Australian

Time of Conflict, Judah Waten

wadholloway Australian, Literature , , ,

1961 Club

I read this in time for last week’s 1961 Club, but failed to get it written up before work took me away for 9 or 10 days. Now Kaggsy wants us to start thinking about 1949, which, as it happens, is about when Time of Conflict, which is set in the Depression years, comes to an end.

Judah Waten (1911-1985) was the son of Russian-Jewish migrants who came out to Australia in 1914. He is best known for his first work, Alien Son (1952), a fictionalized account of his growing up in Perth and Melbourne. Time of Conflict (1961) is I suppose not quite Historical Fiction, but is an account of Communist activism in the Unemployed Workers Movement in NSW in the 1930s based around the quite readable story of Mick, a boy from Wagga (southern NSW) growing up via stock theft and reform school to become a boxer and activist.

Waten, himself, joined the Communist Party while still at school (around 1928), University High, Melbourne. In the early 30s he was in England and Europe, including 3 months in Wormwood Scrubs. Back in Australia he was a writer and activist. He must have been researching the Depression both for Time of Conflict and, a decade later, The Depression Years, 1929-1939, but I’m not sure to what extent if any, Time of Conflict reflects his own activities during that period. An excellent entry in the ADB says “In 1935-36 he travelled with Noel Counihan through country Victoria and New South Wales to Brisbane, living off the proceeds of Counihan’s portraits of local identities.” Which seems to be the only time he spent any time in NSW.

Waten was one of four Australian writers I can think of who remained with the Party after initial youthful enthusiasm had worn off (as it did with Kylie Tennant for instance). The others were KS Prichard, Dorothy Hewett and Frank Hardy. Of the four, Hardy probably hewed closest to Socialist Realism – the style demanded by the Party. The others, while still genuinely concerned with the working class, seem a bit freer in their style of writing.

In the 1960s and early 70s Communists began to split into streams (not that they hadn’t split earlier into Leninists and Trotskyites) – CPA (European), CPA M/L (marxist/leninist which was actually Maoist), and the SPA (Stalinist) for all the old hard-liners. Waten went with the SPA which surprises me as his politics in Time of Conflict are pretty easy-going (and in fact Waten was expelled from the Party for a while in the 30s for “petty-bourgeois irresponsibilities”).

I was an anti-War activist in those late 60s early 70s, an anarchist/syndicalist choosing to caucus with SDS (at Melb Uni), so while much of that Communist stuff was in the air, it was off to one side. From the point of view of this novel, the organisation I feel most aligned with is the Wobblies – Industrial Workers of the World whose heyday had already passed by the 1930s but whose members are mentioned from time to time as being involved in the Unemployed Workers Movement. For more on the IWW in Australia a must-read is Sydney’s Burning (1967) by Ian Turner. Sadly, my son has my copy and I might never see it again.

The novel begins in the late 1920s with Mick Anderson, then 16, walking home late at night after meeting up with his girl, Agnes. Mick “was broad shouldered, thick chested and heavily muscled and without much effort he could lift a bag of potatoes or wheat above his head” (a bag of wheat is 180lbs and most fit men – eg. young me – would struggle to carry one on their shoulders). His father steals mobs of sheep to order for a local butcher, and Mick is his increasingly unwilling offsider.

This time they get caught, Mick is put into a juvenile prison until he is 18 and Agnes’ middle class parents demand that all contact between the two cease. In prison Mick learns to box. Eventually, rather than wait for release, he escapes, makes his way to Sydney, and from there a couple of communist seamen smuggle him on board a ship going to New Zealand.

In NZ Mick is a farm worker. Time of Conflict is quite in the mainstream of Australian literature in that it is the story of a man and his mates in the bush written by a guy from the city. Waten subverts the model to some extent in that most of the men who befriend Mick are communists or activists and that generates a lot of political discussion.

Mick becomes a boxer, though his heart is not always in it, returns to Sydney, makes his way to Newcastle, using an assumed name to stop his past as a prison escapee catching up with him, and there becomes involved with the Unemployed Workers.

Although the novel goes on past the Spanish Civil War, past WWII, to round out Mick’s life; its strength is in the 1930’s and in Waten’s close knowledge of the politics of those years. One Sunday Mick goes to the (Sydney) Domain – nearly 40 years later I would listen to speakers on the Domain in Melbourne. I wonder when all that came to an end – “There was a vast crowd .. Mick moved away to the Douglas Credit platform … Then … to the humorous Charlie Reeve, one of the last surviving defendants in the wartime [WWI] IWW conspiracy case … Mick stopped to listen to all the speakers, the rebels, the wild, the peaceful, the conservative, the ribald … everywhere people talked about evictions that were continuing under labor governments … about the already low wages that had been reduced again .. Then Mr [Jack] Lang stepped onto the platform. There were shouts of triumph.”

There are other books of the Depression years, but mostly from the point of view of the suffering of the unemployed. Waten here takes us through another aspect – the men who were advocating for change, and who put their bodies on the line to prevent police from enforcing evictions. It’s not a dry or lifeless book, Mick’s personal life bubbles along throughout, and I’m glad I finally made the time to read it,

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Judah Waten, Time of Conflict, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1961. 281pp. Cover from a painting by Noel Counihan. (This first edition hardback with dustjacket was a 70th birthday present from my brother, B2)
David Carter, ‘Waten, Judah Leon (1911–1985)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University

The Beauties and the Furies, Christina Stead

wadholloway Australian, Literature , , ,

This is the cover of the edition I read. The only other cover I could bring up with a search was Virago’s. I wonder what the original covers were – Peter Davies, London and D Appleton Century in the US – in 1936.

Ok, I found the original American cover. Boring (but it was the Depression). On with the review …

The Beauties and the Furies (1936) was Stead’s third published work. It is beautifully written; shows Stead fully immersed in the Modernism of James Joyce and DH Lawrence; but as with her previous two, still lacks fully realised central characters.

My developing hypothesis is that until her fifth and sixth, The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1945), which are largely autobiographical, Stead was focussing on speech – what her characters say, rather than what they think – but not achieving the insight that Joyce and Woolf were conveying with ‘stream of consciousness‘. However, in those two, she knows the characters so intimately, and she herself as Louie and Teresa is so central, that she finally gives her fiction the psychological depth she was always aiming for, and which reaches perfection in her following novel, Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) .

The first novel she wrote, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), is based on times and locations she knew well. It jumps around between main characters who are based on herself and people she knew without any one of them being preeminent. When she finally found a publisher willing to take her on in 1930 or 31, Peter Davies, he wanted something more conventional to bring out first, to introduce her to readers, and she promised him, and began, another novel. But when that ran into a block, she came up with the technically excellent and equally unconventional The Salzburg Tales (1934), tying together short stories she had been working on for a while with some new ones, and in a startlingly confident take on The Canterbury Tales, framing them as being told by travellers in Salzburg which she had recently visited. Davies, a bit reluctantly, released them both in 1934, in conjunction with Appleton in the US, to some critical acclaim.

Stead and her partner, later husband (when he finally got his divorce), William Blake, had moved from London where they had met, to Paris in 1930 where he was an executive in a small merchant bank, and where they were able to move on the edges of Paris’s Modernist arts community.

It was [Samuel] Putnam who introduced Stead to Louis Guilloux, whose proletarian novel, Le Sang Noir influenced her early writing. A page of notes survives, in which Stead forms comparisons between Guilloux and Joyce: both write cinematic scenes; both see their role as active, explanatory and sometimes philosophical (as opposed to Flaubert, who believed the writer should be entirely off-stage); both use two characters as mirror or shadow selves – all techniques Stead was to try out in her early writing.
Hazel Rowley, 1993, p.110

The Beauties and the Furies (1936), her next work, reflects this time living in Paris. But she’s not in it and I think because of that it struggles to develop any force. She fails to make you care about the characters.

“I’m a fool.” [Oliver] said to himself pleasantly. “Coromandel’s unattached, and she likes me: she’d make a good wife. Poor Elvira! I won’t read her my essay tonight, at any rate: I’ll have that much self-control.
“When he got home Blanche had just put Elvira to bed. Oliver could not resist saying to Elvira: “You are always lovelier at night than in the daytime: Your great underbrush eyes – when I make money I’m going to buy coloured sheets and pillow-slips for you to lie on, black, cream, damask.
“Blanche watched them eagerly, and then left, saying: “Now, look after her; amuse her!”
“Oh, I will.”
He read her the scene in the lying-in hospital in James Joyce’s Ulysses, then some of his poems ..

The story, briefly, is that, Elvira, 30-ish and childless, leaves her husband, Paul, a reasonably well off doctor in London to join Oliver, a not well-off doctoral student in his twenties, in Paris, where they live in various hotels and rooms. On the train over, Elvira meets Marpurgo, who works with a firm buying and selling fine hand-made lace. Marpurgo attaches himself to the couple as an older friend and advisor. Elvira meets a ‘dancer’, Blanche, in a bar. When Elvira finds she is pregnant (to Oliver) it is Blanche who finds a solution, though Elvira shilly-shallies about taking her up on it. Eventually Paul, accompanied by Elvira’s brother, comes over to take her back. They all meet in various combinations over and over as Elvira struggles to come to any decision.

We learn a lot about Marpurgo, his absent wife, his relationship with the two brothers who employ him, and through him see a lot of Paris. Paul gets his country cousin, Sara, who has always had a crush on him, to join him in Paris. Through Oliver, who is at least notionally a Marxist, we are engaged in the workers struggle of that time. Oliver meets a young woman, Coromandel, who Marpurgo also knows indirectly. Oliver falls into an affair with Coromandel while Elvira is laid up in bed.

The problem for Stead is that she spreads herself a bit thin over all these people, and, more importantly, we never get to care about any of them. Coromandel is easily the most attractive (personality) and the one who understands herself best, but she is in the story for a while and then she is gone.

So, great writing, and an important step along the way for a developing writer. But not one of my favourites.

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Christina Stead, The Beauties and the Furies, first pub. 1936. My edition, with Introduction by Margaret Harris, Text Classics, 2016. 347pp
Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead: A Biography, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1993

Plains of Promise, Alexis Wright

wadholloway Aboriginal, Australian, Literature , ,

Alexis Wright (1950 – ) a Waanyi* woman, is Australia’s greatest living writer. Like many readers it seems, I came to her work via her second novel, Carpentaria (2006) which took two years to find a publisher (Giramondo) before going on to win the Miles Franklin. The implication being that this novel, her first, Plains of Promise (1997) didn’t receive much attention. Luckily for us, Wright’s rise to prominence led to it being republished in 2022 (There is a long list of reprints prior to 2022, so perhaps the truth is I just failed to notice).

Mykela Saunders in her Introduction points out that 1997 was the year of Bringing Them Home, ‘The Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families’; the year we ‘discovered the Stolen Generations – the taking, over the previous century, of maybe a third of all Aboriginal children from their parents; the year Prime Minister John Howard made it clear he would not be apologising, the first recommendation of the Report, nor would he ever implement any of the others.

Saunders makes the interesting point that over the course of her fiction Wright deals with the Stolen Generations (Plains of Promise); with land rights and mining on Aboriginal land (Carpentaria); and with the Federal Government’s ‘Intervention‘ in Aboriginal communities (The Swan Book and Praiseworthy), echoing the change in focus of Aboriginal activism over the course of her adult life.

Plains of Promise begins with St Dominic’s Mission for Aborigines; a dormitory for “three generations of black girls laughing in their innocence”; a crow, a harbinger of death, in a tree; a (presumably Waanyi) community. The girls dormitory sounds like a shearing shed: “The corrugated iron windows, held out with long sticks, always stayed open before the Wet.” Later, the community’s housing is described as rows of “corrugated iron, one-room huts that looked like slight enlargements of outdoor dunnies”, plus communal sheds and shanties for the less ‘privileged’, with one water tap for every 200 people.

A woman originally from another people further south kills herself.

Errol Jipp, the missionary in charge of St Dominic’s, with full powers for the protection of its eight hundred or so Aboriginal inmates under state laws … stood directly in front of Ivy ‘Koopundi’ Andrews, aged about seven. She had just acquired the name Andrews .. “Your mother died this morning, Ivy,” Jipp announced, looking around the dormitory.

We learn more from the chatter of nameless others. That the dead woman had taken a shack down by the creek, was distraught when her daughter, her only company, was removed, had borrowed some kerosene and set herself on fire. Then we get a little of her back story. How she grew up in the homestead of a remote sheep station, separated from her own people to be a companion to white children; had lived for a while with a shearer, got pregnant, found herself unwanted by the whites, unwanted by her own people and sent away to the mission by a magistrate.

We’re in the 1950s, Ivy’s timeline roughly matching Wright’s own. One of my great grandfathers, 60 or 70 years earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century, was a magistrate and gold warden further east, at Charters Towers. Gold history always predominates, but I wonder now how many Aboriginal ‘problems’ he had to deal with in the course of his work. Not that most of them were not dealt with by shooting (eg. the extinction of the Waanyi’s neighbours, the Injilarija)

Jipp begins taking Ivy out of the dormitory at night, to the vestry or to the banana plantation/cemetery, and raping her. Ivy is ostracised, blamed. A rash of suicides by fire breaks out. The Mission of course covers it up, but the elders have their own laws and, eventually, send a young man, Elliot, to go down to Ivy’s mother’s country to determine the source of the evil she has brought on them.

Some years pass. People in the community continue to die. Elliot makes a second quest into Ivy’s country, getting caught up in the flooding of Channel Country (when it rains in north and central Queensland the usually dry rivers drain inland towards Lake Eyre in northern South Australia, a great salt lake which is below sea level. As it happens, this is occurring right now (Feb, Mar 2026)).

At age 14, marriage and a child, Mary, come to Ivy. Life goes on, not happily. Ivy moves into a country town, on the fringes as always. Mary gets an education, begins working with an Aboriginal Rights organisation, ends up back at St Dominic’s.

This is not quite a saga, though there is a huge range of often colourful supplementary characters, but rather, I think, Wright’s fictionalisation of what it was to be Aboriginal over the four or five decades of her life to 1997 and of the changes that occurred over that time.

It is astonishing that such a great writer took so long, if not to begin writing, I can’t imagine she didn’t always write, then to make her work public. In Plains of Promise you can see her gathering her material – the colonisation of her people; marshalling her rage; and beginning on the dream-like quests which are a feature of her later work.

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Alexis Wright, Plains of Promise, UQP, Brisbane, 1997. 384pp

* Waanyi country( in centre of map). A largish area in north Queensland, south of the Gulf of Carpentaria, including Cloncurry where Wright grew up and Mt Isa. (extract from map of Pama–Nyungan languages)

Alexis Wright, works:
Grog War (19977) NF. I own a copy. I’ll read it soon
Plains of Promise (1997) BIP review
Carpentaria (2006) my review
The Swan Book (2013) my review
Tracker (2017) NF my review
Praiseworthy (2023) my review 1/2, my review 2/2

Andrew Blackman attended Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Alexis Wright in conversation at Southbank Centre (London, UK, I guess) in 2008. (Here)

Anna, Angus Gaunt

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ReadIndies Month

Anna by Angus Gaunt was the co-winner of the 2025 “20/40” Prize – for works between 20,000 and 40,000 words – from Finlay Lloyd publishing. I don’t know how many words it is, but it’s 110pp. The other co-winner was Kim Kelly with Touched.

WG sent me Anna last year to get my opinion (I’m sorry, I’ve misplaced the card she sent with it) and I’ve saved it up to participate in Kaggsy’s ReadIndies Month. Finlay Lloyd, based in Braidwood, NSW, are definitely ‘indies’ “without the commercial imperative of most publishers,” well, half their luck! “we are able to champion ideas and authors for their intrinsic interest and quality.”

The author’s bio says “Angus Gaunt was born and educated in England and came to Australia in 1987.” I put that in because for all that Gaunt has been here for the best part of 4 decades, this is a totally European story.

Anna, a young woman, is a detainee – I’ve just read a near future dystopia, set in the US, where women are held on suspicion that they might commit crimes and so are ‘retainees’, theoretically still holding rights that detainees don’t (The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami). We have all sorts of weasel words for holding people we don’t like in concentration camps – in a camp in an endless forest of mostly birch and aspen (I’ve been reading the words ‘birch’ and ‘aspen’ all my life without knowing, or even wondering particularly what they are. Well, trees obviously, confined to the northern hemisphere, and I think to colder climates, and apparently aspen mostly coexist with conifers).

The story is an old one. There has been a war. Families on the losing side are displaced, herded into remote camps where they are poorly fed and made to work. Anna, having the care of her own younger siblings, has been given the care of others as well. On this day, it seems the war is over, the gates are open, Anna ventures out into the surrounding forest, bumps into a guard, a boy her own age

She was not used to the back and forth he seemed to want. He knew little of Anna’s language, beyond greetings and thanks, but she had picked up enough of his to grasp most of his words. It was odd hearing the language used like this. Her experience of it had mostly been words that could be barked – commands and threats and insults.”

Anna wanders off into the bush. By the time she gets back to the camp it is deserted. Trucks have come for the guards and the detainees have followed them on foot to the railhead, some days walk away. Anna sets out to follow them, encounters the boy guard who with a lucky shot with one of his last bullets has killed a hare. They share it and she warily allows him to accompany her.

