Australian Women Writers Challenge – Completed!

Ok so it's kind of eleventh hour (the story of my life in 2016), but I got my ten reviews done for the Australian Women Writers Challenge, and I read 36 books by Australian women writers altogether (I’ll list these in a later post when I sum up my reading for 2016).

Here are the books I reviewed:

1.     Comfort Food, Ellen van Neerven

2.     Defying Doomsday, Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench

3.     Fishing in the Devonian, Carol Jenkins

4.     Not Just Black and White, Lesley and Tammy Williams

5.     Painting Red Orchids, Eileen Chong

6.     Cloudwish, Fiona Wood

7.     Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms, Anita Heiss

8.     Everywhere I Look, Helen Garner

9.     The Soul of Countess Adrian, Rosa Praed

10.  Close to Home, Robin Barker

With three Indigenous authors, two editors with disability and one author from a migrant background, this list is happily much more diverse than last year’s.

Over at the AWW challenge, I arranged a focus on Australian women writers with disability in April which featured guest posts by Gaele Sobott and Amanda Tink, as well as my own thoughts on why we need diverse books. In October I organised a focus on Australian women writers of migrant heritage, with posts from Eileen Chong, Lee Kofman and Michelle Cahill. And in July I interviewed Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko as part of a celebration of NAIDOC week

Sadly, this is the last year of my role as diversity editor. What with working full time and trying to do my creative writing in my spare time, my life has become completely overloaded and I need to try and balance things better. I’ll continue to arrange the guest posts (and am going to try to include more by Indigenous writers), but the roundups will be done by the excellent and capable Marisa Wikramanayake.

I’ll sign up for the challenge next year, but I won’t set myself a target (part the trying to minimise strain business). It’s a wonderful and valuable initiative, and it’s introduced me to a new way of thinking about discussing books. In fact I’ve found this so interesting that I successfully applied for an internal grant at UQ to study vernacular criticism in more detail.

I don’t know if my reading habits have changed that much over the past five years, as the reason why I gravitated towards the challenge in the first place was because I naturally read a lot of books by women. However it has definitely raised my awareness of gender bias and I’ve started having conversations with other people about the books they and their children read (my sister, for example, is now actively getting her son to read books with female protagonists). I'm really grateful, too, to the challenge creator Elizabeth Lhuede for approaching me five years ago after she read a post I'd written on Eva Hornung's Dog Boy and disability. It's made me far more aware of the representations of disability in literature, and given me an opportunity to be part of sorely-needed conversations in Australia about diversity.

The challenge is still going strong and Elizabeth has new volunteers helping out and looking over stats. I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens in 2017!

Review of Close to Home

I met and became friends with Robin Barker when we were doing an MA in Writing course at the University of Technology, Sydney. Robin was famous because she had published two books of advice on babies, Baby Love and The Mighty Toddler. I was a twenty-three year old who loved nineteenth-century fiction and wanted to write my first novel and didn’t have a clue about babies in any shape or form. Somehow we hit it off. I’ve always enjoyed the company of older women – they’re more interesting and emotionally complex than younger women and, having done more, they often have good stories too. I’m not sure why Rob was interested in me, unless it was that she recognised my ambition and wanted to help, which she certainly did. When I later won a mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors, she introduced me to her editor Julia Stiles, who in turn helped me with my manuscript and introduced me to some agents, and then A Curious Intimacy finally found its feet.

Rob has been working on the stories in Close to Home since that time (I discovered I still had a draft of one in my writing box) and it was fantastic to see them in print, particularly the stories I knew she was struggling with, as all writers do. Plus the cover is gorgeous. I read the book a while back, leaving it in a tequila bar when I took everything out of my handbag to find my wallet. To my relief, the bartender still had it when I went back the following week.

Of all the stories, the one that’s stayed with me is ‘Josephine’s Face’. A fairly long, meandering story in the second person, it doesn’t have a great deal of tension, but it achieves nuance and complexity through the use of hindsight. The narrator, posted to America with her army husband and kids, befriends an African-American mother in the park attached to the military’s housing complex. As the narrator comes to know her, it slowly becomes apparent to her how race is entwined with class. Where the white women make their menfolk lunch and listen to their day, Josephine goes out to work. Young and naïve, the narrator comments how ‘It didn’t take long for Don and me to be drawn into a welcoming circle of officers and wives, which I soon noticed you and AJ weren’t part of. It didn’t seem to be because you were deliberately excluded, and nor did you ever give me that impression. At the time I presumed it was because you were working shifts in that hospital in Alexandria’. Subtlety, the use of ‘at that time’ shows it wasn’t this reason at all. The accounts of subtle racism continue in conversations at dinner parties or at shops. There are tiny, dropped words that, on their own, are hard to pick out, but when they’re laid in a line with the benefit of hindsight, they accumulate into something cruel. In the midst of it all is this glamorous, intelligent, accomplished woman, ignoring the insults with aplomb.

Children bind together many of these stories, illuminating the messes that adults get caught up in, and sometimes make for themselves. I loved the shifting relationships and liaisons occasioned by a couple trying to conceive in ‘First Love’, and its unexpected twists. In other stories there are complications arising from inadequate parenting, or parents wrestling over custody, but joy always wells up, from employers, babies, unexpected strangers.

The first and last stories are pieces of memoir, and they resonated with me most strongly. The last is about the complex legacy of war and its memories, and how writing can help soothe and smooth the trauma that war carries. The first, story about Rob’s two grandmothers, shows her skillful rendering of character and class. There is the fat grandmother, who vacuums in the nude and takes in an Aboriginal family when floods threaten. Meanwhile the thin grandmother, to survive, takes in boarders, ‘New Australians with broken English and glistening hair’. Later, a part of her history unexpectedly emerges, leaving her with a ‘silent, rebellious anger’. I loved this story for its clear rendition of class through dialogue and contrast, and its illustration impact of poverty upon women, and how tough they have to be to survive. It’s a good way to end my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge this year.

