Essays

‘joanne burns keeps language moving, and her shifts between first and second person are part of that ceaseless motion. She makes that second person work for her, effortlessly ploughing, turning up the unexpected. She writes in third person too, but there’s something special about the slippage between ‘I’ and ‘you’ in her poetry. Sometimes she’s talking to me, or to you, sometimes she’s talking to herself.’

The Slasher case begun in early 1956, when a cluster of disparate reports of prowler activity, break and enters and assaults on sleeping women were registered in the Kingsgrove and Beverly Hills area. The attacks increased in number, then dropped off, then spiked again in late 1958, and continued until an arrest was made in April 1959. The Sydney papers, particularly the afternoon tabloids Sun and Daily Mirror went large on the ‘Kingsgrove Slasher’ case right from the beginning, and much to the annoyance of police, that term stuck. The perpetrator, one David Joseph Scanlon, was ultimately charged with eighteen counts of break and enter and assault. The trial was a media sensation, and Brian Doyle, arresting officer and leading prosecution witness, went from being an obscure suburban detective to a national media figure.

‘At the south-west extremity of Westfield Penrith, between the shopping precinct and the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, there is a narrow strip of outdoor space. It is a simulation of a public square.’

‘I stood with my face almost touching a wall of glass, a sheer window looking out into an immense depth, a profound, almost unfathomable dark green chasm girded by sandstone precipices and a halo of mist and cloud. It had been raining all afternoon. In the diminishing light the distant wet cliffs looked dark orange, blood red, gold. A motionless wing of pure white cloud floated over the valley floor like an apparition on a billow of air.’

‘I want to live my culture, my way of life within my country. Often this means a humble existence; a freedom that requires constant access to our traditional and natural world, always with an emphasis on family and cultural exchange.’

What I missed in labeling Miss Spence a campaigner first and a novelist as an afterthought was that her primary ambition was as a writer. It was only after her writing failed to find an audience that she moved away from it toward journalism and lecturing. My experience with her novels is typical. There’s a silence around reading nineteenth-century women writers – not many people do it and if they do they are most likely specialists on Spence and her founding role in the history of Australian feminism.

We circle, we move, we leave and return. The grass isn’t still. Nor the water. Nothing is static. Country extends over borders.

‘The pace of living in a city a tenth the size of Sydney teaches someone like myself, who has been obsessed with literature since my early teens, of the rich complexity of lives and characters to be found outside the community of the book. Where people once came to Sydney from places like Newcastle and smaller to find the world of the book, in Newcastle you find the book’s place in the world, a discovery whose emotional resonances include fear and release.’ Ed Wright on novels about Newcastle and the literary life of Australia’s first industrial city.

It’s November, 2004. I’m sitting in one of the elegant reading rooms of the British Library, gazing at rows of readers bent to their books at long wooden tables, their hair illuminated by the glow of desk lamps. The ceilings are high above my head, the woodwork panelling of the walls rich and dark. I am tired, my head groggy. I moved to London two months before with a suitcase and a scholarship to study expatriate Australian writers, but I sometimes feel like I can’t wake from a bad dream.

In these Annandale terraces we share more than walls; we share the sight of the jacaranda flowering in November and the yellow wattle flowering in July. Between the roar of planes on the flight path and the speedy SUVs, we hear the warbling and shrieks of currawongs, native mynahs and rainbow lorikeets. We share conversation: of what we are cooking for dinner, how tired we are from our work-a-day lives, and speculation of which uncouth residents dumped their rubbish, or let their pampered dogs crap, on our nature’s strip. One neighbour who has lived here over thirty years tells me how her children once played, unsupervised, on the street till nightfall; I remember it because it was also the time of my own childhood in another suburb further to Sydney’s west…