The Prime Minister's Literary Awards winners ...

... were announced yesterday. Evelyn Juers' House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann shared the nonfiction prize with Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake's Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, while Nam Le's The Boat, to no-one's surprise despite the quality of the shortlist, won the fiction prize outright.

There's something unusually coherent about this set of winners; together, qua winners, they have about them the feel of a viewpoint new in Australian literary prizegiving, a strong whiff of post-nationalist awareness. Drawing the Global Colour Line is, as its title suggests, global in the scope of its analysis, while The Boat has been widely praised for its cosmopolitanism and its range, containing stories set in several countries. House of Exile is a 'group biography' of author and activist Heinrich Mann, his partner Nelly Kroeger and their several overlapping circles of acquaintances and friends, including Virginia Woolf (about whom there are some beautiful and surprising stories) and Heinrich's brother Thomas Mann, who despised and looked down on Nelly as a schreckliche Trulle which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

So congrats to the 2009 nonfiction judges Phillip Adams, Peter Rose and Joan Beaumont, and fiction judges Peter Pierce, Lyn Gallacher and John Hay, for taking the long, broad view of what, within its official brief, an Australian literary award might encompass. Especially a Prime Minister's literary award, the judging process for which one might have expected to be somehow more rah-rah but is glad it wasn't. This is not for a moment to disparage more nationally focused awards, which have an important place, but only to be pleased that there's also room for books like these to rise to the top of the pile.

I've owned all three for yonks but to my shame haven't read any of them yet, except for Nam Le's story 'Halflead Bay' for a review of Mandy Sayer's anthology The Australian Long Story. It's not quite a question of not having the time. It's more that books of this quality demand an answering quality of mind in their readers, a sharpness of focus and subtlety of attention that it can be very hard to bring to non-work reading when reading is what you do for a living. Because you need to be in a particularly alert and receptive state of mind to do any of these books proper justice as reading-for-pleasure.

'This new work took on fresh urgency with the consolidation of Nazi power in Germany in the 1930s and the pitiless application of eugenic principles and racial technologies -- many of which had been rehearsed under colonial regimes -- in the heartland of Europe, the results of which were to finally scarify the conscience of the world.'

'Keep a straight back, Mrs Sasaki says. Wipe the floor with your spirit.'

'But the party was in full swing, the atmosphere rippling with anecdotes and laughter, so much so that a button popped off the decolletage of Nelly's red velvet dress to reveal the splendid contours of her lacy bra. I like to think that the little red velvet button described a perfect arc across the table and landed right on top of Thomas Mann's Charlotte surprise.'

Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

The Kiss

Last night I went to the premiere screening of a new short film by young local filmmakers Sonya Humphrey (producer) and Ashlee Page (writer-director). Adelaide's Mercury Cinema was filled to capacity, no mean feat at 6.30 on a warm Tuesday evening, by a crowd that included some well-known faces.

The film is an adaptation of Peter Goldsworthy's short story of the same name, 'The Kiss', a story I know very well because I chose it to include in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aust Lit and have therefore read it about eleven times, if you count repeated proofreadings. Not to be giving away the whole plot, but it's a chilling tale in which two teenage boys, the worse for drink, decide to go for a swim in an isolated underground tank and realise only after they have jumped in that the water level is too low for them to be able to reach the ladder.

Considering that in Page's screenplay the characters are girls instead of boys, which you'd think was a pretty substantial change and a most disconcerting one at first, the film is actually one of the closest and cleverest adaptations of a piece of fiction that I think I've ever seen. Page gets a couple of extraordinary performances out of her two young actors, and a lot of mileage out of the look of rural Australia at night, simultaneously sinister and glorious.

