Abstract
Introduction
One of Australia’s most significant living writers, Helen Garner, turned 75 in 2017, and the occasion was marked with two collected volumes − Stories: The Collected Short Fiction and True Stories: The Collected Short Non-Fiction. Gretchen Shirm writes that Garner drills into experience and comes up with such clean, precise distillations of life, once you read them they enter into you. Successive generations of writers have felt the keen influence of her work and for this reason Garner has become part of us all. (WAR
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11 Nov.)
These collected volumes were accompanied by the most significant literary biography of 2017, Bernadette Brennan’s A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work, which offers an illuminating discussion of Garner’s boundary-crossing work. Its own magic lies in bringing elements of memoir and criticism into an absorbing conversation that begins with a rich contextualisation of Garner’s work and extends into the literary and ethical questions with which Brennan has long been concerned. (Felicity Plunkett, WAR 29 April)
Another milestone was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Henry Lawson, a bush poet with a remarkable popular following in Australia. Two dual biographies of Lawson reveal new sides to him. After decades of caricature, Lawson’s wife, Bertha, has an advocate in Kerrie Davies, who is convinced Bertha’s claims of domestic violence are true. The biography A Wife’s Heart interweaves the story of the Lawsons’ troubled marriage with the biographer’s own. In Mates: The Friendship That Sustained Henry Lawson, Gregory Bryan recovers the story of Lawson’s best friend, James Gordon, the now forgotten poet who wrote under the pseudonym Jim Grahame. Frank Moorhouse has collated quite a different celebration of Lawson in an anthology dedicated to his most influential story − The Drover’s Wife: A Celebration of a Great Australian Love Affair. Moorhouse drew media attention with the claim that Lawson was bisexual, for which Moorhouse admits he has no hard evidence. The book collects fictional and critical responses to “The Drover’s Wife”: Moorhouse lightly describes his book as ‘a series of footnotes to footnotes’, knowing of course that it is much, much more than that. And he characterises the phenomenon he is working with as ‘the cultural ricochet of painting, stories, scholarship and gender politics’. (Carmel Bird, WAR 4 Nov.)
Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) has had an enduring place in Australia’s cultural memory thanks especially to the 1975 film adaptation, and its 50th anniversary was marked by the publication of two books. While Helen Gotz’s No Picnic at Hanging Rock is focused on “solving” the “mystery” of the disappearance of the schoolgirls and a teacher, Janelle McCulloch’s biography Beyond the Rock moves past this to give the first detailed account of Joan Lindsay’s life.
Black Inc published final volumes of its long-running anthologies, Best Australian Essays (1998-2017) and Best Australian Poems (2003-2017). Best Australian Stories (1999-2017) will become Best Summer Stories but continue the same approach of combining published and unpublished short fiction. The poetry and essay anthologies have become an essential annual curation of the nation’s writing − a pulse-taking and a showcase − and the loss of them leaves a gap in Australian literature. Writing before the news of the discontinuation, reviewer James Ley (SMH
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11 Jan. 2018) comments, Black Inc’s annual Best Australian anthologies have been around long enough to qualify as a cultural institution, and as with all cultural institutions there comes a point when one has to ask what purpose they actually serve, whether they are in fact performing their nominal function effectively.
He makes a number of criticisms of this year’s anthologies, including the over-representation of the publisher’s own material in Best Australian Essays, and a “blustering” preface to Best Australian Stories which promises more than it delivers. Reviewing Best Australian Stories 2017, Gretchen Shirm (WAR 9 Dec.) notes the unifying theme of children running through the collection and writes that editor Maxine Beneba Clarke “has selected stories that show us unsettling truths about our culture and history, focused on individuals and on Australia. Yet the presence of children alters the overall dynamic: because of a child’s capacity for change and growth, wherever there are children there will always be hope.”
