Some subliminal airing of my own

Rebecca Starford

Deputy Editor of ABR

During October, Radio National broadcast Elisabeth Holdsworth’s reading of ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’. This essay, which won the inaugural Calibre Prize, describes Elisabeth’s return in 2005 to Middelburg in the Netherlands, and her family’s vicissitudes during World War II. In its printed form (ABR, February 2007), the essay had generated a uniformly laudatory response from readers. Elisabeth’s measured and understated reading of her extraordinary history was poignant in ways that are difficult to articulate – it was such a moving experience to listen to this story and all its nuances, the shapes and sounds of language; all in a kind of melancholic bliss.

Unsurprisingly, in the days that followed the Radio National broadcasts, dozens of listeners telephoned, faxed and e-mailed ABR to convey their admiration for the reading, the memories it evoked, their own connection to the Netherlands, and similar childhood experiences during the war.

The weekend after the broadcast, I spent a weekend with friends in a dune-nestled beach house in Rye, on the Mornington Peninsula. In preparation for the weekend, we organised the usual provisions: food, alcohol, DVDs and of course ‘road-trip entertainment’: an assortment of music from our various collections. But when I went to my CD collection I couldn’t find anything that seemed right. I was still affected by a kind of displaced and unwarranted nostalgia after listening to Elisabeth’s reading; I was sighing a lot. In the end I went to my local library and borrowed a talking book – or play, to be precise: The Importance of Being Earnest. My friends are literary-minded – what could be better than careering down the Nepean Highway, chortling away at Oscar Wilde’s wit?

Sadly, my friends weren’t taken with Martin Clunes’s rendition of Algernon, nor with Judi Dench and her regal enunciations as Lady Bracknell. In fact, the whole play was rather lost on my captive Corolla audience.
‘What’s wrong with a talking book?’ I demanded when the CD was peremptorily changed. The car went quiet; all eyes turned slowly on me with a look of exasperated pity that seemed to say, ‘Okay, we know you work at ABR but do we really have to listen to a talking book?’

Since then, I have developed something of a complex, possibly paranoid, about talking books. Is there anything wrong with liking them as much as I do? Am I really, as friends increasingly observe, an older person trapped in a younger person’s body? Or is this an outmoded stereotype – does it have nothing to do with age at all? Am I simply a younger person trapped in the body of someone who likes talking books, and therefore a social outcast?

My penchant for audio books is, of course, my choice. I don’t rely on them, or other forms of audio media, to provide my dose of current affairs, sport and literary recreation. Seventeen per cent of Australians do, however.

According to RPH Australia, a network of Australian radio stations that represents people who, for whatever reason, are unable to access print material, more than three million Australians have a print disability – whether they are blind, visually impaired or illiterate.

When ABC Commercial recently cut its audio sections (ABC Audio), many print handicapped lost access to a key source of information and entertainment. In a public statement, ABC Commercial cited financial losses as the main reason for the move. According to the Director of ABC Commercial, ‘losses incurred from such enterprises directly impact on the ABC’s ability to produce programs for ABC radio, television and online’.

Fortunately, in September, ABC Commercial announced a new partnership with Vision Australia to ensure the continued supply of audio books to the Australia market. The agreement provides Vision Australia with direct access to ABC’s extensive back catalogue of audio titles and will enable Vision Australia to produce up to sixty audio book titles per year. This is good news. Let’s hope that this particular facet of the publishing industry continues to flourish and is not undermined by ‘losses incurred’ and other bureaucratic machinations.

In the meantime, another beachside weekend is planned and the ‘road-trip entertainment’ play-list must to be formulated. Among the live streams and podcasts, I will attempt some subliminal airing of my own: it may not be the best example of an audio-literary loan (John Birmingham’s He Died with a Felafel in his Hand, all that was available at the local library!), but for the purpose of this blog it is convenient (as blogs so often are), since one of the actors in the recording is Gretel Killen, host of Channel 10’s supremely awful Big Brother. And this allows me to end thus:

O cruel, needless misunderstanding. O stubborn, self willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of their noses. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was over. They had won victory over themselves. They loved Talking Books!

At the Mildura Writers' Festival

Andrew Burns, ABR Editorial Assistant

There is a seven-hour avenue of scribbly gums and wheat fields between Melbourne and Mildura – if you include a lazy lunch in Bendigo. It is a beautiful drive, if rather long.

Recently, a party of university friends and I enjoyed it all the more for the fact that we were racing towards our first Mildura Writers’ Festival. The music was up loud, the conversation even louder. This drive was the culmination of weeks of anticipation: the mystery of that literary phenomenon – the writers’ ‘festival’ – was about to be unlocked. What goes on at these things? How do writers choose to be festive? We were armed only with a list of sessions and a hotel booking.

After the sun had set and the sugar-high of road trip supplies had worn off, we had our first glimpse of Mildura. We navigated our way between streets aptly dubbed Orange, Lemon and Lime to find our hotel – cheap and cheerful. But no time for a rest: a panel on censorship – featuring Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, poet and artistic director of the festival Paul Kane and journalist-turned-academic Barry Hill – was about to begin. It was straight back in the car and to the Mildura Club, a charming and eccentric building on the town’s main drag.

We had all wanted to attend this session. It was not only the first session of the festival, but also a discussion panel, which meant it would be a great opportunity to see the human side of these writers, and particularly that of J.M. Coetzee, who is famous for avoiding the limelight – sure to be difficult in the citrus capital.