What I've always admired most about Peter Goldsworthy's work (NB if you're wondering, he may or may not be a distant cousin, so this is nepotism five times removed if it is nepotism at all), in any genre, is his ruthlessness in following the logic of the body to its often bitter end; to me at least, all of his best work is firmly grounded in his experience as a GP over several decades, pitting the detailed abstractions of moral dilemmas against the stark, simple, unrelenting clarity of the body and its processes and frailties. The film is very faithful to this particular take on the mind-body problem. One of the most interesting things about watching it was that although I was all too familiar with the story's events and therefore knew what was coming, I still felt chilled and wired by it -- tense muscles, racing heart -- which makes you wonder about the nature of suspense. Another kind of mind-body problem.






Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

Brother, sisters and anthologies: oh the irony

So when I got home this afternoon from fifteen rounds with a sibling -- the ferocious upfront one, all teeth and claws all the time, and no backing down until one of you dies -- so stratospherically stressed out that my eyeballs and teeth were aching and there was a strange metallic taste in my mouth that no amount of medicinal chocolate would shift, I found two things in the mail.

One was a copy, kindly sent by Allen & Unwin, of Charlotte Wood's new themed anthology of specially-commissioned stories by Australian writers about siblings, entitled Brothers and Sisters. The other was my copy of the current Australian Book Review, in which critic Peter Craven continues his attack on the team of scholars of Australian literature (of which he is not one) who edited the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, including moi, that he began in his magisterially and savagely opinionated review of the anthology in the previous issue.

I've been a fan of Charlotte Wood's since I read her novel The Children, in which she shows great interest in the sibling dynamic and great skill in representing it, an impression further borne out by the brilliant, funny, moving introduction to this new book. And after reading the ABR correspondence pages I'm considering the possibility that one way to understand the shifting, endlessly complex dynamics of the literary scene and all its tortured interrelationships is to think of it in terms of sibling relations, where the keynote is intensity for better or worse, and where endless fights for territory, dominance, independence, sentimental vases and Mummy and Daddy's approval all take place in the hothouse arena of shared interests and common experience.

At the very least, I find that thinking about these things anthropologically and psychoanalytically helps me to get some distance on them, to back away from the rage. It's that or the bottle shop, and I have too much work to do tonight for the bottle shop to be an option. Besides, I want to be fully alert when Germaine takes on Planet Janet on Q&A.


Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

... and a bad bad review ...

There are four kinds of book review. There's the good good review, which is both favourable about its subject and skilfully, knowledgeably written on the basis of a careful, thorough reading of the book in question. There's the good bad review, which is well executed in all respects but unfavourable. There's the bad good review, which is favourable but a bad example of the book review genre.

(There are many ways of badly writing a review: not reading the book properly, making opinionated and magisterial assertions instead of properly arguing your case, getting your facts wrong because you haven't actually read the book, pushing your own pet writers and ideas at the expense of the book you're supposed to be reviewing, blowing your own trumpet about your own achievements, not distinguishing between your personal opinions and the actual facts, making wildly offensive statements, and so on and so forth.)

And finally there's the bad bad review, which is ... Well, you know.

A few years ago I was invited to participate in a forum at the University of Sydney on the subject of book reviewing. Allotted a generous amount of time for my talk, I needed to come up with an infinitely expandable structure for it, something with a strong backbone that I could sketch out and then amplify here and there, both at the keyboard and then again, if called for, on my feet.

In the end, I came up with a way of doing it that meant I had a single central line of argument and organising principle: the text of the talk was a heavily annotated list of the people and entities to whom/which I believe a book reviewer has a responsibility. It was a list whose length surprised even me (for over the decades I have given these matters a great deal of thought), as I thought about just how many people and things I have at the back of my mind, or even halfway to the front, whenever I review a book. The list looked something like this:

1) To the readers of the review, to

(i) describe the book accurately,
(ii) tell the truth as you see it, and
(iii) provide entertainment and useful information.

2) To the potential readers of the book (some overlap there, obvs),

(i) not to mislead them about its contents, and
(ii) to save them $30+ if that's what you think.

3) To the writer(s) and/or editor(s) of the book,

(i) to read the book carefully and comment on it thoughtfully,
(ii) not to misrepresent it, and
(iii) not to say anything that will actually make them want to slash their wrists.

4) To the literary editor who saw fit to commission the review from you, to

(i) justify her or his faith in your (suit)ability and expertise,
(ii) write to the word length you were given,
(iii) provide clean copy in the requested format (e.g. not phone it in, say) and
(iv) provide said copy on or before the deadline you were given.

5) To the publication for which you are writing,

(i) to pay attention to its house style,
(ii) to fit in with its general editorial approach and standard of writing,
(iii) not to write anything that will either require extensive and expensive legalling, or, in the absence of said legalling, get the publication sued, and
(ii) not to compromise, or indeed trash, its reputation.

6) To the people who are paying you to do a decent job of work, to be worthy of your hire.

7) To the literary culture in particular and indeed to the culture in general, to make a worthy contribution to it and not demean or devalue it by adding junk rather than good useful stuff.

8) To yourself,

(i) to maintain your standards, not just professional but also moral (say, turning down editorial requests to review books by friends, rivals, enemies or old lovers),
(ii) to refuse to say anything you don't mean, and
(iii) not to make yourself look like a wanker or a dickhead, or both. 'Both' is possible but not attractive.


Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat

And a new art form emerges: the YouTube trailer/preview of the novel

Sent off my review of Andrew McGahan's new novel Wonders of a Godless World this morning to Australian Book Review, in whose October issue it will appear. One is not supposed to talk in advance about novels whose embargo dates are still three weeks away, so I'm not going to -- but do watch this strangely beautiful little animation, which appears to have been done by the same person who did the cover, one James Gulliver Hancock (check out the weight-lifting lorikeet).

When I found this the other day I thought it was a one-off, but a quick Google confirms that these book trailers are everywhere.

New books: Cate Kennedy's The World Beneath

In tomorrow's Australian Literary Review I have a piece reviewing four new (or, in one case, newish) Australian novels. They only have two things in common really -- they're all intensely region-specific, and they're all by women. Of the four, it's Cate Kennedy's The World Beneath that I confidently expect to turn up regularly in the longlists and shortlists of next year's literary awards.

Kennedy is an experienced and much-admired writer of short stories but this is her first novel, and of course inevitably someone has asked her about what far too many people see as the 'advance' from the short story to the novel, as if, in moving from the former to the latter, one had succeeded in one's OWLs and was now tackling one's NEWTs. Kennedy's answer to this, as quoted in the detailed, engaging interview that the SMH's Susan Wyndham published last weekend, appearing also in her Undercover blog, is maybe the best riposte to this short-story v. novel thing that I've ever seen in the whole thirtysomething years I've been being annoyed by it:

"I heard someone once say, 'You must feel different now that you've moved to the big pool from the toddler pool,' " she says of her change of form. "I quite bridled at this because I don't think the short story is a toddler pool. In a way it is more like the beautiful diving pool - it's not the shallow pool, it's the smaller pool that takes a lot of practice to do the one entry perfectly."

'The beautiful diving pool' -- how Katherine Mansfield would have loved that. And Chekhov, Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Grace Paley, Alice Munro and who-all else.

The novel is reviewed in the new issue of Australian Book Review by Jo Case, who kind of likes it but says it's hard to get carried away by the plot because you're too aware of the structure. I can't agree with this. What I kept thinking was that the structure was intensely cinematic and was carrying me around the circuits of feeling among the characters while at the same time moving them and the action forwards. Topspin, as it were.

There are three main characters: the dizty leftover hippie Sandy, 45, henna'd devotee of decaf and hand-turned coffee mugs, still bravely making jewellery and selling it at a market stall in between massages and earnest conversations; Sandy's former partner Rich, a restless, rootless middle-aged man with a ponytail, a string of dead-end jobs and a long-held but never-realised ambition to be a successful professional photographer; and their daughter Sophie, fifteen, sullen, watchful, clever, tagged 'emo goth', whose father scarpered when she was a baby and therefore knows her not at all.

