Australia

Introduction

The increasing contestation around “Australianness” has been dramatically highlighted by the reception of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writings from Manus Prison, with one reviewer writing that “It may well stand as one of the most important books published in Australia in two decades, the period of time during which our refugee policies have hardened into shape – and hardened our hearts in the process” (“CG”, SP ¹ 4 Aug.). After his Australia-bound boat was intercepted in 2013 as part of Australia’s “Operation Sovereign Borders”, he was eventually transferred to a detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Boochani, a Kurdish journalist who writes for the Guardian and often breaks news on Twitter, remains on Manus Island along with other “detainees” still there after the detention centre’s closure in 2017. The Australian media has not been allowed to access Manus, so writers working from detention are key to our understanding of this part of the Australian story. Boochani smuggled his memoir out of Manus in encrypted messages sent from a contraband phone, writing in Farsi which was then translated by Omid Tofighian. Felicity Plunkett says:

The work transcends memoir, especially because Boochani is often self-effacing. The blaze and flicker of his self-assessment limns a more empathetic project through which he examines larger questions of the nature of human behaviour and the search for an adequate way to name and anatomise the cruel experiment that is offshore detention. (ABR ² 405 [Oct.])

No Friend won the prestigious Victorian Prize for Literature, having been given special exemption from the eligibility rules requiring the author to be an Australian citizen or permanent resident. Novelist Richard Flanagan writes in the preface, “I hope one day to welcome Behrouz Boochani to Australia as what I believe he has shown himself to be in these pages. A writer. A great Australian writer” (see Letters and Autobiography).

Confronting monocultural notions of national identity is also the project of The Lebs by Sydney community arts worker Michael Mohammed Ahmad. The novel continues the story of Bani Adam, protagonist of Ahmad’s debut novella The Tribe; he is now in a senior year at Sydney’s once-notorious Punchbowl Boys High. Ahmad wrote an essay on his own experience of this school at the height of its infamy, prompting reviewer Ed Wright to observe that the book is “autobiographically founded fiction” and that its display of performative misogyny, anti-Semitism, student stabbings, and hero-worship of Osama bin Laden represents the use of “tactics we also see in writers such as Christos Tsiolkas”. Wright then places the work in a wider context:

There’s an anger in this, a desire to shock the middle-class conformity of the Anglo elites who control capital-C culture, but who can, of course, find shock refreshing. It’s a curious process best understood in terms of the frameworks of cultural capital and how markets, aesthetic ones too, constantly seek newness, something to which by its very name and nature (see Ian Watt’s classic The Rise of the English Novel, for instance) the novel is beholden. […] Writers such as Ahmad also provide the establishment with the insider’s version of what it prefers to keep on the outside in the performance of its own rituals of belonging, the vision of decency that so often airbrushes out its dependency on privilege (Ed Wright, WAR ³ 3 March).

Rodney Hall’s A Stolen Season also seeks to expose “what [the establishment] prefers to keep on the outside” – in this case the consequences of Australia’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan (as part of the “Coalition of the Willing”). One narrative strand deals with a soldier who has been disfigured and catastrophically damaged in an explosion, leaving him helpless without a carer until his estranged wife abandons her career to rescue this veteran. Reviewer Brian Matthews observes that A Stolen Season “abandons explanation and offers the kind of network of glimpses, echoes, apparent juxtapositions, voices, intriguing possible connections, and credulity-testing ironies that most of us encounter and shrug through year by year, sometimes seeing and making the connections, sometimes not” (ABR 400 [April]). Two further narrative strands enact these “glimpses, echoes” – one concerning a woman separated from a husband who has led a secret life as a fraudster, the other about a man who uses a valuable bequest to defy his family’s outmoded conservative rigidity. Venturing to make the “connections” to which Matthews alludes, reviewer Gretchen Shirm points to

a deeper layer to this novel, to do with the impact men have on women’s lives. […] To the extent men have prevailed, Hall suggests, it has been at the expense of, or “stolen” from, women. […] [The soldier’s] ruined body unfolds into something much larger. Reading of the people in this book, especially the women, you can’t help but think that what they need to leave behind is a particular type of masculinity, the undercurrent of which is violence. (WAR 24 March)