When they finally reach the rail head, the last train has been and gone. An old couple living in one of the few remaining cottages of a derelict railway village takes them in. Temporarily. Anna will press on.

It is hard to say what this story is , or even why it was written. Certainly it maintains our interest – will Anna ever make her way out of the forest? Is the boy guard anything other than a necessary, though barely trusted, ally in a difficult situation?

But what does it say about the many, many Anna’s of this world making their way on foot from impossible situations to slightly less impossible situations? Not a lot, certainly nothing about the causes of their situation. Nor is it a particularly deep character study. And – I’m sure Sue is waiting for this – what does a sixtyish man, safe in middle-Australia, bring to our understanding of a not yet adult girl, coping with isolation and starvation, a long way from home, a home that probably no longer exists? Not much.

I mentioned above The Dream Hotel in which Lalami explores undeserved internment, effectively a critique of the mindset that produced ICE; in The Left Hand of Darkness the great Ursula le Guin uses two people on a long, difficult trek to explore all sorts of things, but especially our understanding of gender; and if you want a male author envisaging how a young Australian woman might deal with war, you have John Marsden’s Tomorrow series.

Anna is none of these. WG, in her review, sees the story as succeeding as a character study. She writes, “Anna is beautiful to read, from the first sentence. The language is tight but expressive. The necessary tension is off-set by moments of tenderness and hope ..”.

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Angus Gaunt, Anna, Finlay Lloyd, Sydney, 2025. 110pp

Finlay Lloyd are proud that their books are printed in Australia. Anna was printed by IVE Print Victoria. Not a name I recognised, but a search turned up that IVE’s printing operations in Melbourne were the former Franklin Web where I worked for many years off and on developing software (when I went out on my own around 1987 my intention was to write software for the transport industry, but Franklin Web kept giving me so much work that I ended up an expert on printing operations).

Discipline, Randa Abdel-Fattah

wadholloway Australian, Literature , ,

These days, with ICE, Trump’s Gestapo, killing white people in its occupation of Minneapolis, along of course with all the brown people being dragged off the streets throughout the US for arbitrary incarceration, deportation, disappearing and sometimes death, it is easy to forget that Genocide continues in Gaza, and indeed all Occupied Palestine, under cover of Trump and Netanyahu’s mock ceasefire.

Discipline (2025) is a story about how Palestinians, safe in Australia, cope with what is happening to family, people they know, a country they love, to what might be its complete disappearance, live-screened to an apathetic world.

Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979- ), an Australian-born woman of Egyptian and Palestinian parents, who identifies as Palestinian (rather then ‘pro-Palestinian’), was of course in the news just a couple of weeks ago when she was disinvited from speaking at this year’s Adelaide Festival Australian Writers Week, leading to an almost unanimous boycott by writers and the cancelling of the week.

Australian governments, state and Federal, Liberal and Labor, are far more pro-Israel than the general population, and it was pressure from South Australia’s Labor Premier, on the notionally independent Festival Board, which led to Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to attend being withdrawn (and to the resignation in protest of Writers Week director Louise Adler).

Abdel-Fattah has since launched defamation actions against the Premier, Malinauskas, for his comments likening her to a terrorist murderer.

Her first career was as a lawyer, but she is now a research fellow at Macquarie studying ‘Islamophobia, race, Palestine, the war on terror’. See Coming of Age in the War on Terror (2021). Her first work of fiction was the YA Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005) about a schoolgirl deciding to wear the hijab.

Discipline is Abdel-Fattah’s first work of adult fiction, an interrogation of how Palestinian-Australians cope; of how self-censorship works in the supposedly liberal press and academia; of how pressure from above works to suppress analysis (and facts) not conforming with the world-view of those in charge, in this case, the pro-Israel views of the ruling class.

Hannah is a young, Muslim journalist on a paper which might be the Sydney Morning Herald; her husband Jamal is a PhD student whose mother and wider family are trapped in Gaza, under daily bombardment by the Israeli occupation forces; Ashraf is Jamal’s supervisor whose ex-wife had become increasingly devout and has now moved with their two daughters and a new husband to Yemen.

Abdel-Fattah isn’t a literary writer, her prose is plain (which is good, some writers not naturally literary go for florid), and the story is clearly told from the point of view of the three protagonists, though we tend to side with Hannah and Jamal. I’m sure her point is to say this is how ordinary, middle class Muslims live in Australia and this is what we are up against.

Australia seems to have very little fiction from post-War first and second generation migrant communities. Omar Sakr has a similar pov, and there’s AS Patric’s, Black Rock White City (2015), the early works of Christos Tsiolkas, and not much else. In some ways this work seems closer to (urban) Australian Indigenous Lit., to the fiction of Anita Heiss say, than it does to ‘Anglo’ writing.

The setting is Sydney, towards the end of Ramadam and all the observances that go with that. An 18 year old schoolboy has been arrested at a university pro-Palestine demonstration and is being charged with a terrorism offence because he was wearing a Hamas headband. The boy attends a Muslim college whose principal is Ashraf’s ex-wife’s sister. Hannah wants to tell the boy’s story but her editor constantly prefers an older journalist, more experienced in bothsidesism.

When Hannah submits a story about a Palestinian-Australian woman whose family in Gaza had all been killed by an Israeli attack on a refugee camp, the editor runs it under another story about the ‘suffering’ of Jewish-Australian families whose sons are fighting with the IDF.

The more unapolgetic and strident [Hannah] was, the more her desperation to be seen for who she was and all that it meant was interpreted as her being an intense, out of place, angry Arab woman – and, God forbid, whisper it now, identity politics.

Jamal, who wakes every morning to the prospect that his mother may not be alive to answer the phone, posts increasingly angrily on his social media, which is of course scrutinised by the university.

Ashraf, who has not been putting runs on the board, accepts funding from the Dept of Home Affairs for a research project into Muslim yoof, and then must weasel out of his commitments to Jamal.