The session did not disappoint. Barry Hill spoke first, stressing the need to preserve freedom of speech in an era of increasing security, citing the problems of Australian McCarthyism in the Cold War, and recent security-related raids on writers and publishers. Hill said that one consequence might be self-censorship by writers. Paul Kane compared the Australian situation with that of the United States, citing the constitutional protection in the States that Australians do not have, if only symbolic. Then Coetzee, who until this point had sat there pensively, gave a short, provocative speech about censorship. He began by asking if censorship of pornography and the like is to ‘protect’ our children or in fact our own sense of dignity.

It was fascinating to see these writers speak, who – intentionally or not – normally hide behind the authority of their printed words. The short Q&A session that followed suffered, rather ironically, from its own form of censorship in that the only questions permitted were from session mediator Peter Goldsworthy – the audience was silenced!

Next morning, after a brunch of baguette and triple brie on the banks of the Murray, we consulted the programme again. One thing that had drawn me to this festival was the emphasis on poetry. Many of the sessions listed in the programme featured poets; and often poetry was the subject of discussion.

One such session featured poets talking about poetry. ‘Poets on Poets’ was another panel session, consisting of ‘emerging poet’ Judith Bishop, whose first book Event has just been published (soon to be reviewed in ABR), and two established poets, Alan Gould and Bronwyn Lea. This session was held at the Mildura Brewery, a modern and striking place, with ceilings high enough to house stainless steel brewing vats and other brewing paraphernalia – suitably lofty for the discussion of poetry.

Warm and yeasty, this was a great session, relaxed, intimate and confessional. Judith Bishop spoke of her ‘first love’ Sylvia Plath, while Alan Gould revealed his affection for Ted Hughes. Bronwyn Lea spoke of her first encounter with American poet Robert Hass, reading his poem ‘Mediations at Lagunitas’.

That night we ate home-made sardine-laksa while the winner of the festival’s major award, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, was announced. Being students, we could not afford all of the festival dinners put on by celebrity chef Stefano de Pieri, so we had opted for the festival dinner the next night. As for the winner, I can only quote from the Age article:

It was quite a moment when Hodgins’ two young daughters, Anna and Helen, sharing the same dark eyes as their father, stood next to his wonderful, brooding portrait and presented the medal to the historian and essayist Inga Clendinnen … Sharp and gracious, Clendinnen was the star of the festival. Her clarity and passion for her art were beguiling.

Beneath a blue sky, we had another picnic on the banks of the Murray on Saturday. We rented a little motorboat and took turns motoring up and down the river alongside the giant wood-fired paddle steamer, the P.S. Melbourne. At one point, we turned the motor off and paddled up to some ibis and a pelican. In the rippling light of a golden sunset, we felt a connection between us and this serene natural setting, felt the spirit of the great Murray. That is, until the pelican let out a rude grunt, like a foghorn, and took off to a safer location.

The festival dinner was both the culmination and celebration of a very friendly and accessible meeting of minds. The atmosphere was jovial, with the sharing of literary anecdotes between courses, some hilarious, others more meditative, followed by an after-dinner series of poetry readings. After the readings we hit the local pubs. It was a late night, but apparently the stars of the festival had an even later one than we did!

Our final day was appropriately gentle. Coetzee read from Diary of a Bad Year (reviewed by Geordie Williamson in the September issue of ABR). The reading was an interesting juxtaposition of public commentary and personal meanderings, which spawned a great deal of discussion on the drive home. After the reading it was coffee and Kristen Headlam’s exhibition at Gallery 25, a quick lunch and a parting tangerine.

What the Dickens! Compacted Classics

Rebecca Starford
Deputy Editor of ABR

Back in May, I was first alerted to the UK publisher Orion’s plans to release abridged versions of classics such as David Copperfield and Moby-Dick on the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club. Shocked as I was by panellist Peter Goldsworthy’s claim that ‘none of these texts [Eliot, Gaskell, Thackeray] are sacred …
[y]ou can take great slabs our of Tolstoy without damaging it overall’, I did take a guilty glance at my bookshelf – where the token War and Peace, The Illiad and Chaucer sit, spine uncracked – and wondered if I would ever find the time to read them.

Who hasn’t been through the ‘Wordsworth Classics’ phase: those familiar $4.95 editions of canonical volumes found conveniently outside inner-city bookshops. I’d always thought that there was something terribly romantic about bedrooms overcrowded with books: spilling from shelves, cluttered upon the desk, stacked on a window sill. (This illusion quickly dissolved: my bedroom soon had a greater resemblance to the decrepit residences regularly featured on Today Tonight specials, ‘Neighbours from Hell’.)

The literary classics are, as Jane Sullivan wrote in the Age earlier in the year, ‘the brussels sprouts of the book world. Worthy tomes that feed the intellect and nourish the soul.’ I like this analogy; an absence of such tomes from the literary diet can make the best of us a little scurvied. But the digestion of these novels is not always easy. As Zadie Smith notes, ‘reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing’. Yes indeed, though as she continues with claims like ‘reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and no shame in cultivating them’, and ‘to become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more’, such intestinal fortitude begins to sound dangerously like a chore. We don’t read for duty, do we, but for pleasure?

Here I must confess that I feel a strange kind of obligation to read the ‘classic’ works. Not in the same league as the ‘1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die’, these texts do, nonetheless, feature on my burgeoning list of ‘must reads’ – the list we all have, clandestine or otherwise. Which brings me back to the abridged classics which this week made their way to ABR. Well marketed from Orion, they are attractive, dare I say sexy publications, with lustrous covers depicting appealing young men and women. They remain weighty books, none less than 300 pages. The blurbs, however, take a different tone. The final paragraph on the back cover of The Mill on the Floss, for example, reads:

The great classics contain passionate romance, thrilling adventure, arresting characters and unforgettable scenes and situations. But finding the time to read them can be a problem. So, we’ve condensed some of the finest books in the world to a manageable length to enable you to enjoy them.

