Archive

The name of this collection, with its pastoral associations, is ironic. Here we have no neat opposition between the country and the city; instead the lyrical evocation of the countryside serves merely to emphasise the brutality that women suffer there as men exercise their economic power through sexual cruelty. This is particularly obvious in the first six stories, set in the previous generation, which lead up to the experience of the central character, Anne. Bella, for instance, of the story ‘Isabella’, has degenerated under the tyranny of her father from the proud Edwardian beauty in the parlour photographs to a ‘lazy fat slag’ (his words). Her ‘lair’ is a rural slum, her brain a swamp into which every scandal scarcely percolates: ‘… the pinpoint gleams of interest receding into the sluggish brain where she will mumble at the information for the rest of the day.’ Her death from gangrene parallels her mental decay. Mrs Scarr of ‘That Woman’, let down by her ‘gutless’ lover Lennie – ‘Usually he climbed through the rough orchard just after lunch and came to her back door red in the face and breathing hard. Today he came late …’ – must now find a new home for herself and her children. The child Danuta of ‘A Bad Influence’, pregnant at ten, having been exploited by all her male relatives – uncles, fathers, brothers – mimes her nocturnal experience to her school friend:

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I had thought, and still do, that the phenomenon of publishing a book in paperback only was a good thing, especially for fiction. As a bookseller, I observed the paperback achieve sales three and four times what they would have been if the book was hardback. It should be good for the author too, I thought. The lower royalty payment per book would have been more than compensated for by the higher sales and the larger audience. When I suggested this to a writer recently, he was quite adamant that paperback only editions meant that writers got a much smaller return because they missed out on PLR. ... (read more)

It is often the case that a well-informed outsider can light on structures, habits of thought and patterns of behaviour which, to the people living them out, are neither perceived nor understood.

           Vincent Buckley, who describes himself as a ‘loving outsider’, has visited Ireland on numerous occasions and lived there for long periods over almost thirty years. If he is an outsider, he is certainly a well-informed one, and no-one reading this book – subtitled ‘Insights into the contemporary Irish condition’ – can doubt that it is a book of love and, by that means, penetration.

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Sometimes I feel like quitting the whole scene. There’s so much hype and petty politicking. But that goes on in your own backyard. So there I am again – up there on stage, with Mike, wearing my Greek sailor’s cap, and my heart having stopped thumping now, because I’m reading what I really (may I be anachronistic?) dig, and am serious about – POETRY! I mean Gene Wilder really works hard at being a comedian, and me at my funny poems. ‘Well’ I might say ‘this is an angry poem, because I’m one of those angry middle-aged men’, or ‘this is called “Poem-Ugly” because a lot of what I write is ugly. I try to strip the veneer from my everyday matter mundane existence, the extraneous matter in my grey brain; to rarefy to an essence the human condition, and all I’ve got left is my bare existential soul, and my poem – but maybe that’s not too bad!’

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I saw an elderly, quite famous poet sitting all forlorn on a large boulder, neither quite inside a lecture room nor quite outside on the leafy lawn.

Her location, and the droop of her shoulders said, See, I am alone. I knew her, I had taken her once on a short publicity round in Sydney, years ago: should I stop and say, Remember me? Remember that book you wrote, how we thought it might change things, and perhaps it has.

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A tense moment in this household is when two of my children produce books to be read. Mercifully, the Mr Men and the more excruciating of the Golden books have been mysteriously mislaid; and we have gone beyond whiffy Miffy. It is a delight to return to Aranea and John Brown and the Midnight Cat, by Jenny Wagner and Ron Brooks; to look again at Possum Magic by Mem Fox and Julie Vivas. And a bit sad to realise that the great achievement of contemporary children’s fiction is not given enough serious recognition in the community at large.

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The heat of recent controversy in Australia about the meaning and value of multiculturalism in education, in history and in society at large is an indication of the tenacity with which a dominant culture, in this case that of British Australia, clings to its privileges.

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Those who read the gloomy criticisms of modern education by some educationalists might be pardoned for wondering whether any but the most privileged children nowadays can hope to gain mastery of their language or development of their mind and talent. Meanwhile, the talented young blithely make nonsense of crabbed and intolerant age. Paul Zanetti, aged twenty-three, wins the Walkely Award for a political cartoon. Paul Radley, while still in his teens, and Tim Winton, barely older, won Australian Vogel Awards and continue writing with force and imagination.

Winton is now twenty-four. Shallows is his second good novel. It is set in a fictional West Australian whaling town called Angelus. Although I have never been to Albany (where Winton had part of his education), I suspect I might find it recognisable after reading Winton’s devoted and detailed account of Angelus. The time of the action is now, or a year or so ago, but the story ranges through much history. Change is inevitable for whaling ports and industries but whether it should come abruptly or gradually is still debatable.

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Long term readers of Thea Astley have come to expect novels and short stories of finely tuned social satire which have increasingly employed Astley’s individual idiom: a richly textured and often baroque language of compressed meaning, of striking and original metaphor, of the incisively apt phrase which encapsulates character.

Her satiric themes have almost always focused on Australian society or that of the Pacific region – that ‘tropic cliché’ which she identified in her Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture – ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of’ Literary and Geographical Conceit’.

The favoured Astley microcosm is an enclosed or isolated community, the small northern town of many of her novels, or the tropic aeland of A Boat Load of Home Folk and her latest novel Beachmasters. Within this environment she is apt to place an isolated and vulnerable individual – perhaps an adolescent like Vinny Lalor of A Descant for Gossips or Gavi Salway of Beachmasters – who must, under the pressure of the social dialectic, learn the complexity of human response.

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Words and Images is a valuable contribution to the rapidly growing body of work on Australian film culture and a welcome addition to the relatively small collection of volumes dealing with the film-literature connection. As McFarlane notes there is not, as yet, a ‘definitive work’ on the art of adaptation, though George Bluestone’s Novels into Film (1957) established a fairly solid base for others working in this area. McFarlane’s acknowledged indebtedness to Bluestone is most evident in the method he adopts in order to examine individual adaptations. Essentially it is one of determining and exploring changes to texts, that is, the major alterations and manipulations which take place in the process of adapting a narrative from one medium to another.

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