The Monastery and the Monaro

On an early walk in my then-new Vancouver neighbourhood, I found a copy of Brian Castro’s 2009 novel, The Bath Fugues, in a street library. I recognised the Giramondo logo and took a photograph of the book to memorialise the deep creases in its white spine. I was comforted by the suggestion that one of my new neighbours was a reader of Brian Castro. Had I opened the book, I might have found a name or inscription on the flyleaf, and that might have led me into conversation with the former owner of the book. I might even have left my own note on the shelf, entered into a textual intrigue with a chain of imaginary readers, as if inspired by Castro’s peripatetic writings. More than two years later, I have not yet met the neighbour who reads the work of Brian Castro. It is not impossible to find Australian literature in Vancouver, but the prospect held by that early chance encounter with The Bath Fugues – that when I moved from Sydney to Vancouver I would step into a milieu of effortless unmediated encounters with Australian writers and their readers – turned out to be a fantasy. 

In my local branch of the Vancouver Public Library, there are books by Australian authors on the stacks: Jane Harper, Liane Moriarty, Pip Williams​.​​ T​hese writers travel easily across the Pacific, and their books are shelved alongside others by legions of mid-list Canadian and American authors whose names I do not recognise. Someone ordered two books by Clementine Ford for pick-up from the bookshop down the road. They caught my attention, and kept it for months, because whoever ordered the books did not come to collect them. Who was it, this reader interested in a​n ​Australian feminist, but not interested enough to pick up their books? A parent on the sidelines of a Little League game had read Lech Blaine’s Australian Gospel on holidays in Port Douglas and wanted to know whether Queensland was really like that. I missed a reading by Claire G. Coleman downtown because I had Covid; I did see James Bradley share a stage with Richard Ford at the Vancouver Writers Festival. The Wiggles toured earlier this year, but it’s Bluey who is the most recognisable ambassador of Australian culture on the West Coast. If a person is willing to do business with Amazon or pay high shipping costs or read everything on a screen, there are theoretically no geographical limits to reading Australian literature. Still, I’ve had to learn the lesson that for all our excellence, for all our world-class aspirations and punching above our weight, for all our worldliness, Australian literature remains a regional literature, that we deceive only ourselves if we try to shrug off the mantle of provincialism. 

I could not put my hands on a hard copy of Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood when it was published in Australia in October 2023. I might have ordered an e-copy or waited for an import to arrive, but I did not. I found myself reading this fine novel belatedly, in an edition trafficked by a visiting family member. Critics should not judge a book by its cover, but book designers and publicity departments do everything they can to tempt us to do so. Since publication, Stone Yard Devotional has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Booker Prize, and garlanded with endorsements from various literary eminences. These successes were conspicuously arrayed on the cover of the edition that I read. Of course, it’s very easy now to discover what the cultivated hacks of the English-speaking world think of Australian fiction, even if the praise isn’t conveniently collected in the front papers of a novel. Lauren Christensen’s New York Times review of Stone Yard Devotional declares it an ‘Exquisite, Wrenching Novel’. Frank Cottrell-Boyce in The Guardian professes that he has ‘rarely been so absorbed, so persuaded by a novel’. (This assessment appeared six months after Fiona Wright’s slightly more subdued, though positive, review of the novel for Guardian Australia.) An Australian reviewer, Astrid Edwards, wrote about Stone Yard Devotional for the TLS, Blake Morrison praised its restraint in the LRB and it was Briefly Noted in that bible of middlebrow mores, The New Yorker. At a time when Australian novels infrequently receive more than one or two local reviews at home, such attention is remarkable.  

Stone Yard Devotional was published in Australia, as Wood’s books have been for over a decade, by that stalwart of local publishing, Allen & Unwin. International readers, however, will encounter the novel and its predecessor, The Weekend (2019), via ​the global publishing conglomerates​. In the US and Canada Wood is published by Penguin Random House; in the UK by Sceptre, an imprint of Hachette. There are many copies of Stone Yard Devotional in the Vancouver Public Library system, now with a long list of holds, as well as copies of The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things (2015). (The VPL holds only one book by Castro, The Garden Book [2005].) Charlotte Wood is now an Australian writer who is being read by a global audience.  