Reflection on Australian masculinity and its association with violence was central to many works in 2019. David Cohen’s The Hunter and Other Stories of Men “follows the lives of various men in their rituals of ordinariness – their failures, foibles, and fetishes – with a razor-like eye observing the disenchantments of modernity” (Sophie Frazer, ABR 405 [Oct.]); The Coves by David Whish-Wilson explores the short period of Australian-American history which saw Australian male expatriates committing shockingly vicious crimes as they tried to establish gangs in San Francisco; Preservation by Jock Serong “offers a fresh glimpse of the violence at the heart of the colonial project, not just as it was, but as it is” (James Bradley, ABR 407 [Dec.]); Robert Drewe’s fourth story collection, The True Colour of the Sea, “sensitively depicts ordinary men: husbands and fathers with their shortcomings, but with feelings of longing and love undiminished. The most virile examples of Australian males, however, are quietly unpicked” (Anthony Lynch, ABR 404 [Sep.]) and The Valley by Steve Hawke “engages with multifaceted aspects of masculinity such as fatherhood, men’s relationships with one another and with women, issues of violence, substance abuse, emotional well-being, and caring” (Helena Kadmos, ABR 408 [Jan.-Feb. 2019]). The most widely discussed novel on this topic was Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut, which reviewer Geordie Williamson identifies as “the most concentrated iteration yet of some of Winton’s enduring concerns”:

What is it, he asks, over and over, to be a man in the Australian context? And how is a masculine ideal transmitted between generations, or else corrupted in the passing on?

Read in the long arc of Winton’s oeuvre, The Shepherd’s Hut becomes a tale freighted with context. … [S]omething has stirred inside Winton, urging him once more to revisit the balance of power, love and responsibility he has attached to masculine relations over time.

Often in his writing, the relationship between father and son has been based on respect, even adoration, even if such feeling is modulated by the need to disguise or sublimate it. This time it is different. The father of The Shepherd’s Hut is an implacable, emotionally unavailable presence; a source of violence and little more. He is Australian masculinity pushed to its narrow extremity… (WAR 10 March)

The reassessment of masculinity runs parallel with the recognition and re-assertion of women’s place in family, community, history, and nation. Susan Midalia’s first novel, The Art of Persuasion, is “essentially about female experience, about being a woman in this particular time – its quotidian character, certainly (the peculiar dissatisfaction of text messages, for example) – but also the horror of domestic violence and sexual predation, and the perils of motherhood” (Sophie Frazer, ABR 404 [Sep.]); The Whole Bright Year by Debra Oswald explores the resilience of women in rural Australia, especially when abandoned by their menfolk and facing harsh economic conditions and The Fortress by S.A. Jones inverts immersion in gendered violence, offering a vision of a futuristic civilisation of women living apart in their fortress and reforming males who commit crimes of misogyny by assigning them to menial social roles.

Reviewers were also impressed by the many energies and qualities of Melissa Lukashenko’s Too Much Lip, especially the iconoclastic protagonist Kerry (the character with “too much lip”), an Aboriginal woman returning to live with her family in Bundjalung country in New South Wales, who roars into the novel on a stolen Harley-Davidson motorbike. Whilst celebrating the novel’s wit and energy (“a splendid black comedy, where just about everybody bites and gets bitten in a cycle of ancestral woes and injustices, pointless violence, family dysfunction, and general stuff-ups”), reviewer Jane Sullivan emphasises that Lukashenko “is consistently unflinching and makes no excuses for anyone, black or white” (ABR 405 [Oct.]) (see Fiction).

