Archive

I have a theory that every second Australian is a closet short story writer. And this is a conservative estimate. According to my theory, the so-called ‘booms’ in the history of the Australian short story in the 1890s and 1950s merely reflected fashions in the book and magazine publishing businesses, not the relentless scratching away in exercise books or thumping of battered typewriters which occupies the waking hours of the determined taleteller and which is, I am convinced, a more popular national pastime than dodging income tax. How else to explain the sheer volume of short stories being published? And these are but the tip of the iceberg – a mere fraction of those that have been and are being written.

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Leonard Mann’s account of his experiences in World War One, Flesh in Armour, has recently been reissued. It may be the case that there are certain experiences that are impossible to write about unless one has personally undergone them. The three great Australian classics of World War One – Flesh in Armour, The Middle Parts of Fortune and When the Blackbirds Sing – all convey an air of total verisimilitude when it comes to describing the conditions of battle. In comparison, even such gifted writers as David Malouf and Roger McDonald convey the impression of faking it when they come to write about war, no matter how much care they take or research they have done.

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The jacket painting on Bruce Beaver’s highly wrought little book of prose poems is Lloyd Rees’ ‘The Coast near Klama’. It’s an elevated view of virgin green and dun coloured headland, the ochres rising through. Sea swirls into an oysterish bay. There is one distant figure looking down on another distant figure in a rock pool below. The sky, as with so many Rees skies, is egg-shelly yellow near the horizon, a glowing compliment to the taste we form and hold of earth.

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Books flow steadily from the northern to the southern hemisphere through the traditional conduits of empire. To get them to flow back the other way is difficult but it can be done. The real task though, it seems to me, is to overhaul the plumbing so that writing and writers can flourish, and that’s a long haul.

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As artists get older, they are supposed to mature, and commentators begin to look for the demarcations of their three periods, a nice bequest from Beethoven. One vitiating side effect of this is to misplace freshness in their art. Judging the vital middle period works, and bowing before the sublimity of the late, the critic bestows a nostalgic glance over his shoulder to the early output – ah, what freshness, what morning glory there! It may be true of Beethoven, but the experience of most of us lesser creatures is more often the opposite. We start a bit grey and elderly: only later, after much experience, do we throw off ponderousness, embrace wit and light-spiritedness and appear verdant for the public gaze. I hope Chris Wallace-Crabbe will not object to my including him in this (to me) honourable company: those who write, after thirty years on the job, with twice the élan they had at the beginning.

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In ‘Partying on Parquet’, the story from Vernacular Dreams chosen by Don Anderson for inclusion in Transgressions, the hapless Steve attempts to hold a party for his HSC tutor Penny. The party is split into two small groups: Penny and her ‘uni friends’ Jan and Greg, and Marina and Pavlos, ‘dumb ethnics like himself whom he had met at Greek dancing class’. Naturally everything goes wrong, from the loudness of heels on the parquet floor to the botched lunge at Penny in the kitchen. But this is not just a simple story of humiliation. Steve is depicted at the end standing under the shower moving from resolutions (‘As for Greg and Jan, the only way he would ever be able to get on top of smart arses like them was to beat them at their own game,’) to what might be called ‘shower dreams’: ‘The steam had got so thick, he could hardly see a thing. He stared up at the ceiling. It was hanging there like a mist, a fog, with the light shining through; and it as his for as long as he wanted.’ ... (read more)

The Australian Stage represents an interesting intersection between the academic world and the creative arts, between the long perspective of the historian, and the ephemerality of theatre performances. Its methodology is academic; it proceeds from an examination of documents, of written records of an art form only one aspect of which we think of as being written, the actual texts of plays. However, these are not the documents in question (although some bibliographical information about the plays is also included); rather it is the responses to performances, particularly reviews, written reminiscences, playbills, newspaper reports, which provide, collectively, the material for a historical survey of theatre in Australia.

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When the Writers’ Week organisers asked me to come and talk on a panel of literary agents, I naturally asked what they wanted me to talk about. (I knew that jokey anecdotes about publishers, writers, and agents would be just the thing; I also knew that my delivery would fall horribly flat, even if I could remember any.)

It was suggested that I might talk about pitfalls for writers – a subject on which literary agents can wax lyrical for hours – but that seemed slightly arrogant from where I sit, and I began to think of pitfalls for agents. And from there I started to think about what agents can and can’t do, how useful we are or aren’t, and by the time I’d thought all that through, I had the bones of what I wanted to talk about.

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Now we are in the season of missed and mellow fruitfulness. The mellow fruitfulness belongs to the winners of literary awards and literary grants. The missed are those who are eternally short listed but never ascend the throne. Of course, some books shortlisted never have a chance of winning. They are put there for encouragement, minor recognition, sometimes tokenism.

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In the late nineteenth century, the Sydney barrister and critic, William Bede Dalley is reported to have said: ‘I enjoy literature in all its manifestations. But if there is one class of books I prefer to another, I think it must be’ – with a flash of his teeth – ‘why, New Books!’

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