​​For the most part, Australia, or a vague idea of rural Australia, has been a backdrop to the international reception of Stone Yard Devotional, but Australian literature has not. It has been read as an allegory of the contemporary condition, rather than a work rooted in the Australian 2020s. Such responses have the curious effect of de-provincialising works of Australian literature, and installing them in a borderless canon of contemporary anglophone literature. These are the books that travel the world, trading on the currency of prize listings and enthusiastic reviews in legacy media. Ivor Indyk has formulated provincialism as ‘a determination to see the large context in one’s own culture’. That is not, as we shall see, the impulse of Stone Yard Devotional, whose narrator is determined to unmoor herself from culture and history, to live a life that is placeless and timeless. Australian novels like Stone Yard Devotional that have managed to break out and reach international audiences ​require​​​​​, I think, a kind of critical provincialism as a counterbalance to the de-provincialising effect of international success. ​By critical provincialism I do not mean a reinstatement of cultural cringe, and even less so a reflexive parochial refusal of international perspectives on Australian literature. Rather, I’d advocate for a set of reading practices that stay close to the contours of place and culture, that let themselves be informed by topography and history. In the case of ​Stone Yard Devotional​, this involves reading against the narrator, refusing to follow her example in disengaging both from contemporary life and from identity.​​ 

Stone Yard Devotional begins with an absence where a pronoun should be: ‘Arrive finally at about three.’ The first several journal entries in Part One of Stone Yard Devotional begin this way, with an elided first-person. This syntax captures the unchecked intimacy of journal writing and is an obvious early signal of the precarity of ​​the ​narratorial​ self. When we meet her, she is visiting an abbey located on the Monaro plain, seeking respite from the chaos of contemporary life and from her marriage. The climate crisis is one of the wells from which this environmental activist draws her anguish, but not the only one. Soon enough, she abandons her marriage and career, all of her friendships and what’s left of her life in Sydney, to become a lay nun in this tiny rural abbey. The retreat is understood by the narrator as a kind of repatriation, as the abbey is located close to the town in which she grew up, and in which her parents died decades earlier. It’s an ironic reversal of the standard provincial narrative, in which the upstart moves to the city to make a name for himself.

A daughter of English migrant parents, the narrator, it is implied, is white. She’s not broke, and nothing of her crisis seems to be a result of being broke. ​Her​ search for other values is intense, but money isn’t meaningful to her. She’s not at risk of violence and her self-destructive impulses are bloodless. As a young woman she joined forestry blockades, and her journal emits the residual whiff of genteel anti-capitalism. She’s a member of the knowledge class, or the PMC, or, if you’re on talkback radio, a member of the cultural elite, a greenie pushing unpopular causes. She is a middle-class, middled-aged white lady, which is to say, the dominant demographic buying and reading Australian fiction. Although the first-person pronoun is eventually restored, ​she​ is never named and she never describes her appearance, or even appears to consider it. ​This frictionless narrator​ could be anyone; at least, anyone who thought they had left their religious schooling well behind, anyone who yet craves the structures of meaning provided by organised religion. The general atmosphere of despair is leavened by the narrator’s dry and sardonic wit, which is directed both inwards and at her surroundings.

