Sarah Kanowski

Some stories are very familiar to us, as a society, stories whose ugly truths we seem to have accepted, may even have, belatedly, apologised for, but the story of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams, as told by Peter Read, reveals how much White Australia still has to learn about the complexity of our national past and the tragedy of its continuing legacy. Eileen Williams, three weeks after her birth in 1943, was sent to the United Aborigines Mission Home at Bomaderry, where she was renamed Joy. She grew up in state institutions and was later incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, spending many years struggling with alcohol and drugs. As a young woman she had a baby taken from her, a repetition of the trauma inflicted on her mother and her grandmother. Joy, a poet and activist, mounted a long and unsuccessful lawsuit against the New South Wales state government. She died of cancer, alone, in 2006.

While spying in Scotland in 1706, Daniel Defoe wrote a letter to the queen’s secretary of state explaining his technique: ‘I Talk to Everybody in Their Own Way.’ In his energetic and instructive introduction to The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, Adrian Poole takes Defoe’s declaration as a neat summation of the novelist’s method. It was following the success of Robinson Crusoe that the word ‘novelist’ was first recorded in the OED, heralding an art form whose great virtue has been its receptivity to all kinds of experience, its mimicry of all manner of voices: rich, poor, black, white, male, female.

Living in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, Christopher Isherwood wrote the stories that first brought him fame and later became the basis for the musical Cabaret. This was the period that Isherwood mined for his ground-breaking memoir, Christopher and His Kind (1976).

‘I am interested to know all about you: who you are, how your life developed, from the time your mother was pregnant with you, till today. Are you willing to tell me?’ This request, made by Paul Valent to one of his first patients, is as seductive as it is impossible. The great realist writers of the nineteenth century approached their characters with the same voracious desire to know everything, to explain everything, to have everything revealed. But the psychotherapist’s mission is far more daunting than the novelist’s, for the secrets he aims to uncover are those the subject hides from himself.

Media discussion of the 2006 Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk, tends to focus on his political persecution at the hands of the Turkish state. Pamuk concedes that history has forced him to don a ‘political persona’, one that journalists and literary festival audiences are keen to encounter. Yet Pamuk’s new collection of essays, Other Colours: Essays and a Story, reveals where politics (or political commentary) and the writer of imaginative thinking part company.

The Singing is the inaugural publication in the Varuna Firsts series, a collaboration between the Varuna Writers’ House and Brandl & Schlesinger. Both should be applauded for bringing a distinctive new voice into Australian writing; not to mention the honour due to the prodigious talent of Stephanie Bishop herself. Bishop has written a haunting novel with a seemingly simple story: love gone awry. A woman runs into an ex-lover on the street (neither protagonist is named), and this meeting throws her back into the story of their past. The two narratives – her solitary life now and the tale, mainly, of the relationship’s end – run in parallel. The novel’s energy, however, is ruminative rather than linear, circling around the nature of their love, pressing at the bruises left by its collapse.

The picaresque adventures of an eager young woman tap-dancing through the streets of New York and New Orleans to the rhythms of her boozy, freewheeling jazz-drummer father – it’s not surprising that Mandy Sayer’s first memoir, Dreamtime Alice, was widely embraced by reviewers and readers on its publication in 1998. Busking in the United States was Sayer’s attempt to graduate from being a listener to her father’s stories of on-the-road bonhomie into one of their players. Like her father, she uses the resulting tales to beguile and seduce, polishing them so that they reflect both the tradition of Broadway star stories and countless coming-of-age romances.

In Dreamtime Alice, Sayer’s father recounts the loss of his virginity, his daughter’s conception, his wet dreams, his drug highs, his failed schemes – a staccato rhythm of self-creating storytelling. Her mother, in contrast, ‘is shut up tight … the antithesis of my verbose father’. In Sayer’s new memoir, Velocity, the life of this silent woman moves to the foreground.