This is my tenth and final review for the Challenge. And here is a pic of Rob and I in 2003.

Review of The Women's Pages

To pick up a piece of writing by Debra Adelaide is be instantly assured that one is in calm, capable hands. The kind that can smooth down bed sheets, whip up a meringue, tally up a line of numbers without error, guide you steadily through a narrative and deliver you to a satisfying ending (although it might, as in The Household Guide to Dying, make you cry). The narrators in Adelaide’s stories are problem solvers, and in her most recent novel The Women’s Pages, the problem is one of writing itself.

As her mother lies dying, Dove reads her Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and she begins to write a novel. She is compelled into the act of writing by reading this text, which she had picked up when she was young and which ‘was like a malaria of the brain, lying dormant then leaping up at unexpected times to attack with the fever of unresolved narrative’ (7). The same might be said of Dove’s attempts at writing: she is plagued by dreams, her characters intrude into her consciousness, and she is puzzled by how to fit it all together. As she tries to work out what’s happening so, too, does her reader.

The novel which Dove writes is set in the 50s, with all of its thick and casual sexism. When Ellis, her character (named for Ellis Bell, the pseudonym of Emily Bronte), refuses the advances of her friend’s husband, he calls her a ‘tight bitch’ (23). Ellis looks for a job designing typefaces and is cowed by the weight of male disapproval of a woman who should be at home, doing the laundry. Unwanted pregnancies are hidden, their attendant pain smothered beneath the daily rituals of cooking, cleaning and earning an income. Yet even some decades years later, sexism is still rife: while at university, Dove finds her breast groped by a man mid-conversation and is paralysed with indecision about whether to voice the violation, until she ‘thought she might gag with the effort of doing nothing’ (59). The scene reminded me of The First Stone, in which Helen Garner was groped during a massage, but still paid the masseuse afterwards because she was unsure of how to deal with the situation. It still seems there is no language for some acts, although I think this is (thankfully) beginning to shift with social media.

I sometimes found myself confused as to who was speaking throughout the narrative, and it took me a while to work out whose story I was in, Ellis’s or Dove’s. And yet this was apt, for this is what happens to a writer (well, to me at least) when in the thick of writing a novel – it’s hard to shake off your characters, and you carry them around with you. You know they’re not real, but they’re not phantoms either. To Dove, Emily Bronte is so real that she enters her dreams, while Ellis plagues her with questions, pushing through the narrative in search of their answers.

The two stories hinge in the final scene, which I thought was wonderful for its elegance and surprise. My own mother, however, was unimpressed: she’d seen it coming. I didn’t mind; the novel has so many intricacies in it that I know I’ll return to puzzle it out. It has also occurred to me that this might be more of a writer’s novel, rather than a reader’s, as so much of it is about the process of writing.

What I have always loved about Adelaide’s writing is her celebration of domesticity and the feminine, particularly her descriptions of cooking. For example Ellis’s carer, Mrs Wood, ‘taught Ellis how to add a few pinches of curry powder – she favoured Clive of India – to the batter for fried flathead, which took care of the fishy smell in the house’ (108). Much of Mrs Wood’s knowledge has been gleaned ‘from the women’s pages of the Sunday newspapers over the years’ (108).

Ellis, in need of an income, finds work sorting out the recipes for one such magazine, titled the Women’s Pages, although most refer to it as the Pages. This becomes its official title as a way of increasing its appeal for, as Ellis observes, ‘the Pages turned out to be read by a surprising number of men’ (187). It’s a simple reference that underscores the difficulties we’re still having with selling women’s writing and asking people (well, men, mostly) to take it seriously. Siri Hustvedt discusses these issues beautifully in her essay about the reception of Knausgaard’s emotional writing, and his dismissal of women writers as ‘No competition’.

I adored so much about The Women's Pages, including its intertextual references to other quietly domestic novels such as Camille’s Bread, and movies such as Love and Other Catastrophes (one of my favourites). It’s the perfect way to wrap up my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

This is my 10th and final review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Georgiana Molloy: The Mind That Shines

A few weeks ago, I came across an article in Inside Story, ‘Everyone was a Bird.’ It opens with a reference to the author’s composition of a song cycle for baritone and orchestra. This composition included the words from a letter that 19th century Western Australian botanist Georgiana Molloy wrote to fellow botanist James Mangles in England about the death of her son by drowning. In the end, the composer writes, he wasn’t able to find the music to fit to the words, and he relied up on the sounds of birds from the bush near Augusta, where she lived before moving to Busselton: sounds of the West Australian bush near Augusta: bristlebirds, New Holland honeyeaters and spotted pardalotes, splendid fairy wrens and a Carnaby’s black cockatoo.

Georgiana Molloy emigrated from England to Augusta in 1829 with her new husband, John Molloy. Not long after her arrival, she had a baby girl, who died a few weeks later. She had another two girls, then the son, whom she lost through the drowning. This loss coincided with the request from Mangles to collect Australian specimens and seeds for him. Georgiana went into the bush to take her mind from her grief, and this engendered a radical shift in the way she perceived her environment.

Georgiana and her story has not only inspired musicians, but also artists and writers. Miles Noel created a portrait of her for his series on Western Australian scientists, using artistic licence to slip a piece of Boronia molloyae (the only specimen named after her) into her hair. Libby Hathorn wrote a children’s historical novel, Georgiana, Woman of Flowers, while my first novel A Curious Intimacy was inspired by the research I did on Molloy for my Honours year in English literature.

Until recently, there have only been two monographs on Georgiana’s life, Alexandra Hasluck’s Georgiana Molloy: Portrait with Background (1955) and William Lines’ An All Consuming Passion: Origins, Modernity and the Australian Life of Georgiana Molloy (1994). Hasluck’s work is a standard biography, citing extracts from Molloy’s letters, which Mangles had copied and bound into two letterbooks (along with others from his correspondents), now held in the Battye Library of the State Library of Western Australia.