Both Sandy and Rich, even now, live in the faded glory of the high point of their lives: participation in the Franklin River Blockade 25 years earlier, a story to which Sophie has been subjected over and over while, she thinks bitterly, other kids got the Three Bears. (There's a stern message here for Boomers endlessly reliving their illusory glory days, though frankly all the Boomers I know, including me, are all too aware that the glory days were actually not all that glorious and are firmly focused on the present: on our financial survival in interesting times, on the longueurs and woes of our young adult children and our aged parents, and on our own increasingly unreliable and wonky bodies as bits and parts of them play up and wear out one by inexorable one. Types like Rich and Sandy are by no means unknown, but they're not typical, either.)

Anyway, the plot gets into second gear on Sophie's fifteenth birthday, when Rich rings her to wish her a happy birthday and suggests that he take her on a Tasmanian wilderness hike and bonding exercise on Cradle Mountain. Off they go to catch their plane to Hobart: third gear. But then things start to go wrong. Vroom.

From this point the narrative alternates between scenes of Rich and Sophie on the hiker trail and scenes of Sandy first at Mandala Holistic Wellness Centre and then, very worried after Rich and Sophie turn out not to be on their scheduled return flight, back at her own house surrounded by well-meaning alternative-living friends who keep trying to give her back rubs, read her tarot cards and help her think positive thoughts. Running in tandem with these changes of scene and the increasing tension and suspense they generate is the increasing subtlety with which everyone has begun to see everyone else: all three have been seeing each other in the light of cliché and caricature, and Kennedy manages very expertly the small shifts by which the characters begin to see each other as human beings with unexpected or hitherto unnoticed strengths and complexities.

In some ways Kennedy is working the same territory as Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap: contemporary domestic realism focusing on parenting and on conflicting cultural values. But there's less cultural diversity, fewer characters, less sex, more social history, and a better plot.

Northen southern southern northern Southern Gothic: Rachel Ward's Beautiful Kate

*SPOILER WARNING*

American writer Newton Thornburg's 1982 novel Beautiful Kate is set during a cold winter on the outskirts of Chicago, where a once-prosperous family farm has been swallowed up by suburban development and all the farm land sold, the family in decline in a way that manifests in that classic trope of inward-turning decay, incest.

In Rachel Ward's film version there are similarities and differences: the setting is now the forbidding beauty of the Flinders Ranges, in South Australia's rain-deprived north, where the dominant spatial note is not increased urban crowding but overwhelming isolation. But the story is essentially the same and in some respects follows the novel closely, including the chronological jumps that Thornburg thought might cause trouble for any writer wanting to adapt it for the screen.

Perhaps because it's the story of a family, it has translated with surprising ease from the chilly north of the US to the dry, hot north of South Australia. The Kendall family, once comprising patriarch Bruce, his wife and the four kids, now exists only as a fragment: the dying Bruce ('congestive heart disease'), played in a bravura performance by Bryan Brown, and the dutiful youngest daughter Sally, played in a most beautifully understated and quiet way by Rachel Griffiths, are all that's left in the decaying farmhouse.

Sally keeps Bruce clean and fed and the farmhouse in some sort of order before trundling off to her day job with the Aboriginal community. The really lovely thing about Griffiths' character is the sense that she's happy to be this person. Wears old no-nonsense jarmies, loves her job, loves her dad, gets on with it.

So when her big brother Ned, a more than usually tortured-looking Ben Mendelsohn, arrives at the farm after a twenty-year absence to say goodbye to his dying father, she looks uncomplicatedly delighted to see him and he looks at her as though she's the only real person he's seen for a very long time.

The other siblings, we slowly learn, are dead. Something happened twenty years ago to Cliff and Kate, and now there is only photography and memory. The family's been clinically, even symmetrically, cut in half like the carcase of a beast; the barn is full of junk; the dam is empty.

You sort out your thoughts about movies, I find, while the credits are rolling. What an excellent movie, does a lot of new things, super-dramatic subject matter handled with delicate thoughtfulness. Screenplay by Ward, wow, that is the first Australian movie I have ever seen whose dialogue does not at any point let it down, and it took a British aristocrat to write it, what's that about, Ward's a very experienced actor, rare for screenwriters, she knows what words will work in the mouth. Ooh look, music by Tex Perkins, might have known. God the Flinders are unearthly and gorgeous and terrifying. Wasn't Rachel Griffiths excellent, actually Griffiths and Brown and Mendelsohn were all brilliant, who would have thought they would look so convincingly, when you put them together, as though they were all related. Got rural South Australian life visually down to the tiniest details of light along verandas, no romanticisation, no gross grot either. Southern Gothic but which kind, not McCullers, certainly not Flannery O'Connor, maybe a bit Welty, oh right, Faulkner. Lovely incidental unobtrusive symbolism, the patriarch with his congested heart, the screen door, the now-empty dam, blighted, revealing its history, the junk and mire beneath the smooth surface of water no longer available for playing in, playing games with your drunk teenage brother, on the farm, in the dark, all that sexual energy and burgeoning life and nowhere to put it, nowhere for it to go.

'... a homeless man reading under a streetlight ...'

Jessica at the Meanjin blog Spike has a great post up today on the Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library, a scheme established in 2003 by Sarah Garrett for distributing books to people living in hostels and on the street. So far the library operates only in Sydney and Melbourne but Garrett hopes it will eventually be set up in every Australian capital city. The Footpath Library website is here.

Peter Temple's new book ...

... is under embargo until September 28, so although I have an advance copy I'm really not supposed to talk about it. It's called Truth and it's a sequel to The Broken Shore. Cashin's in it, but only (as far as I can tell from a quick flip) marginally, with flashes back to what happened to him. Dove's in it. Villani's in it front and centre.

At a glance its style looks even more compressed and elliptical than last time; Temple is the kind of writer who makes extensive demands on the reader's intelligence and no concessions to any momentary lapse of concentration. His writing reminds me of Dorothy Dunnett's and the way that she, too, cavalierly leaves vast tracts of information unexpressed and unexplained, and makes the sorts of jokes that depend largely on what is not said, making you howl with laughter but only after a longish internal silence while you work it out. Reading them both is a sort of chairbound steeplechase, a series of wild attempts to get to the next paragraph with your understanding fully intact. The epigraph is a haunting, abstract scrap of Rilke:

But because truly, being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Sydney, and other stuff

Wow, a two-week hiatus. I don't think I've not-blogged for that long since I started in October 2005. For some reason this time of year, anything between August and November, always seems busier than usual. Spent a week and a half attending all-day Arts SA meetings and doing my real job at night before leaving for three days in Sydney last week for the launch of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (UPDATE: Angela from Literary Minded, who I see shares my taste in images and the placement of images, went to the Melbourne launch a few days later), thus:

Thursday, June 30, 11 am: sample Adelaide Airport long-term car park. Discover walk from farthest reaches of car park to shuttle bus slightly longer than bus ride to Virgin terminal and daily rates add up to exactly two taxi fares between my place and the airport. Write experience off to experience.

1.30 pm: hear slightly panicked air crew member come on, somewhere over the Hay Plains, and ask if there is a medical practitioner on board and would the rest of us please stay in our seats. It's times like this I'm glad I'm not a doctor, and that Virgin Blue offers only Mr, Mrs and Ms as choice of honorific when booking one's flight, the old days of being asked 'Miss or Mrs?' and enjoying replying 'Dr' being mostly gone and a good thing too; 20 years ago, having habitually done this with Qantas and the dead-and-gone Ansett, I used to worry occasionally that I'd be called upon to perform an emergency tracheotomy with a biro and a coathanger at 30,000 feet and have to explain that I couldn't, but if they needed an impromptu history of the Australian short story or an emergency fisking of a Clive James poem then I was indeed their woman.