It is made clear to Hannah that if she doesn’t back off from her ‘political’ positions she will be increasingly sidelined.

Abdel-Fattah attempts to finish her novel on an upbeat note, but we, a year after publication, can already see a future Gaza, ’emptied’ of its population, no longer a site of mass murder, but a real estate opportunity for the Trumps.

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Randa Abdel-Fattah, Discipline, UQP, Brisbane, 2025. 245pp.

New writers event to replace cancelled Adelaide Writers Week

Randa Abdel-Fattah and Louise Adler are to headline Constellations: Not Writers Week from 28 Feb – 5 Mar 2026, with other participants including J.M. Coetzee, Yanis Varoufakis, Clare Wright, Bob Brown and Melissa Lucashenko.

Burn, David Ireland

wadholloway Australian, Literature , ,

I had a project a few years ago to read and review all the works of the great and underappreciated Australian novelist David Ireland (1927-2022). It turned out that John/4ZZZ, who is a frequent commenter on our posts, was engaged in a similar project on Goodreads (where he posts as Zed). We have since cooperated on some posts on Ireland’s later work and are presently reading Brett Heino’s Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland: An Australian Atlas (2025) for review later in the year.

The two works of Ireland’s I am yet to review are his first, The Chantic Bird (1968) and Burn (1974) which I disliked so much that I failed to finish it. On the other hand, John thinks Burn is “brilliant”, so I will briefly state my case then direct you to his review (much of which I agree with, especially on the subject of Ireland falling out of popularity).

The plot of Burn centres around the life of an Aboriginal man, Gunner McAllister, a returned soldier who had served in the Pacific in WWII, now living in a humpy on the fringes of a NSW country town, maybe based on Gundagai, with his wife Mary; 15 year old foster daughter, Joy – “She’s a good little root, this kid. Not bad at all“; and his father. A son, Gordon is away at school.

It is said that McAllister is based on the distinguished Aboriginal (Gunditjmara, Western Vic.) serviceman, Captain Reg Saunders (1920-1990), who served in WWII and in Korea, but nothing in Burn matches up with Saunders’ post-War life. The photo on the cover (above) of the Sirius/A&R edition published in 1989, the year before Saunder’s death, is of Saunders, which I think is disgraceful.

Ireland purports to be writing from inside Gunner’s head. Today that is appropriation, not something that was much thought about in the 1970s when Burn and Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith were written.

John says Burn, Ireland’s fourth novel, grew out of the play Image in the Clay, published in 1964 but first produced, in Sydney, in 1960 – so some years before his first novel. He quotes Ireland writing in the Preface: “No opinions are presented: my interest in aborigines is no more than anyone else’s, except that they are people. That is my interest”. For John, Ireland is an observer of ‘aborigines’ here as he is of “‘workers’, ‘drunks’, ‘women’, ‘red setters’, whatever” in other works and he writes what he sees. (John’s 2018 review of Image in the Clay in Goodreads, here).

John/4ZZZ’s review of Burn

Geordie Williamson says of David Ireland “He has fallen out of fashion and fashion is king in contemporary publishing. His subject matter is not simpatico with today’s currents. Now, if he was gay and took drugs instead of being straight and drinking beer, he’d be Christos Tsiolkas [author of The Slap] and a best-seller.” Read on … (Go down to reviews, Zed’s is 1st, and click on ‘Show more’).

Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Christina Stead

wadholloway Australian, Literature , ,

“Christina Stead is a simon-pure genius … the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf.” (New Yorker, 25 Apr 1936)

Christina Stead (1902-1983) was born in Sydney and grew up in Watson’s Bay at the Harbour entrance. I have told a brief version of her story in my review of Chris Williams’ biography, A Life of Letters and Stead herself told fictionalized versions of her childhood and early adulthood in The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone.

Briefly, she was educated at Sydney Girls High and Sydney Teachers College, worked for a short while as a teacher, did some university courses, worked as a typist in a factory to save up to go to England, sailing in 1928. In London she began living with her boss, Bill Blake, her partner for the rest of their lives.

From 1930-35 they lived in Paris where Blake (a Communist!) was employed as a merchant banker and where they were at least on the fringes of the Modernist set around Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare and Company, the publishers of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

Before leaving Sydney Stead unsuccessfully offered a collection of short stories to Angus & Robertson. By 1933 or 4 she had completed Seven Poor Men of Sydney but publisher Peter Davies asked for something more conventional to go first. She gave him her (updated) short stories framed as The Salzburg Tales, both coming out in 1934.

I have recently read Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999) which is about in particular the different careers of Sydney modernist painters Stella Bowen (1893-1947) and Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984). There are many parallels with the careers of Stead and, say, Eleanor Dark (1901-1985). All were pioneering modernists brought up in Sydney. Of each pair, one spent her whole career abroad, one entirely at home. It is likely that none of the four met (unless Stead met Bowen in Paris) and yet all, over time, have proved influential. Sydney between the Wars might have been a second Paris, but the arts scene was dominated by the misogynistic Sydney Push and the women, far more talented, as time would prove, stayed home in the suburbs or went abroad (see Modjeska’s Exiles at Home, 1981).

Seven Poor Men of Sydney is not autofiction but Stead situates the story in the environment of her early twenties – the fishing/commuting community at Watson’s Bay; the streets of inner Sydney, out to the University; the dingy little houses, factories and meeting places of the poorer inner suburbs; public lectures, meetings of striking workers and communists; church. I did not think Stead was brought up Catholic but for whatever reason Catholicism and church attendance are on ongoing presence.

The novel is centred on a few months in the life of Joseph Bagenault, a practising Catholic living with his parents in Fisherman’s Bay (Watsons Bay), employed in the city as a printer, wishing that he were better educated, desperately poor – this is at the peak of the Depression. The people around him are Catherine and Michael, his cousins, whose parents live on the other side of the Harbour after coming into money; Baruch, Winter and Withers, fellow workers at the (failing) printing works; Marion and Fulke Folliot, married, middle class, communists; Kol Blount who is paralysed from the waist down, his mother’s home a meeting place for the others.