In “The Irresistible Rise of Indigenous Writing” Jane Sullivan notes that Australia now has two Indigenous Miles Franklin winners (Alexis Wright and Kim Scott), a Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, and publishers UQP and Magabala Books show special interest in Indigenous writing:

Importantly, there are also moves to help a new generation of writers make an impact. These include the Blak & Bright festival, presented by First Nations Australia Writers’ Network and eight other literary organisations. It brings together old hands such as Kutcha Edwards, Bruce Pascoe and Sam Wagan Watson with rising stars such as Ellen van Neerven and Ali Cobby Eckermann. (see Criticism: General Studies)

Blakwork, the second collection by Gomeroi woman and Fulbright scholar Alison Whittaker, “never takes its eye off the history of post-invasion Australia and what this means for Aboriginal people”, resulting in “a nuanced, critical, felt, and poetic account of being, and of Australia, with all its complexities and its passions” (Jen Webb, ABR 410 [April 2019]). For Gregory Day, “the way Gomeroi words are always bursting through the English in Blakwork feels more like the future than the past. It’s surely a key book in our current Aboriginal literary and linguistic renaissance” (SMH ⁴ Dec. 7). Walk back Over, by Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane, extends her 2010 Dark Secrets after Dreaming (AD) 1887-1961 by articulating a “fine-tuned poetic rage” that is “juxtaposed with love from her sovereign Wiradjuri woman standpoint” (Natalie Harkin TEXT ⁵ 21 Oct. 2017). In an online statement Leane says:

Aboriginal women are the great gatherers of many things – food, of course, but also stories and inner strength. The women who raised me had vast reserves of inner strength, and to pass that on was a powerful act of activism. In particular, they taught me to listen to the past as it speaks in the present. This work is about listening to the past and walking back over it, step after step, to see what you missed the first time. It speaks to what has been left out of official records, recordings and documents – the emotions, the other sides of paper – and what is not said. These poems engage with the ongoing, interventionist nation-state and the crime scene that is Australia in the lives of Aboriginal people. In contrast to state archives, museums, libraries, universities and collection agencies – and their methods of “recording the lives” of Aboriginal people – my work explores the body where memories are stored as an archive; anchored and etched. Writing is an act of remembering a dismembered past. (https://corditebooks.org.au/products/walk-back-over)

Lisa Bellear, a Goernpil woman, documented Aboriginal activism from within; noted as a photographer and dramatist (inter alia), her poetry has been collected and edited by Jen Jewel Brown in a posthumous collection, Aboriginal Country. According to reviewer Amy Lin, eco-feminist Anne Elvey’s White on White “explores the limitations and downfalls of colonialism, and the paradoxical act of ‘building a falling’ that settlement represents”, though Lin emphasises that “Despite its title, the collection is about the co-existence of whiteness and colour” (ABR 408 [Jan.-Feb. 2019]). Kevin Brophy’s Look at the Lake is the poetic record of a year living amongst Walmajarri people in the remote Aboriginal community of Mulan on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert. “Brophy animates the specificities of remote community life with the masterful imagery that Australian letters has come to expect from a poet of Brophy’s calibre and experience”, says reviewer Joan Fleming, noting that the collection “can be meaningfully located in a tradition of books by poets who have spent time living intimately in remote communities, including Billy Marshall-Stoneking’s Singing the Snake (1990), Lee Cataldi’s The Women Who Live on the Ground (1990), and Philip Hall’s Sweetened in Coals (2014)”. The poems range across “the bewilderments of camp life, the curious dysfunction of the white service providers, and the paradoxical realities of Aboriginal people caught between the languages, practices, and infrastructures of two very different cultures” and whilst the book “may not risk telling the harder truths, it does risk hope. It is a beautifully observed book of poems that has real value as a portrait of community life” (Joan Fleming, ABR 404 [Sept.]). Hope is also present amidst the anger in False Claims of Colonial Thieves, which is a poetic dialogue between Charmaine Papertalk Green, a Yamaji woman poet, and Anglo-Celtic poet John Kinsella. “This book is an attempt to creatively rethink the broader legacy of colonisation and its various systemic manifestations,” says one reviewer,

[i]n particular, the poets take aim at the greed of mining companies and their deceptions over uranium deposits around Wiluna. And yet False Claims also feels like an encounter at a kitchen table or camp fire where the personal and the political blend in the intimacy of a shared space. […] Private moments connect with activist statements about land and culture and history according to the poetic logic of a good old yarn (JR, The Saturday Paper (SP) 14 April).

