Christina Hill

The Gospel of Gods And Crocodiles rewrites the boys’ own adventure tale of the nineteenth century. In an intertextual gesture, R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) is the favourite book of one of Elizabeth Stead’s main characters. The thrill of conquest and the titillation of cannibal atrocities typical of Ballantyne’s imperialist fiction are thus replaced by a humanitarian concern with competing foundational myths and the clash of cultures. Stead’s narrative opens, like Genesis I, with the creation stories: the moon and crocodile legends of the unnamed coral island, situated ‘two degrees below the equator’. The arrival of white missionaries brings the attempt by the newcomers to overwrite this indigenous mythology with the Christian message. With this comes the inevitable introduction of Western ways.

In his latest novel, Everything I Knew, Peter Goldsworthy uses this famous quotation. Indeed, it is so apposite that it might well have provided the epigraph. Everything I Knew is, in part, a self-conscious reworking of Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953). The first-person narrator, Robert Burns, is a naïve fourteen-year-old boy in desperate thrall to a young woman. But where the emotional life of Hartley’s boy protagonist is destroyed by the precipitate arrival of sexual knowledge, Everything I Knew subverts this notion.

The year is 1964 and the setting is Penola, a country town in South Australia. Robbie is a Year Seven schoolboy, precociously intelligent, restlessly pubescent. His father is the town policeman and his mother a well-meaning but stolid housewife. The community is narrow; everyone knows everyone else. At the beginning of the novel, Robbie is beginning to outgrow Billy, his best friend from primary school, an Indigenous boy with a reputation for getting into trouble that Robbie, to a lesser extent (being white), shares.

The Well in the Shadow, whose title is drawn from Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo (1929), is an unconventional book, shaped entirely by Chester Eagle’s idiosyncratic responses to certain writers and their work. Eagle’s engagement with, and enthusiasm for, the texts he considers are undeniable. So too is his close knowledge of the books and writers discussed. The range of subjects is broad and reasonably inclusive, but I did wonder, given the book’s subtitle, about the absence of well-known writers such as Peter Carey, Tim Winton, David Malouf, and Christina Stead. Nonetheless, the choice is diverse.

Cath Keneally’s second novel, Jetty Road, is set in the beachside suburb of Glenelg, South Australia. Her subject is the relationship between two sisters in early middle age, and the narrative is fabricated from the daily happenings of their lives. Evie, the older sister by several years, has no children and ekes out a living in a number of part-time jobs as a child-care worker. Paula, matron of an aged care home, has two children: Bert, aged nineteen, and Rosie, six. Neither of the sisters is married.

It is characteristic of Marion Halligan’s work to celebrate surfaces, how things look and taste. Wine and good food matter, as do décor, old houses, antique furniture, and books, gardens and architecture. Valley of Grace is set in a strongly realised contemporary Paris, and the novel is very much about how Parisians live now. The past is also important, not only as the source of a revered aesthetic but as a legacy that shapes the present. The central plot device is an antiquarian bookshop in the Latin Quarter and the social and professional interactions of the characters connected with it. The main focus of the novel is upon the lives of two generations of women.

The title of Jesse Pentecost’s first novel refers not to a confidence trick but to a Conservatorium of Music. Primarily, Pentecost seems to want to talk about classical music, to offer considered criticism, to impart his knowledge of its history and practice, and to suggest the difficulties of a professional career in music. He is also keen to explore the post-Enlightenment idea of the ‘genius’.

The Great Arch has considerable if unlikely charm. It is a history of the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a novel about real and imagined people living near its construction site. Hastrich brings to life (potentially dry) detail about huge steel plates, creeping cranes, rivets and cables. We see this mostly in the writings and photographs of her central character, an Anglican vicar who records the progress of the bridge-building in his parish paper and also writes a two-volume book about it. The Reverend Ralph Anderson Cage, rector at St Christopher’s at Lavender Bay (based on a real person, Frank Cash), is an endearingly hapless yet decent man who becomes obsessed with the unfolding engineering marvel that reshapes the population and topography of his once-thriving parish.

Barry Oakley, in his brief introduction to Families: Modern Australian Short Stories, tells us that the quality he was seeking in the fiction was ‘vitality’. This seems a rather broad filter: surely all good writing must possess vitality if it is going to hold the reader’s attention? Notwithstanding, many of the stories here are good, even excellent.

Camilla Noli’s novel about a cold, narcissistic personality is not pleasant reading. It is, of course, a tall order to write about a woman whose will to power is so all-consuming that she is prepared to kill her children to reassert her need for control. Narrated in the first person, it is quickly apparent that the speaker is hardly sane. Her anger exacerbated by her need for sleep, she burns with rage at the demands of her two small children. Her wilful young daughter, Cassie, a miniature version of herself in all but appearance, seems especially to provoke her resentment, even hatred. 

The Barton family of Susan Johnson’s Life in Seven Mistakes is ‘unhappy after its own fashion’, to quote Tolstoy’s famous dictum. Elizabeth Barton’s perspective dominates the narrative. A 49-year-old ceramicist who lives in Melbourne and is preparing for her first exhibition in New York, Elizabeth is under pressure to complete some pieces needed for her opening. With her third husband, Neil, Elizabeth and her three children are spending Christmas with her parents. Bob and Nancy Barton have retired to the Gold Coast where they live in a vulgar, ferociously air-conditioned apartment. Also there are one of Elizabeth’s brothers, Robbie, with his wife, Katie, and their two children. The youngest brother, Nick, is in jail for drug offences and erased from the family narrative, but he is ever-present in Elizabeth’s mind.