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s monumental Like Nothing on This Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt offers an account of the “event” of the creation of Western Australia’s Wheatbelt over the 20th century through the writings of 11 literary “witnesses”, from Albert Facey to John Kinsella. Unlike the approaches of other disciplines to this event, literature, according to Hughes-d’Aeth, offers “the interior apprehension of how life feels to people” (p3). Susan Lever writes, “This kind of literary criticism amplifies the writing by putting it into a meaningful context. It demonstrates the centrality of literary writing to our understanding of ourselves” (Inside Story 4 May). Another noteworthy monograph, this one published in the series ‘Sydney Studies in Australian Literature’, was Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver’s Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy. This work emerges from a decade of research into nineteenth century Australian popular fiction; the authors have previously published a series of genre-based anthologies. “The five chapters follow a broadly chronological path, taking us from the squatter novel of the 1840s through to the Australian Girl of the 1890s. In between, we are introduced to bushrangers, detectives, shepherds, swagmen, larrikins and dandies, with city types increasingly taking over from bush types as the century progressed” (Elizabeth Webby, Australian Literary Studies 25 Feb. 2018).
A new series called “Writers on Writers” combines criticism, biography, and interview in short books the publisher says aim to “start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work”. The first two of six titles were published in 2017, Erik Jensen On Kate Jennings and Alice Pung On John Marsden, two Generation Y writers paying homage to writers of the Baby Boomer generation.
Canada’s contribution to last year’s Bibliography (JCL 51[4] 2016 p535) draws attention to the significance of Indigenous literary criticisms in connection with broader attempts to address the legacy of colonialism in Commonwealth countries. 2017 saw similar critical engagements with different genres of contemporary Australian Aboriginal literature. Xu Daozh wrote on Aboriginal children’s literature and Danica Cerce on Aboriginal poetry. Indigenous Futurism was especially prominent: Croatian-based academic Iva Polak published a monograph, Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction, while Westerly featured an essay on the post-apocalyptic fiction of Ambelin Kwaymullina, and Hilary Donraadt examined “Race, Reconciliation and National Identity in Australian Genre Fantasy of the 1990s”.
Australian Indigenous contributions to the project of decolonising literature were also evident in fiction. Genre conventions are interrogated in Paul Collis’s Dancing Home, winner of the 2016 David Unaipon award (for Indigenous writing). Promoted as “Koori-noir”, the story deals with three men taking a road trip after their release from prison. “The relationship between the three central characters is well developed and believable”, comments Jay Daniel Thompson, though the historical setting is “opaque” (Australian Book Review 3 397 Dec.).
Two-time Miles Franklin Award winner Kim Scott describes his third novel, Taboo (itself longlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Award), as “A trippy, stumbling sort of genre-hop that I think features a trace of fairytale, a touch of Gothic, a sufficiency of the ubiquitous social realism and perhaps a touch of creation story” (Afterword). Linking Scott’s three novels, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth observes that “If Benang was the great novel of the assimilation system, and That Deadman Dance redefined the frontier novel in Australian writing, Taboo makes a strong case to be the novel that will help clarify … what reconciliation might mean” (ABR 393 Aug.). In the Noongar country of the Great Southern region of Western Australia, past injustices flow into contemporary times when a Peace Park is being dedicated. The main narrative concerns the sexually abused woman, Tilly, who in finding her own means of salvation may also become, in the words of reviewer Peter Pierce, “a saviour” to her people and community (SMH 12-13 Aug.). Related themes are explored in Claire G. Coleman’s debut novel Terra Nullius, which won the Queensland State Library’s black&write! Fellowship for emerging Indigenous writers. As reviewer Catherine Noske warns, too much prior information about the story risks “undermining the genius of the novel’s structure”: Terra Nullius gently and persuasively lulls the reader into understanding the setting as historical fiction, encouraging him or her to participate in assumptions about the characters and social politics at play. Coming mid-narrative, [a] twist then forces the reader into a consciousness of their own reading and the ideas it has perpetuated, pointing to and undermining stereotypes which tend to frame the reading of colonial spaces. The lines between colonial ‘Other’ and self are blurred. (ABR 397 Dec.)
