Abstract
Introduction
In his editorial introduction for Southerly 70(1), David Brooks observes that
Southerly’s mandate, often missed by critics who find it their task-of-the-moment to review one issue or another, is to publish, almost exclusively, new writing by Australian poets, authors, critics and scholars, or commentary by critics and scholars on Australian writing. There are few print journals left now that do any such thing. Indeed it sometimes seems as if we are the last one standing.
Whilst this year’s bibliography demonstrates that Southerly is not the last journal to follow this tradition, the bibliography certainly attests to the prevalent attitude which has seen many journals direct their pages away from literature to general political or socio-political issues.
Another trend which is gradually changing the nature of the annual bibliography is the fact that, slowly but surely, Australian literature is locating parts of itself online. Here again Southerly can be used as an example, for it has developed what it calls its “long paddock”: an online space for extra features (http://southerlyjournal.com.au/long-paddock) which announces itself as follows:
Welcome to the Long Paddock, the on-line component of Southerly, Australia’s oldest and (still) premier journal of Australian Literature and new Australian writing. In conception, the Long Paddock is still in development. You should not be surprised to see changes. It has been introduced as a means of providing significant supplementary material for Southerly on an issue-by-issue basis, helping us to avoid backlogging material and to publish more contributions than the strict page limits of our hard-copy version allow. Material published in the Long Paddock is not in any way secondary to the material in our print edition: it is simply more of the best – and, for those who have the nous to find it, free-of-charge.
The larger ramifications of this looming “change of paradigm” are ably explored (amongst other issues) in the essays in Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, Eresearch, and Australian Literary Culture, edited by Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon.
The Australian Poetry Centre closed in 2010, bringing about the demise of its magazine, Blue Dog: Australian Poetry. A new organization, Australian Poetry Ltd, is to be launched in 2011, representing a merger between the former Australian Poetry Centre and the Poets Union. As the new peak body for poetry in Australia, Australian Poetry Ltd will have a charter to promote and support Australian poets at all levels from the local to the international. It will be based in Melbourne and there are plans to develop a new poetry journal and a series of publications; further details are available from <www.australianpoetry.org>.
Important figures in Australian poetry continued to release fresh work in 2010. Les Murray’s new volume, Taller When Prone, seemed to reviewer David McCooey to be less controversial and less concerned with the social divisions present in Australian history and contemporary politics, but he noted that the theme of estrangement remains in the “stylised idiosyncrasy” of his work (Australian Book Review 320). Thomas Shapcott’s Parts of Us, his thirteenth collection of poetry, investigates the relationship of the light of life with the dark in areas that include the metaphysical, the social and the personal, as well as our interface with the world. Similarly, Alan Gould’s twelfth collection, Folk Tunes, celebrates “the value of friendship and love, work, culture and history” in poems which “entertain and enliven” (Paul Hetherington, Australian Book Review 318). Dark Bright Doors, the tenth volume of poetry from Jill Jones, continues to exhibit her interest in contradictions, both in her poems’ subject matter and form. Gig Ryan finds Jones’s poems to be like sketches, offering hints that retain mystery, rather than pinning anything down definitively: “The driving forces are description and imagination rather than intellect or analysis”, says Ryan (Australian Book Review 322).
“Irony and the irony of writing poetry in a culture more or less indifferent to it, are the unexpected threads that hold this diverse collection together”, writes reviewer David McCooey in response to Ron Pretty’s Postcards from the Centre (Australian Book Review 324). Rose Lucas declares that “there is beauty here” in Sarah Day’s Grass Notes, but she also detects “the bass note of a brutal past and the complex position of the post-colonial poet who has inherited this difficult history” (Australian Book Review 320); Lucas notes further that the poems in this volume are observations reminiscent of both the Romantics and the post-Romantics. Winifred Weir’s Walking on Ashes is a collection of poems about the effects of both the first and second world wars, reflecting the poet’s intense personal connection with her material and investing it with a moving quality. Ken Bolton’s long poem, The Circus, is “wry” and “sly”, in the words of reviewer Michael Farrell, and is narrated in the third person (a significant shift from the first-person narration of Bolton’s earlier works) (Australian Book Review 321). Although most of Katherine Gallagher’s works have been published overseas, Carnival Edge: New and Selected Poems demonstrates, in reviewer Susan Lever’s view, that the “most vivid” poems concern the poetess’s childhood in rural Victoria and are permeated by nostalgia for the era before the 1970s (Australian Book Review 324).