Significant works of poetry by newer writers included The Sky Runs Right through Us by Renee Pettitt-Schipp, which is drawn from her experience working with asylum seekers detained in Australia’s Indian Ocean territories; Flood Damages, the debut collection from Filipino Australian poet Eunice Andrada; The Hijab Files by Maryam Azam, which “allows young Muslims in Australia to enter a narrative usually reserved for white, secular, ‘regular’ folk” (Anupama Pilbrow, Cordite Poetry Review 23 Oct.); non-binary transgender poet Rae White’s debut collection Milk Teeth and A Trillion Tiny Awakenings, the debut collection from prize-winning Lebanese-Palestinian Australian performance-based poet Candy Royalle, who died from cancer at age 37 shortly before the book appeared. Works from established poets included David Malouf’s An Open Book, Jennifer Maiden’s Selected Poems: 1967-2018, Timoshenko Aslanides’ Collected Poems, and a Collected Poems from Les Murray (who died in 2019) (See Poetry).

Several anthologies brought together writings which explore the experiences of groups under-represented in Australian literature. Growing up Aboriginal in Australia, edited by Anita Heiss, features 51 Aboriginal writers who “describe different paths to Aboriginal identity against the background of a nation that has yet to come fully to grips with a legacy of massacre, dispossession and persistent racism” (SP, 14 April.). Queer lives are celebrated in Living and Loving in Diversity: An Anthology of Australian Multicultural Queer Adventures, an anthology which “does its best to capture the breadth of queer experiences, and many of the pieces focus on cross-cultural identities and intersectionality” (Jordi Kerr, Books and Publishing 24 Aug.). Women of a Certain Age attempts to counteract the invisibility of older women in our society; Louise Orner calls it “a charming collection of personal reflections and life stories, [which] demands we witness ageing female lives with open eyes” (Books and Publishing 25 Jan.) (See Anthologies).

A significant drama publication was Louis Nowra’s Lewis Trilogy, comprising Summer of the Aliens, Cosi and This Much Is True, and following Nowra’s alter-ego, Lewis, through 50 years from the 1960s to the present. Martin Portus describes the latter play as “a gloriously funny, unsentimental, deeply moving kaleidoscope of sharp characters surviving in the underbelly of the big city” (Stage Whispers 12 Aug. 2017). One of the most confronting and topical plays published in 2018 was David Finnigan’s Kill Climate Deniers, in which militant eco-activists threaten to kill their 1700 hostages in Parliament House unless Australia immediately ceases all carbon emissions and coal exports. Finnigan revised the play to incorporate a meta-discussion of the media outrage in 2014 which led to the original production’s cancellation. Anne-Marie Peard writes, “Its satire is bitingly sharp and its truth could easily be satire” (SMH 25 Sep. 2016) (see Drama). Two significant studies of drama were Maryrose Casey’s “Performances of Belonging” and The Ripples before the New Wave: Drama at the University of Sydney 1957-63 by Robyn Dalton and Laura Ginters (See Criticism: General Studies).

Two other works of literature with wide societal resonance - and newspaper headlines - in 2018 were Kate Lilley’s poetry collection, Tilt (see Poetry), and her sister Rozanna Lilley’s memoir, Do Oysters Get Bored?: A Curious Life (see Letters and Autobiography). In their respective books the sisters write about their mother, poet Dorothy Hewett, encouraging them as young teenagers to have sex with adult men visiting the family home, including the late cultural icon, Bob Ellis. In the words of Jane Jervis-Read, “#MeToo asks us to revisit environments of the recent past so that we can understand them more fully, their objects now speaking as subjects” (Meanjin 20 Aug.). After Rozanna and Kate spoke about these experiences in an interview with The Australian, the revelations caused a cultural flashpoint in the ongoing reactions to historical child sexual abuse and the #MeToo movement. Conservative commentators demanded a stronger condemnation from the left of the sexual libertinism of the 1970s, equal to the condemnation of sexual abuse within churches. There was also debate within the literary community about whether the high profile Dorothy Hewett Award should be renamed; with the daughters supporting the continued use of the name, the award convenors decided to retain it. The issue of responding appropriately to the work of writers after negative revelations about their lives is only likely to intensify in coming years. Reviewing Tilt, Ali Jane Smith writes,

It has at times been distressing to witness the media coverage of Kate and Rozanna Lilley’s story, as the intelligence, courage and nuance of their own accounts are temporarily obscured by blunt angles and agendas… in part by various investments held in culture wars positions. But Kate Lilley writes poetry, and poetry offers a space for subjectivity that is not bound to the implied causality of narrative. Poetry can disrupt, evade, and effloresce. (Sydney Review of Books 3 Sep.)