Nevertheless this is a debut novel with “some redundancy and repetition in developing both themes and characters” (Noske).
Richard Flanagan’s new novel First Person received somewhat mixed reviews. For James Ley it is Flanagan’s “most artfully constructed and thematically complex novel to date”, exploring issues of identity and the collapse of idealism in the face of western corruption, cynicism, and moral ambiguity (ABR 396 Nov.). The narrator recalls events from 1992 when, as a penniless would-be writer with no prospects, he is hired to ghostwrite the memoir of a notorious international con-man. As Ley explains, the dramatic focus is “the intense face-off that develops between the ghostwriter and his evasive subject”: this explores the relationship between author and subject, fiction and reality, and the con-man’s demonstration that decency and hope are naïve allusions. Whilst broadly endorsing this account of the novel’s concerns, Peter Keneally is less impressed and concludes that “however gamely constructed, [First Person] meditates itself into a corner, because it asks a question it isn’t really very interested in: What is truth?” (SMH 7-8 Oct.). Keneally’s review draws significant close parallels between Flanagan’s early life and that of his protagonist. Geordie Williamson makes a similar point about Alex Miller’s twelfth novel, The Passage of Love: “So much of [the] story accords with that of Miller’s own, that it is difficult to shake the sense of pure memoir … [e]verything down to the title of [Miller’s] first published short story appears here in unamended form” (ABR 396 Nov.). Miller’s protagonist, another would-be author, abandons his writing for over two decades in order to care for his lover. The first section of Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home is set in Bacchus Marsh, where Carey grew up – but this novel “turns much more challengingly on what the idea of ‘home’ means and how a homeland is framed and memorialised” (Paul Giles, ABR 396 Nov.). A car salesman sets out to win the 1954 Redex Trial – an automobile reliability test which involves driving across Australia. Paul Giles’ review provides an insightful account of the novel’s complexity, concluding that “Carey’s magical realist dimensions, like those of Rushdie, always seek alternative ways of mapping local scenarios, and by reconceiving Australian cultural history through his double idiom of demotic sympathy and cerebral distance, A Long Way from Home provocatively postulates a state of exile as integral to the constitution of the country”. In Giles’ view, “A Long Way from Home is a major work of fiction by the writer who will probably be regarded, in a hundred years, as the leading Australian novelist from the early part of the twenty-first century”.
Wary (and perhaps weary) of “nationalistic” concerns, Australian writers are increasingly attracted by conventionally “non-Australian” subjects. Anthony O’Neill’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Seek is a “sequel” to the R.L. Stevenson classic, and The Pacific Room by Michael Fitzgerald centres on an 1892 portrait of Stevenson painted in Samoa. One facet of the novel deals with the time-period of the portrait-painter, the writer and his Samoan friends; a second facet concerns a contemporary scholar’s research into the context of the painting (Gillian Dooley, ABR 397 Dec.). Dennis Glover’s The Last Man in Europe is a fictional recreation of George Orwell’s struggle to write 1984; Kate Forsyth’s Beauty in Thorns concerns the Pre-Raphaelite women; and in As Lonely as the Fly Sara Dowse covers three continents over fifty years to explore differing perspectives on the founding of Israel. Sherlock Holmes: The Australian Casebook (see that rare kind of love story: familiar but unpredictable; messy, yet achingly, gorgeously true. The myth is only partly unsettled, but the gaps in Jeanne’s story are coloured in with vibrant, piercing details. An illiterate peasant girl who “changed the course of Western history” becomes one its greatest, tragic lovers. (Shannon Burns, ABR 395 Oct.)
