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A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.
I am a girl who knows how to hold a gun. On weekends, Dad drives me out to the pistol club, while Mum pulls white-sapped weeds from the garden. She plants natives that can handle the salt in the air; angular, bristling plants with angular, bristling names: banksia, grevillea, bottlebrush. A line of Geraldton Wax along the verge to replace some mean and blighted rose bushes. She knows we won’t stay long enough to see them tall. We never stay. She plants them anyway.
There is always a pistol club, and so I pack my gun box and Dad and I drive out, away from the wind-churned coast and deep into the canola. In a converted dairy shed we stand next to each other and shoot at paper targets alongside sharp-eyed farmers and retired cops. They are men with enormous hands and wide, sun-ruddy faces, and they are always watching me. There’s never been a girl in the shed. Wives, sometimes; sons, often. But the men never bring their daughters. A girl is alchemy. I change something, curdle it.
‘First time for everything,’ they say.
And there is.
‘Show us what you can do, sweetheart,’ they say.
And I do.
I have often spoken of trying to write in some meaningful way about what it means to belong to all times in this place that we call our traditional homeland. Aboriginal people know that we have been here since time immemorial. We have never lost track of the wisdom and knowledge that generations of our ancestors had developed over thousands of years about the powerful nature of this country. It was their knowledge that ensured the survival of our culture to this day.
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Narrative and Media provides a lengthy and extensively researched overview of one of the central features of contemporary popular culture. The four authors (all of whom have been scholars at Sydney University) discuss the roles that narrative has played in mediums such as television, cinema and radio. In the introductory chapter, the authors explain the importance of their topic: ‘In a world dominated by print and electronic media, our sense of reality is increasingly structured by narrative.’ Later chapters address issues such as ‘narrative time’, ‘print news as narrative’, and the impact upon narrative conventions of postmodern and post-structuralist thought. In doing this, the authors also provide a ‘consideration of industry-related issues that affect the production and consumption of media texts’.
A number of books have been published of late that theorise the function of literature in contemporary society (a trend indicative of an anxiety about literature in public culture, which is itself worth speculating on). In Why We Read Fiction: Theory of the Mind and the Novel (2006), Lisa Zunshine argues that reading provides us with cognitive practice for our lives as social beings, in which we are called upon to interact with and interpret others. Characterisation, then, would seem to be an important component of the appeal and function of a text. Henry James recognised the importance of character to narrative long ago. In his famous essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’, he asked: ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’
For some sixty years Donald Friend kept a diary, making his final entry just days before his death in 1989 at the age of seventy-four. The National Library of Australia published them in four massive volumes between 2001 and 2006. They were intractable. You needed an axe to cut through the stream of consciousness which flowed from an uncensoring pen ...