A selection of Kate Llewellyn’s poetry from seven volumes across thirty years, Poets and Perspectives: Kate Llewellyn also offers critical essays – but it is the poetry that shines, “offering her own praise to the everyday” with “odes to the objects and feelings that inhabit a woman’s world, including her own body, that really sing’ (Bronywn Lea, Australian Book Review 324). Martin Langford’s The Human Project: New and Selected Poems also enables the reader to judge how the poet has progressed, with the selections coming from four previous collections. It maintains the poet’s concern with the bigger picture, approaching “the matter in the broadest possible sense, ranging across atrocities of war, social injustice and environmental degradation” (Andrew Sant, Australian Book Review 318).
A notable first poetry collection was Maria Takolander’s Ghostly Subjects, a consideration of various types of haunting by the alien within. According to reviewer Rose Lukas, Takolander’s poetry suggests “the subject is not only the world under the scrutiny of the poet’s eye, but also the subjectivities of poet and reader, both drawn into these shifting spheres of light, shadow and surprise” (Australian Book Review 318).
The latest reprints of “significant poetry collections” from Picaro Press include Gary Catalano’s Fresh Linen, Roland Robinson’s The Hooded Lamp and Ken Taylor’s At Valentines: Poems 1966-1969. Julian Croft describes Catalano’s work as “minute essays written not in the discursive logic of prose, but with the metaphorical leaps of poetry” and asserts that these poems reflect the strength not only of the poet’s voice, but of poetry of the 1980s period. For Croft, Taylor’s collection – written in the 1960s but not published till the 1970s – contains some wonderful moments, with poems that “perform the ideas of the poem: that writing, marks on paper, can catch the air, can make solid something insubstantial” (Australian Book Review 326). The Hooded Lamp, Roland Robinson’s final volume of poetry, is filled with his hallmark lyricism, mysticism and drama, all well as being grounded in the physical world.
One of the most significant novels of 2010 was Roger McDonald’s When Colts Ran. According to reviewer Peter Pierce, this is the author’s finest work to date and “clearly one of the novels of the decade” (Australian Book Review 326). Spanning history from the mid 1920s to the 1990s, this saga novel is filled with memorable characters as well as Australia itself, with its droughts and hardships, its people and foibles. Incidentally, Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink continues this survey of Australia’s development. Set at the end of the Howard era, it reveals the disconnectedness of lives lived within Australian cities, a disconnectedness highlighted when the protagonist gets herself a tattoo. Changes batter Sydney as drought shrivels once-lush gardens and fuels bushfires, petrol prices rise and certainties dissolve. It is a novel of coming to terms with change and the uneasiness of the increasing segregation of Australian society. Roger Averill’s Keeping Faith is set in a Melbourne of the 1970s and 1990s, using a narrator who works in a labour ward to explore themes of faith, life, and death. Trust by Kate Veitch continues her first novel’s preoccupation with family, feminism, religion and the need to come to terms with truth and motivations within the self. Set in contemporary Melbourne, it explores the repercussions of a single tragic event as well as touching upon the recent drought and the Black Saturday bushfires: “an engaging portrayal of family life in all its quivering complexity” (Amy Baillieu, Australian Book Review 321).
As usual, many writers looked back into history for their material. Time’s Long Ruin by Stephen Orr is based on the infamous disappearance of the Beaumont children in 1966, fictionalizing the responses of neighbours and friends whilst working within known historical details of the case; this novel won the Adelaide Festival Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript.In Houdini’s Flight Angelo Loukakis creates “a moral fable” in which the figure of Houdini not only inspires a friendship between two men, but allows them to find the strength to confront their pasts. The novel combines “an enthusiasm for magic” with “sober reflections on how we might live extraordinarily in the everyday world” (Patrick Allington, Australian Book Review 322). Michael Meehan’s Below the Styx is an entertaining and whimsical murder mystery, heavily involved with anything and everything to do with Marcus Clark, author of For the Term of His Natural Life, but “it wears its learning lightly, if not playfully” (Don Anderson, Australian Book Review 319) and carries its mystery right through to the very end. Set in the aftermath of World War I, during the influenza plague, the narrator of Chris Womersley’s Bereft lies quarantined in a small rural New South Wales town. The story hovers between mythic imagination and reality as the narrator imagines the lives of her lost children, one murdered when a child, the other presumably lost in the war. It is a novel of “plain and startling, yet tender and lyrical prose”, a “moving narrative” that “opens up the wounds of war, laying bare the events that pre-date the conflict and reach forward into the collective memory” (Carmel Bird, Australian Book Review 324). Alan Gould’s The Lake Woman is set during Rommel’s World War II flooding of Normandy, referencing medieval romances involving the Lady of the Lake. The novel is at first “dreamy, at times almost fabulist; a kind of essaying-forth into the world of an unlikely intimacy between two strangers” before resolving the romance in a more conventional narrative, begun when a woman rescues the main character from the flood (Paul Hetherington, Australian Book Review 318).