2.30 pm: arrive Sydney, where the sky is a flawless blue, literally and metaphorically. Whenever the cab pulls out of that airport drive and into the sunshine made lacy through the subtropical vegetation, I can actually physically feel my heart lift. Never having managed to get a job in Sydney (applied for three, shortlisted for all of them, didn't get any of them, message in there somewhere) is the single biggest regret of my life, which is saying a great deal.

5 pm: arrive Admiralty House for the launch of the anthology by the Governor-General. Mill around on footpath in growing crowd that, by the time the uniformed dudes on the gate start ticking off our names and letting us in, includes David Malouf, Drusilla Modjeska, Peter Rose, and about twenty people I used to teach, research and/or go to conferences with, including former longtime Melbourne U colleague Prof Chris Wallace-Crabbe and the lovely Prof David Carter from U of Q, formerly a Melbourne boy, whom I haven't seen for many years.

5.30 pm: have surreptitious look around and confirm that I have dressed appropriately for the occasion. Just as well.

6 pm approx: listen to the Governor-General make her nicely personal and informal speech. Listen to David Malouf read his lovely poem Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian, in which the body addresses the departing soul at the moment of death, and which begins with the Emperor Hadrian's own actual words, which are, naturally, in Latin.

Wonder how long it's been since the sound of Latin poetry being read has been heard in Admiralty House or indeed anywhere else in Australia.

Wonder what degree of mischievousness informed David's decision to choose for this occasion a poem about death.

Am flooded by a sudden awareness of the history of this spot, and wonder about past ceremonies here and their participants' private thoughts as the sun set outside with ludicrous magnificence, then as now.

Reflect that the last time Australian literature got this much attention at this level of politics must have been the 1957 occasion, of which there is a photograph in the David Marr biography (an except from which is also included in the anthology), on which Patrick White was presented with the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award by the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, with the Leader of the Opposition in attendance and looking on.

Wonder if current PM has been presented with a complimentary copy. Think must remember to suggest it. (Discover later that he apparently got the No. 1 copy of the signed and numbered Collectors' Edition. Hope he dips into it from time to time. Have my own collectors' copy, courtesy of Allen & Unwin, which I hardly dare take out of its box.)

7 pm approx: Mill about some more, as various sweet and discreet boys weave through the crowd bearing crystal jugs full of liquid rubies that turn out to be iced white rum with cranberry juice. Watch William Yang, whose writing is featured in the anthology, taking photos (the pic in that link will give you a good idea of what the gathering was like). Reflect that what I should really do is get out my iPhone and take a photo of William Yang taking photos. Many photos being taken, as you can see in this nice (though not by William Yang: see below) shot of SMH literary editor Susan Wyndham and me.

Photograph by Sam Begg

Note the way our drinks are colour co-ordinated with my necklace and Susan's shawl.

Friday, July 31, 9.30 am: arrive at ABC studios in Sydney, half an hour early because (a) nervous and (b) have forgotten that in Sydney if you want a cab you simply step out into the street and hold your hand up, and one will pull over. Do 40-minute live-to-air segment on anthology for Radio National Book Show, being interviewed by Ramona Koval with fellow editor Nicole Moore and Sydney U Professor of Australian Lit Robert Dixon. This goes much better than I was expecting it to.

Friday 4.30 pm: meet up in Gleebooks with the lovely Viv aka Tigtog from Hoyden About Town, whom I have not previously actually met, and add her to my ever-growing collection of bloggers I've met in person. Decide we will go next door to soi-disant 'Chocolateria' (and so it proves to be, with a vengeance) and have a hot chocolate: thick hot chocky with chili and cinnamon, oh my goodness.

