Australian Fiction

I remember trying a few years ago to communicate to a younger friend something of the way I remember my childhood in Adelaide in the 1970s. It was a world in which an older Australia still lingered, a quiet, suburban world where men caught the tram to work at 8.15a.m. and came home at five, where the banks closed at four p.m., and where World War II veterans and their wives lived around us. In 2004 that world – somnolent, conservative, oddly outside time – seems almost unimaginable; even then, it was almost gone. Instead, it inhabits that hinterland between memory and nostalgia, lingering for me in the textures of the things and places which gave it shape, textures that are hopelessly entangled in the possibilities, pleasures and disappointments of childhood.

Philip Salom’s poetry has won many awards since his first collection, The Silent Piano, was published in 1980. His poems range widely and have often included fantastical elements, most notably in Sky Poems (1987). The opening of Sky Poems enjoins the reader to ‘Throw out the world’s laws’, promising: ‘Anything you wish, possibly more!’ Such poetry seems to proceed from the assumption that fiction can, after all, be stranger than truth. And, despite its variousness, Salom’s work often returns to certain kinds of strangeness.

His second book, The Projectionist (1983), is a kind of proto-novel constructed as a collection of poetry. It is impossible to summarise this book neatly, but it foregrounds the sensibility of a character called Mr Benchley, a retired film projectionist whose ‘reality’ is partly filmic. In this work, Salom investigates the elusiveness of human experience and reflects on how experience may be represented suggestively through audiovisual technology. He writes in one poem, ‘This playback of life’s feeding / every thread of the rough cocoon’ – the ‘cocoon’, among other things, being the self-reflexive activity of a lonely life.

Playback (1991) became the title of Salom’s first novel, recently reissued. The main protagonist is a male oral historian and folklorist living as a visitor in a country town. At the core of Playback is a mystery centred on a possible, and unsolved, crime, along with the erotic charge of an adulterous relationship between the oral historian and an artist. The novel progresses by counterpointing the past – captured in a growing, if precarious, store of taped oral histories – with the historian’s evolving and increasingly destabilised present. The dynamic is fairly merciless. Various forms of disintegration occur; the novel’s conclusion answers some key questions but leaves others unresolved. In both The Projectionist and Playback, people are shown never to be free of their pasts, even though they remember their lives poorly. They are depicted as often creating themselves and their fantasies on the ground of their own forgetting.

A few years ago, it seemed that anyone with a personal or family story to tell – even first-time authors – wrote a memoir rather than distilling those experiences into fiction. Think of Kate Shayler’s The Long Way Home (2001) or Sonia Orchard’s Something More Wonderful (2003). Many claimed this was because, at a moment when Australian memoir was resurgent, publishers were not supporting first-time novelists. But the tide may be turning. Recently, a number of autobiographical novels by new writers have appeared, well promoted and capturing the public’s attention, including Sophie Cunningham’s Geography (2004) and now Larissa Behrendt’s Home.

John Clancy does a number of curious things in his new novel. One of them is to put Patrick White’s Voss into the hands of his heroine. Laura is in Year 12. Her teacher, Miss Temple, happens to find a copy of Voss when they are together on a school excursion to Alice Springs. Laura immediately warms to the book. She is a remarkable young woman, sensitive and resourceful. Destined to study medicine, she has literary gifts as well. People offer her jobs at places where others her age are queuing for work. One of her reasons for going on the school excursion, where she helps supervise a group of Year 7 and 8 children, is that she is recovering from the termination of her relationship with Patrick, her slightly older beau.

It is difficult for non-Aboriginal novelists to deal adequately with Aboriginal experience in their work. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is general ignorance about Aboriginal experience. But another, more insidious, reason is self-censorship. The politics of speaking in an Aboriginal voice, if you’re not Aboriginal, is at best fraught and at worst a nightmare. Thinking twice before embarking on such an ‘adventure’ is no bad thing, a counter-balance, perhaps, to the days when it was all too easy to usurp an indigenous point of view, days of racist triumphalism or paternalist do-goodism.

Adib Khan’s fourth novel mirrors many of the concerns of his second, Solitude of Illusions (1997). Like Khalid in that novel, Martin Godwin in Homecoming looks back over a life that could have been better lived and a moral trajectory that has long since been deflected by one key event. Martin reflects on what could have been different and is tortured by what he sees as his own hypocrisy and cowardice. These attitudes to the past have repercussions for the future as his relationship with his son, again like Khalid’s, is characterised by guilt and misunderstanding. More broadly – and this is a feature of all Khan’s novels – there is a crucial disconnection between the older generation’s way of doing things and the ways of the next. This structure of present guilt and past actions (and inaction) results in novels that shuttle, sometimes a little awkwardly, between flashbacks and the present.

Sylvia Lawson is a distinguished cultural critic and essayist. Her award-winning The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship was published in 1983, and her collection of essays, How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia, won the 2003 Gleebooks Prize for literary and cultural criticism. In selecting the latter volume among my best books of 2002 for the Sydney Morning Herald, I claimed that it was characterised by ‘complex, spacious, committed, convincing, intellectually riveting speculations and reflections’. Many of these qualities may be found in The Outside Story.

Miss Maude Silver, Miss Jane Marple, where are you, with your splendid and authoritative bosoms, your discreet inquiries, natural reticence, and cunning powers of deduction? Oh, a long way from these sisters in crime.

To an outside observer of the Australian literary and cultural scene, the Ern Malley hoax is one of those spin-offs in the Australian experience that keep on conjuring up Mark Twain’s famous dictum of the nature of the country’s history: ‘It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies ...