Nene Gare

Australia in the thirties – tough, innocent, conservative and patriarchal to the ninth degree. In A House with Verandahs Nene Gare writes about men dispossessed by the Depression and who become working class casualties, unable to grasp the world outside and clinging tenaciously to the world of domesticity and the comfort of women. And, in tum, the women struggle to maintain their world and to support each other through the petty obstinacy of their men. Nene Gare’s novel is drawn from her own childhood – its form is close to the autobiographical fiction of the Canadian writer Alice Munro. It also has similarities to Glen Tomasetti’s Thoroughly Decent People, and to a much earlier Australian classic, Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians. All depict the culture of women and the linked culture of children. Like much of the fiction written by women, A House with Verandahs is episodic as it meanders through the intricacies of human relationships. The world outside makes very few impingements even the man’s work as a tradesman is spent in the backyard workshop. The Hounslow family are poor. They recycle everything in their battle to survive. Women’s skills are endlessly on call to save the day-old cast-off adult wear clothes are cut and made into children’s Fruit is bottled and preserved and served up as jams and chutneys. House­hold repairs are done by the family members usually again by the women or left to languish. The men are so debilitated that all their energy is spent keeping face. Anything extra is a threat to their identity and to their position. Molly Hounslow must continually remind her more rebellious and impatient daughters to be careful of Dad. She says after any crisis: ‘Don’t say anything to your father ... it might worry him. We all knew about not worrying Dad. It made him nervy . . . newspapers also upset him. He said people would get the idea from newspapers that the world was full of criminals.’

In Tirra Lirra by the River, an elderly woman, Norah Porteou, returns to live in her childhood home in Brisbane after forty years as a ‘London Australian’. The house is empty, so is her life. Norah is a ‘woman whose name is of no consequence’. She is sensitive, vaguely artistic, slightly superior (‘Mother,’ she appeals in a childhood scene, ‘don’t let Grace call me Lady Muck.’) The novel consists of a review of her past, with interruptions from half-remembered neighbours offering curious and resentful help.