Hear the classicists screech! ‘Finding time to read’ will certainly be a problem: reading takes time. A fast-food approach to reading is bound to leave you intellectually bloated and unsatisfied. And what about the question of editing – or rather deletion – of particular sections of the novel? Who decides what should remain and what is worthy of omission? The Orion press release assures us that

the editing has been done with sensitivity in order to retain the author’s voice. [Tell that to Tolstoy!] In addition, each book includes a timeline to give the new reader a sense of its historical context.

It is ungracious, but such editorial smacks of ‘Eliot for dummies’. Which is not fair, as the appeal of the shortened versions of these books is clear. The complete and unabridged volume of Anna Karenina weighs in at a whopping 806 pages; it requires patience and stamina. And reading literary fiction is not the same as reading popular literature, poetry or short stories. In a sense, a reader must train themselves for the reading of classics, which proves difficult for increasing numbers of people. There has been much discussion about the reduction of canonical texts in English courses at school; English Literature is a VCE subject of choice, rather than a requisite. I was not introduced to Shakespeare’s sonnets, in a formal sense, for instance, until university; in high school, there was not a single work of Dickens, Austen, Eliot or the Brontës on my English syllabus; Medea was the sole Greek appetiser; David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, though brilliant, seemed a strange sort of Roman understudy.

Perhaps we take for granted an ability, acquired through training, education and privilege, to ‘read’ these awe-inspiring works. ‘The Compact Editions are aimed at encouraging more mainstream readers to become better acquainted with our literary heritage,’ wrote The Bookseller (UK), ‘which, personally, I salute.’

For those who approach the classics for the first time, these abridged versions may act as gentle introductions. Clever marketing may also play a part in this – time will tell. And while the Compact Edition of David Copperfield is not the version I will choose when I walk into the bookshop (particularly when those wonderful Wordsworth Classics are handy), I appreciate their place in the broader literary landscape.

Yarra Murder Mystery Repeats Itself?

Rebecca Starford,
Assistant Editor of ABR

I tell you, we just don’t react to a murder like we used to.

Who likes reading about grisly murders in the newspaper? Does the report of a double homicide titillate you? Does your pulse quicken when ‘Killing Spree’ is screamed across your computer screen? Come on, be honest – you’re among friends here. (Not that I am trying to gauge the psychotic urges of the ABR readers – full of untapped bloodlust, I’m sure.) In a time when experts report our alarming anaesthetisation to violence, both virtual and ‘real’, I simply would like to ask you, reader: would you go to a mortuary to look at a severed head in a jar?

Before you close this blog window, tut-tut, and cancel your subscription to ABR, I want to assure you there is lucid method behind my question. I began framing it last month after reading about the discovery of a woman’s body in the Yarra River, headlined in the on-line Age as ‘Bizarre Yarra body find’. The brief article went on to explain:

A walker has found a body in a bag on top of Dight Falls in the Yarra River at Abbotsford. Police confirmed a body had been found in a blue bag on the top of the weir … More details as they emerge.

The following day, a small article in the ‘In Brief’ section of the same newspaper elaborated, minimally, on the initial find:

A passerby saw a leg protruding from the bag … A backpack with weights had been strapped to the cloth bag. ‘Reggie’ was tattooed on the inside of her left wrist and ‘Elsie’ on her right. A cross was tattooed under both names.

Dribbles of information surrounding the investigation were later revealed: the young woman, who had grown up in the outer western suburbs, had been a small-time drug dealer and prostitute. A ghastly end to a shocking tale, though quickly forgotten in the ephemeral world of the press.

Yet this does not explain the question of the head in the jar. Here I shall oblige. Were I not an incorrigible habitué, the recent ‘Body in the Yarra’ story might registered for a day or so and then slipped entirely from my consciousness, like that of the footy player and his drug habit, or the pop singer who flipped and shaved her head. However, being of the studious (some might say nerdish) bent, I was able to recall, with unsettling clarity, several microfiche articles I had perused during a stint at State Library Victoria. Was history repeating itself, I wondered.

Such an alarmingly metaphysical question relates specifically to an article I read in the Argus, of 15 December 1899. Headlining page 7 was ‘A Terrible Crime, Gruesome Discovery – Dead Woman in a Box Found in the Yarra’ and the amusingly obvious subheading, ‘Supposed Malpractice’.

In the following days, the page-stopping murder kept Melbournians enthralled. The Argus reported:

…the nude body of an unknown young woman was found floating in a box near the Chapel street bridge on Saturday afternoon. The body, which is that of a well-formed, healthy woman, had been in the water about a week, and, though deliberate murder was at first suspected, the post-mortem examination ... indicates that death resulted from the use of chloroform, administered, it is supposed, for the purpose of an illegal operation.

I should say so! What the deuce else would it have been used for? With her identity remaining unknown, police exhibited her severed, putrefied head at the Yarra Bank morgue on Batman Avenue. They hoped that members of the public would visit the morgue to view the head thus making an identification. In addition, a large sum of money was offered.

Personally, I can think of better ways of spending my weekend. The theatre, perhaps? Deportment classes? Even a visit to the ‘Dead Meat Market’ in North Melbourne? You can imagine it, can’t you: after doing the Block, taking a leisurely stroll along the Promenade to the Morgue to view that jolly looking head in the jar. Rum sort of afternoon that would have been.

