Fossicking for Australian Treasures

15 06 2009- Gregory Day

Gregory Day

Christina Stead was born and grew up in Sydney in the early years of the 20th century but escaped overseas in her mid twenties with an extroardinary talent completely unheralded in her own home town. Inevitably enough she flourished abroad, living and writing in Europe and the United States with her banker husband William J Blake, until his death in 1968, after which she returned to Australia. Her outstanding literary career began with the publishing of The Salzburg Tales and Seven Poor Men Of Sydney in London in 1934.

The Man Who Loved Children, first published in 1940, is Stead’s excoriatingly brilliant novel about her early family life in Sydney. Curiously though, rather than being set in Sydney, The Man Who Loved Children is set in Annapolis and Chesapeake Bay in the USA. This remarkable transposition of the setting of the book was due to Simon & Schuster, Stead’s US publishers at the time (her books were not published in Australia itself until 26 years later, in1966) believing that no-one would be at all interested in reading about Australian life. As if writing such a personally based masterpiece as The Man Who Loved Children wasn’t already difficult enough, Christina Stead had then, as her biographer Hazel Rowley has documented, to turn ‘sharks into marlins, eucalyptus trees into poplars and Australian dialogue into American’.

Having read, re-read and loved The Man Who Loved Children over many years, I felt contradictory emotions when I discovered through Rowley’s biography that Stead had been forced to relocate the drama of her own troubled Australian childhood on Sydney harbour to the far from antipodean Chesapeake estuary. On the one hand it made total sense that such a sardonic, unromantic and authentically detailed novel about the viciousness of families would be firmly rooted in the author’s own experience. On the other hand I could only regret the commercial realities of cultural scale which I felt had deprived my country of its mythical Great Australian Novel. As trivial and even antithetical to great writing as the very concept of the Great Australian Novel might be, the fact remains that if and when it did appear, one requirement of it would surely be that it could not be set on the east coast of America.

Something perverse in me however likes the idea that it could be. The discovery that Stead had been forced to change her novel’s sound and setting for commercial reasons has only furthered my appreciation for her artistry, proving once and for all that she was some kind of uber-craftswoman whose command over her fictional worlds was prodigious and deep. It has redoubled my admiration for the vigilant and seething masterpiece that is The Man Who Loved Children, because in a fundamental human sense the novel has not suffered one bit from the self sacrificing trans-Pacific ventriloquist’s act that Stead had no choice but to perform on her own personal history. The emotional cost to her of this is unknown but The Man Who Loved Children is spiky and racked with a teeming life-force, livid with the shriek of a family whose collective soul is being subtly barbarised by the hollow and hypocritical cheer of the father Sam Pollitt, an unforgettable character. His estranged wife Henny, mother of the large Pollitt brood, is equally unforgettable. Her cantankerous despair and scathing wit provide some of the book’s most extroardinary moments. The Pollitt family house radiates with the bitter glare of this disfunctional parental relationship, to the extent that I know of no other novel, Australian or otherwise, so ironic and insightful in its domestic portraiture.

But these days, as a writer re-reading The Man Who Loved Children, what I wonder is this. Did the limitation placed on Christina Stead by her publisher somehow fuel the rare incendiary brilliance which flickers on every last page of this great novel? Did the constraint of having to place her own formative childhood memories into a North American dialect unleash an unexpected alchemy, which served to heighten the universal humanity of the novel? I suspect so. As the experiments in literary form of the OuLiPo movement in Europe has proven time and again, there is often nothing as helpful to an imaginative writer as a good limitation. 

What is regretful however is that despite being a great hero and inspiration to writers across Australia, and having a prestigious literary award named after her by the New South Wales government, Christina Stead’s readership in her own country remains miniscule to this day. As Australian cities clamber over each other to trumpet their artistic bonafides in glossy public relations statements and expensive corporate branding exercises, a stark fact to remember is that in 2007 the sales in total of all Christina Stead’s books in Australia, seven of which remain still in print, including The Man Who Loved Children, was a measly 199 copies.

Of course part of the reason for such a depressingly low figure is the enormous amount of new fiction which is published across our shrinking globe every year. How are we all meant to keep up with both the cutting edge and the classics, as well as properly engaging with the most likely site of the new century’s zeitgeist, the digital media? To be sure it’s difficult and a case could be put that great books can be forgotten, as opposed to neglected, more readily now than ever before.

Another of my all time favourite, but relatively unknown Australian books, Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang & Me, is a case in point. Published by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press as recently as 2005, and warmly received at the time as both a book of cultural importance and a great read, it seems already to have receded into some back warehouse of the cultural imagination, despite being perhaps the most sophisticated text I’ve ever read on what still remains the most important issue in Australian cultural life: indigenous and non-indigenous relations.

In 2000 Kim Scott became the first aboriginal writer to receive the Miles Franklin Award, then the most prestigious literary prize in Australia, for his novel Benang. Scott is a Noongar, an indigenous Australian from the south western region of Western Australia, and his aunty Hazel Brown is an elder of his people. Together in Kayang & Me they have composed a history of their extended family since first contact, including their ways of life and thought, their love and knowledge of country, and importantly the way their culture was smashed and yet survived the intentional savageries and unforeseen complexities of white occupation.

The power of this book lies in its wonderful mixture of oral and written history, and of western and indigenous ways of thinking. It is composed in beautifully edited interleaving passages, with transcripts of Aunty Hazel narrating her own and her ancestors’ stories followed by Kim Scott’s painstaking yet charismatic documentation of his own difficult archival quests to patch back together the cultural shards and broken hearts of his people.