The structure of Lines’ book is more complex,  beginning with an account of the earth itself, then the geological creation of Australia as it broke from Gondwana, and then the populating of south west Western Australia by diverse forms of flora, then Indigenous people, then white colonists. In his preface, Lines explains his approach as a way of avoiding the anthropocentrism of biographies, which ‘situates a human at the centre of the world’ (xi). Molloy, he continues ‘as the single dominating character … holds the different parts of the narrative together, but she is not the only source of that narrative’ (xii). It’s an admirable approach, but the book is unavoidably anthropocentric because humans remain its focal point. While Lines does incorporate more research than Hasluck on the Aboriginal people with whom Molloy and her neighbours interacted (often violently, and sometimes peaceably), he doesn’t refer to the environment again at any great length in his work. I am still indebted to this work, however – if I hadn’t randomly found it on the shelves of a library at the University of California, Berkely, where I was on exchange in 1999, I would never have started my research on Molloy.

Now, with the recent publication of Bernice Barry’s Georgiana Molloy: The Mind That Shines, readers have a far more comprehensive and detailed account of Georgiana’s life and her motivations. Over the last decade, Barry has painstakingly combed the archives in Cumbria to piece together Georgiana’s family history. In doing so she reveals a young girl who was forced to make a decision to travel to the other side of the world with a man she barely knew, even if her heart wasn’t entirely in it.

In writing this, I’m reminded of a class which Glenda Adams took in my writing course at UTS, in which we discussed a young woman dressing herself and curling her hair before a ball in the nineteenth century.

‘It’s a job, right?’ Glenda pointed out in her soft, American accent.

And so were every woman’s accomplishments a gentle, desperate kind of work necessary to find security. Happiness was something that came along if you were lucky.

I’d had an inkling of the strain in Georgiana’s family from reading the Cumbria archives, but I never had the time, while I was doing my PhD on Georgiana, to transcribe them. I was enthralled by Barry’s account of the disasters that rippled through the family, and by their desperate attempts to save face. Barry’s meticulous research also reveals a background that John Molloy, whom Georgiana married, wished to keep to himself in the new colony of Swan River.

For me, this was an exciting book because of its wealth of new information. Barry mentions that one of the books Georgiana placed in her trunk was The British Album, an anthology of poetry by group of English writers living in Italy. The poems in this book ‘describe physical passion, only lightly veiled by erotic imagery’ (8). She also packed a copy of The Songs of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet of high emotion. These works affirmed Georgiana’s passionate nature, which is usually bridled in her letters, but sometimes flares free

Barry also includes a transcript of the letter Georgiana wrote to her mother when her first child died not long after her arrival in Augusta. It shows Georgiana’s (often overlooked) skill as a writer. ‘I knew not what to do,’ Georgiana wrote. ‘I felt inclined to rush out into the open air and charge the winds with what weighed so heavy at my bursting head’ (172). This sentence is packed with movement (‘rushing’ and ‘charging’) and pressure (‘weighed’, ‘heavy’ and ‘bursting’), suggesting Georgiana’s emotion was too much for her body.

Barry’s writing is clean and detailed and, aside from a few moments of authorial intrusion that annoyed me (which would in any biography), the narrative pulled me along. There is also a lovely set of colour plates, and the cover is gorgeous. The research is also testimony to Barry’s patience, because transcribing the letters, which were often crossed to save postage (which the recipient paid) would have taken hours and hours of work.

I read this book as I was travelling back to Brisbane from Goondiwindi after giving a writing workshop. The flat, orange-brown landscape outside was worlds away from the lush greenness of Roseneath, where Georgiana stayed with friends before moving to Western Australia, and from the tall tuarts of south west Western Australia. It reminded me of what I love so much about Georgiana’s life: her precise vision of the natural world, and her poetic rendition of this in her letters. 

I’m a biased reviewer because I’ve been researching Georgiana on and off for fifteen years, but anyone who is interested in remarkable women writers and scientists of Australia should pick up this book. It does much justice to an intelligent, brave and creative woman who achieved an astonishing amount in her too-short, but intensely rich life.

This is my fourth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. If you'd like to subscribe to these posts and other updates, you can sign up here.

Review of Hopscotch

When I was slipping this book into my bag to take to work, my boyfriend asked me, ‘What’s that one about?’

‘It’s a family drama.’

‘Why not just a drama?’

I paused, blinking. ‘I don’t know.’

As I sat on the bus and fell into my usual habit of staring out the window and thinking, I wondered if I had unconsciously taken on some kind of bias. Why should a drama always signify war zones or shoot-em-ups? Why, when it enters the (historically feminised) realm of the family should it be classified as a different type of drama?

I made a note not to use that phrase again, particularly as I’d offered to review this book for the Australian Women Writers Challenge when I got talking to Jan Zwar (who knows the author, Jane Messer) at a conference. One of the aims of the AWW Challenge is to redress the tendency to overlook writing that is written by women, or may have feminine subject matter.

The drama in Hopscotch comes not from car chases, but from the tension in the Rosen family. The Prologue finds them gathered around the table for Sam, their father’s, birthday. Already there is bickering, tentative singing, forced jollity, tears and shouting, while the opening line, ‘Hours before the spring winds crashed through, the sash windows rattled only a little’ signals the disorder to come.

The novel then backtracks to four months earlier and follows the lives of the three Rosen children, Mark, Jemma and Liza. Mired in debt as the GFC hits, Mark and his marriage begin to crack with strain. Jemma, a new resident of Redfern, finds her stereotypical assumptions of Aborigines are challenged when she becomes the victim of crime. Liza is desperate for a child, which doesn’t look like it’s going to happen with her current boyfriend.

