By John, posted by Tracy
Once again, the ‘outside’ world has paid more attention than Australia does to the abysmal conditions many indigenous Australians live in and under. Australia is a racist country, make no mistake. And racist in so many complex and overlapping ways. It’s not just a case of ‘white’ and ‘black’ politics, but an amalgam of complex and also very subtle personal, religious, social and institutional prejudices. Whether it’s the muttering behind closed doors about ‘their’ behaviour, or overt rudeness in public, or it’s government agencies and politicians acting as mirrors for concentrations of (voting) prejudice, the overall effect is devastating for the recipients of this racism (in the sense of racist individuals differentiating themselves from and demeaning other people on the grounds of ethnic difference)... in the end bigotry is bigotry, and it’s a simple equation.
I was involved in an Amnesty anti-slavery forum just before the Sydney Olympics, and it’s a sad thing that the same discussion needs to continue. No progress has been made in addressing the core of these issues of inequality. See:
"Amnesty slams indigenous conditions"
Remember this as you read this blog or play netgames in general. This tool of our lives is still about choices made out of privilege. Not even access is equality: how it is used and what it provides according to wealth and advantage are key factors.
John Kinsella
Showing posts with label Australian fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Australian fiction. Show all posts
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Julienne van Loon's Beneath the Bloodwood Tree
By Tracy
I read this book over the Christmas holidays (it came out in 2008, from Allen & Unwin) and have been meaning to blog a short review of it ever since.
This extraordinary novel stands apart from so much current writing for its unsentimental representation of contemporary Australian life.
Pia Ricci, a kind of antiheroine in all her real human imperfection, has built a life for herself on returning to the mining town of Port Hedland, where she grew up before her parents’ separation. A life of sorts, running smoothly and efficiently, it appears at first, if repellently detached and self-enclosed.
What Pia unearths beneath the bloodwood tree of the book’s title is both real and symbolic, linking her (outside her conscious knowledge) to the novel’s two other main characters, the dying woman Maureen Barnes, and the Dutch nurse Joachim Kalma, in Australia on a temporary working visa.
The story alternates deftly between their viewpoints in the third person, in language that begins baldly, almost too sparsely, as if in broad, bright brushstrokes, before growing more specific and complex, yet remaining always highly readable.
Understatement is what helps build the novel’s tensions. If in some ways it might seem the book is crowded with topical “issues” (ranging from domestic violence through stalking through euthanasia to immigration, mining industry etc), each of these, whether foregrounded or left as troubling backdrop, is handled with a subtlety that means the book is not overloaded.
You won’t find an overt critique of, say, the greed that drives Australia’s primary industries, but its outline or shadow is arguably there not only in the portraits — for instance, of the repulsive Dick Barnes — but in the intimations of moral decay creeping up on all the book’s cast. It’s a compelling and very disturbing read that leaves you turning over notions of morality and ethics in the way you might after reading Camus or Highsmith. Both literary and accessible in the best senses of each term.
I read this book over the Christmas holidays (it came out in 2008, from Allen & Unwin) and have been meaning to blog a short review of it ever since.
This extraordinary novel stands apart from so much current writing for its unsentimental representation of contemporary Australian life.
Pia Ricci, a kind of antiheroine in all her real human imperfection, has built a life for herself on returning to the mining town of Port Hedland, where she grew up before her parents’ separation. A life of sorts, running smoothly and efficiently, it appears at first, if repellently detached and self-enclosed.
What Pia unearths beneath the bloodwood tree of the book’s title is both real and symbolic, linking her (outside her conscious knowledge) to the novel’s two other main characters, the dying woman Maureen Barnes, and the Dutch nurse Joachim Kalma, in Australia on a temporary working visa.
The story alternates deftly between their viewpoints in the third person, in language that begins baldly, almost too sparsely, as if in broad, bright brushstrokes, before growing more specific and complex, yet remaining always highly readable.
Understatement is what helps build the novel’s tensions. If in some ways it might seem the book is crowded with topical “issues” (ranging from domestic violence through stalking through euthanasia to immigration, mining industry etc), each of these, whether foregrounded or left as troubling backdrop, is handled with a subtlety that means the book is not overloaded.
You won’t find an overt critique of, say, the greed that drives Australia’s primary industries, but its outline or shadow is arguably there not only in the portraits — for instance, of the repulsive Dick Barnes — but in the intimations of moral decay creeping up on all the book’s cast. It’s a compelling and very disturbing read that leaves you turning over notions of morality and ethics in the way you might after reading Camus or Highsmith. Both literary and accessible in the best senses of each term.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Robert Drewe's "The Rip"
By Tracy
I've just finished reading Robert Drewe's latest collection of short stories, The Rip, and know that I won't be able to get it out of my system for a long time. It's a hardback of thirteen stories, one or two of which I'd already read in journals or elsewhere, though they take on an even stronger resonance in this context.
The stories hang together beautifully, though the only recurring "character" is the setting, mostly on the Pacific side of Australia, but there's a bit of the West in there too, in the devastating "Stones Like Hearts", which takes place at Shelly Beach, covered in stones "after those savage winter storms off Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian and Southern Oceans collide in a maelstrom of tides, spindrift and stinging winds..." (p. 77). It's a story that demonstrates excruciatingly the kind of thing life is too short for, that places the petty but cruel interactions that can happen between human beings in the context of a larger, more anonymous darkness -- but I'm misrepresenting here, because the story's also imbued with Drewe's typical satirical humour -- aimed frequently but not unkindly in these stories at the "New Age" element -- deftly offsetting the pain.
