Australian Fiction

Stealing Picasso is an art heist caper based on the sensational theft in 1986 of Picasso’s Weeping woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. The crime, attributed to a nebulous gang of militant aesthetes calling themselves the Australian Cultural Terrorists, remains unsolved. Anson Cameron, a Melbourne writer best known for the novel Tin Toys (2000), takes this historical loose end and runs with it, discarding all but the most cursory details of the source story.

Set in Sydney, Wendy James’s third novel, Where Have You Been?, an intriguing story of family, loss, memory and identity, is just as compelling as her previous ones, Out of the Silence (2005) and The Steele Diaries (2008).

Keeping Faith, Roger Averill’s first novel after his non-fiction début, Boy He Cry: An island odyssey (2009), is a quiet and resonant piece of work. Befitting a novel set partly in a labour ward and beginning with a description of a stillborn baby, it proceeds with the knowledge that finding the right words can be difficult. It speaks carefully and tactfully, in a spare language of great focus.

Soon after the end of World War II, Robert Booker, husband of Catherine, returns from service in New Guinea to their home in Sydney. It is immediately apparent that their relationship has deteriorated. With Catherine’s hasty disposal of a telegram from an American soldier named Lewis, we learn that she has had an affair, and also a child, in Robert’s absence. The story then moves back to 1944, when the liaison began. Eventually it returns to the present, and Catherine has a hard time concealing her affair and child from her husband.

'What’s in a name?’ as C.J. Dennis and Shakespeare asked. Maybe much, as in nomen: omen – maybe naught, as in the case of the narrator Michael Meehan’s fourth novel, Below the Styx. For this chap’s name is Martin Frobisher, a distinctive name that rings several bells. Sir Martin Frobisher (c.1535–94) was an English navigator who made three attempts from 1576 to 1578 to discover the North-West Passage, giving his name to a bay on Baffin Island and bringing back to England ‘black earth’, which was mistakenly thought to contain gold. He later served against the Spanish Armada and raided Spanish treasure ships.

Meehan’s protagonist would appear to have nothing whatsoever in common with his Tudor namesake, and his name may be a subspecies of that great Australian comic trope, the furphy. From the first page of the book, it is all but impossible to shake the conviction that ‘Martin Frobisher’ has a weighty significance, while it may in fact be empty, a linguistic terra nullius. It may be a Shaggy Dog, happily at home in this benignly witty and whimsical novel, which is also a murder mystery.

The mystique of the Roman Catholic Church has been thoroughly exploited by the likes of Dan Brown and writers of the medieval monastic murder mysteries that gained a certain popularity following the English publication of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in 1983. Carmel Bird’s latest book contains a mystery, though not a murder. It is set mostly in 2001, but monks, convents, rosaries, black madonnas, and miracles fill the pages of The Child of Twilight, along with artificial insemination and air travel.

Sydney Peony Kent, the narrator, is the product of assisted reproductive technology, both of her genetic forbears being anonymous donors; her parents, habitually and oddly bundled together as ‘Avila/Barnaby’, are infertile. Sydney has a couple of imaginary friends, a Mexican nanny, and a collection of snow globes containing black virgins. And she writes novels.

Suspenseful, heartrending, and transcontinental, Come Back to Me’s dynamic scenes extend from debauchery at an office part to a shocking outback crime. A complex psychological tale, Sara Foster’s début novel – forged from her years as an editor and a life lived in Britain and Australia – throws us head first into marital distress.

Keeping Faith, Roger Averill’s first novel after his non-fiction debut, Boy He Cry: An island Odyssey (2009), is a quiet and resonant piece of work. Befitting a novel set partly in a labour ward and beginning with a description of a stillborn baby, it proceeds with the knowledge that finding the right words can be difficult. It speaks carefully and tactfully, in a spare language of great focus.

Peter Goldsworthy justly commands a seat at the big table of the Australian hall of literary achievement. This was underlined on Australia Day with his gonging as a Member of the Order of Australia for service as an author and poet. It is a prize that should glitter comfortably on the mantelpiece alongside the likes of his South Australian Premier’s Award, his Commonwealth Poetry Prize, his Bicentennial Literary Prize for Poetry, and his FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction.

For someone who has practised half-time as a writer and half-time as a GP for the past thirty-five years, his output is admirably prolific: eight novels, including one co-written with Brian Matthews, five collections of short stories, half a dozen poetry collections, two novels adapted as plays, two opera libretti, and a spot of essayistic Navel Gazing (1998). He has also done time on literature’s administrative front line, his committee stints including four and a half years as chairman of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. All of which mark him out as a littérateur of the first order.