Simone Lazaroo’s fourth novel, Sustenance, deals with the personalities, trials and triumphs of characters in a classy hotel resort in Bali; reviewer Thuy On noted that it explores cross-cultural issues without resorting to clichés (Australian Book Review 324). Wayne Ashton’s Equator covers the period from 1900 to 2009 with an exuberance and a flair for magical realism that redeems its sometimes heavy themes and excessive length; Sarah Hopkins’ Speak to Me deals with a family in crisis and, while some of the characters may be a little stereotyped, the novel nonetheless avoids the clichéd view that discussion can solve all problems and Carmel Bird’s Child of the Twilight plays amongst the mysteries and rich imagery of Roman Catholicism, both in the historical and the mystical sense, its story of a stolen statue and a convent school-girl imbued with what reviewer Gillian Dooley calls “fey charms” and a “frankly pagan version of Catholicism” (Australian Book Review 318). Palimpsest by Kathryn Koromilas seemed “proudly postmodern” in its approach to the story of a woman travelling from outback Australia to bury her father in Greece (Susan Gorgioski, Australian Book Review 322). Kathleen Stewart’s Men of Bad Character was described as “unsettling, compelling and illuminating” in its insights about changing perceptions, suppressed instincts and self-deception as Rose, the main character, moves from one man of bad character to another, aware of her mistakes and unable to help herself (Gillian Dooley, Australian Book Review 322). While Adrian Hyland’s Gunshot Road prompted a reviewer to warn that “a middle-aged white man writing in the guise of a young black woman raises questions of credibility and fidelity”, the reviewer conceded that Hyland pulls it off, presenting a highly readable novel that reveals how life is lived and language used in the Northern Territory and successfully canvassing “the uneasy nexus between the spiritual and the material, development and environment” (Thuy On, Australian Book Review 322). Robert Engwerda’s Mosquito Creek offers an interwoven tale of various characters in the Victorian Goldfields linked by a murder victim who appears throughout the novel in second-hand tales which create a framework for all the other characters. Lisa Reece-Lane’s Milk Fever traces the relationship between a spiritualist and a woman who has moved to a small rural Victorian town.
Other works to win high praise from reviewers included Lloyd Jones’ Hand Me down World. The first novel since his award winning Mister Pip (2006), this story of an African refugee “combines the page turning quality of Mister Pip” with an “innovative fragmented narrative style” and is a “beautifully constructed, genuinely affecting book with immense heart and a varied cast of expertly inhabited characters, each with his or her own distinctive voice and milieu” (Jo Case, Australian Book Review, 326). The Norseman’s Song, by poet and former political speech writer Joel Deane, was described as “a slice of Southern Gothic that is a unique and very welcome addition to Australian literature”; reviewer Chris Flynn found the novel to be “a refreshing, unashamedly adult respite from the anodyne family dramas” as it relates a nightmare trip through a gritty, rain-drenched Melbourne in search for the meaning of a story that began over a century earlier in the Arctic (Australian Book Review 321). Clinton Carward’s Love Machine won praise from Kate Holden as “a brightly written, savagely funny, melancholy and adroitly sympathetic novel” which examines the lives in and around a sex shop, yet offers a traditional love story set in that grungy world (Australian Book Review 320). Daniel Ducrou’s The Byron Journals won shortlistings for several prizes as an unpublished manuscript for its story of a youth who leaves Adelaide on a “schoolies” outing and ends up joining street musicians, in Bryon Bay and elsewhere, to find his summer holidays filled with drugs, alcohol, sex and music.
