Australian Fiction

How much do you care about sheep? I mean really care about sheep. Because The Ballad of Desmond Kale is up to its woolly neck in them. It’s an unusual and inspired variation on the classic Australian colonial novel of hunters for fortune, for identity and for redemption. The historical record is filled with accounts of early settlers grappling with the hostile and unpleasant environment. The battle to tame the distinctly un-European landscape has been a recurring theme in Australian literature ever since. As a consequence, the physical landscape has been mythologised. Here, the rhetoric goes, we might find ourselves. The bush and the outback are awarded a spiritual quality. If we can understand this, be at one with the space that was formerly so hostile to us, then maybe we can understand what it means to be Australian.

This book made me laugh, especially during the love scenes. I doubt this was the author’s intention. Short, gnarled, gritty Italian cop meets posh British beanpole and they spend the first half of the book being crisply offhand, the last part sounding like canoodling dorks. Katie Hepburn and Spencer Tracey it isn’t – but it should be. Whenever they meet, I have an indelible image of the cop looking laconically at her belt buckle. He is Carmine; she, would you believe, is Desdemona.

Within a week of the recent release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, millions of children and adults around the world had read it. Now comes the long wait for the final tome in this cleverly designed series by the prolific J.K. Rowling. Nil desperandum. The fantasy novel for children – and especially crossover books which, like the Harry Potter series, appeal to both adults and children – has a long tradition, and there are a myriad other fantastic books to turn to, many of which have been written by Australian authors.

Kate Grenville is a brave woman. For some years now, the representation of Aboriginal people by white writers has been hedged about by a thicket of post­colonial anxieties, profoundly problematic and important but too often manifested as hostile, holier-than-thou critique, indulging, at its most inept ..

John Clanchy’s fictional concerns are with the large things: desire, pain, guilt, innocence, infidelity, sexuality, madness and the cost of making great art. In various guises, the spectre of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh haunts many of the stories: he appears in a biographical portrait, in the recurring echoes of his first name, in a discussion of the use of colour in his pictures and in several reworkings of his mental illness.

Spirit Wrestlers takes its title from ‘Doukhobors’, the name adopted by a strict religious sect that originated in Russia and that was harshly repressed both by the tsarist state and the church. The Society of Friends, attracted by the Doukhobors’ pacifist beliefs and by their prayer meetings, which reject liturgy ...

Visiting Shirley Hazzard in Italy is like entering a Hazzard novel. She lives in an apartment within the grounds of a splendid villa at Posillipo. The rooms are cool against the summer sun, and when you step onto her terrace the vista and the light are dazzling. Scarlet bougainvillea falls in twisted festoons. From the terrace, she surveys the breathtaking scope of the Bay of Naples. To the left, the shadowy silhouette of Vesuvius. The long cluttered arch of the Neapolitan littoral holds the blue bay in its stretch. The Sorrentine peninsula seals off the southern edge, and out on the fringe, a blue punctuation, the island of Capri, where Hazzard also maintains a house.

I remember trying a few years ago to communicate to a younger friend something of the way I remember my childhood in Adelaide in the 1970s. It was a world in which an older Australia still lingered, a quiet, suburban world where men caught the tram to work at 8.15a.m. and came home at five, where the banks closed at four p.m., and where World War II veterans and their wives lived around us. In 2004 that world – somnolent, conservative, oddly outside time – seems almost unimaginable; even then, it was almost gone. Instead, it inhabits that hinterland between memory and nostalgia, lingering for me in the textures of the things and places which gave it shape, textures that are hopelessly entangled in the possibilities, pleasures and disappointments of childhood.

Philip Salom’s poetry has won many awards since his first collection, The Silent Piano, was published in 1980. His poems range widely and have often included fantastical elements, most notably in Sky Poems (1987). The opening of Sky Poems enjoins the reader to ‘Throw out the world’s laws’, promising: ‘Anything you wish, possibly more!’ Such poetry seems to proceed from the assumption that fiction can, after all, be stranger than truth. And, despite its variousness, Salom’s work often returns to certain kinds of strangeness.

His second book, The Projectionist (1983), is a kind of proto-novel constructed as a collection of poetry. It is impossible to summarise this book neatly, but it foregrounds the sensibility of a character called Mr Benchley, a retired film projectionist whose ‘reality’ is partly filmic. In this work, Salom investigates the elusiveness of human experience and reflects on how experience may be represented suggestively through audiovisual technology. He writes in one poem, ‘This playback of life’s feeding / every thread of the rough cocoon’ – the ‘cocoon’, among other things, being the self-reflexive activity of a lonely life.

Playback (1991) became the title of Salom’s first novel, recently reissued. The main protagonist is a male oral historian and folklorist living as a visitor in a country town. At the core of Playback is a mystery centred on a possible, and unsolved, crime, along with the erotic charge of an adulterous relationship between the oral historian and an artist. The novel progresses by counterpointing the past – captured in a growing, if precarious, store of taped oral histories – with the historian’s evolving and increasingly destabilised present. The dynamic is fairly merciless. Various forms of disintegration occur; the novel’s conclusion answers some key questions but leaves others unresolved. In both The Projectionist and Playback, people are shown never to be free of their pasts, even though they remember their lives poorly. They are depicted as often creating themselves and their fantasies on the ground of their own forgetting.

A few years ago, it seemed that anyone with a personal or family story to tell – even first-time authors – wrote a memoir rather than distilling those experiences into fiction. Think of Kate Shayler’s The Long Way Home (2001) or Sonia Orchard’s Something More Wonderful (2003). Many claimed this was because, at a moment when Australian memoir was resurgent, publishers were not supporting first-time novelists. But the tide may be turning. Recently, a number of autobiographical novels by new writers have appeared, well promoted and capturing the public’s attention, including Sophie Cunningham’s Geography (2004) and now Larissa Behrendt’s Home.