Archive

Jessica Anderson’s One of the Wattle Birds celebrates the painful arrival into adulthood of Cecily Ambruss. Cecily is nineteen years old. She lives in a flat with her boyfriend, Wil, who, appropriately in view of his name, is studying Law. Cecily is an English student and during the three days over which the novel is set they are both preparing for end-of­year exams. They are a bright, intelligent, attractive couple. The previous year they backpacked through Europe and India with four friends. Workmen are making a racket in the building where they live (this novel moves between noise and silence) and things are a bit hectic and scattered but not unbearable. In fact, Cecily’s life seems to be following a fairly conventional path towards marriage and a comfortable future in one of Sydney’s pleasanter suburbs.

As a preliminary I must say, frankly, that I am hardly interested in canonised literary culture. And having known for a long time that it is absurd to criticise the conventional literary establishment and then expect its attention or affection, I can also say that canonical inclusion has never been a personal aspiration. However, I am alert to the ramifications of the processes of historicisation. I don’t want to sound high-falutin’ but I’ll begin with Nietzsche who began his enquiry into the value of history with a gem from Goethe: ‘In any case I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.’

What do we do, where do we go to get beyond the routines of the self and the paradoxical alienation it produces in both ourselves and in others? Is it possible to break down the shell of separation and deal with others from a perspective that is neither ‘self- or need-observed’? These are the questions that occupy Bruce Beaver in many of the poems in this collection, and one that he traces through an engaging variety of forms and themes.

Is it possible for love to flourish between an oppressor and one who is oppressed? J.M. Coetzee, in his novel Waiting for the Barbarians, thought not, but Coetzee provided some compensation for his hero by ennobling him to an almost mythical degree in order to present the argument that power can be used equally to fight injustice and brutality, or to inflict it. The main character in Coetzee’s novel, the Magistrate, recognises the pathology inherent in his love for a captured ‘barbarian’, and chooses to return her to her·people. He then becomes a victim himself as he fights the atrocities being perpetrated around him.

There is one kind of writing that, unfailingly, moments after I start it, stiffens my wrist till it’s too painful to go on. It must be genetic because my daughter has the same condition. Diary-writing, filling up a Daybook or whatever. Consequently, I keep no journal or notebook of any kind. I did once, in a red exercise book, for a month, on the Strathnaver from Tilbury in 1954. I’ve read it. Embarrassing! And just now I’ve been prospecting the diaries my father gave me as Christmas presents, one for 1953, the other for 1954. The later one opens in Hampstead and closes in Black Rock, swearing on the last page (to whom, I wonder, Her Majesty herself?) that Rule Britannia will never, as far as this lad is concerned, tum into Waltzing Matilda. Oh dear!

When I visited Bruce and Brenda Beaver in their Manly flat it was a sparkling day. The water of the Harbour was glittering, and the pines on the foreshore were stirring only slightly in the breeze. But, however soothing the weather, I was nervous. For me, Bruce Beaver is huge, a poet of the first order, and his extraordinarily difficult life, the periods of debilitating sickness and the various almost mythic stories that attach themselves to his history, all added up to make me feel very nervous indeed.

And his wife, Brenda had made it very clear that my being able to come to see him was a privilege. She protects him fiercely, with constant courage, and if I hadn’t read Bruce Beaver’s superb love poems to this woman, I would have been even more nervous when my companion and I knocked on their door.

I came to Suzanne Chick’s book full of prejudice and cynicism. Certainly Chick was the illegitimate daughter Charmian Clift had when she was nineteen, but Chick was relinquished at two weeks to her adoptive family and Clift took her own life before Chick began to make enquiries about her natural mother. What could Chick have to say about Clift that those who knew her couldn’t? Wouldn’t this just be crass cashing-in on a famous and alluring name? A ‘Mommie Dearest’ genre from a different angle?

Midway through Sally Morrison’s new novel, Mad Meg, I began to develop the scissor twitch, an almost overwhelming urge to cut it up and reassemble it into a new structure. Not quite the vandalism it suggests – I read Mad Meg in galley pages, which encourages scissorly desires. It is a vast, kaleidoscopic novel, which opens with a wonderful mischievous energy, full of surprises and pleasures, and laconic wit. Yet it begins to teeter midway and, in my view, ends in unnecessary disarray. Hence the twitch.

One of the defining features of recent years in Australian ‘literature’ (as I suppose we must call it), in tandem with a perceived growth in the quantity of fiction and poetry by women, titles reflecting the ethnic diversity of origin in more and more writers, and a growth industry in Aboriginal studies, has been the remarkable increase in sophistication of approach to biography. Perhaps more specifically, cultural biography.

Janine Burke in Lullaby, is writing about writing-out. Her character, Bea, is a writer with a block, seemingly precipitated by the failure of a marriage and the temporary loss of a recent lover, but the author is trying for much more than just this one story, which looks, on the evi­dence of the first chapter, to have more than enough fuel in it for a novel.