The year’s crop of first novels included Ashley Hay’s The Body in the Clouds, which weaves together four narratives around central themes and settings, including the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and structures itself around recurrent parallaxes. According to reviewer Don Anderson, “Ashley Hay’s structures and her characters are illuminated by an incandescent intelligence and a rare sensibility” (Australian Book Review 324). Carol Middleton praised Enza Gandolfo’s first novel, Swimming, as “a beautiful tribute to womanhood” for its seamless interweaving of two narratives which together form the story of a woman searching for the truth of her life behind the myths she has lived by and the photographs that have glossed reality (Australian Book Review 320). Steve Holden’s Somebody to Love won praise as “excellent” and “engrossing” (Lorelei Vashti, Australian Book Review 327) for its tale of a nameless transvestite mortician who reflects on the transitions between states of being as well as for presenting the stark differences within herself and the chaos within her psyche. Gothic elements were also present in Kirsty McDermott’s Madigan Mine, a promising first novel which pushes genre boundaries to produce a “truly engaging” blend of Gothic horror, psychological thriller and fantasy (Benjamin Chandler, Australian Book Review 327). David Musgrave’s Glissando: A Melodrama was described as a delightful debut novel that does not take itself or its subject matter (artistic culture) at all seriously, demonstrating both originality and wit in his “sketches of eccentric behaviour in a rather innocent rural Australia” (Susan Lever, Australian Book Review 322). Other debut novels included The Vintage and the Gleaning by Jeremy Chambers, Stillwater Creek by Alison Booth, The Listener by Shira Nayman and Ellen Mullane’s Once on a Road.
Amongst the most important short story collections of 2010 was Tom Shapcott’s Gatherers and Hunters. Covering the period from 1997 to 2005, this collection of nine short stories and one novella “traces the socio-cultural history of Australia in recent decades” (Don Anderson, Australian Book Review 322), from rural to urban in stories that range from the folly of nostalgia to the changing demographic of small rural towns and from the north of the country in Queensland to its urban south in Melbourne. In Peter Goldsworthy’s Gravel the various characters of a diverse range of stories are pushed through their paces in a variety of urban settings, allowing a dissection of society’s morals and certainties and delivering the “seismic jolt that works of clarity and compassion can deliver” (Murray Waldren, Australian Book Review 319). Winner of the 2008 David Unaipon Award for unpublished manuscripts by indigenous writers, Marie Munkara’s Every Secret Thing is a hilarious chronicle of mission life revealed in a series of linked stories and, while the “ensemble nature” of the book prevents a deeper investigation of the characters, it is nonetheless “an important and entertaining book” (Patrick Allingham, Australian Book Review 320). Georgina Scillio’s A Dandelion on the Roof and Other Stories was described as a “pleasing and absorbing” collection about “the little things that make everyday lives unique” (Jay Daniel Thompson, Australian Book Review, 318). Richard Rossiter’s Arrhythmia: Stories of Desire explores the connections between people (families, friends, strangers) and their connections to places, prompting reviewer Patrick Allington to comment that “Rossiter’s sparse and tense prose possesses a distinctively dry, desert-like beauty” (Australian Book Review 320). The delicate interlinking of stories gives a sense of passing through the world, stopping every now and then to observe particular actions or individuals. Under Stones, a collection by actor/comedian Bob Franklin, was an “impressive debut” in the eyes of reviewer Ellen Mullane, who observes that “Franklin’s experience as an actor no doubt informs the breadth and scope of these stories and their compelling characters; but it is his natural writer’s eye that captures the oblique and blurred boundaries” (Australian Book Review 320).
2010 also brought a new edition of Herz Bergner’s classic Australian Jewish novel, Between Sky and Sea, with a new introduction by Arnold Zable which mentions that this novel is amongst the first fictional representations of the Holocaust and has gained a new relevance in light of the current political debate concerning boat people.
While the number of anthologies decreased in 2010, there was no apparent drop in quality and three particularly notable items appeared. The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction is the third in a series of anthologies of colonial fiction edited by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver (the first two covering crime and Gothic fiction). Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets, edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones, was praised as a beautifully produced and presented collection which “consolidates Puncher & Wattman’s position as Australia’s foremost publisher of poetry” and provides access to works which will inevitably provoke “discussion and debate about that fluidity of identity that is integral to what-ever the ‘self’ of the writer might be” (Gregory Kratzmann, Australian Book Review 320). Legends of Australian Fantasy, edited by Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan, presented eleven “short novels” showcasing the work of some of the writers leading the boom in fantasy writing in Australia.
