Australian Fiction

As HarperCollins continues to release this welcome series of Australian reissues, it’s especially pleasing to see them including less well-known, even long-forgotten, titles. While I had read none of these latest offerings, I did at least know something about three of the authors. Les Robinson, however, was almost a complete mystery. ‘Almost’ because I had a vague memory of one of his stories being included in an anthology I once lectured on. Obviously, it did not impress me enough to seek out more of his work. Nor would it have been easy to find, since, unlike the other three titles, The Giraffe’s Uncle had never been reissued since its first printing, in 1933, by the Macquarie Head Press, a firm now as forgotten as the books it published.

Much loved public characters who venture into fiction in their mature years are, of course, on a hiding to nothing. Their apprenticeship, their experiences, their intuitions have all been spent or deployed elsewhere. In the case of Robyn Williams, these were as a distinguished science reporter and analyst for the ABC. The knowledge and opinions that he gathered there have been brought to the making of his pre-apocalyptic first novel, 2007. This is, the cover warns, ‘a true story, waiting to happen’. Williams’s mentor in fiction is George Orwell, who is quoted with approval by a cashiered and bibulous former Cambridge don, Cyril, now exiled to a weather station at Cape Grim in north-western Tasmania (site of the world’s purest air, as it happens). Orwell advocated ‘retaining one’s childhood love’ of the things of the natural world, toads not least. The alternative was ‘hatred and leader worship’.

Here are two novels of exile, one contemporary, the other about coming to Australia in the nineteenth century. In Carol Lefevre’s Nights in the Asylum, Miri, a middle-aged actress, escapes from Sydney and her tottering marriage, and drives back to the mining town of her childhood. On the way, she picks up an escaped Afghan refugee, Aziz, and drops him off in town, where he immediately falls foul of the inhabitants and ends up on the doorstep of Miri’s family home, uninhabited while her aunt is in hospital. The house becomes asylum for more than one outcast: Zett, the abused wife of the local cop, has already found herself there, baby in tow.

Awareness of the tension between fantasy and realism in fiction has been heightened in recent years by the trend in young adult novels towards gritty urban realism. The tension itself is not new, however: in America half a century ago it was known as the ‘milk bottle versus Grimm’ controversy. Although there is a clear distinction between extreme examples of fantasy and realism, the intervening grey area encompasses a great deal of fiction which successfully mingles the two. Thus Sparring with Shadows, though on the face of it another example of contemporary realism, is peopled with characters who are clearly shaped to serve the author’s intentions; they’re believable but they’re not as ‘real’ as hyper-realists might prefer. Black Ice, on the other hand, is built on elements of the fantastic – spirits, poltergeists, séances, and the like – but it sets those elements against a recognisable late twentieth-century background in which a teenage girl is struggling to understand the disintegration of her parents’ marriage.

Robyn Ferrell has written a novel as beguiling as champagne on a summer’ s evening - astringent, sparkling and more-ish. The fizz of dry wit comes bubbling up through layers of metaphor as Leo Wetherill (aptly named) embarks on a journey of self-discovery, alternately abetted and frustrated by the quixotic Weather Gods of the title.

Margaret Coombs’s second novel is an account of personal struggle against oppression and an analysis of the painful growth of awareness wryly viewed with humour and compassion. This is not a tranquil recollection; it is a confronting, buffeting novel, racy, witty and uneven.

Helen Ayling (pun intended) is both protagonist and narrator. The narrator, perhaps occupying time present, views her younger Australian self living in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when she was overwhelmed by misery following the birth of her second daughter, Jemima. She is exhausted and depressed, but she knows that her problem is not biochemical. The combination of fear, exhaustion and isolation forces her, however, to accept the diagnosis of puerperal depression despite her sharp-eyed assessment of her own capacity to self-dramatize and the capacity of others for self-interest.

Cat Tracks was originally intended as a novel for young people. It has, however, attracted a wider audience, partly because of its well-constructed story and partly because of its excellent presentation of an important conservation problem.

If it is a truism that every person has a novel in them, then it is equally hackneyed to suggest that every doctor/lawyer/vicar has a fund of entertaining anecdotes waiting for retirement from public life to allow the leisure for setting them down on paper. Yet we can all recall with pleasure a few such collections of stories. They are not, perhaps, all that well written. They certainly have no place in the millstream of contemporary literature, busily recycling fashions in style and content, and establishing new paradigms for those who follow breathlessly to admire and adopt. Nevertheless, a small book of anecdotal, humorous tales can be just the ticket when you won’t a book that won’t, thank you very much, stretch your mind.

Sophie Masson’s first novel deals with the probing of emotional wounds. It alternates from present to past as a journalist goes back to her village to write a story on a Family Court tragedy about people with whom her past is inexorably entangled. Set in northern New South Wales and Sydney, it examines the slow death of the rainforest areas and their rebirth as alternative lifestyle habitats for people fleeing the city.

Ignored by literary historians, consumed quietly by the reading public, Australian crime fiction has been evident enough to readers of Miller and MacCartney’s classic bibliography, and restates its bloodied but unbowed presence in two forthcoming reference tools: Margaret Murphy’s Bibliography of Women Writers in Australia, many of whom write thrillers, and in Allen J. Hubin’s near-future third edition of his international bibliography of crime fiction, in which Michael Tolley of the University of Adelaide will exhaustively update and correct the Australian entries.