Australian literature

I know this probably makes me a bad reviewer but I am pretty agnostic about the question of literary value. I carry the inherent suspicion of canonicity of my generation of scholars and feminists (and the generation that went just before me). The question of what makes a book important, or even very good, is difficult for me. But to review a novel is to wade into the waters of literary value and try to snag something on your stick. I tend to snag things I have inherited from modernism and its impact on my education as a literary studies scholar: the complexity of the ideas that the book is grappling with, or its awareness of other books, or its ability to do something new. But there are others things to snag, that have tended to be coded feminine: the pleasure of plot, the engagement of complex identification, recognition, thrill (the kinds of things Rita Felski writes so beautifully about in The Uses of Literature).

Three new Australian titles from debut novelists prompt just such a consideration of the connection between monumental and historical time, and its relationship to femininity. All three novels bestow a value and significance on women’s experience across two centuries: from the early penal settlement of Van Diemen’s Land in Jennifer Livett’s Wild Island to the ferocious and tragic friendship of two girls at the foot of a lighthouse in Kate Mildenhall’s Skylarking, and a pianist’s entrapment within an Oxford terrace from the 1950s to the present day in Zoë Morrison’s Music and Freedom. These novels all consider the domestic, with a weightiness given to private scenes and the interior – and alongside this, a feeling of movement, of an unsettled and unmoored female independence. Far away from the colonial centre, a certain wildness and abandon comes to the fore.

‘There’s the power of glam and androgyny to Forster’s generation, and with it the influence it had on punk and post-punk. There’s the sensuality of experience that lies at the heart of many of Forster’s tales in the book. There’s the setting of the 1970s as a formative period, where music is glimpsed fleetingly on the radio and the ghosts of pre-war life in Brisbane are hovering. And perhaps most tellingly there’s the drama of Forster’s persona, developed over decades of song- and prose writing.’

‘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.’

In Vancouver, the third entry in Nick Earls’ series of five linked novellas, the Wisdom Tree, Knut Knutsen, a former…

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.

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.

Barbara Baynton’s book of short stories, Bush Studies, has fascinated me for years, because there’s so much that is deceptive, as well as utterly transgressive, about it. Written at the very end of the nineteenth century, the stories within it are mostly delivered in a deadpan narration that means the violence at their centre often builds so quietly and subtly that their eruption is as shocking as it is brutal.

The short story is sometimes viewed as an apprentice form, yet the heterogeneity of the stories collected in these volumes attests to its adaptability in structure, style, voice and genre – and to the particular freedoms it offers as a site for experimentation.

I suspect that, like me, most readers are inclined to approach any new work of fiction that explores the writing life with a kind of wariness verging on dread, but two recent Australian books prove that metafiction can still be stimulating, and that the Künstlerroman is not yet an exhausted literary form.