This is a middle-class family, dealing with the everyday concerns of mortgages and relationships in Sydney. The strength of the novel lies in its detailed rendition of how the characters negotiate their daily lives, buffeted by the unpredictable forces of illness, desire, violence and financial markets. Although there was so many people in the Prologue that it took me a while to work out who was who, and I found the metaphor of Jemma pleading with her family to harmonise the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’ somewhat forced, I was soon pulled into these characters’ worlds.

Each person was well-drawn and consistent, and the push-pull of their relationships was believable. Sam, edging towards death with cystic fibrosis, is apathetic with tiredness, much to his wife’s frustration. Life doesn’t stop when one becomes sick, and Rhonda, impatient, arranges for them to sell up and move. The use of focalisation (of narrating a character’s thoughts in third person), is excellent: ‘He would always be out of reach; she would never be able to repair him or love him or make him well again. She couldn’t stand him … In the kitchen, the boiling kettle whistled. She would make him tea’ (213).

Neither does life stop for Mark, who is crushed by the debris of falling markets. His paranoia, then full-blown terror, over losing his job is mesmerising. Up to his neck in debt, panicking about how to find money for his wife and potential child, he becomes deluded and resentful: ‘He was going to be sacked in the morning, Ingrid was on the lounge resting and not working to save their financial arses, and he was going to struggle to get the funds for the Dee Why deal’ (275). Ingrid is irritating, with her nose constantly in pregnancy magazines, but she rallies when disaster strikes.

While Mark’s life falls apart, the sisters’ lives knit slowly and surely into something stronger. Jemma, uptight, neurotic and recently moved out of home, is traumatised by violence but released into the delight of a new relationship. Liza, after dating a string of deadbeats, slowly becomes more secure through managing a childcare centre. I loved the administrative details of her job and her placation of fractious parents, maybe because I'm obsessed with order myself.

When the novel finished, I was disappointed that I couldn’t read anymore of the characters’ thoughts about childcare, the cloud, or the invasion of online privacy. I wanted to stay involved in their lives, and kept thinking about them for a week afterwards.

Usually, for me, this is the sign of a good book. Yet, while Hopscotch is an undeniably enjoyable read, I also found the plot frustratingly formless and I wanted more ideas to mull over. I couldn’t get much more from it that the notion that people must always deal with the stressors and unpredictability of life regardless of how well-off they are. This aside, if you’d like an engaging snapshot of middle-class relationships in Sydney’s mid-noughties, with drama aplenty to keep you turning the pages, play Hopscotch and you’ll find yourself having fun!

This is my third review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. If you'd like to subscribe to these posts and other updates, you can sign up here.

Miss Representation

A few weeks ago I was invited by Ashleigh Thompson of the Women in Tech group at Queensland University of Technology to be part of a panel at a screening of Miss Representation, a documentary about the representations of women in mainstream media, and the implications of such representations for their consumers. Also on the panel were three stellar people – Jenine Beekhuyzen, director of the Tech Girls Movement; Danielle Neale, recently named by the Sydney Morning Herald as a rising star in Information & Communications technology; and Isaac Pursehouse of Guerilla Welfare, and I felt very privileged to be speaking with them.

I’ve been a feminist since I went to uni and discovered what feminism was, so I’ve been reading about it for close to two decades. Even so, this film still knocked my socks off. It was written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom who was worried about what kind of world her young daughter would grow into. The media is crucial in shaping this world because people spend so much time watching TV, films, the internet or their smart phones.

From a very early age, Newsom explains, girls get the message that what’s most important is how they look – that their value and worth depends on this, and boys also get the message that this is what’s important too.

As a bright and brave school girl observed, ‘There is no appreciation for women intellectuals – it’s all about the body, not about the brain.’ I wanted to start cheering, not least because I’ve had my fair share of men who have only been interested in my tits, rather than the knowledge that I’ve gained through four degrees (including a PhD in literature), two novels, overseas travel and a disability.

The film was clever in that it cut between fully clothed, regal female leaders in history, and contemporary depictions of women which are sexualised and degrading.  The message I took away from the screening was that the more power women gain, the more the media tries to diminish it by demeaning women and by denying them a voice.  And the stats show that the media is male-dominated.  7% of directors and 10% of writers are in the film industry are women. Only 16% of protagonists in films are female. Women in their teens, 20s and 30s are 39% of the population yet make up 71% of television roles.

Actress Geena Davis commented in the film that all of Hollywood is run on one assumption – women will watch stories about men but men won’t watch stories about women, yet no one has ever really proved that this is true. The same might be said of the book industry – it’s assumed that men won’t read stories by women. Marketing has a huge part to play in this. As author Maureen Johnson writes:

if you are a female author, you are much more likely to get the package that suggests the book is of a lower perceived quality. Because it’s “girly,” which is somehow inherently different and easier on the palate. A man and a woman can write books about the same subject matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simple more likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it.

She inspired a wonderful project of swapping book covers so that you can see the marketing process at play. From personal experience, many men who have read A Curious Intimacy wouldn’t be seen dead with the second imprint (pink and red, with two women necking) in their hands on the train, but all commented to me that they thoroughly enjoyed the story.

If more women can tell their stories through film and literature, the representations of women inevitably become more nuanced, intelligent and complex, which demonstrates to girls that there are a multitude of roles and shapes they can inhabit, rather than the photo-shopped ideal of a hairless, big-breasted, big-lipped Barbie.

By brainwashing girls to believe that Barbie is the best way forward, they inevitably become anxious about their bodies, which has flow-on effects. As the film noted, the more women & girls self-objectify, the more they’re likely to be depressed, have lower ambition and lower cognitive functioning. They’re also likely to have lower political advocacy, which is the idea that your voice matters in politics and that you can create change. If we therefore have a whole generation of women who self-objectify and who are damaging themselves physically and psychologically on account of this, then we have a whole generation that’s less likely to run for office and less likely to vote. The emphasis on appearance distracts women from making a difference & becoming leaders. Focussing on women’s appearance also trivialises them, for it emphasises what they look like rather than what they’ve done. 