Drewe doesn't focus only on the quasi-hippy/New Age/finding-oneself brigade; he's equally sharp-eyed yet still fair toward the conservative farming type alongside whom they often live in these stories -- in fact, in some instances, these divergent social sectors have to pull together despite themselves, or end up doing so out of self-interest of one kind or another.
It's impossible to pick out favourites in this collection, because though there's great variety within the thematic cohesion, they're all, to my mind, of an equally high standard. Drewe accomplishes in prose fiction what I often (perhaps my limitation and not the genre's!) think is only possible in poetry: the suggestion of so much more than is actually told. That's not to say the writing is "poetic" in the sense that people often intend when they complain of "poetic fiction" -- the diction is clean and muscular, to the point, carefully chosen and "clear" enough to please any reader.
But over and above (or even underneath) this beautiful clarity, there's a metonymic expertise that makes each story greater than itself, that points up for us aspects of our society, our psyche even, that are in need of facing. On the most minute level, a tree or a plant or an animal in this work is at once specifically itself and of its region -- Drewe's an artist of precision, there's no bald, generic, lazy backgrounding here -- and also symbolic or suggestive of the human folly pressing in upon it from all sides (the camphor laurels of "The Lap Pool" are one example). The folly, however, is observed with enough neutrality that it invites compassion (the satire never strikes me as mean).
At the same time, there's genuine narrative drive and suspense, but I won't go into too much detail on that, because I don't want to spoil surprises. Drewe makes it look so easy. The Rip is perfect reading, if at the same time daunting for the would-be fiction-writer who reads it, and feels in awe ("why bother trying when he does it so well?").
Many of these stories explore a more or less middle-class milieu, but they are completely subversive of the kind of fiction I associate with the narrower version of middle-class taste, the fictions in which women are supposed to admire the "Sargassos" of this world ("Sargasso" is a character -- or a quintessence! -- in Drewe's final story, "The Life Alignment of the Coffee Grower", a caricature designed perhaps to put paid to any lingering fantasy of romance about the so-called S.N.A.G. who still pops up in women's fiction and movies. And even in life?)
I could say so much more about this book, but now I'm going to pass it on to a family member I know will love it...
I've just finished reading Robert Drewe's latest collection of short stories, The Rip, and know that I won't be able to get it out of my system for a long time. It's a hardback of thirteen stories, one or two of which I'd already read in journals or elsewhere, though they take on an even stronger resonance in this context.
The stories hang together beautifully, though the only recurring "character" is the setting, mostly on the Pacific side of Australia, but there's a bit of the West in there too, in the devastating "Stones Like Hearts", which takes place at Shelly Beach, covered in stones "after those savage winter storms off Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian and Southern Oceans collide in a maelstrom of tides, spindrift and stinging winds..." (p. 77). It's a story that demonstrates excruciatingly the kind of thing life is too short for, that places the petty but cruel interactions that can happen between human beings in the context of a larger, more anonymous darkness -- but I'm misrepresenting here, because the story's also imbued with Drewe's typical satirical humour -- aimed frequently but not unkindly in these stories at the "New Age" element -- deftly offsetting the pain.
Drewe doesn't focus only on the quasi-hippy/New Age/finding-oneself brigade; he's equally sharp-eyed yet still fair toward the conservative farming type alongside whom they often live in these stories -- in fact, in some instances, these divergent social sectors have to pull together despite themselves, or end up doing so out of self-interest of one kind or another.
It's impossible to pick out favourites in this collection, because though there's great variety within the thematic cohesion, they're all, to my mind, of an equally high standard. Drewe accomplishes in prose fiction what I often (perhaps my limitation and not the genre's!) think is only possible in poetry: the suggestion of so much more than is actually told. That's not to say the writing is "poetic" in the sense that people often intend when they complain of "poetic fiction" -- the diction is clean and muscular, to the point, carefully chosen and "clear" enough to please any reader.
But over and above (or even underneath) this beautiful clarity, there's a metonymic expertise that makes each story greater than itself, that points up for us aspects of our society, our psyche even, that are in need of facing. On the most minute level, a tree or a plant or an animal in this work is at once specifically itself and of its region -- Drewe's an artist of precision, there's no bald, generic, lazy backgrounding here -- and also symbolic or suggestive of the human folly pressing in upon it from all sides (the camphor laurels of "The Lap Pool" are one example). The folly, however, is observed with enough neutrality that it invites compassion (the satire never strikes me as mean).
At the same time, there's genuine narrative drive and suspense, but I won't go into too much detail on that, because I don't want to spoil surprises. Drewe makes it look so easy. The Rip is perfect reading, if at the same time daunting for the would-be fiction-writer who reads it, and feels in awe ("why bother trying when he does it so well?").
Many of these stories explore a more or less middle-class milieu, but they are completely subversive of the kind of fiction I associate with the narrower version of middle-class taste, the fictions in which women are supposed to admire the "Sargassos" of this world ("Sargasso" is a character -- or a quintessence! -- in Drewe's final story, "The Life Alignment of the Coffee Grower", a caricature designed perhaps to put paid to any lingering fantasy of romance about the so-called S.N.A.G. who still pops up in women's fiction and movies. And even in life?)
I could say so much more about this book, but now I'm going to pass it on to a family member I know will love it...
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