But putrified heads were all the rage, apparently, in Melbourne 1899. For days, a steady stream of people – 2000 in all – visited the morgue. The Argus noted:

So many family parties dotted the Yarra Bank road, including children, to view the head in the preserving jar … one 100 of which were police … the vast majority seemed to be actuated by no other desire than to see the horrible object that had caused so much talk and discussion.

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t exactly sound like a wholesome family activity. Hadn’t these people heard of the park? A picnic? Group embroidery, even?

Though I wonder at the general attitude of the public towards crime, and murder, we must put these events, and subsequent reactions, in some context. The particular case of the woman in the box came hard on the heels of the discovery of a severed arm and leg found in the river, just days earlier. (With the benefit of hindsight, it might have been better to stay away from the River Yarra that year.) The fever from the Whitechapel murders across the Atlantic a decade earlier still lingered, like the updraft from Melbourne’s recently covered sewage drains. Crime enjoyed access to a multitude of discourses: if people weren’t reading about it in the dailies, they were discussing it at salons and tea parties, viewing it at the theatre, reading about it in sensational novels, such as Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of the Hansom Cab (1886) and Francis Adams’s The Murder of Madeline Brown (1887).

In 1892 another crime gripped the city, generating unprecedented attention among the general public and in the press. Every newspaper in Melbourne was filled with reports of the discovery of a woman’s naked, decomposing body behind the hearthstone of a typical suburban villa. It was finally revealed that Frederick Bailey Deeming, a jewel thief, swindler, bigamist and conman, was responsible for this crime, along with many others. Rachael Weaver’s The Criminal of the Century (2006) is a fascinating study of Deemings, the public reaction to his crimes, and a more detailed analysis of criminality in the antipodes at the turn of the century. In 1899, of course, came our lady friend in the box. And the rest, as they say, is history.

As you can see, we just don’t react to crime in the old way. So when your requisite dinner-party conversation begins with the rant about ‘the depravity, oh, of modern society’, where ‘sex, drugs and murder etc’ that confronts in newspapers, television programmes and on-line news outlet, just savour your foie gras, sip on your sauvignon blanc, and ask, with feigned airiness, the essential question of the debate: Would you go to a mortuary to look at a severed head in a jar? You run the risk of not being invited to dinner again. Then again, you might not want to be.

Hunter Stockton Thompson: One of my heroes

March 1, 2007
Dan Toner, ABR Editorial Assistant

It was in June 2005 that Hunter Stockton Thompson, one of my heroes, was scattered ceremoniously to the four winds, six months after his death by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Actually, ‘scattered’ may be too polite a word for it. About half of Thompson’s remains were boomed skywards from a 153-foot cannon erected on the Woody Creek property that he had called Owl Farm – and home – for much of his artistic life. The cannon, which sports the infamous two-thumbed gonzo fist at its business end, was commissioned by Thompson’s celluloid doppelgänger, Johnny Depp, and will remain as a permanent memorial to the great man.
I, like many generations of young people, came to HST via his classic novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), a landmark work of creative writing that clenched a deep meditation on the human condition within a flying (two-thumbed) fist aimed squarely at the forces of conservatism. It was, of course, a revelation. Never had I experienced the physicality of the medium to this degree; never had I borne witness to such an aggressive advocacy of social digression; never had I known the conscientious and creative urges to bond so forcefully, and in such unlikely climes. Fear and Loathing was so energised and powerful that it felt athletic, competitive even, despite its outrageously unhealthy subject matter. I was inspired by the author’s combative attack on what we might call ‘wowserism’; astounded by the artistry with which he denounced it; and more than a little star-struck by the audacity he displayed in championing such high-voltage degeneracy. By the time I had finished Hell’s Angels ( 1967) and The Curse of Lono (1983), I was an unabashed hero-worshipper. I was around twenty one by then, content largely to accept that Thompson’s style was the result of a natural talent unleashed in an unnatural habitat.
It wasn’t until recently, as a more circumspect twenty-six year old, that I read the first volume of his collected letters, and began to understand just what a shallow version of the man I had been idolising. The HST that emerged for me was, in fact, a dedicated, tireless craftsman, utterly devoted to the art of writing, who married his ambition to create with an innate, unconquerable hunger for justice. He was an anti-authoritarian and an iconoclast well before fame found him. And while first impressions count, I feel that, having come somehow closer to an understanding of him through his personal correspondence, it is his generosity, discipline and fearlessness that have come to define him for me, over and above his legendary appetite for excess.
In James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), John Eglington comments that, ‘[t]he supreme question of a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring’. Here then, is the clue to the power of Thompson’s letters: they painstakingly reveal the depth of the man in a way his combustible literature only rarely managed to do. This isn’t to say that his work was shallow, but that the choppy tides of his manic and aggressive style tended to obscure, at least for the casual reader, the eternal springs from which they gained their energy. In a way, Thompson’s letters become the bathyscaphe through which we observe what in him is lost to the surface: that obscured world, that intimate space where access is restricted to those who have earned his trust. Where else could we witness this bastion of social justice and anti-conservatism announcing that, ‘[i]t used to worry me that I was really an evil redneck, but now I sort of like it …’ Letter-writing here, can be seen as a site of intersections, the informal tray on which he serves favourite meals to favourite people. Such meals do not require the orderliness of a set menu; they allow the haphazardness of personality to dictate the taste and the pace of the banquet.
There was one literary forum where HST was able to tread the line between his public and private selves: journalism. In particular, his articles for Rolling Stone represent some of his most incisive and inspiring work as a social commentator and author of conscience. Never a shrinking violet, Thompson’s cluttered columns in that venerable magazine became the pulpit where he criticised presidents, corporations, authoritarians, industries, celebrities, blowhards and religious figures – with so much passion, humour and earnestness. It was here that Thompson found a medium of relevance, a position of centrality where his opinion not only counted, but influenced opinion. The history of American journalism cannot be told without mentioning the legacy of Hunter S. Thompson. It is my opinion that in Australia today there has never been more need for a journalistic maverick like HST, and that such an influential stirrer and rabble-rouser has never seemed so far away.
Hunter S. Thompson injected himself into his writing, whether it was for personal or public consumption. In so doing he set an example, one that not enough young writers are following in Australia. In our political and social climate of rapidly encroaching conservatism, his letters felt like a personal challenge, and were no small factor in my resolve to dedicate some time and energy to my own politically conscientious writing. The left wing has lost its bite, if not its bark, and the journalistic obsession with ‘balance’ is coming at the cost of a strident presence for non-conservative views. Balance be damned! Thompson confirmed for me that conservatism has to be railed against if its influence is to be countered.

