Haylen (Australia, 1898-1977)

  

Les Haylen was a journalist and a long-serving Australian Labour MP, who grew up in rural New South Wales and just missed serving in the First World War (the troopship he was on in 1918 was turned round before it got to Europe). He wrote five other novels before this one, also a number of plays, some travel books and a memoir.

Big Red turns out to be a good, old-fashioned rural coming-of-age story, set on a small Australian farm against the background of the 1931 drought and the Great Depression.

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Bobbin up (1959) by Dorothy Hewett (Australia, 1923-2002)

  

Dorothy Hewett was a well-known journalist, especially on the Australian Communist paper Tribune, and wrote two other novels after this one, as well as many stage works and poetry collections. In the fifties her day-job was in a Sydney spinning mill; later in life she took on various teaching posts. Bobbin up has been reissued a few times over the years and seems to be her best-known work; Virago also published Hewett's memoirs.

The novel, set in the hot Southern Hemisphere summer of 1957, with Sputnik 1 visible in the sky, shows us vignettes from the lives of a group of women who all work in a spinning mill in Sydney. It’s a wonderfully lively, engaged picture of working-class lives.

—-

The Dyehouse (1961) by Mena Calthorpe (Australia, 1905-1996)

  

Mena Calthorpe was a schoolteacher, office worker and political activist from New South Wales. She wrote two other novels after The Dyehouse.

It’s another very interesting workplace novel, which has been reissued a few times since it originally came out in 1961. The characters are office staff, managers and shop-floor workers in a textile dyeing plant on the suburban fringes of Sydney, and the book digs, sensitively and a little bit obliquely, into some of the everyday, but still brutal, cruelties and arbitrary injustices that go with any kind of paid employment.

I read all of Patrick White's books, most of which are set in Australia. This thread makes me want to reread some of them, but I cannot as the are packed away in boxes for an impending move. Will catch up later this year. Anyone else here who thinks White is a brilliant author?

>9 swiftlina: I read Voss several years ago. It was a bit of a slog for me, but in the end I felt it had been worth the effort. There were certainly sections of brilliance in the work, though also patches of very slow, dry going. Anyway, I could certainly understand why folks would consider him to be a brilliant author.

>9 swiftlina: >10 rocketjk: I had a huge crush on Patrick White about forty years ago and read all the novels plus whatever else I could get my hands on. So much so that I haven't quite dared to re-read any for a long time, but I'm sure there are some that would still stand up. Voss, obviously, and The tree of man, probably also The aunt's story and Riders in the chariot. Not quite so sure about A fringe of leaves and The vivisector, although I liked both at the time.

>10 rocketjk: patches of very slow, dry going — isn’t that rather the point of what Voss is doing? :-)

>12 thorold: isn’t that rather the point of what Voss is doing? :-)

Yes, you're right there, of course. Even in the places where I was having trouble finding the prose enjoyable, I did understand that the effect being produced was intentional. For example there were sections where I was ready for the philosophic musings to be over, even, again, realizing at the same time that these were the sections many others find most memorable.

And, yes, very slow, dry going for the characters, as well!

Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding (1918) is one of the most robustly masculine of all children’s classics, full of fussin’ and fightin’ and foodin’ and feudin’. It is perhaps that as well as its intense Australian-ness that has kept it from the global popularity that it deserves (it is scarcely known at all in the United States). There is tutting disapproval of its rambunctious, knockabout Gestalt even to be found in some current reviews. SMDH.

The pudding of the title, which is a steak-and-kidney type pudding rather than a smooth dessert pudding, can be eaten over and over by its sailor, penguin, and koala owners without ever diminishing. The pudding doesn’t MIND being eaten, but is grumpy about everything else. He is the perpetual target of two rascally pudding thieves, a possum and a wombat.

The book romps along at a rollicking pace, interspersed with some really funny nonsense verse. I love these two legal bits:

Obey the mandate of our chosen lawyer,

Remove that hat, or else we’ll do it faw yer.

———-

To win your case, and save your pelf,

Why, try the blooming case yourself!

>14 PatrickMurtha: this Canadian had never heard of the Magic Pudding until I went to an adorable cafe with that name. It was somewhere in the Southern Highlands of NSW in 1982. Of course I then had to get a copy of the book

^ I would patronize a café with that name for sure! 🙂

>11 thorold: I’ve been wondering the exact same thing. I might try Voss. I’m a dual citizen - Australian born and bred, but completely out of touch with the Australian literary scene. I’m making a concerted effort to get back into it in 2024.

>16 PatrickMurtha: And what about Snugglepot and Cuddlepied by May Gibbs?