Two reviewers (Andrew Riemer and Patrick Holland) described Brian Castro’s Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria as “playful”, chiefly on the basis of its jokes, puns, and allusions, as well as Castro’s formal designation of it as “a novel in 34 cantos”. It concerns an Adelaide town-planner whose diagnosis of terminal cancer leads him to move to Paris to write his long-planned epic, only to fall in with a clandestine society of experimentalist writers who bequeath their works to others in rejection of the tyranny of authorship. They inhabit a timeless, surreal Paris inhabited by long-dead authors and iPhone users. Andrew Riemer senses a serious formal breakthrough beneath the phantasmagoria, suggesting that “finding the appropriate form for his often unusual preoccupations hasn’t always been successful [for Castro]. There often seems to be a conflict between the demands of the narrative and what really engages Castro’s intellect and imagination”, however this latest work has “found a solution to that conundrum” (SMH 3-4 June). Patrick Holland reads the book in relation to language, noting that the protagonist “turns to silence” just as Wittgenstein claimed that we all must do when language fails us; to Holland this is Castro’s “finest book” (ABR 394 Sept.).
Robert Drewe’s Whipbird is not only his “funniest novel” but also “the finest satirical anatomy of Australia to be published for years” (Peter Pierce, SMH 30 Sept.-1 Oct.). “Whipbird” is the name of a vineyard owned by one family for four generations, the latest of which is Drewe’s target: “The younger generation is a stranger to idealism, … middle-aged men prefer shiraz to pinot and decry the nanny state from which all benefit, while their female contemporaries are at once rapacious and disappointed” (Pierce). There is also satirical edge to Michael Wilding’s In the Valley of the Weed, which is extremely funny; Hugh Mackay’s scathing Selling the Dream; and Elizabeth Tan’s quirkily-structured debut Rubik, described by Cassandra Atherton as “a puzzle where twenty-six ‘cubelets’ rotate around a core crosspiece”. Atherton notes that “Rubik is less a novel and more a book of interconnected short stories exploring narcissism, neoliberalism, and consumerism” (ABR 396 Nov.). A similar deliberate blurring of form is apparent in Heather Taylor Johnson’s Jean Harley Was Here, which Anna Spargo-Ryan describes as a “multi-narrator linked collection [of stories]”, although “the book presents itself as a novel” (ABR 391 May).
In addition to the Helen Garner collection mentioned earlier, the year’s short fiction included John Kinsella’s Old Growth, which is concerned with environmental degradation, small-town contempt for outsiders, and indigenous people, children who need protection from adults and one another, lives lost to compromise, terrible miscalculations of the motives of others, and isolation, particularly the geographical and emotional isolation of women. These stories are not overly concerned with exquisite observation of the natural world; the emphasis falls on the need for environmental protection and the exposure of rural social destructiveness. (Brenda Walker, ABR 390 April)
Walker argues that “John Kinsella’s short stories are the closest thing Australians have to Ron Rash’s tales of washed-out rural America, where weakened and solitary men stand guard over their sad patch of compromised integrity in a world of inescapable poverty, trailer homes, uninsured sickness, and amphetamine wastage.” Catherine Cole’s Seabirds Crying in the Harbour explores the notion that the forebears of all non-Indigenous Australians have crossed oceans to reach this land; the stories deal with subjects as diverse as refugees or an outback teacher whose pupils have never seen the ocean; “every story” in “this intelligent collection” is “a work of elegant and meticulous craft” (Rachael Mead, ABR 398 Jan.-Feb. (2018)). Melanie Cheng’s Australia Day displays “a remarkable sense for the portentous drama in everyday lives” (Johanna Leggatt, ABR 394 Sept.), especially the lives of those who are “outsiders or misfits in some way”.
2017 saw increased publishing of crime fiction (a notable example being David Whish-Wilson’s Old Scores) and a reassuringly large number of debut works in all fields. Marija Peričić won the Vogel Award for her debut novel The Lost Pages; Odette Lelada’s debut novel Drawing Sybylla won the Dorothy Hewett Award; and Sarah Bailey’s The Dark Lake was longlisted for Debut Fiction in the Indie Book Awards 2018 and for General Fiction Book of the Year in the Australian Book Industry Awards 2018.