Best Books of 2006

Friday 1 December, 2006
Jo Case, Deputy Editor

Another year is grinding to a close. The signs are everywhere. Christmas party invitations are jostling for attention in my inbox. (All three of them.) The last of my favourite television shows has departed from the screen, leaving me with a renewed resolve to read more, watch less. Yesterday, I saw my first ‘real’ Christmas tree, hanging its head in the sun outside my local fruiterers. And this morning, the last issue of ABR for 2006 arrived on my desk, fresh from the printers.

One of the most popular features of the summer issue is always ‘Best Books of the Year’, as selected by some of Australia’s leading critics. It’s certainly one I always read with interest. This year, proofing those pages for the seventh (or was it the seventeenth?) time, I began to ponder what my own books of the year would be …

I know that the Booker shortlist (let alone the final winner) pricked the spines of a few critics this year. (Christopher Bantick’s furious piece in the Courier Mail struck me as particularly amusing, especially his assertion that neither The Secret River nor Carry Me Down explored the human condition, and that the latter was about ‘a very tall child’.) But for me, the shortlist provided rich pickings.

My favourite was Mother’s Milk (Edward St Aubyn, Picador), somewhat reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited in its acerbic examination of the wildly dysfunctional British aristocracy. Patrick Melrose and his family spend their summers at the palatial family home in the south of France, which Patrick’s dying mother, Eleanor, has bequeathed to a new-age shaman (read: trickster). The bizarre bequest follows her lifelong pattern of caring deeply for nameless unfortunates, yet relatively little for her only son. Nearby, the near-paralysed Eleanor expires in a nursing home, trapped and terrified. Patrick, too, is paralysed: with resentment. He self-medicates with alcohol and prescription drugs, toying with his old girlfriend Julia, while his maternally obsessed wife Mary is occupied tending to the every need of their two sons. Perspectives shift between the hyper-intelligent, eerily observant older son Robert (aged approximately five when the novel starts), domestic goddess Mary and the caustic, deteriorating Patrick. Patrick’s voice dominates and, almost despite itself, charms the reader. The language and descriptions are lush, the plotline heart-rending and absorbing, and the characters sharply observed. I remember thinking, halfway through this novel (which I read after a few successive romans à clef), that this, at least, was definitely not an novelised autobiography. I was then shocked (and vaguely appalled) to discover that it most definitely is. In fact, it is follows on from the earlier Patrick Melrose trilogy, Some Hope (Picador) – which I rushed to buy and subsequently devoured. Some Hope is pretty much a chronicle of abuse: emotional and physical, outwardly imposed and self-inflicted; not recommended for the weak of heart or stomach. Though the prose is still freakishly talented, Mother’s Milk is the superior book.

M.J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down came a close second in my Booker barracking. Claustrophobic and unsettling, it takes the reader into the mind of precocious eleven-year-old John Egan, a socially isolated child from a troubled family who discovers a rare gift for lie detection. His attachment to uncovering the truth in others — coupled with his own smooth propensity for lying — is to prove disastrous for a family determined to skate over the surface of things. Hyland has said that it’s a story about the dangers of taking beliefs (of any kind) to extremes. This is exemplified by a series of scarily intense characters, from John himself to one especially charismatic teacher. Hyland is the mistress of the telling detail. This is a multi-layered book, rich with secrets (only partially revealed) and detailed characterisation. A book to ponder and analyse long after it has been put away.

Stephen Matchett recently wrote in the Weekend Australian that ‘it is hard to imagine many people staking their reputations as discerning readers on recommendations of [The Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai, Hamish Hamilton)]'. Well, at the risk of losing my credibility, I have to say that I loved it. And I came to it biased; ready to enjoy tut-tutting that it didn’t deserve to win (as opposed to my favourites). This is an intricate, thoughtful meditation on colonialism, migration and the tensions between the developed and developing worlds. In the tiny Himalayan outpost of Kalimpong, the citizens are divided between the lingering survivors of colonialist Britain, aspiring devotees of capitalist America, and frustrated fledgling activists, who gradually sow the seeds for an ethnic rebellion. There is a retired judge, risen far from his humble beginnings in the merchant class, who has lived his life in intense discomfort – never accepted by his British civil service colleagues, yet tutored by them in disdain for his own people. His orphaned granddaughter, Sai, is a victim of India’s brief flirtation with communism – her parents died participating in the Russian space programme. The cook, Sai’s surrogate father, puts his money on the dark horse of the American dream – where anyone, no matter how lowly, can succeed. He hopes his son Biju will make his fortune in the United States and transcend the family’s cycle of servitude. Of course, Biju, an illegal immigrant, starves in a Harlem cellar, dreaming of a Green Card, bone-achingly lonely. Enduring a series of woefully underpaid jobs, he is as much a servant as his father, but with no community and no support. Meanwhile, Sai’s tutor and first love, Gyan, seeks to escape his own inherited cycle of poverty through his involvement in the increasingly militant ethnic movement – which wrenches his loyalty from his love affair to the business of class war. In this book, the tangled consequences of globalism result in eternal strivings towards new identities that promise, but don’t deliver, happiness.