Stone Yard Devotional is part of what Beejay Silcox memorably termed a ‘churchy streak’ in contemporary fiction, by which I think she means novels in which organised religion, especially Catholicism, is used to pose moral questions that were formerly answered by the texts and teachers of those religions. How do we atone for our sins? How do we live with the chaos and cruelty of the world? What does it mean to ask for forgiveness? Can we forgive ourselves? Rather than looking to external moral authorities for answers, it turns inwards. The narrator’s diary is a lay form of the devotional, a reflective text that records the spiritual journey of its author. But where in a conventional devotional an author might reflect on the ways Scripture has shaped her insights, the text the narrator of Stone Yard Devotional mostly reflects upon is the self, particularly those chapters written in childhood. She may have closed her social media accounts but her insights retain something of the ​vernacular ​rhythm of online self-help: ‘I’m used to it now, the waiting. An incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered.’​ ​I hear an echo of ​Psalm 130​, ‘I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope’ – but w​hen penitence shades into platitude, the effect is less dignified meditation than algorithm-friendly self-development talk, a hybrid language that crosses borders and mulches historical and cultural distinctions.

The novel is ‘churchy’ rather than church-going, then, because it is avowedly secular and embodies less a religious turn in literature ​​than the so-called therapeutic turn. Although the narrator’s Catholic schooling often looms into view, it is difficult to place Stone Yard Devotional comfortably in any tradition of Australian Catholic writing, whether Ruth Park’s chronicles of urban Irish-Catholic life, Gerald Murnane’s meditations on his upbringing, or the poetry of Les Murray. In their terse self-scrutiny and attention to domestic detail, the book’s fragments bring to mind other literary counterparts, such as Helen Garner’s diaries, Sheila Heti’s epistolary autofictions, Elizabeth Strout’s vivid first-person fictions. To the contemporary reader, the novel’s form may well be legible as a kind of journaling, a practice sometimes prescribed to those who seek healing, recovery and self-discovery. This form provides the narrator with a set of contained and safe spaces, not unlike the analyst’s office, in which she can sift through memory and experience, freely associating and connecting images, ideas, and emotions. Stone Yard Devotional is thus entirely contained by the perspective of the narrator, a perspective only partially transcribed in her ​​​​journal. 

​​When she goes to the abbey ‘for good’, the narrator relishes the solitude offered by the contemplative life: ‘The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all. Not having to explain, or endlessly converse.’ She wants to keep her head down, to immerse herself in the details and rituals of domestic service, and most of all, to disconnect. And yet, in one of the novel’s many persistent​ and compelling​ ironies, the abbey is not at all quiet. The world noisily intrudes. The spooky sound of piano keys being struck at night is the harbinger of a mouse plague. At first there are mice nesting and rustling in the piano; soon they are everywhere. As the nuns struggle to contain the mice, to kill them, to dispose of their corpses, they must wrestle with the moral significance of so much killing. Who needs metaphors when you have a mouse plague?

The mortal remains of Sister Jenny, a former member of the order, are discovered in Thailand and returned to the abbey. The nuns wish for nothing more than to bury their sister, to return her to God, but are stymied by municipal bureaucracy. For the narrator, the most shaking intrusion is that of the nun who accompanies the remains of Sister Jenny to the abbey. Helen Parry – never Sister Helen – is a celebrity nun, known for her environmental advocacy and her defence of marginalised communities around the world. The narrator is cowed by Helen’s capacity for fearless action in a violent and unjust world; she recognises that Helen has not relinquished a sense of collective responsibility for solipsistic healing, as the narrator has. Thanks to Covid restrictions, Helen must stay at the abbey. She remains at one remove from the community, and her presence is experienced by the nuns as an imposition. But the narrator has special knowledge of Helen Parry, because they went to high school together. She knows that Helen was the vulnerable child of a violent single mother, and she carries the shameful memory of having bullied her. Helen becomes a screen onto which the narrator projects her apparently limitless desire for atonement.

One of the first things we learn about Wood’s narrator is that she hasn’t visited her parents’ graves for thirty years. She does so on the way to the abbey at the beginning of the novel, recalling the ‘cold, unsheltered feeling’ she had at their funerals, the sight of ‘adjacent shafts of opened earth’. The progress of Stone Yard Devotional is the narrator’s shifted relationship to that opened earth, her hard-won understanding of what it means to lay grief to rest. ‘My mother said that anything that had once been alive should go back to the soil’, recalls the narrator. A kind of peace is granted the narrator when she is able finally to understand that to bury the dead is to contribute to a larger cycle of regeneration. 

​​This is a lesson that the narrator urgently needs to learn, because her diary is a ledger of griefs and unburied corpses. Of the many griefs that bewilder the narrator​,​ it is the early death of her mother that emerges as a defining loss. Griefs and deaths and losses accumulate, and the narrator has no ability to distinguish between them, to check her impulse to draw grotesque moral equivalences and connections. I started to keep a list of the dead bodies in this book, the unburied griefs, and stopped because there are just so many. She grieves her parents. She grieves the child victims of violence, those who die by suicide, murder, cancer, starvation. As the mouse plague intensifies, bodies of poisoned, drowned, maimed mice pile up. They need to be buried with a digger, without ceremony. There are dead birds, poisoned by eating poisoned mice. With the sisters at the abbey, she mourns the murder of Sister Jenny. She regrets her cruelty towards Helen Parry. She rages against the hypocrisy of the Church. She sees the brutal consequences of colonialism, registers the deaths of Indigenous people by illness, massacre, systemic injustice. The narrator is witless, disoriented as she tries to bear honest witness to this loss. ​

The project of the book is to bury these bodies, to bear the grief, to find a way to live on this earth and, it is implied, with the earth. It is burial, mind you, that is important to this novel and its narrator, with all its connotations of returning to the earth, of slow decomposition. Cremation, the narrator seems to suggest, is a form of denial. ‘We don’t want to think of our bodies gradually breaking down, our tissue leaking softly into earth. We want death done with, vanished like smoke into air.’ Thematically, this statement is important, but it is typical of the kinds of bromides the narrator administers to herself as she tries to ​reach​ a mature understanding of mortality. Who is it who wants death done with? And whoever said that cremation accelerates grief?

Many critics have described Stone Yard Devotional as austere, and the adjective usefully signals the purposeful frugality of the novel. The narrator’s style cleaves to the familiar argot of unfussy Australian literary minimalism. Sentences break into fragments, fragments into single words. Suggestive metaphors abound – the mice, the dry plains, swimming in the dam – but similes and other figurative flourishes do not, save in accounts of dreams and the lives of saints. The narrator admires characters who speak ‘brutal truths’: a doctor who provides her with grief counselling, the father grieving the death of his anorexic daughter, and, of course, the blunt Helen Parry. There’s something of that old Australian suspicion of intellectualism and loquacity in the narrator’s valorisation of simple lived truths, versus the things you might learn in books. Chatty characters are pathologised as nervous, insecure, as somehow self-concealing. In the novel’s tight-lippedness, proper nouns are mostly gone too. The narrator remains unnamed and so does the town where the novel is set; apart from Helen Parry, all the sisters have changed their names. As the narrator strips the context from her journal, she makes it easy for her reader to take the novel entirely out of context and read Stone Yard Devotional as an allegory of the modern condition. This allegorical dimension is familiar to readers of Wood’s previous two novels, The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend. The Natural Way of Things addressed itself more directly to the grotesque circus of misogyny in Australian public life in the mid-2010s; in Stone Yard Devotional, the world falls away. The narrator could be anyone; we could be anywhere.

Yet there are carefully observed details that root the novel in regional Australia – not just the obvious ones, like the bloody mice, the single serves of Vegemite, and the Jatz biscuits at a party, but the reed-thin country wife in moleskins, the disposition of poplars in autumn. Wood’s sparse landscapes were immediately familiar to me because I grew up not so many hours’ drive from the arid paddocks of the Monaro, where Wood spent her childhood, and where Stone Yard Devotional is set. And yet readers around the world might locate themselves on similar treeless plains, whether the pampas of Argentina or the prairies of inland Canada. The remoteness of the novel’s location, the Monaro, is emphasised by international readers, just as it is by the narrator; Christensen in the New York Times refers to the abbey being ‘on the edge of the earth’. In fact, it is a ninety-odd-minute drive to Parliament House from Cooma. Smoke from the 2019-2020 bushfires drifted over the Monaro and closed the roads. The Monaro is a rural setting, for sure, ​​but it’s no Goroke. Wood knows this, and she lets her narrator use remoteness as a cipher for her state of mind: she is nowhere, she is anywhere, she has revoked her cosmopolitanism.

Who cannot connect emotionally to this narrator’s desire to renounce contemporary life? Who, on the precipice of exhausted despair, has not toyed with a digital detox, or at least lamented that the parade of atrocity through all forms of media is too much, that the news is all too terrible? We might not be ready to cut all ties and move to an abbey – a massage or a day of rest might do the job – but Wood has presented her readers with a character whose dilemma is easy to understand and relate to​, and is indeed the stuff of any number of digital lifestyle pieces​. As Erik Baker writes on internet self-help and the ‘anaesthetising pleasures’ of disengagement, ‘the most straightforward way to cope with hopelessness is to tell yourself that hope was a mistake in the first place.’ Yet this is also the great risk that Wood takes: to convey her thinking on survival and atonement to such a limited and ​self-involved​ narrator. The reader is invited to reflect on their inclination to judge her, to see her self-deceptions, to reflect, surely, on their own. The risk is then doubled insofar as Wood has released her narrator in a cultural moment that already privileges narratives of self-improvement and recovery, and endorses self-care over community, ​the individual over the collective​. There’s more to this novel, however, than its flailing anti-protagonist. To overcome the trope of the woman on the edge and the thousand appeals to women to slow down, to take care of themselves, to disconnect, to stop caring – to overcome all this requires paying attention to the troubling Helen Parry, who models a very different response to the crises of contemporary life. The problem is the narrator struggles to look directly at her antagonist, even as she is on alert for her gaze and the moral authority it suggests.

I’ve already claimed that Parry is a screen for the narrator, who, if she is curious about Parry’s faith or spiritual energy, does not record it in her journal. It is Parry who breaks a deadlock with the local council that allows the nuns to bury Sister Jenny. It is Parry who jolts the narrator out of a solipsistic understanding of their shared past, who forces her to confront the limits of her own knowledge and experience. Although the narrator is preoccupied with her, when the two spend time together they seem barely to speak, consistent with the novel’s thesis that authenticity lies in laconicity. Parry is often alone or watched by the narrator as she strides away. We are given access to her effect on other people (she intimidates the nuns), to her traumatic childhood, and to little else. Why is she so exercised by the pursuit of justice in a manifestly unjust world? Who knows? Parry, in the narrator’s view, is exceptional, it seems, because of her willingness to face the truth of the world, and her difference from the narrator:

It’s at moments like these that I wanted to shake the narrator, to ask her what she means by holding that knowledge of truth, how it’s different from facing the truth. ​The narrator’s lapidary style makes the​ fuzziness of this philosophical language all the more frustrating. Little wonder that at the end of the novel, Helen Parry walks out.

​​​Poised between the Monaro and ​cloistered​ placelessness, Stone Yard Devotional is a novel about earth and home, about belonging in the present and living in the past.​ ​Early on, knowledge of self is located in the body and connected to the earth, and what presents itself as a vague ecofeminism thrums, to use one of the narrator’s favoured verbs, throughout the novel. When the narrator first drives to the abbey, local place names come back to her. She finds herself able to list Indigenous and non-Indigenous names for tiny towns and geographical features of the Monaro ‘like beads on a rosary’, experiencing this as akin to ‘naming the bones of my own body’. Yet in the face of these themes, the novel treads very carefully around questions of colonialism and the dispossession of First Peoples from their sovereign lands. No doubt this is a function of the narrator’s reticence; our woman is in retreat from conflict, grief and pretty much all painful emotions. Settler Australians have the habit of retreating from the genocidal violence of colonialism – this narrator is no exception. She names the Traditional Owners of the land, includes colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in her tally of suffering, and speaks up at the dinner table about the unjust treatment of Indigenous people with the nuns – but she will not reckon with what it means to live and write on stolen land. Insofar as this is a portrait of denial, it is convincing. ​​​

It is one thing for an Australian novel about the earth and grief and despair authored in the 2020s not to reflect in any profound way on colonisation. But it is quite another for critics to sidestep such questions, as uncomfortable or as woke or as pigheaded as they may be. ​​​Despite​ the centrality of figures of earth, burial​,​ and land to the novel, and the narrator’s dazed references to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the reception in Australia and abroad has barely nodded at this aspect of the novel. The narrator finds great meaning in the earth. She finds something like atonement, a reprieve from shame and guilt, and a way to find ‘nourishment’ in the face of the brutal face of death. ​​But even on a reading that takes the limitations of its character’s milieu to be deliberate​​​​​​, the achievement of Stone Yard Devotional is ultimately curtailed by its narrator’s unwillingness to connect this redemptive return to earth to a reckoning with Country.

​​For decades, it’s been conventional wisdom that Australian books about Australia won’t sell overseas unless they win a big prize. Write what you know – but consider getting to know a place that other people also know. This reasoning accounts for the swath of Australian novels that are set at least in part in recognisable international locales, especially in the United States. For an emerging novelist who wishes to generate an income above the poverty line, it is sensible to strategise about how to access international markets, whether through the settings of their books or their choice of publisher. Can it sell? Will it travel?​ Will anyone understand it?​ If international prizes and recommendations count in the Australian literary economy, so too do prestige institutions. Whether Australian writers will continue to matriculate from expensive MFA and DCA programs in the United States in the new Trump higher education and immigration regime remains to be seen. And yet this anxiety about whether Australian literature is legible internationally has in 2025 been challenged by a wave of global recognition for a cohort of very different Australian women writers who have built their careers writing fiction rooted in Australian places and culture, and first published in Australia – not just Charlotte Wood, but Alexis Wright, whose work continues to attract longform critical attention, Michelle de Kretser, and perhaps most of all, Helen Garner, whose diaries have been heralded and whose work has been republished in new UK and US editions. What a relief! The acclaim these writers have won in the unpredictable and capricious arena of​ international​ literary reputation should free our critics from a sense of obligation to promote and defend Australian literature.​

In a secure literary culture – ​one in which we allowed ourselves to be a little more provincial in our inquiries – ​we might be able to ask ourselves more complex ​and specific ​questions of our fictions, to subject them to a bit more curious stress-testing​, to localise their contradictions and ambivalences​. ​Narrators, fallible, self-absorbed, desperate narrators might fantasise that they can step out of history, but critics should not. The play of ironies in ​Stone Yard Devotional ​​becomes more confronting, less palliative, when read in the context of contemporary Australian life and literature.​ Doing so allows us​​​​​ to see that Stone Yard Devotional can be two things at once: a moving allegory of grief and atonement, and a story of a self-absorbed white woman who returns to the scene of her childhood and finds answers in the stolen land itself. ​We might detect the tension between the novel’s provincial setting and the frictionless cosmopolitan concerns it maps; we might see that the narrator is just as much shaped by contemporary online therapeutic cultures as she is by Catholicism. ​We might question how the novel reflects the concerns and prejudices of a middle-class, middled-aged urban readership. We might lift our heads and look beyond the perimeters of the abbey and the narrow point of view of the narrator, to see anew what it was that the narrator fled, apart from a comfortable city life. Stone Yard Devotional emerged from the chaos of the pandemic and lockdowns and the idiotic final stretch of the Morrison government. It was released over a week before the Voice Referendum, and just days before October 7. In the months and years since, it has become easy to identify with the narrator’s overwhelm. This identification might even make it easier to extend our compassion to her, as we reflect, uncomfortably, as indeed we must, on our own failures to take action, to respond to the moment. Writing this I wished again that Charlotte Wood had extended her generous imagination to the figure of Helen Parry, who represents not respite from the world, but ​the necessary​ path back to it.