Michael has returned from WWI shell-shocked, unsettled; often sleeping rough, or at friend’s, especially Blount’s; unable to hold down a job; still interested in Marion Folliot with whom he had an affair in London during the War. Catherine his sister is younger, looks up to him, and also spends nights wandering the city, attending meetings, sleeping in parks.

In an interview reprinted in the Australian Womens Weekly (9 March 1935) Stead says: “My purpose, in making characters somewhat eloquent, is the expression of two psychological truths; first, that everyone has a wit superior to his everyday wit, when discussing his personal problems … ; second, that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is a fountain of passion, which is turned by circumstances of birth or upbringing into conventional channels” (Wiki)

This is to say that Stead’s characters talk eloquently and at length; that the great strengths of her subsequent works may be seen developing here; that the story is carried forward on the passionate speech of her characters.

Seven Poor Men of Sydney is of its times. There is a continuity with the crowded inner Sydney streets of Louis Stone’s Jonah (1911) through to, say Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948). But you may also feel the pressure that Ulysses and the advent of Modernism put on all subsequent novels in Joseph and Michael and Catherine walking endlessly, alone or with friends, through night-time streets, our attention focused on their monologues (interior and exterior) and arguments.

“If we could do everything we had a mind to,” remarked Catherine, “if bread grew on trees, no one would recognise his brother or lover: we’d be a race of angels. You struggle and struggle for years to make a place for yourself, to work out your destiny, to justify yourself, and at the end nothing is right. You find yourself in a false position even with your friends, even with your co-workers.”
They passed along the lower path in the outer Domain opposite Garden Island. In a cave two unemployed men, rolled in newspapers, lay behind the embers of a small fire.
Fulke threw out his hand gracefully.
“Can’t help it, we’ll never be free. My secret thought is – but I never tell Marion this – this struggle will never cease. It will go on generation after generation…”

They talk and meet and argue. Eventually, Joseph finds comfort elsewhere, Catherine commits herself to an asylum, the printery closes down, Baruch departs for America, the group’s time is over.

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Christina Stead, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, first pub. 1934. My edition Imprint Classics, 1990. 319pp Cover Illustration: Circular Quay, NSW (1925), Margaret Preston

Out of the Silence, Erle Cox

wadholloway Australian, Science Fiction , ,

I needed a SF post on which to hang the Ursula K le Guin Prize for Fiction 2025, so when I saw an early – the first? – Australian SF novel in Whispering Gums 1925 post, and started reading it, I decided to go with that. At this point I’m writing almost a week before posting, and I’m just the Prologue and the first chapter in, but it seems ok, very Australian in the dialogue.

Out of the Silence appeared as a serial in The Argus in 1919, and was published in book form in 1924. According to Goodreads I’m reading an abridged version. “Capricorn Publishing’s 2006 revised edition, author-ized by the Cox estate, returns the major cuts made in the original 1919 text in the Robertson and Mullens 1947 and later editions, thus becoming the first complete edition of Out of the Silence ever published!”

The Project Gutenberg Introduction is from the “Australian Writers Series,” The Australasian, Melbourne, 3 June 1939:
“THE name of Erle Cox is well known to readers of The Australasian, by reason of his weekly book review, and is also familiar to a wide public through the medium of his own books, especially Out of the Silence, which has maintained— and is maintaining—a steady sale over a period of 20 years or so, something unusual in these days of mass production and short lives in novels.”

So. The winner of the UKLG Prize 2025 is Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera (Marcie’s Review).

I was barracking for Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson which still seems to me both an excellent SF novel in itself and the most in the le Guin tradition of all the shortlistees. But, with de Marken last year and Rakesfall this year, the judges are obviously going down a much more experimental line than I expected.

Out of the Silence is very readable, written in a blokey style typical of English and Australian middlebrow fiction of that time. We begin with a Prologue in which two men and a women have been selected to be entombed, in specially constructed spheres, the only representatives of their race to survive when the world ends in a few weeks time.

Chapter I switches to the ‘present’ with Allan Dundas, a young bachelor farmer of grapes, as the author was for a time at Rutherglen in north eastern Victoria. While digging a well he comes on a very hard, spherical surface, which he begins to excavate.

His older friend Bryce, the local bank manger, calls on him to invite him to Sunday dinner. His wife has in mind a particular young woman, Marian, she would like Dundas to meet. Afterwards Dundas takes Marian home in his gig (horse-drawn two seater) which involves the horse bolting on a bush track in the dark, Dundas masterfully pulling it up, and Marian sitting demurely not turning a hair. They make gooey eyes at each other.

Dundas returns to his excavation, concealing it by building a shed over it, makes his way eventually down to a doorway, solves the puzzle of how it opens, avoids various boobytraps, and spends weeks exploring a temple full of wonders, pausing only briefly to supervise the picking of the grapes. Marian is if not forgotten then at least left to form her own opinions.

A few days pass, I get work, a couple of days. Sunday home as I write now. A trip north tomorrow. I’m presently at Chapter XV of XXXII, I can’t see me posting on Tuesday. I read on for a while.

In the last section of the buried structure Dundas finds and falls instantly in love with a sleeping beauty, young and blonde, inert under an indestructible glass canopy. He locates the instructions to bring her back to life, and with a doctor friend sworn to secrecy, does so. She is of course the woman from the Prologue, from a civilization on earth destroyed millions of years ago. He teaches her English and she in turn demonstrates how much more advanced than ours her civilization was.

Late Sunday night, at Chapter XX I get to this. The woman, Earani, is discussing her own society:

The great problem however was the problem of the coloured races. Mentally and in everything but physical endurance they were beneath us. They could imitate but not create. They multiplied far more rapidly than we did… and everywhere they demanded as a right an equality they were unfitted for.