As with The Man Who Loved Children, it is the powerful and precise divination of difficult truths that makes Kayang & Me such an uplifting and life-affirming book. The intricate consequences of the colonisation of Australia, and in this case specifically southwestern Australia, are enumerated here in a close and real light. And of course it’s not as simple as black and white. Both of these Noongar authors are light skinned, and Kim Scott grew up very much with a western mindset, even complaining to his father as a young boy about ‘bloody coons’, obviously not numbering himself among them. Hence Kayang & Me, by dint of the inevitable compound of suffering that is always the product of injustice and violence, amounts to an almost baroque reclamation of culture, as Scott undergoes his own personal archaeology with the loving help and guidance of his aunty’s stories and vast knowledge.

It is what Kayang & Me amounts to in the genre of history writing that makes it a groundbreaking and indispensable book on the global stage. It is both a rendition of first contact and a precise account of how that moment, or series of moments, resonates on a daily level in the 21st century. It is a family history, in the ordinary sense of a questing through geneaology. It’s also an exploration of the fragility of identity, and a touching and intimate story of a relationship between a woman elder and her loving nephew hellbent on recomposing that identity in the name of their people. Nothing is presumed in this labour of love but everything is rich and well worthwhile. And importantly, the way this book is made, in its elegant synthesis of oral and written history and the equal respect and validity accorded to both scholarship and memory, Kayang & Me goes to the heart of a new way, and perhaps the only valid way, of telling the Australian colonisation story properly. It is a work whose form seems to perfectly embody its content, in the way that only classic texts can do.

Of course Kayang & Me is also infused, almost aromatically, with the Noongar landscapes between Perth and Israelite Bay. Rendering drama in the landscape, despite the overwhelming urbanisation of the Australian population through the twentieth century, remains the traditional, and often hackneyed, grand project in our literature. City writers often protest about this on demographic grounds, as if the source of our cultural imaginations should migrate, like the population, to where the jobs are, but of course the mythical intensity and strangeness of the Australian bush to the European mind, (even one like mine, whose family have lived here since the 1840s), and its inextricable resonance within indigenous culture, not to mention its vast stores of biodiverse majesty, remain a unique artistic challenge particular to us. Two books that are born from the landscape on the opposite side of the continent to Noongar country, specifically the coastal scrub around Port Phillip and Westernport bays south east of Melbourne, but which approach the challenge in very different ways, are Liam Davison’s novel Soundings (UQP 1993), and Alistair Stewart’s documentary poem Frankston 281 (Five Islands Press 1998). Both of these wonderful books have slipped I fear from public consciousness in the years since their publication.

Davison’s Soundings is a true work of art, an ultra-painterly novel, despite it’s main character being a rather eccentric photographer. Jack Cameron roams the shifting wetlands around the two Victorian bays with an old photo-finish machine he has picked up from a racetrack, whose mechanical peculiarity is to capture time passing through the still point of its lens. Cameron himself is at a still-point in his life, and becomes fascinated by the salt-laden sightlines of the swampy bayside country and the complex histories which it’s layers of weather and mud seem to be shielding from him. Davison, in the manner of W.G.Sebald, is a master of modulated repetition and meditative cadence, and as the pages flick by in Soundings we begin to realise that by a slow accretion of images he is doing exactly what the title of his novel implies, ie: sounding the depths of an enigmatic and watery landscape, reaching down through the suck and density of time for the stories that history has left hidden in the mangroves and mud. This all makes for a highly conscious yet extremely sensual work of art, and in Davison’s hands the human body and the landform become as interchangeable as the past and the present. By the book’s end an uncanny human inquiry has taken place, full of mystery and pathos and depicting the true scale of the tiny vertical human within the wide horizontalilty of landscape.

Back in 1993, when Soundings was first published, the creep of Melbourne’s sprawl was to be felt only a few kilometres back up the road from Davison’s waterlands. In the outer suburban town of Frankston, in that very year, a young man inflicted a series of bizarre murders on young women, terrifying the town’s inhabitants to the extent that they signed a petition in their hundreds to reinstate the death penalty. Alistair Stewart’s narrative poem, Frankston 281, to my mind a unique classic of Australian poetry, transforms these events into a pulse-taking portrayal of suburban Australia in such a climate of local terror.

Frankston 281 is written in a heavily sculpted free verse and is striking both for the exactness of its art and for its political analysis of a highly charged human situation. Stewart brilliantly dissects how the climate of fear engendered by the serial killer is reinforced and even preyed upon by the instruments of law and order. He undertakes a kind of geological inquiry into the social fabric in a moment of high stress, using a spare vernacular style which both locates and heightens the book’s considerable drama, which is bolstered even further by expressionist techniques of collage and cutting-up of text. At times, in the muscularity of its language, Frankston 281 is reminiscent of Ted Hughes, but in its political bite it is perhaps more reminiscent of another northern English genius, Peter Reading. Reading is actually quoted on the back cover of the edition of the book that I have, describing Frankston 281 as ‘suitably disturbing’. I’d also suggest that a book such as this restores some dignity to the often sensationalist and voyeuristic genre of True Crime.

In the current ocean of brand new books being published each one of the four titles mentioned here is in danger of being forgotten, even of going out of print. Thank God for second hand bookshops! But also, this is perhaps where the internet, by dint of the increasingly popular possibilities of Print-On-Demand, can play an important role by ensuring their continuing availablilty. I for one certainly hope so.