Anthology

Richard Walsh – former OZ co-editor, A&R, ACP and PBL director – has proven again that he has keen eye for what fixates Australians. To be remembered is of course an enduring human obsession, while the ability to send off (or send up) a friend or family member is more often an afterthought, a stepping into the breach.

David Malouf, one of the subjects interviewed by Margaret Throsby in Talking with Margaret Throsby, recounts his childhood experiences as an eavesdropper. He reveals that by listening in on conversations between his mother and her women friends he learnt about a world that was otherwise off-limits to him. For devotees of Mornings with Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM, the experience might sound familiar as they tune in to live conversations between the host and her distinguished guests; conversations which, although obviously public in that they are broadcast on national radio, frequently open a window onto the private world of the subject. Paul Keating, in Talking with Margaret Throsby, reveals that he would often prepare for cabinet sessions by listening to music (‘Start off slow, you know, and finish on something big’), conductor Jeffrey Tate discusses the ways in which he has coped with spina bifida, and writer and restaurateur Pauline Nguyen, who arrived in Australia as a ‘boat person’, talks about the difficulties of growing up in a household marked by fear and violence.

Despite the deadly title, this anthology of twenty-eight poems from the 2008 Newcastle Poetry Prize is replete with gems. Assembled from 423 entries by judges Jan Owen, Philip Salom, and Richard Tipping – effectively the anthology’s editors – it is a brilliant sampler that few anthologies can match for the legroom offered to the longer poem and poetry sequence.

‘I like sad girls,’ confesses the creepy narrator of ‘His Blue Period’, the story by Deborah Robertson that opens the latest anthology of short fiction from Black Inc. It is never entirely clear what form this liking took. The narrator’s intentions were undoubtedly sexual, but not just that. What he seemed to desire most of all was the story of each girl’s sadness – the telling of her particular tale of woe, ‘the full, heavy, sad, sweet works’ which blossomed (at least in his mind) like a magnolia. And how did he elicit such revelation? Simply by asking each of his melancholy companions about her childhood; it is there, he supposes, that true sorrow first takes root. Robertson’s story is sinisterly opaque, not least because the tables are eventually turned on the predatory narrator (the past tense of his opening confession is surely significant in that respect). Things start to fall apart after his brief encounter (a late-night quickie) with a woman who boldly describes her childhood as ‘lots of laughs’. This entanglement precipitates such a crisis of confidence in him that he suddenly has the urge to redecorate his yuppie apartment: ‘I wanted to go downstairs and take the car from the garage and drive out of the city to the suburbs, and in the unfamiliar streets I wanted to find a Bunnings.’ There is a deft comic touch here, but the dominant note is indeed a blue one, suggesting a vast metropolis of inexplicable sorrow.

When G.B. Barton presented his two works concerning the literary history of New South Wales to the Paris Exhibition of 1866, he hoped that they would enable readers ‘to form an exact idea of the progress, extent and prospects of literary enterprise among us’. The words are succinct, unobjectionable, and their sentiments influenced much of the literary history of the next century, much as the productions of that time were usually annals rather than analysis. Barton’s civic-minded project linked the maturing of Australian literature with its political culture. Implicit in his endeavour, though numerous others would use the metaphor outright, was the notion of ‘coming-of-age’. This chimera had as long a life as the search for the Great Australian Novel.

Creative Writing courses – those ostensible hothouses of creative ferment whose methods and very existence have been so heatedly debated in these pages and elsewhere – often appear to those of us on the outside as the breeding ground for several subspecies of writer. On the one hand, there are the determinedly postmodernist, whose highly ironic and heavily footnoted metafiction is, on average, about fifty per cent less clever than they like to think it is. On the other, there are the magic realists and wannabe lyricists, whose lilting, pastel-coloured prose seems more at home in the pages of a teenager’s personal diary than it does in those of a serious anthology. Then there are the plain-speaking reporter types, who should probably be doing journalism but, for one reason or another, have chosen Creative Writing instead.

A striking work by Adrian Feint and Hera Roberts appears on the cover of Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967. It shows an aeroplane, a locomotive and an ocean liner travelling in opposite directions through a vivid landscape of radiating lines and concentric circles. On the circular forms, which are reminiscent of abstract paintings by the French artist Robert Delaunay, we read the legend ‘Paris, Rome, New York, Cairo’; on the diagonal lines, ‘Hobart, Melbourne, Brisbane’. This 1928 work is typically modernist for its celebration of the exciting possibilities of modern technology, and in its use of bold colour areas and geometric shapes. It is also a declaration of a perceived, or wished-for, globalisation of culture, which Feint and Roberts, by adopting styles from international modernism, have realised in the work’s very design.

In the acknowledgments to this collection of short stories, Stephanie Green tells us that these stories came to her over sixteen years. Several stories draw on her life as a teacher, academic and freelance writer. There are university yarns and staffroom intrigue, along with busy pieces from family history. Overall, these are stories of women in states of change: a wife, returning to the childhood farm, considers leaving her husband; a faded jazz singer reflects on the highs and lows of her career; an artist returns to her roots in the country.

In an essay for Australian Literary Studies (ALS) exploring the modernist networks of Judith Wright and Frank Scott, Anouk Lang argues that ‘participation in modernist little magazines … was crucial to their development as writers. Publication in these journals validated their tentative efforts and imbued them with confidence to move on to further ventures.’ It is a terrific recommendation for the important role that literary journals continue to serve for writers – both emerging and established, creative and academic. ALS and Antipodes provide vigorous examples of two such journals which support the fostering and fortification of literary culture in Australia.

At the close of the twentieth century, in the tradition of countless Westerners before him, British travel writer Julian Evans travelled around the Pacific. At the Kwajalein atoll in the independent republic of the Marshall Islands, he found the resident US missile testing base to be efficient, clean and ‘tidy, quiet, ordinary: suburban trailer-park America at its best’. No Marshallese lived at Kwajalein, but 10,000 of them huddled on the small neighbouring island of Ebeye, whence they commuted to provide labour for the base. At Ebeye, nothing was ‘real nice’, as Evans described: