Juncture

There isn’t a neat ending to The Gaps, for a pat resolution would go against the grain of the book.

In Araluen’s work spirits and ghosts speak from beyond, above and below the layers of colonial time to remind us of past in present and present in past intertwined and unresolved.

Like Murphy’s, my heart is housed in a body that is judged for being ill-mannered or slow when I cannot hear people speaking to me, and like her, the architecture of the culture through which we move causes me immense stress. My life story, like hers, is affected by the movement and stillness of hammer, anvil and stirrup – and indeed these three tiny bones caused our lives to intertwine.

By having Tussaud pit her wits against men determined to sideline or outmanoeuvre her, Lyons-Lee has herself fashioned a protagonist as wily as any conjurer.

We are edging unsteadily out of the pandemic, into the rainstorm, into a world in which we might, finally, be able to hug with abandon. Fire, Flood, Plague, and others like it, have magnified voices that speak to the inequities of Australian society.

Right from its opening line: ‘The white boys stare at us from the pub’, this story brings its readers into the First Nations community of south coast of NSW and into the realm of Aboriginal protagonist Jackson on the cusp of adulthood.

One summer evening, as fires rage elsewhere in the country, three women at different stages of life are sequestered in the plush chill of the Melbourne Theatre Company watching Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

As A Jealous Tide continues, MacDonald abandons the apparatus of realism in favour of a more playful and elaborate approach. The contours of time and place erode. The narrator’s watery fancies of libraries turning into vessels become hard to distinguish from the hallucinations of the shipwreck survivors she’s researching . The traffic outside filtered through the windows takes on the rhythmic sound of waves; the railing, encircling the library’s upstairs gallery, becomes a ship’s deck, listing in the breeze; the ladders are knotted ropes over the sides of a sinking ship. And her desk is now a lifeboat as she ‘magicks’ herself onto a bench seat, a sole survivor adrift in open sea.

If women remain hidden, or hide themselves, how are those who follow to find the stories in which they blaze a trail through oceans, or support themselves and their family with literary success? As Clode writes, ‘Stories construct the mythologies of our history, help us to understand our present circumstances and illuminate the possibilities of the future. If we cannot see ourselves in stories, how can we imagine ourselves creating new ones?’ This is not, I expect, a conundrum that can ever be resolved, and one of the great pleasures of these books is the ways in which their authors fill in the blanks.

Ordinary matter is what we are made of – everything we can see or detect with telescopes or microscopes or our own eyes. Such a wide descriptive ambit makes it an apposite title for this second collection of fiction by Brisbane-based Laura Elvery, which ranges far and wide, across decades and geographical spaces, and occupies the nexus between arts and science, writing and innovation.