Amongst the significant volumes of poetry for 2017 were three posthumous (or nearly so) collections of work by major women writers. The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (who died in 2017, the same month as publication), edited by Lucy Dougan and Tim Dolin, gathers the work of one who was “always a morally and ethically attuned poet, […] constantly aware of avoiding didacticism and ideology, which she perceived as being the enemy of the imagination and ultimately freedom itself” (John Kinsella, WAR 22 July). Kinsella further argues that her moral purpose was political, rebellious and far noisier than her manners or her Church of England upper-middle class (Europeanised) cultural upbringing might permit. Everywhere are the signs of a spirit in rebellion, but also a rebellion in language itself. I consider her one of the most intense and even angry voices speaking for the sanctity of the human spirit to have come out of Australia.
Nathanael O’Reilly’s New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham presents 100 previously published poems and a selection of 150 unpublished works from manuscript. Wickham (1883-1947) grew up in Queensland and Sydney in the 1890s, then moved to Europe at age twenty: She belonged to that remarkable generation of literary women, modernists in life if not always in poetic technique, who were social and political radicals, supporting the women’s suffrage movement and various experiments in free love and communitarian living. They had much in common with the women of second-wave feminism, who often included Wickham in their anthologies of women’s poetry. (Susan Sheridan, ABR 390 April)
Cheryl Taylor’s edition of Thea Astley: Selected Poems presents “116 poems, representing about half the extant range to be found in the Astley archives” (Susan Sheridan, ABR 396 Nov.). The selection ranges from “schoolgirl poems” to “the work of the mature writer”, says Sheridan, who discloses that Astley once “told an interviewer that she had made the conscious decision to abandon poetry for prose when she realised that she would ‘never be any good as a poet of any stature’”. She nevertheless made occasional use of her own poems in her novels and editor Taylor notes that the best of them were once intended for publication. Astley died in 2004.
Jennifer Maiden produced two books of poetry in 2017. The Metronome is “essentially part of a series that could be dated to the appearance of Friendly Fire in 2005,” says Jill Jones; “[w]hile it may not be a series in the sense of a life-poem, Maiden’s ongoing production of this sequence of books carries an impression of vocation or serious commitment” (Jill Jones, ABR 391 May). It features recurring characters and recurring dialogues between historical characters of different eras (such as Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt) and “a fearless interrogation of the moral complexities of our age” (Jones). Reviewing Maiden’s Selected Poems 1967-2018, Geoff Page assigns the reasons for Maiden’s enduring popularity over fifty-one years to her “interest in moral complexity and the accessibility of her discursive mode,” observing that over her latest seven collections she has offered a commentary on world (as well as Australian) politics that cannot be obtained elsewhere. Her account goes well beyond the relatively simple nostrums of both left and right and offers original insights into the deeper motivations of characters as various as Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and quite a few others. (SMH 6 April)
Page’s review offers an incisive account of Maiden’s development as a poet. John Kinsella’s three-volume Graphology Poems: 1995-2015 is a mammoth (yet ongoing) discontinuous series hailed as “Kinsella’s magnum opus” and “a major publishing event in Australian poetry” (David McCooey, ABR 389 March). In an extensive essay on Graphology Poems reproduced on the Five Islands Press website, Nicholas Birns describes the work as a “vast, dilating rhizome, [a] meme of global poeticising” and explains that in the 1990s, it was popular to speak of Kinsella’s poetry as inhabiting two modes, the “dark pastoral” or “ruined pastoral” of volumes like The Hunt and The Silo and the more experimental, language poetry-influenced mode of Syzygy. This influential scheme seems less adequate to describe Kinsella’s poetry in the 2000s. Kinsella himself says the Graphology series, “encapsulates many of the concerns of The Hunt and The Silo, in the same way that Syzygy does. It is landscape poetry as well as wordscape or linguistic poetry.” The Graphology series represents, not the synthesis between Kinsella’s alleged two modes, but the rupture of any sort of solid membrane separating them.