Representation is not just about visual imagery, it’s about the way in which language is used. Hilary Clinton has been called a bitch, and the word “Mrs’ is used instead of ‘Senator.’ In the newspaper, when commenting on how politicians speak, a female politician ‘complains’, whereas a man ‘states.’

Although the film was about American media and politics, many, if not all, of its messages can be transferred to Australia – simply witness the brutal verbal attacks upon Julia Gillard during her time in power. Tara Moss has also just released a book about the representations of women, with a similar litany of facts (such as that 70% of bylines of Australian newspapers are by male journalists, despite equal numbers of men and women being employed as writers). 

If language is a way of taking women down, it can also be a way of building women up and increasing their representation through stories and characters that are complex and multi-dimensional. Women are more than their bodies, and stories can show this.

The Australian Women Writers Challenge and prizes such as the Stella, Dobbie, Kibble and Barbara Jefferis are enacting change by drawing increased attention to women writers and their stories.  Women themselves can also create change because they are consumers – in the US, women have 85% of the purchasing power, and I imagine it would be a similar story in Australia - so they can decide which books are bought and which authors are supported.  On Twitter, women who are jack of the catcalls, the lack of promotion, the rapes, the physical assault, the privileged white male who gets out his gun because he thinks he’s entitled to women, the pay gay, the touches on the arse, the being told it’s their fault for being assaulted because they were walking alone in the evening, are speaking out by using #YesAllWomen. It makes for a depressing read, but it’s also inspiring. My father once said to me that after two generations of feminism, women ought to be getting into positions of power. Of course they should, but misogyny is entrenched and often invisible until people speak of it. By telling women’s stories, and by naming the injustice and making the problems clear through screenings such as those organised by QUT’s Women in Tech group, we can move towards equality.

Thoughts on the NDIS (from a deaf woman)

This morning I made it back into the pool for the first time in two months, due to various permutations of cold/flu/sinus infection that have left me perpetually exhausted.  It was delicious it was to be back in the water, stroking through my very slow laps with the sun falling onto my back, and as I swam I thought about people who couldn’t simply get on a bike, ride to a pool, wrestle themselves into their togs and dive in, because they had disabilities, and didn’t have the support they needed to get into the water.

This was a week in which I became immensely frustrated by the manifestation of selfishness across Australia.  After Julia Gillard’s proposal to increase the Medicare levy by half a percent to help fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme, cyberspace exploded with rants on yet another tax, wasteful spending, I-want-to-help-disabled-people-but-I-don’t-want-to-give-up-two-coffees-a-week while, to top it off, the CEO of Myer had the effrontery to suggest that the tax was going to harm business, and made a sloppy, half-hearted apology.  Fortunately, there are sensible writers such as Ben Eltham at New Matilda who point out that the NDIS makes economic sense in the long run because, as he notes, ‘it will bring people into the workforce who are currently unable to work – not just the disabled themselves, but also their carers and family members.’  I’m writing this post because I exemplify Eltham’s argument.

When I was nearly four, meningitis wiped out all but 25% of my hearing.  I have no hearing in my left ear, and half in my right, which is a diagnosis of severely-to-profoundly deaf.  I wear a hearing aid in my right ear, and use an FM system if I attend lectures, or if I’m teaching classes at uni.  I can hear in a group of two other people in quiet situations, but beyond that it’s really hard work as I have to mostly rely on lipreading, which takes an enormous amount of concentration and energy.  Talking in bars is just about impossible, what with loud music and alcohol impairing my concentration, so I usually just give up on socialising and go dancing somewhere.

My father was a farmer who couldn’t leave the land, and I was too young to be sent to the deaf school in Sydney (an eight-hour drive away), so I went to the local primary school of 100 kids in Boggabri with my brother, sister and cousins.  The school had its floors carpeted to help with the acoustics (which wasn’t too hard as it was a very small school), while Hearing Australia paid for my hearing aids and FM system (until I was 21), and for an itinerant teacher to visit me once a week.  Mr Tony was the first one from Kindy to Year Two, and then he was replaced by Mrs Tibbits, who stayed until year 6, and helped with my speech therapy.  I was given the FM system in Year 4 and it was a godsend, because it meant I didn’t have to strain so hard to listen (and they’re even good for kids who do have hearing, because they make the teacher’s voice so clear).  Sometimes the teacher, who was also the headmaster, would forget to turn off the transmitter when he went out so I heard him talking on the phone, and pretended complete innocence when he came back into class.

I went to secondary school in Gunnedah.  My sister was sent to boarding school in Armidale, but that school wouldn’t let me board because they’d had a bad experience with a previous girl who was deaf.  These days, this would have been grounds for suing for discrimination, but Mum wasn’t aware of those kinds of rights then.  As it transpired, we moved to Armidale when I was 15, and I went to the school as a day girl and became one of their top students.

Those years in secondary school in Gunnedah were harrowing.  In the small primary school in Boggabri I’d been fine because I knew everyone there, and my siblings and rellies were at the school.  There were occasions on which I wasn’t invited to birthday parties, or in which the visiting chaplain wouldn’t put me in the nativity play, because I had a disability, but Mum usually came down on those people like a ton of bricks and (nicely) sorted it out.  Mostly it was misunderstanding, and a bit of social stigma, but really, life could have been worse.  As I moved into adolescence, however, social situations became far more nuanced, and because I didn’t have enough hearing to overhear conversations and understand how people communicated, I couldn’t make friends.  I was ostracised, which was an experience so painful that even now, as a confident and capable woman, I still panic about being left out of things by friends.  I could have done with a counsellor then ( and most schools have them these days, which is good), but I eventually worked things out by watching people, and forcing myself to interact (or rather, by obeying my mother, who told me to talk to people instead of reading books).  By the time I got to the school in Armidale I was coping much better, and made good friends there who I still have today.  