I don’t usually agree with those cynics who say that the best books were written years ago. But I might have to revise my opinion, based on this recently uncovered masterpiece, written in occupied France during World War II. Irène Némirovsky originally planned Suite Française as a five-part series capturing the everyday experience of wartime. She died in Auschwitz before she could finish more than two parts. An established author, the Jewish Nemirovsky was no longer able to find publication in Nazi-occupied France. She hand-wrote this story in a journal and it was kept (in a suitcase) by her daughter for decades after her death. Only recently bringing herself to read what she presumed to be a personal diary, her daughter was amazed to discover this unpublished novel, which has since been heaped with praise. The back-story is amazing (and included in full at the back of the book), but I shouldn’t let that overshadow the book. Suite Française beautifully captures life during and after the Nazi invasion, as experienced by a disparate group of Parisians. The period detail is (of course) just right, but the characters are rendered just as wonderfully, from the haughty family of aristocrats to the bourgeois banker couple, the snobbish aesthete only worried about his precious porcelain to the savvy professional mistress who sees that the new régime as just a change of scenery.

Sometimes it’s the small, seemingly unobtrusive books that really get under your skin. The ones that don’t arrive on your desk accompanied by breathless press releases (let alone whizz-bang websites featuring pole dancers), that aren’t rewarded with literary prize money or debated and discussed in the literary pages. One such book this year was Michele Gierck’s 700 Days in El Salvador (Coretext), the memoir of a Melbourne woman who lived and worked in war-torn El Salvador, first with her partner Jose (a refugee); later, on her own. The book is earnest and heartfelt, drawing the reader into an entirely foreign world, where people have very little but freely give of themselves – including regularly risking their lives for one another and for a common cause. Visiting a refugee family on her first visit to Latin America, Gierck feels guilty when served up chicken soup made in honour of their visit. ‘You have to accept graciously,’ says Jose. ‘Even the poor like to be able to give.’ Later, after she finds herself confronting the military and saving Jose’s life, she muses: ‘Later, I wondered how I’d managed to step forward … But El Salvador in wartime was the kind of place that could easily make you into someone you never believed you could be.’ This extraordinary book deftly blends memoir, travel writing and politics.

I am ashamed to say that a proof copy of Mister Pip (Lloyd Jones, Text) sat in my house for weeks (okay, months) before I read it. Maybe I was being stubborn, dismissing it based on the industry hype. Text bought world rights to this New Zealand novel (originally published by Penguin New Zealand) after Penguin Australia declined to publish it. Subsequently, both Text and Jones have earned a substantial sum in international rights sales – trumpeted as the most money fetched by a New Zealand novel, beating even Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors. Anyway, pushing past the hype …

I finally succumbed to ‘Great Expectations in Bougainville’ and spent a whole day entranced, reading the book from beginning to end. Since the troubles started in Bougainville, the whites have deserted the tiny island – taking with them Matilda’s dad, who worked for the mine and has been happily transplanted to Townsville. Matilda’s village has been abandoned by the outside world. Both ‘Redskin’ soldiers from Port Moresby and local rebels are menacing occasional presences. ‘We had what we always had,’ says Matilda. The one white man left on the island is the elusive Mr Watts, married to a local girl. Eventually, he is commandeered as teacher. The children return to a schoolhouse in the process of being reclaimed by the bush, where Mr Watts teaches from just one book, Great Expectations. Gradually, the children are bewitched, as much by Mr Watts’s storytelling as by the story. ‘Mister Pip’ becomes a very real presence on the island. Matilda’s mother is suspicious of this charismatic fictional newcomer and his affect on the island children – and later, sinister outsiders share her concern, with traumatic consequences. This is a love letter to books and reading, and the transformative power of the imagination – but it is also a powerful examination of power and belonging. Believe the hype.

Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road (Picador) literally gave me nightmares, but I was compelled to re-enter that world the next morning. Chilling. Bleak. Merciless. Moving. Cynical. Hopeful – I’d use all of these words to describe this tale of a man and his son, ‘each the other’s world entire’, travelling through a post-nuclear America. Personal encounters are potentially lethal: the few survivors (‘the walking dead in a horror movie’) include marauding gangs of cannibals. McCarthy is with William Golding: this group of isolated individuals, torn from civilisation and competing for meagre resources, hunt rather than help each other. Man and boy are heading south, to the coast, to avoid freezing to death in the harsh winter cold. Their few possessions, including a pistol with two bullets, are in a shopping cart. The tender father-son relationship and the boy’s hunger to believe in human kinship contrast with the brutal reality that surrounds them and with the father’s equally brutal (understandable) cynicism.

As mentioned recently on litblog sarsasparilla, this scenario is far more likely than the pristine preserved community of television’s Jericho. Most of all, the language in this book is superb. It had me reaching for the dictionary several times (gambreled? rachitic?), but that’s a testament to McCarthy’s dedication to choosing the most exact word for what he means. Sometimes that word is obscure. But his imagery and storytelling are universal, packing an emotional punch that lands in the pit of the stomach. The scene is set with: ‘Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.’ On post-apocalyptic fatherhood: ‘This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job.’ And father/son heart-to-hearts go something like this:

They’re going to eat them, aren’t they?
Yes.
And we couldn’t help them because then they’d eat us too.
Yes.
And that’s why we couldn’t help them.
Yes.
Okay.

