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Kate McFadyen
Kate McFadyen is a former bookseller turned horticulturalist who lives in Melbourne.
The practice of making a garden is simple. Prime the soil, choose and arrange the plants, tend it, water it, enjoy it. The complications arise with the awareness of the cultural, environmental, and personal elements. Is it your land or are you renting it from a landlord? Is the soil tainted with lead or other contaminants after centuries of industrialisation? Are the plants you have selected meani ... (read more)
‘There is no pleasure in travelling,’ Albert Camus jotted in his notebook while in the Balearic Isles one summer. ‘It is more an occasion for spiritual testing.’ Pleasure, he argued, leads us away from ourselves; travel, which he considered part of the eternal search for ‘culture’, always brings us back to ourselves.
When Cate Kennedy left rural Victoria for an extended posting in Mex ... (read more)
Early in Carolyn Leach-Paholski’s The Grasshopper Shoe, a maverick artisan named Wei argues that ‘all form strives to the enclosed and therefore piques our curiosity. What lies open or does not have a hidden side could be counted as formless. All that remains unjoined, the line which does not seek the satisfaction of unity in the circle, all this to aesthetics is dead.’ These words could be ... (read more)
One of the best essays in the excellent spring issue of Griffith Review: The Next Big Thing, is a sustained attack by Griffith University academic Mark Bahnisch on the lazy clichés of ‘generation-journalism’. In an issue devoted to an examination of generational similarities and conflicts, Bahnisch calmly reminds us that not everyone living in the 1960s was a hell-raising radical, just as not ... (read more)
The Good Parents, Joan London’s second novel, begins with the seduction and disappearance of Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old who has recently moved to Melbourne from a small Western Australian town. Maya’s worried parents, Jacob and Toni, travel to Melbourne, set themselves up in her Richmond share house, and begin to search for clues to explain her absence. We know that Maya’s affair wit ... (read more)
Literary definitions often have an indeterminate quality. To state the precise formal characteristics of the novel or the short story is almost impossible. There are some basic tenets, but these forms are fluid; open to interpretation and experimentation. Is there, then, any grounds for conceiving of the ‘long story’ as a distinct entity? Caught somewhere between two already amorphous forms, i ... (read more)
In the introduction to her Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), Angela Carter considers the contrary nature of the fairy-tale form. Born of a lively oral tradition, fairy tales are not beholden to veracity, and Carter celebrates the complete lack of desire for verisimilitude in Andersen, Grimm and Perrault: ‘Once upon a time is both utterly precise and absolutely mysterious: there was a time and n ... (read more)
There is a scene in Kate Lyons’s The Corner of Your Eye in which the narrator, Lucy, watches her daughter, Flo, being comforted over the death of a bird by their kind but bumbling friend, Archie. As Archie soothes Flo, hugging her and talking to her about what they will do next, Lucy stands apart, not knowing how to act. She feels negligent and guilty: ‘I felt like a pretend mother,’ she say ... (read more)
The latest issue of Meanjin (Vol. 66, No. 3, 2007: On Crime and Law, edited by Ian Britain $24.95 pb, 233 pp) is excellent. Ian Britain and his co-editor, Jennifer Digby, have assembled a group of learned contributors to address the theme of ‘Crime and Law’. The interaction between their wide range of experiences and orientations – professional, personal, poetic – makes the journ ... (read more)