On the plus side, isolation meant that I studied and worked hard, and turned to writing as a way to deal with the stress and social soreness that I repeatedly encountered.  My good grades gave me confidence, and my parents indoctrinated me with the belief that there was nothing I couldn’t do and so, even despite the anxiety and exhaustion occasioned by my deafness, I found temping and office jobs each summer to help pay my way through uni.

For the summer between finishing my undergraduate degree at Wollongong and starting my Masters at UTS, I found work as a Christmas casual at David Jones.  Part of the reason for wanting to do a customer-oriented job was because, as a deaf person, people generally thought that I couldn’t do it and, having a perverse and stubborn streak, I like to prove people wrong.  I also genuinely enjoy meeting new people, despite the effort involved with socialising.  There probably were a few occasions on which I didn’t hear a customer asking me for something, as a more experienced staff member who I worked with mentioned she explained to the customer that I couldn’t always hear, but it certainly wasn’t the end of the world.  It would seem that DJ’s is slightly better than Myer in the disabilities department, and if you’d like to pressure Myer into doing something about their appalling attitude to people with disabilities, Graeme Innes, the Disability Discrimination Commissioner, has set up a petition.

Later, when I was living in London and studying for my PhD, I worked on the desk at University College London library, checking out books to students and academics and answering questions.  UCL installed a loop system for me which didn’t work very well because they’d got the cheapest possible model and it broke (although they were obliged to have a decent working system not just for me, but also for deaf patrons), but I hooked up my FM system and that was more successful.  They also gave me a phone with volume on it, and if there was a call that I really struggled with (for example, if the person had an accent) then my lovely colleagues were always happy to help out.

I have also won several scholarships to help fund my studies, including a Study Abroad scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley, and it was there that, for the first time ever, I felt like I fitted in, because it was a place that encouraged diversity.  There were a few problems, in that, in my (ironically titled) Identities Across Difference class, Professor Trinh T. Minh-Ha wouldn’t wear the FM transmitter because, as she said, ‘It changes the way I speak!’  Perhaps she didn’t understand how the transmitter worked, because it only amplified her voice for me, the person who was wearing the receiver, and not for the whole class.  She agreed to have it on her desk, which didn’t really help, and the nice man at the Disability Office said by law she had to wear it, but I was too young and too nice to want to make waves, so I just struggled on.

The reason why I have rendered all this is to indicate that, with help from the government, my parents and siblings, I have become a successful writer and contributing member of society.  I have always been able to find a job and, although I have sometimes been curtailed by the exhaustion of my disability, the accommodations that have been made for me have helped to alleviate this.  I am a well-spoken, intelligent and articulate woman who pays taxes and I AM PROOF THAT FUNDING WORKS.

I understand that people are upset with Labor’s economic mismanagement (as I am too: I was ropable they expect already band-aided universities to make ‘efficiency dividends’ to pay for primary education) and that they’re concerned this money will not be justly spent.  I understand too that things are tight for people who are trying to juggle mortgages, new school uniforms, holidays, cars and, now, disability insurance, but we are a wealthy society (just visit India for a comparison), we aren’t heavily taxed in comparison to other nations and we have so many opportunities that it’s obscene to complain.  

Finally, one day your son, daughter, niece, nephew, granddaughter or grandson might almost die from meningitis, and you’ll be so grateful that they made it through and survived, even with a severe hearing loss, that the one dollar a day you paid through insurance will be the best investment you ever made.

On Reading when Rundown

Sometimes when I forget to stop working, my body makes an executive decision for me and puts me to bed with an illness.  The only positive thing about this state of affairs is that I can lounge about feeling sorry for myself, bake carrot cake and eat it, and read incessantly without guilt. Which is just as well, as 2012 has been designated the National Year of Reading, although our newly elected Queensland premier would appear not to be cognisant of this.  In a wonderful initiative, Elizabeth Lheude of Australian Women Writers has set a challenge to read and review books by Australian women.  The motivation for this approach is, as she writes, ‘to help counteract the gender bias in reviewing and social media newsfeeds that occurred throughout 2011 by actively promoting the reading and reviewing of a wide range of contemporary Australian women’s writing’.  Already 696 links to reviews have been posted on her site, which is a fantastic response, and through this I’ve added another three.

First off the rank is Romy Ash’s Floundering, recently released by Text.  A first novel shortlisted for the 2011 Vogel, it follows the journey of two boys picked up by their unstable mother (who has left them, without explanation, with their grandparents for a year), and driven across the country to a caravan park by the sea.  The prose is absolutely crystalline and the tension, up until about page 100, is superb.  After that it wobbles a bit, but takes off again.  The titular scene, in which the boys try to catch flounder in the sea with their mother by the light of a torch, stands as a perfect encapsulation of the story.  With ripples of disquiet created by the boys’ interactions with their old neighbour in the caravan park, the hint of prostitution learned from the mother, and a car accident with kangaroos that reminded me of Wake in Fright, the novel was on the cusp of springing into something truly disturbing.  Sadly, however, this didn’t happen, as it wrapped up in a somewhat pedestrian way and didn’t leave me with a huge amount to think about.

Alternatively, this might be because this is the fourth in a rash of first novels I’ve read recently about disturbed children, largely written in first person.  It began with Jon Bauer’s Rocks in the Belly (recently shortlisted for the IMPAC), which had no lyricism and left me cold.  Then there was Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game, which was very well-written and constructed, and finally Favell Parrett’s Past the Shadows, again finely-written (this one in third person), but largely unmemorable aside from the distressing ending.  Maybe I’m just a bit over this theme.  However, having said all that, I’m looking forward to seeing what Ash does next, as she is clearly a deft and dedicated writer.