The Road should be required reading for anyone with access to
nuclear weapons (yeah, right: I know).

Finally, I was thoroughly seduced by Days Like These (MUP), the memoir of Michael Gurr, playwright and former speechwriter for Premier Steve Bracks. Gurr is the successor to Bob Ellis as the sad clown (and eternal optimist) of the ALP: poignant, laugh-out-loud funny and insightful. This is a rewarding journey alongside a writer gifted with a bowerbird’s eye for the sparkling anecdote – and sometimes, the perfect line to make you catch your breath. I can’t really do justice to this book in the way that Joel Deane (poet, novelist, current speechwriter for Steve Bracks) does in this month’s ABR, so I’ll quote him:

This is a strange book. Strange in that it defies the kind of easy categorisation of which marketing departments seem increasingly fond. It is not a ‘political’ book, yet it is political. It is not a ‘theatre’ book, yet it is theatrical. It is not a ‘memoir’, yet it is memoirish. It is simply a good –no, very good – book to read. Personal and political, Days Like These is a Trojan Horse of a book. It first entertains the reader with stories that also inform via their penetrating insights into the lamentable state of our national affairs and national theatre. If Days Like These can be defined as anything, though, it is as a ‘writer’s book’: a book by a writer about writing on a canvas that is both personal and public, political and artistic.

I deliberately haven’t mentioned the books I talked about in my inaugural ABR blog post, two of which I include as my picks of the year (Careless, Deborah Robertson, Picador; Unpolished Gem, Alice Pung, Black Inc.), but you can read about them here.

You can read the current issue of ABR to see what our critics chose, but I’d like to throw it open to voracious readers everywhere here:

What were your favourite books of 2006, and why?

A Week of Epiphanies for a Publishing Wannabe

Rebecca Starford, ABR volunteer
November 16, 2006

It must be that time of the year again: the time of epiphanies. I have become something of an epiphany junkie. In fact, I have had so many epiphanies lately that I’m considering beginning my own festival in celebration. Most of them have been trifling revelations involving proposed fitness regimes, healthy eating and a realisation that Neighbours is actually really bad.

I blame these epiphanous episodes on me finishing my degree. I had only one goal before November 1: the completion of my Honours thesis. The female hysteric in the late nineteenth-century Australian literary tradition was the subject of investigation. Needless to say, having spent day after day huddled in a spine-fracturing cubicle in the Baillieu Library basement or chained to my desk in my dusty bedroom, I was beginning embody the topic of study.

Don’t misunderstand me – I enjoyed my final year of Creative Arts immensely. Does any other course boast all classes starting after two p.m.? When I made my last ascent of the front steps of that freakishly ugly building on the corner of Swanston and Grattan Streets, it was with a sombre tread. Just imagine, I thought to myself as I sipped, philosophically, at my decaf, skinny caffe latte. My uni days are coming to an end. What am I going to do with my life?

It’s strange, isn’t it, how nostalgic November makes you. But I will miss university. Not just for the sleep-ins, abundant holidays and concession prices; not just for the Che Guevara fashion shows, Riot Grrl exhibits, berets and rollie cigarettes. I will miss uni because it changed me, irrevocably. It awakened me. To put it simply, one day I went to uni and came home different.

I’m sure it sounds trite. I don’t care. Though the regular retort ‘Oh yeah, Creative Arts. Study, is it? You guys read comics and watch porn all day’, trailed about like a bad smell, I soon learned to hold my nose to it. Yes, perhaps there was a modicum of truth in these thinly veiled tauts (among the more dubious aspects of study, I actually did spend two weeks of my ‘Sexuality in the Media’ subject analysing the development and production of mainstream pornography). I’m sure many would argue that such disciplines are not worthy of academic attention; the termination of numerous subjects across the faculty during my degree appeared to indicate that this as an opinion shared by the administration. But had these sceptics experienced the eclectic range of Creative Writing, Visual and Media Arts, and Theatre Studies, they would not been so dismissive. Enriching is a word that comes to mind. Trite again? Maybe. But it always brings a smile to my face when I reflect on tutorials in Short Fiction, Film and Philosophy, Radicalism in Modern Art (I’m sorry, but it was such a conceptual struggle), and the superbly named, interdisciplinary ‘Nymphs, Sluts and Madonnas’. I mean, how many people analysed Peaches Geldof, Courtney Love and Princess Diana’s influence on post-feminist criticism this year? Like, so not many.

To have had such diversity, such well-rounded introductions to these subject areas, was certainly a privilege, and one for which I am most grateful. I have, as a result, discovered diverse and alternating approaches to my own artistic practice, as well as the analysis and critique of others’. This was the most satisfying aspect of my degree: the encouragement and development of alternative viewpoints, understandings, approaches and questions. Some people would prefer to keep our society myopic with ‘structured narratives’ and ‘objective records’. I am proud to agree to disagree with such a stance.