We have barely sat down when in come a couple of literary types I know, closely followed by two young women whom Viv knows and introduces to me as Wildly Parenthetical and Zero at the Bone. I thought this sort of thing only happened in Adelaide but clearly not.

Friday 6.30 pm: second and more informal, though still very structured, launch of anthology upstairs at Gleebooks. This includes wonderful readings by featured authors, and as Michael Gow reads a speech from Away and Michelle de Kretser a passage from The Hamilton Case, I remember very clearly why I chose those passages to put into the book.

Friday 8.30 pm: arrive at a most lovely restaurant in Rose Bay with my dear friend L who has come up to attend the one-day symposium the following day that has been arranged around the anthology launch. We have a quiet mates' catchup while we savour our duck and spinach, and look out at the festively-lit ferries crossing the harbour and the white birds swooping through the pools of light outside.

Saturday, August 1, 10 am: start of all-day symposium at the beautiful State Library of NSW, where I look around and regret for the millionth time my ongoing failure to score a job in Sydney. The symposium is programmed around the anthology and titled 'Australian Literary Futures'. My session is the one after morning tea, where the editorial team lines up on one side and, on the other, the country's two Professors of Australian literature, Robert Dixon and Philip Mead, plus co-editor of Southerly and immediate past president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Elizabeth McMahon. They ask us questions and we do our best to answer them. This session also goes much better than I was expecting it to, and everybody on the panel and in the audience seems to enjoy it.

Saturday 2 pm: Professor Ivor Indyk of UWS, holder of the Whitlam Chair in Writing and Society and a living national treasure to all who value Aust Lit, which makes this moment worse, gets up to speak in the session on 'Australian literature on the international stage' and shatters the good feeling that has prevailed in the room thus far by getting quite emotional about his view that there are not enough migrant writers represented in the anthology. For some reason I am reminded of the sight of Our Gough fifteen years ago as he launched the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature by making a speech in which he pointed out all the errors he'd found in it so far.

Given how conscious I was of this 'migrant writing' issue in my role as section editor, and how hard I and the other section editors worked to do it justice among the many other claims on tight space in the book, this accusation makes me cross -- cross enough to count a few stats, later after I get home, and ascertain that just in my own section (fiction and drama since 1950), ten writers out of 48 (ie more than 20%) were not born in Australia; eleven came from partly or wholly non-anglophone backgrounds; and thirteen of these stories or extracts specifically and directly address (and were carefully and deliberately chosen so to do) some aspect of the migrant experience.

In his address to the symposium Ivor acknowledges some of these, but argues item by item that each is somehow not legitimate, or not good enough. Or something. Can't quite follow his reasoning here. His real beef appears to be that none of his particular five favourite migrant writers -- two fiction writers who would have been my responsibility, and three poets who would have been that of my fellow-editor David McCooey, between us responsible for the period 1950 to the present -- are in the anthology.

All five are European. The many included writers with their roots in Asian countries, including a number of first-generation immigrants, have scarcely been mentioned; nor is there any acknowledgement of the entries by Elizabeth Jolley and J. M. Coetzee, both brought up in bilingual households in other countries and both adult emigrants to Australia. Can't help thinking Ivor has a few blind spots of his own. One of the poets he names as an 'omission' is someone David simply thinks isn't very good. One of the novelists he names is someone whose one novel available in English, a translation from her original Italian, I found unpleasantly hysterical and practically unreadable.

Saturday 4 pm: David McCooey and I have an extremely lively conversation in the cab we share to the airport.

Saturday 8 pm: Arrive home where am greeted ecstatically by cats behaving like dogs. This is quite new; usually they punish me for going away by doing that cat ignoring thing.

Saturday 8.05 pm Crack spine of first of four books that must be read and reviewed by Wednesday. Thank God and my editor that a couple of them are very short. Unlike this post.


Cross-posted from Still Life With Cat