On finishing her book, I picked up Kirsten Tranter’s second novel, A Common Loss.  I liked Tranter’s first work The Legacy.  Although, as with many others in my bookclub at Avid Reader, I felt the ending too convenient and clichéd, I was thoroughly impressed with her ambition in applying James’ The Portrait of a Lady to Sydney and America.  A Common Loss, also set in America (and evoking that country so well that I wanted to go back there) follows four college friends who meet annually in Las Vegas.  This year is the first without their friend Dylan, who died in a car accident and who, it transpires, holds secrets about them all. While the story had enough intricacy to draw the reader on, and while I liked the setting of Las Vegas and its attendant subtext of the blurring between reality and fiction (although this was too labored at times on account of its filtration through an academic character), the story failed to come to life, remaining stubbornly pinned to the page.  It also took me a good twenty pages to work out that the narrator was a man, and I didn’t have an overwhelming sense of masculinity throughout the text, despite all the main characters but one being male.  I wonder, too, if anyone can write a college novel these days without being overshadowed by and compared to Tartt’s sublime The Secret History, or if this even matters.

Then I got all hot and bothered and uncomfortable with Krissy Kneen’s Triptych, as it was designed to do.  As with Nabokov’s Lolita, referenced several times throughout the novel, Kneen’s skillful writing arouses her readers, despite her rendition of interactions that they may find confrontational (bestiality and incest, for example), making us question our responses and desire.  It follows the engagements, virtual and otherwise, between three sets of people: Susanna, daughter of deaf parents (a family setting I found beautifully done), who engages with Aaron online; zoophiles Rachel and Leda, who have couplings with animals and also communicate with Susanna online; and Aaron and Katherine, who are brother and sister.  I really enjoyed the novel, not least because it had narrative drive, unlike erotica such as Cleland’s The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which was initially entertaining but became tedious through so much repetition.  However the strands of the characters’ lives in each of the three stories, which looked as though they would be tied together, were left loose at the end – particularly Susanna’s, which bothered me.  If reading is anything like sex, a writer really oughtn’t leave their readers hanging.  Alternatively, Susanna’s disappearance might simply be indicative of the internet’s strange conflation of intimacy and distance: you can be close enough to see someone masturbating, but might never be able to connect with them again.  I still haven’t read Krissy’s much lauded Affection, which is very poor on my part, but have ordered it to the library.  Sometimes I think I’m the only person who keeps Stone’s Corner Library alive, as it’s so small I constantly need to pay to order books they don’t stock.  I console myself with the thought that at least every 80c goes to buying new books for other people to read, a concept with which our premier might be unfamiliar.

Beside my bed I still have Brigid Rooney’s Literary Activists, and Melissa Bellanta’s Larrikins.  These will have to wait for another day for review, however, as I need to get stuck into Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance.  And have another cuppa, a couple of paracetamol and piece of cake.

The Stella Prize

On International Women’s Day I finished up at work, caught the bus into town and walked down the main street of West End in my pale pink Alannah Hill shoes with bows, while my silk frock rippled against my calves.  At Avid Reader, I bought yet another copy of Anna Funder’s All That I Am for a friend, gratefully accepted a glass of wine from Fiona and sat outside to listen to a forum on the Stella Prize. Still in the making, the prize will award $50,000 annually to a woman writer with Australian citizenship, in any genre.  It is intended to raise the profile of women writers and increase their readership.

It was another humid Brisbane evening and the palpable indignation of the speakers and audience made things even warmer.  Here was Susan Johnson, whose writing I have always loved and whose blog I used to read when I was miserable in London, brandishing some thoroughly depressing pie charts from Vida showing the number of women’s publications vs men’s publications in respected literary outlets in 2011; here was Anita Heiss declaring from the audience, ‘I don’t want to be pigeon-holed as a black woman writer, I just want to be a writer’; here was Ben Law attending to the absence of women’s representation in culture through an anecdote of Triple J’s Hottest 100 of all time which showcased no female artists whatsoever; and here was Krissy Kneen saying that her sexy books are marketed with pink covers whereas a male author writing about sex has a more serious cover.  So, it was asked, do we need an award just for women writers?  Then consensus was that yes, we do.

To me, it was blatantly obvious after the discussion that evening that a culture exists in Australia which women’s intellectual and artistic contributions are diminished or made invisible, and that we need the award to draw attention to this.  Some might argue that market forces push women’s work to the margins.  Books such as Carrie Tiffany’s finely crafted Mateship with Birds, with its muted love story and gentle renditions of domesticity, would be completely swamped in a market that favours, as Mary Philip noted, the weighty non-fiction tome.  Yet if the readership isn’t alerted to the beauty of quiet texts such as Tiffany’s, how are these texts to gain the attention they deserve?

As someone who is disabled, I know full well that unless you get up and make a noise, nothing will happen or, more likely, people will walk on you.  If you don’t jump and shout, if you just accept the status quo, then society remains blind to its flaws.  Naturally, such challenging might result in stripping the status quo of its privileges, which is undoubtedly why, as Ben Law pointed out, when four male bands in a row win an Indie music award, it’s called a meritocracy, but when a woman is a winner, it’s a conspiracy.

The effects of such shouting were apparent that evening.  One member of the audience noted that she often bought books by female authors as gifts for her female friends, and books by male authors for her male friends.  She hadn’t realised it until that point, and from now on, she said, she was going to buy books by female authors for her male friends.  Consciousness raising might be a dated and unfashionable concept, but clearly it still works.

There are some however, such as MJ Hyland and Sonya Hartnett, who are completely opposed to the idea.  Mention was made of the anonymity of Hyland’s name.  Are we, I wondered, returning to the days of Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell?  Concerns were raised, too, that such an award might trivialise women’s women by consigning it to a corner.  Yet, as another audience member pointed out, women can still win awards for both genders and besides, when was getting winning more money ever a problem?  Male authors might complain that they’re missing out, but given Vida’s stats showing how well they’re doing, I don’t know how strong an argument this is.