In keeping with trends of recent years, many significant works of criticism dealt with large-scale issues concerning the nature of Australian literature or the way it is to be approached. During 2010, this ongoing debate was continued in Nicole Moore’s “Impossible Literary Histories” (which reviewed recent literary histories by Graham Huggan, Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon, and Peter Pierce), in Meaghan Morris’s “A Small Serve of Spaghetti: The Future of Australian Studies” and in Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, Eresearch, and Australian Literary Culture, edited by Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon. The idea of Australia in Asia and the interrelationship of Australian and Asian literatures was considered in Paul Sharrad’s “Reconfiguring ‘Asian Australian’ Writing: Australia, India and Inez Baranay” and Merlinda Bobis’s “The Asian Conspiracy: Deploying Voice/Deploying Story” as well as in Malati Mathur’s “India and Australia: Cross Cultural Connections”. There were also other items appearing in a special issue of the journal Southerly devoted to Indian-Australian literary connections.
The anthology Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets was supplemented by Michael Hurley’s overview article, “Gay and Lesbian Writing and Publishing in Australia, 1961-2001”, while Annette Stewart’s Barbara Hanrahan: A Biography was complemented by Lyn McCredden’s study of “Body and Spirit in the Fiction of Barbara Hanrahan”. K.G. Naga Radhika shed light on a new area of inquiry in “Presenting the Past: Historiography in Aboriginal Theatre of the 80s and 90s” and Toni Johnson-Woods wrote about “Adventures of a Squatter” by Donald Cameron, the first and only colonial male romance published in The Australian Journal in 1866. Researcher Bronwyn Lacken uncovered “lost” manuscripts and stories by Murray Bail and Peter Carey. Jessica White explored the link between spiritualism and Rosa Praed’s collaborative writing with her friend Nancy Harward. Work also appeared on poets Robert Gray, John Mateer, and Henry Kendall, including Felicity Plunkett’s discussion of “Daemonic Currents in Dorothy Porter’s Poetry” and Ann-Marie Priest’s “Between Sanctity and Liberation: The Lives and Loves of Gwen Harwood”. Other writers to receive attention included David Malouf, J.M. Coetzee and Christos Tsiolkas.
The past year also saw something not seen for some time – a substantial book-length study of Patrick White. Patrick White within the Western Literary Tradition is a collection of essays, edited by John Beston, demonstrating the strong influence of European, British and American cultures on White’s work, exposing White’s evocation of dimensions other than material reality, his preoccupation with epiphanies and myth-making and his constant forging of a poetic style. The volume covers White’s interests over thirty-five years and contains a series of analytical studies of themes and characters from his major novels.
In Barbara Hanrahan: A Biography, Annette Stewart “achieves a strong rendering of people and places that Hanrahan encounters, through an appropriate blending of quotations from Hanrahan’s novels with Stewart’s own descriptions from her research” and offers “very intelligent analyses” of Hanrahan and her “general psyche”, though reviewer Kate Livett also thought it was strange that the book does not account for her “seemingly exclusive focus on Modernist writers and painters” (Southerly 70[2]). Other noteworthy non-fiction items included Chester Eagle’s The Well in the Shadow: A Writer’s Journey through Australian Literature; Penelope Hanley’s Creative Lives: Personal Papers of Australian Writers and Artists (a collection of short biographical essays on twenty-two Australian writers, including fresh perspectives on such writers as Patrick White); Patricia Anderson’s Robert Hughes: The Australian Years and Peter Golding’s They Called Him Old Smoothie: John Joseph Cahill (a biography of the Premier of New South Wales from 1952 to 1959 who approved construction on the Sydney Opera house).
Two special issues of Southerly were particularly notable in 2010: Golden Tongues: The Arts of Translation (70[1]) and India India (70[3]). In his editorial to the first, David Brooks, noted that “for all the complications and paradoxes of the term “multi-culture”, Australia is a multiculture […] and its writing, at any point in time, has been written in many different languages and drawn upon many literary traditions”. In keeping with this view, the second special issue offered “a central focus on Indian/Australian literary traditions”.