Amongst several works from new publisher Cordite, Attn: Solitude by Mez Breeze was by far the most quirky and experimental – a quality conveyed by the poet’s own account of her work: Attn: Solitude isn’t a straight poetry book, nor is it a strict collation of cyborgian-emulated [chap+lady] book texts. The codework contents in this book do fragmentally fold [+ spit out of/from] poetic conventions. These microtexts do presentation-lap gently [yes: gently, albeit clinically, in some instances] at the cusp of code and poiesis. Attn: Solitude employs mezangelle – a type of quasi-cobbled conventionset born from 90s digital fomentation – to form packets of code-laced and culturally inflected output. You may choose to snippetswim in[to] these units of mezangelled output, these comprehension chips dragged kicking from one medium and screaming into another. You may not. If not, then … ? If-then-else.
The poems in Jill Jones’ tenth full-length collection, Brink, “evoke and explore being on the brink – of knowing, feeling, sensing, and making sense” and each poem “is a construct that can talk of itself and the world, simultaneously” (Toby Fitch, ABR 398 Jan.-Feb. 2018). To Fitch, Jones is concerned with the contradictions of the contemporary world – its beauty, how to live “without all the modest accounting”, versus our destruction of it: “We know plexiglass, expecto patronus / or police presence won’t save us”. Her poems are always “thinking the unthinkable today”.
Stephen Edgar’s Transparencies is permeated by “the recurrent spirit of the poet’s mother, Marion Isabel Edgar (1922–2015), to whom the book is dedicated”, and sets out the poet’s elegant conviction that the universe lacks any meaning beyond that which we arbitrarily impose on it. A third concern […] is the unreliability of our senses, particularly our vision, and how our perception of the world tends to be layered rather than completed in a single “take”. (Geoff Page, ABR 393 Aug.)
David McCooey’s Star Struck deals in part with illness (thus sharing ground with the anthology Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain [see
Melbourne poet Paul Croucher’s debut, The Landing, “has the assuredness of coming from someone who has been writing a long time”; his free verse poems “have been slowly pared back … as he searches for an essential clarity liberated of ego and rhetoric” (Simon West, WAR 6 Jan. 2018). Launched in 2016, University of Western Australia Publishing has been publishing a significant number of poetry collections, including many debut poets: Amanda Joy’s first full-length collection, Snake like Charm, has “an intensity of almost ecstatic perception” and its publication “marks the emergence of an important voice in Australian poetry” (Rose Lucas ABR 392 June-July); Carolyn Abbs’ The Tiny Museum “follows the arc of a classic memoir” and is sometimes “charged with narrative intensity” but reviewer Joan Fleming found it “uneven and over-long” (ABR 401 May 2018).
Michael Chamberlain died in 2017; he was the father of the infant, Azalea Chamberlain, whose disappearance near Uluru in 1980 became a key moment in Australia’s cultural memory, followed as it was by the jailing and later exoneration of the infant’s mother, Lindy. Alana Valentine’s play Letters to Lindy uses verbatim extracts from the twenty thousand letters sent to Lindy by the public. On its performance, reviewer Jason Blake called it “a fascinating collage depicting Australian attitudes to grief, justice, celebrity, and to women who do not conform to expectations” (SMH 5 Sept. 2016). Another unlikely adaptation of source material was found in Jane Miller’s Yellow Peril: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia, based on Kenneth Mackay’s bestselling 1895 racist novel of an invasion of Australia by Asian forces. “Jane Miller adapts it to the stage through comedy of great vigour and ridiculousness, celebrating Mackay’s romp while acknowledging its uncomfortable resonance in contemporary Australia” (Cameron Woodhead, SMH 12 May).