A disease, a ‘death ray’ keyed to skin colour, is created which wipes them out. The doctor protests at this. They argue it out. It comes to this:

[Earani] This country of yours you are so proud of – who owned it before your people came here, if I remember rightly, not much more than a hundred years ago?

Have you ever once in your life given a single thought of remorse for the thousands of helpless, if useless, aborigines that were exterminated by the ruthless white invasion? Yet can you honestly declare that you think they should have been left in undisturbed possession?

[The doctor] The parallel is not just. In this case it was survival of the fittest …

[Earani] The ‘Death Ray’ or rum and disease – aye, or firearms – what difference? The result is the same. Your people are in undisturbed possession of their land, and they are exterminated.

Dundas takes Earani’s side: “… the world would be better and cleaner if some of its races were to become extinct .. the Turk for instance.” Earani talks of ‘weeding’.

Someone with a stronger stomach than mine can read the rest. That “aye, or firearms” makes me wonder if perhaps the case for racial purity has been stated now in order for it to be overturned later – we don’t usually admit that in many cases Aboriginal communities were wiped out by shooting parties – but I am not going to be the one who finds out. Marian, I hope, has a lucky escape.

Monday I spend unloading, getting some work done. Tomorrow’s (today’s) trip is cancelled, and here we are. Next up, MARM.

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Erle Cox, Out of the Silence, first pub in book form 1924.

The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead

wadholloway Australian, Literature , , ,

From an 1980 ABC radio interview quoted by Chris Williams in Christina Stead: A Life of Letters (1989) –
[Rodney] Wetherell: Does The Man Who Loved Children have any connection to the life you lived at Watson’s Bay?
Stead: Of Course. It’s exactly word for word. And plenty of words.

‘Plenty of words’ indeed! Stead gets down on the page floods of impassioned speech in a way no other writer can.

The Man Who Loved Children (1940) is the story of Christina Stead’s adolescence – transposed from Sydney to the outskirts of Washington DC and a later decade to appease her American publishers – bottled up for 20 or 30 years and then let fly in a great outpouring of love and hatred for her horrible, impossible father.

The Steads – Christina’s father David and stepmother Ada – are rewritten as Sam and Henny Pollit, Christina is Louie, and David and Ada’s six children, who Christina often had to mother, are here Ernie, Evie, twins Sam and Saul, Tommy and Charles

In this passage, towards the end of the book, Henny has had enough, more than enough of Sam, and Stead, a fabulous writer of direct speech, lets her rip:

“You think you’e so fine with your bragging and science and human understanding – oh, I’ve heard all about it till I could scream myself insane with the words; and you can run everything, and world problems, when all the time it’s other women, you hypocrite, you dirty, bloodless, hypocrite, too good, other women, scientific women, young girls, and your own wife – I’ll write to all your scientific societies, I’ll write to the Conservation Department, I’ll tell them what my life has been – beat me, knock me down, I can’t stand it … [and on she goes. Sam tells Louie to throw a bucket of water over her.] … I’m going to kill myself; tell your dirty father to go downstairs. I’ll kill myself, I’ll do it: I can’t stand it any longer.”

Christina Stead was born in Sydney in 1902. Her mother died when she was two, and her father, David, remarried 3 years later, Ada Gibbins, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. They lived in a substantial house owned by Ada’s father, on Lydham Hill (map, lower left), where they had six more children. When Ada’s father died in 1917 David Stead found his family a large, ramshackle house in Watson’s Bay, between Sydney Harbour and the Pacific Ocean (map, upper right). At the same time Christina became a pupil at Sydney Girls High.

All this is mirrored in The Man Who Loved Children – the Lydham Hill house is transposed to within walking distance of central Washington DC; the death of Henny’s father leaves the Pollits effectively homeless until Sam comes up with a large run-down house in the poorer part of Annapolis, 40 or 50 kms east of Washington, on Chesapeake Bay; Louie starts at a new school where she becomes infatuated with her English teacher, Miss Aiden, and makes a new best friend, Claire, with whom she constantly exchanges highly literary letters.

It would be easy to take your cue from the title and read this as the story of a father, king of the kids, Sam Pollit, at a difficult time in his life – he has married the spoilt younger daughter of a wealthy businessman, expecting her to be his household drudge; he loses his home, which he had thought his wife might inherit, when his father in law dies and his estate is found to be virtually worthless; his job in the Federal bureaucracy looks promising, he is the member of a delegation to Malaya, and then he is unemployed, with just a promised job in Conservation some time in the future.

But this is Louie’s story, Stead’s own story, of the years from 11-14, growing up with a stepmother she sometimes admired and a father she loved, who were both often openly contemptuous of her – too fat, too slow, too lazy, too stupid – at a time when it was frequently on her young shoulders that the running of the house rested.

Louie saw herself as awkward and gawky at an age when all girls who are not Lindsay Lohan see themselves as gawky. At school she was not in the sporty set, nor amongst the pretty ones who talked only of boys, but she was one of the clever ones and rather admired for her poetry about Miss Aiden. At home, she, and the much younger Evie, were expected to do more than their share of ‘women’s work’, especially if Henny was off visiting, seeing her lover, shopping – with borrowed money, or just sitting up in bed.

The atmosphere of the house was a compound of poverty and mismanagement; of lots of noisy, healthy kids; of Henny’s bitterness and inability to cope with her fall in status and her near constant pregnancies; and of Sam’s childish enthusiasm for projects for his sons. Louie feels herself constantly at the centre of a storm, her father interfering in her writing and in her friendships, her only respite school, till at last it is all too much.

Reading through commentaries there is some criticism that Stead doesn’t get the transition to the USA and the 1930s quite right. I was not interested in that, though I admire Stead’s politics, but rather was entirely absorbed in how Stead portrayed herself as Louie, and her relationship with her father and stepmother.; and of course in her marvellous writing.

Christina Stead left home, left Australia, aged 26. In the remaining 20 something years of his life she never saw her father again.

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Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children, first pub. 1940. 514pp.

Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser

wadholloway Australian, Literature , , ,

I’ve been up north for the past week, but mostly in phone range. However, by the time this is posted I will be on a trip from Port Hedland, across the north of the state and out into the Tanami Desert on the WA/NT border. I hope to be back in phone range by the weekend, and in one piece.

Over the past year a number of you have read and praised Michelle de Kretser’s latest work, Theory & Practice (2024), and as you can see by the stickers on the cover it has won or been up for a number of awards, including the Stella. It was Kimbofo I think, who recommended that I read this de Kretser rather than one of her earlier works of which I have a couple, unread, on my shelves, and I’m glad I did.

In some ways it might have been the novel she wrote first, a Rooneyesque or perhaps even a Garneresque autofiction novel of early twenties, inner-suburban life, my favourite form of writing.

De Kretser (1957- ) is an experienced writer, an Australian who came from Sri Lanka (Ceylon) as a girl, who has written seven previous novels about life centred on those two countries. According to the ‘I’ who narrates this novel (unnamed until near the end) she began writing another novel, the first eleven pages of this one, but got stuck

The book I needed to write concerned breakdowns between theory and practice, and the material was overwhelming. Particles of it had entered my novel and jammed up its works… I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess.

And so she goes back to her younger years as a grad student, the 1980s, in Melbourne, writing a thesis on the later works of Virginia Woolf. At this point I considered writing a joint review, comparing this with Gail Jones’ One Another, also out in 2024, set in the 1990s, in London, about an Australian grad student writing a thesis on Joseph Conrad, which I had listened to just a couple of months ago. But, I decided I hadn’t retained enough, and couldn’t be sure of access to a paper copy. Read it though, if you haven’t already, it’s excellent.

So Theory & Practice restarts, first with a story of herself at 11 sitting theory and practice exams in piano and being criminally assaulted; and then, 13 or 14 years later, with her getting a scholarship to do her Masters in Melbourne, moving from Sydney, leaving behind a widowed mother, selecting a flat in St Kilda overlooking the Bay.

I remember St Kilda in the 80s. Shabby grand mansions along the Esplanade subdivided into rooms to rent, wrought iron verandahs enclosed with louvre windows and dusty curtains. My own early twenties were spent in the suburbs around uni: Carlton, North Melbourne, Fitzroy, Victoria Markets – the suburbs of Monkey Grip. Later, Milly’s and my favourite inner suburb was Fitzroy, Brunswick St. But the kids loved St Kilda, it was their goto place for exotic experience, for the Bohemians they dreamed of being – Jean Jaques by the Sea in a winter storm, Luna Park, Fitzroy St. Well after midnight, the night of Gee’s Year 12 Ball, I was one of many fathers in his car waiting at the Esplanade end of St Kilda Pier for over-excited daughters to give up partying and come home.

Violent, and violently policed, St Kilda should have been depressing. But it lay open to sea and sky, and a sense of possibility flowed from that.

A party at Lenny’s, a lecturer, gay, the friend of a Sydney friend, introduces her to the circle of people, students and artists, who were to be her friends and lovers; and to a “boxy object in orthopaedic non-colour”, a Mac. You have to be old, these days, to remember the arrival of personal computers.

She finds that her combined English French honours degree in Sydney has left her unprepared for Melbourne where the humanities were totally in the grip of Theory – French poststructuralism. ‘Sydney is so backward,’ Lenny said.

Theory rejected binaries, exposed aporias* and posited. It posited that meaning was unstable and endlessly deferred. I was good at languages and relished the prospect of learning a new one. Theory took words I knew and used them in startling new ways.

Her supervisor gives her a whole heap of books to read, ‘to help her catch up’, but in the end she takes Lenny’s excellent advice to read Eagleton’s Literary Theory (beside my desk as I write), and Culler’s On Deconstruction instead.

She takes as her lover Kit, the boyfriend of a girl in Lenny’s circle; she has to deal with her mother who learns not to phone when she and Kit might be “studying”; her research into Woolf crosses over with her own origins.

Leonard Woolf, before the War, before he married Virginia, had been a colonial administrator in Ceylon, but was sympathetic to the separatists. In her 1917 diary Virginia describes EW Perera, a representative of the separatists in London visiting their home, as a “poor little mahogany coloured wretch”. And so the work for her thesis veers off into searching for elements of upper class racism in Woolf’s writing.

The machinery of racism ran silently in 1986. It was unmentionable, shameful and ordinary. How could I fit it into a sentence about Virginia Woolf? I couldn’t even fit it into a sentence about myself.

There are things about women men do not understand. Daughters must see life through their mothers and in opposition to their mothers

The Woolfmother outed herself as a snob and a racist and an antisemite, failing us because mothers are obliged to fail. But her writing about women inspired us and gave us courage …

Also St Kilda: As winter closed in, draughts that had flirted with icebergs slipped past my ill-fitting windows

Also criminal assault: When Woolf was in her fifties, she still remembered ‘resenting, disliking’ what George [her older half brother] did when he climbed into her bed.

And so we make our way through a year of love and friendship, and then, quickly, another year, and then, finally, a couple of chapters to close off threads, to bring us up to the present. One of those chapters is devoted almost entirely to Australian artist and paedophile Donald Friend, to the powerful white men who are as oblivious to his faults as they are to systemic racism.

Woolf had wanted her last novel, The Years, to be a hybrid of story and essays, but in the end it was ‘just’ story. I get the impression de Kretser went through the same process. Not that I mind. It’s a powerful story and one that will make you think. I am now reading a Woolf novel I had to hand, Mrs Dalloway, brilliantly written, unrelentingly snobbish, but no racism, not yet.

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Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice, Text, Melbourne, 2024. 183pp.

*Aporia: “a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself” (Derrida).