Letters

No chick non-fic lit

Dear Editor,

Aviva Tuffield’s review of my book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge (ABR, December 2003/January 2004), sends disturbing mixed messages that. I believe, require further dialogue. Tuffield acknowledges that the book is ‘a fine scholarly work’ and an ‘important contribution to Australian history’ by a writer with ‘evident skills’. She grants that the work ‘adds complexity’ to both the historical record and certain theoretical paradigms. Yet Tuffield is evidently perplexed that this ‘thesis-turned-book’ should be ‘brilliantly promoted’ and ‘engulfed in a haze of marketing’.

My apologies if Tuffield expected to snuggle up with a ripping good yarn on a sexy topic only to find herself trawling through an argument-driven work of scholarship, complete with notes and manifest historiography. No one is more aware than I that BLL is not a page-turner. Given Tuffield’s concern that BLL ‘feels like a missed opportunity’, she might be interested to know that I did in fact have ample interest from commercial publishers to produce a ‘narrative history’ in keeping with the ‘current vogue’ that Tuffield identifies. Though tempted. I decided to reject these advances (and, no doubt, far flashier marketing campaigns than a university press can offer) in favour of publishing a ‘harder’, more analytical book. My instinct was that the iconic status of the subject matter (pubs) and the ground-breaking nature of the research (women mostly ran them) required the legitimacy of scholarship in order to be taken seriously by academic and popular audiences alike. The sort of anecdotal, biographical, interview-based book about women and pubs that Tuffield would have preferred could too easily have been dismissed as ‘chick non-fic lit’. My aim was to produce a book that had crossover appeal; a detailed laying out of the historical evidence, written in a direct and accessible style.

Dominic Kelly’s surgery on Frank Brennan’s and Damien Freeman’s analysis of the failed Aboriginal and Torres Voice referendum (ABR, August 2024) reveals how blinkered all three of these worthy commentators remain about bipartisanship. By putting the issue into the populist arena, the Albanese government lost the chance of the century. All state Labor governments and the Liberal-held Tasmanian legislature supported the Voice, as did the Territory Assemblies. Section 51, Article 37 of the Australian Constitution allows the federal Parliament, working in tandem with state legislatures, to enlarge federal legislative power without approval by a national referendum. Long before the vote on 14 October 2023, John Menadue’s wonderful Pearls & Irritations published this analysis. Not a single voice challenged that prospect. 

‘Australia has been a great experience,’ declares Seamus Heaney in a letter to Tom Paulin from Launceston, Tasmania, in October 1994. As well as visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, delivering poetry readings along the way, Heaney gave a lecture in Hobart on Oscar Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘saying it was as much part of the protest literature of the Irish diaspora as “The Wild Colonial Boy” or the ballad of “Van Diemen’s Land”’. What he most enjoyed in Queensland was a drive through the country – ‘red earth and white-barked gum trees’ – to the town of Nambour, close to where his Uncle Charlie (his father’s twin brother) had lived in the 1920s. Heaney’s letters are a vivid interweaving of travelogue, literary allusion, poetic imagery, and personal history. Sharing pleasure in the power of words is fundamental, even when letter writing becomes a thing of duty, rather than beauty, and the unanswered mail piles up around him.

In this week’s ABR Podcast, Peter Rose reviews Hazzard and Harrower: The letters, edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham. The correspondence between writers Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower ran from 1966 to 2008 and, in its unedited form, amounted to 400,000 words. Editors Susan Wyndham Brigitta Olubas have trimmed it down: ‘For the time being,’ says Peter Rose, ‘we must make do with this entertaining and not insubstantial entrée.’ Listen to Peter Rose’s ‘Flies in the Nirvana’: An illuminating and sisterly correspondence’, published in the June issue of ABR.

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‘Everyone allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female.’ So said Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Even allowing for Regency hyperbole, there is some truth in the sally. We think of the inimitable letters of Emily Dickinson, who once wrote to a succinct correspondent: ‘It were dearer had you protracted it, but the Sparrow must not propound his crumb.’ In 2001, Gregory Kratzmann edited A Steady Stream of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood, 1943-1995. Anyone who ever received a letter or postcard from Harwood – surely our finest letter writer – knows what an event that was. She was nonpareil: witty, astringent, frank, irrepressible. Now we have this welcome collection of letters written by Elizabeth Harrower and Shirley Hazzard (unalphabetised on the cover, in a possible concession to the expatriate Hazzard’s international fame).

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In Working: Researching, interviewing, writing, published in 2019, the great biographer Robert A. Caro tells of his writing methods and the lengths to which he goes to gain a better understanding of his subject. Reading Tim McNamara’s Paul and Paula, I was reminded of Caro’s way of research and writing and of his determination to place himself in his subject’s milieu. McNamara spent considerable time in Vienna researching Paul and Paula, stalking the streets for clues, and his efforts show. He writes with verve about the book’s three main characters – Paul Kurz and his wife, Paula, and the city of Vienna, before and during the Nazi occupation – and his search to uncover and understand their stories.