One of the most talked-about non-fiction works in 2018 was Bri Lee’s Eggshell Skull, a debut memoir which could well be remembered as a key text of the #MeToo movement. In the first half, working as a judge’s associate, Lee has to watch on with mute horror as terrible cases of sexual abuse go unpunished; in the second half, she fights to see the perpetrator who abused her as a child convicted. “Written with raw energy and cool intelligence, Eggshell Skull reminds us of the prevalence of abuse and injustice in our communities, and demonstrates the immense courage and determination necessary to combat it” (Ashley Kalagian Blunt Newtown Review of Books 29 May).

Perhaps the year’s most significant literary biography was Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s Half the Perfect World, a group biography of the expatriate colony of creatives nurtured by Australian writers Charmain Clift and George Johnston on the Greek island of Hydra between 1955 and 1964. Brian Matthews calls it “a fascinating, impressively researched, well-told story about a place and its moment” (ABR 406 [Nov.]), while Nathan Hobby finds that “[i]t achieves the hope of group biography, enriching our understanding of its subjects with an account of their network and context” (Westerly online) (see Non-Fiction). After researching Nettie and Vance Palmer for decades, in 2018 scholar Deborah Jordan edited Loving Words, a collection of the letters between these two major literary figures from their courtship years, 1909 to 1914. Brenda Niall writes, “These letters of love and longing are often touching, sometimes tediously drawn out. The philosophical, political, and literary currents of the day are thoughtfully discussed, but the letters seldom sparkle” (ABR 404 [Sep.]) (see Letters and Autobiography).

Black Inc published two new titles in its significant “Writers on Writers” series. Christos Tsiolkas’s On Patrick White argues that White “is an exemplary chronicler of the condition of exile”, making a case for his continuing significance at a time when White is no longer “the imposing cultural presence he once was” (James Ley SMH 24 April). According to Melinda Harvey, Ceridwen Dovey’s On J.M. Coetzee is a “relational memoir disguised as a volume of literary criticism”, as it retrieves the significance of Dovey’s own mother’s groundbreaking work on Coetzee (The Age 16 Nov.). Dovey writes of her appreciation of Coetzee’s characterisations of women, echoing the theme of a special issue of Australian Literary Studies, “Thematising Women in the Work of J.M. Coetzee”, collecting papers from a 2016 conference at Monash University’s Prato Centre in Italy. Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays, edited by Robert Dixon, is the first collection of essays dedicated to the work of the Man Booker award-winning novelist. Susan Lever finds the collection as a whole too adulatory toward Flanagan and “some of these essays too reliant on Flanagan’s many public statements about his work, and unwilling to explore the way the art of the novel might distort and change his ideas” (ABR 403 [Aug.]). Elizabeth Harrower: Critical Essays, edited by Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas revisits Harrower’s four earlier novels, and her recent In Certain Circles (ready for publication in 1971 but withdrawn from publication until 2014). The essays “re-situate [Harrower’s] writing in its historical contexts (showing, for example, its references to World War II, Nazism, and the Holocaust)” but “while some essays attend to Harrower’s uses of genre, there is little interest in style, aesthetic influences, or links to other writers’ work” (Susan Sheridan, ABR 399 [March]). In addition to several individual essays on Indigenous writer Alexis Wright (winner of the 2018 Stella Prize for her 2017 collective memoir, Tracker), Indigenous Transnationalism: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, edited by Lynda Ng, presents critical essays from seven different countries, each analysing Carpentaria from a different national perspective and examining themes extending across cultures and continents, such as the significance of the land, struggles to preserve culture and language, and environmental issues (see Criticism: Studies of Individual Authors).