Having fed such ideals through the short years, it did come as a surprise to have my final tutorial end on a rather gloomy note. The subject co-ordinator had come into the classroom for the traditional ‘goodnight and good luck’ speech. After beginning with the usual spiel of hoping we were fulfilled and inspired after our time in the SCA, along with his hopes for our continued pursuits in artistic practice, his manner abruptly changed. He cleared his throat, and ran a hand through his hair. His face was terribly grim. ‘I think you are all brave individuals,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘You’re on your own now. And it’s not going to be easy out there.’
Wow, I thought, gulping. On your own.
The co-ordinator’s warning did not reverberate with much intensity through the rest of the class – a moment later we left and headed straight to the nearest pub. But don’t think that we didn’t care. It’s just that similar rhetoric had always floated about the School. Little or no job prospects for Creative Arts graduates had been something of a running joke. Sure, we can take a feminist-psychoanalytic approach to a Cleo article or demonstrate the psychological benefits of sci-fi fandom with the best of them, but out there, in the ‘real world’, how much does that count? And for whom?

From next year, such negative rhetoric will only haunt the painfully ugly building on the corner of Swanston and Grattan Streets: with the changes to the degree structure at Melbourne University, Creative Arts is being phased out. That, I believe, is a great loss, not only to the university and its prospective students, but to the wider creative community that would have been broadened and strengthened by the inclusion of SCA graduates.

I hate to be cynical, but I cannot help feeling that the fate of Creative Arts is indicative of a broader trend working against the arts, and potential careers in the sector, in Australia. It seems to me that a career in the Arts is, at least in the current political climate, fraught with difficulties and challenges: the termination of emerging artist programmes; cuts in state and federal funding across the board; declines in production of local creative content across the media forms. Perhaps this cynicism is only the product of my education. But you can hardly blame me for having been reminded each year of the diminishing resources and support for young artists.


It might seem strange, then, to draw comparison between my Creative Arts degree and Australian Book Review. No, no, before you think it, I’m not trying to ingratiate myself with the magazine (hello, Peter!) But when I approach a reading of ABR, I am always struck by the spectrum of cultural, political and artistic critique and reflection. Such a reading of the magazine is not always easy: it requires intellectual stamina.

Confession time. I belong to ABR’s tiny readership percentile below twenty-five years of age: the dreaded i-Pod/You-Tube generation, so often condemned for our mass consumerism, illicit hedonism, and political and social apathy. I would like to take this opportunity to stand up for my undernourished constituent. There is a change in the air, a whiff of movement. ABR, ladies and gentlemen, is getting trendy. More and more younger people are turning to ABR for reference in the arts and artistic practice and critique. Not that this comes as a great surprise: the magazine, in so many capacities, inspires its readers in the quality of reviews, the calibre of the reviewers, the wide-ranging and occasionally contentious ideas and questions that generate such important debate and reconsideration. In its ability to simply fascinate.

I first became involved with ABR last year as a volunteer. It was after an epiphany, actually, which involved me understanding that I wanted to work in the publishing industry. The magazine has several volunteers who come in during different times of the week to assist with proofing, review lay-outs, indexing and other administrative tasks. The indexing from the magazine’s resurrection in the late 1970s has been a highlight. It is very interesting to chart the development of the magazine in the earlier editions. It has certainly changed in many ways (Peter Rose does not, thankfully, sport an enormous beard, as did the founding editor of the second series, John McLaren!) The content in many of these previous issues covers territory that is politically and socially relevant today, and in some instances this is both curious and troubling.

For someone flirting with the idea of a career in publishing, volunteering has been insightful and beneficial. I often listen to my friends gush over their internships, ‘vac’ work and placements. It sounds quite different from my experience. But I am never envious. One friend described her recent acceptance of a position at a leading Melbourne accountants’ firm as like signing her life away. I was impressed with her dramatics.

Entering the ‘publishing world’ might not be an easy career path. And if I had a dollar for every time someone told me what a difficult industry it is to crack, I would have nearly enough to go out to lunch. But that’s the fix, isn’t it? If it is an industry that you’re passionate about – if it’s what makes you tick – then you have to keep pegging away at it, don’t you? You’ve got no choice. I like to think of it as a rash that won’t go away.

I know there are many young publishing wannabes out there. And though I have no great authority, I will impart some advice anyway: get out there and gain as much experience as you can. Build up a folio of work. Become involved in your student newsletters and magazines. Start your own. Contact local newspapers, magazines, online journals, and expressing an interest in volunteering. Visit your state writers’ centre for information on industry information seminars. Check out University and TAFE courses in Publishing and Editing. Read, read, read, and be critical. Become that oh-so-irritating tut-tutter when spotting a typo. When you’ve become that person, you’re halfway there.

In The Feel of Steel, Helen Garner describes being a writer as ‘a sickness, a neurosis, a mania’. She considers writers as ‘rather peculiar people – unnaturally curious, extremely anxious, and probably pretty neurotic, sitting in a room all day by themselves messing around with syntax’. You know, Helen, I’m not sure writers are the only ones matching this description. Publishing wannabes seem to fit the bill very well indeed. Personally, I can’t wait to unleash my pent-up neurosis. But it’s all terribly romantic, don’t you think? – the tortured writer/editor figure. Picture it: the dilapidated residence, damp, mildewed study, bronchial cough racking your lungs as you struggle through that final proof. ‘It’s for literature’s sake,’ you croak, washing down the anti-depressants with a greasy swig of gin.

Actually I did the whole quasi-bohemian thing this year in Carlton. And I was enjoying it until an enormous piece of my roof fell in, the front window blew out, the back gate came off its hinge, mice invaded the kitchen, and I realised students from the Melbourne Uni Law School could see straight down into our bathroom (literally, as the shower, basin and toilet were outdoors!).

So good luck to all you publishing wannabes. And keep up those epiphanies if you can – even if they involve going soap-opera cold turkey.

Note: perhaps tone down on the tortured, bohemian lifestyle. It’s not very sexy.