Writers on Writing

It has a relevance in one sense because it is a worry, since we live in a world which seems to have taxological problems. People like to be able to put things in one category or another. I seem at the moment to be writing in a way that sits on the line.

When I visited Bruce and Brenda Beaver in their Manly flat it was a sparkling day. The water of the Harbour was glittering, and the pines on the foreshore were stirring only slightly in the breeze. But, however soothing the weather, I was nervous. For me, Bruce Beaver is huge, a poet of the first order, and his extraordinarily difficult life, the periods of debilitating sickness and the various almost mythic stories that attach themselves to his history, all added up to make me feel very nervous indeed.

And his wife, Brenda had made it very clear that my being able to come to see him was a privilege. She protects him fiercely, with constant courage, and if I hadn’t read Bruce Beaver’s superb love poems to this woman, I would have been even more nervous when my companion and I knocked on their door.

On a weekend when the Melbourne Age and the Australian could muster barely three book pages between them and only one review of a work of fiction, I went to an exhibition of Juan Davila’s recent work. The paintings were visceral, fierce, transgressive, shocking. Here was art disdainful of demands for beauty, art that took the notion of aesthetics into the dungeons of the mind. And it set me on edge.

I’ve left formal art criticism behind to a certain extent and I’m glad to do that.’ I found the area of art criticism very inhibiting and when I was waiting the book on Joy Hester in tandem with my first novel, crossing the t’s and dotting the I’s, and getting everything absolutely correct, suddenly seemed enormously constraining. But writing about Joy Hester, who is difficult (because so many of her works deal with states of feeling), I think I helped push my writing further and further away from the correctness of art history and towards a much more lyrical and imaginative way of writing.

This was an extraordinary task you set yourself. How did you decide to do it in the first place?

I was actually asked to do it. Lesley Mackay, who has a bookshop in Double Bay that I go to, was doing a bit of publishing and packaging, and it suddenly occurred to her that while there was a Writer’s France and a Writer’s Britain there hadn’t been a Writer’s Australia, so she came to me with the idea. She thought she could package the idea to a publisher and would I write it? I thought, what a wonderful idea and signed the contract, and then realised that what I was going to do was write an entire literary history of Australia, and every chapter could have been a book on its own, and probably should have been.

Book reviewing. I’ve done quite a lot of it. I regard it as my trade and a profession, one to be proud of, with principles and rules and responsibilities, to be practised ethically and with generosity. And not gloomily, nor theoretically, for I write for readers, not scholars.

In his Canberra 1913–1950 Jim Gibbney summarises the indecisions which accompanied the establishment of a site for Canberra around the turn of the century. When finally, in De­cember 1908, Yass-Canberra was decreed the Seat of Government, it brought to a close nearly two decades of hesitation – at least Australia knew where the Federal Capital was to be situated, if not what kind of city it was to be.

Bookseller Terri-ann White surveys the publishing scene in Perth and Fremantle, for several decades now torn by a battle for funds but recently showing encouraging signs of optimistic development.

Since 1975 and the establishment of the Fremantle Arts Centre Press, the writing community of Perth has benefited enormously from the focus and support it has offered. Whether individual writers have been published by it or not, in the most isolated city in the world the possibilities have been opened up. The Press has clearly been responsible, as a developmental publisher, for encouraging and promoting creative writing, biography, and regional history writing in WA, and for opening up resources and opportunities for writers to work closely with good editors, good advice, and plenty of time to learn and hone work into a publishable form.

Just one of the interesting things I found out from reading Tom Shapcott’s The Literature Board: A Brief History (reviewed by Evan Williams in the April ABR) was that I appeared to be just about the only person in Australia who’d never received a Lit. Board grant. Well, me and Sasha Soldatow, who’s a minor celebrity because of Private – Do Not Open (Penguin $8.95 pb) but much more famous for never having received a grant in over a decade’s application. One year he even included a naked photo – of himself – with the standard form. That only seemed to contribute to his perfect score: twelve out of twelve knock backs. And that’s just one thing you won’t find in Tom Shapcott’s book, teeming though it is with statistics for every occasion.

Writing is what I love doing. There is almost nothing like it. Even playing two or three close sets of tennis will not quite compete with having a good poetic theme discover you, and then managing to nut it out, to make it chime like a bell. No wonder the French critics are so fond of talking about the jouissance of a text. When a poetic shape-and-theme I’ve been struggling with comes good, it comes like an express train. And, whether painful or pleasing, writing has become an absolute necessity, so that I grow fretful, grumpy, zany, if I haven’t written anything decent for several days.