I’ve been reading a slew of Australian fiction lately, and I noticed that all of it, aside from Alex Miller’s awful Autumn Laing, was written by women: Gillian Mears’ Foal’s Bread, Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy, Anna Funder’s All that I Am, the abovementioned Mateship with Birds, Sophie Cunningham’s Geography and Bird, Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game, Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs, Janette Turner Hospital’s Forecast: Turbulence and Favell Parrot’s Past the Shallows.  I’ve been trying to work out if this is because I actively seek fiction by women or I just like their subject matter; most likely it’s both.  Given the quality of these books, I think that an award to encourage the production of more of them can only be a good thing.

And then, as we filtered back into the bookstore, P stepped through the doors, diverted me from Anna Krien’s Quarterly essay and we Jam Jarred across the road on a salad with chilli-flavoured popcorn.

On Heroines

Lately I have been reading the Game of Thrones series, with a break to canvass Ron Rash's Serena, and now I find myself hankering after more feminine characters.

“All Game of Thrones has is fucking and fighting,” I complained to a bloke.

“What's wrong with that?” he replied.

Ahem. The clashes and cavorting aside, the series is brilliantly plotted, with jabs of wit and good characterisation in parts, which is why I read the first volume in three days over New Year and am hankering for time to finish the next one. However the representation of the female characters is getting a little tiring. There are maidens who love knights and jousting, mothers who try to guide their sons as they grow into kings, whores aplenty, and tomboys. It is the latter who are the only ones who seem to have any autonomy; the others are caught within the conventional power structures of Medieval culture to which the writer hearkens back. And yet, even these tomboys seem to be no more than female versions of men. The only woman who seems realistic in the whole text is Daenerys, who is forced, by circumstance and the land with which she interacts, to change from a timid girl dominated by her brother into a woman who is sexually confident, resourceful, and loyal to her lover.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the definition of “heroine” as “a female hero”, the word being the feminine version of the Latin hero. The role of the heroine, then, is automatically shackled by its relationship to a man, and a woman becomes valorous, and validated, by engaging in actions that have traditionally brought acclaim to men, viz., poking someone off their horse during a tournament. Given this, how can a woman be admired outside of such an equation, particularly given the long history of dismissal of areas in which women have excelled, such as crafts and cooking? This is something that I think about as I work out the sequel to A Curious Intimacy, which I'll write two novels down the track: how can I create a character who retains her sense of femininity, yet is physically and mentally strong at the same time, in a harsh environment?

Rosa Praed managed it, to a degree, with Fugitive Anne (1902), in which the protagonist Anne, escaping into the desert from her violent husband, collapses near the conveniently placed camp of the explorer Eric Hansen, who has amorous (and of course noble) designs upon her. He revives her by wiping her brow with a silk handkerchief so that Anne, in a state of extreme sensory deprivation, 'was filled with delight at the touch of this fine material to which she had for so long been a stranger' (117). Anne then rallies around and sturdily follows Eric on his explorations, despite being a small woman who seems to wear out easily.

Anne's character works because Praed imagines how a woman would respond in extreme conditions. For a woman, even if she gallivants around the countryside sticking her sword into things, is still not going to think in the same way as a man. She would see the world differently – there would be more attention to the details of things, for example, or she might occasionally want a brush for her hair, or she might get stroppy or nostalgic when she was menstruating. You can't just put a woman in coat of armour and expect readers to believe in her.

This is why I was troubled by Serena (2008) as well. The novel pivots on the character of Serena Pemberton, a woman who marries George Pemberton and moves to the North Carolina mountains to build their timber cutting empire. Stepping — far too efficiently to be believed — into the rural world of the 1930s, she establishes her authority over the timber cutters by winning a bet with a man who spits at her feet. Thereafter, her acquisition of an eagle to kill the rattlesnakes and her ruthless murder of opponents via a sidekick whose life she saves, lends her a mythical air among the workers. She carries out her tasks with elegance and serenity, as her name declares, not even showing much emotion when she miscarries her child of eight months. When she attempts to have Pemberton's bastard child killed, it is suggested that her motivations for doing this are not so much maternal grief, as a reaction to Pemberton's disloyalty, demonstrated through his partiality to the boy. If she does feel grief, it is submerged by throwing herself completely into her plans to expand to timber cutting in Brazil. Serena acts too much like a man to be believed.

Part of the reason for this sense of distance is that we are not privy to her voice or her internal thoughts, as opposed to the focalisation of the character of Rachel Harmon, who bears Pemberton's bastard child and who interacts beautifully — and realistically — with the natural world. I expect the writer was using this technique to create a woman who would impress his readers through her loftiness, but the effect, for me, was one of estrangement.

I think the reason for my attraction to the figure of a female botanist and explorer is because I can create a strong woman who still retains a sense of femininity through her delight in the flowers she collects. I never felt like I achieved this in A Curious Intimacy, because so much of the novel had a domestic focus. I also found, whenever I gave readings of the book, that the scene I always turned to was when Ingrid went into the desert to collect flowers. I realised that, even after changing the point of view three times and cutting out a third of the novel, this was the book I should have written – one that followed Ingrid on her explorations between Adelaide and Busselton while she thought about the lover she'd left behind. The sequel, then, will follow Ingrid's journey back into the bush as she collects flowers and recalls the women she has loved, and Ellyn as she sets up a life in Sydney.

I wish that there was a new word altogether to describe these kinds of women – not just the female version of a brave man, but a woman whose sensibility renders a world that is imbued with femininity, even if that world might be perilous. Until then, we're stuck with the prosaic heroine, to wave around like Adam's rib.