Australian Fiction

This is a very fine first novel by Jean Bedford. Her first publication was the collection of short stories, Country Girl Again, published by Sisters Press in 1978. Sister Kate justly deserves to be one of the two bestsellers in Melbourne.

The novel traces the life of Kate Kelly, sister of the famous Ned, and opens when Kate is twelve and Edward just returned from a three-year stint in Pentridge. He is shocked and outraged to learn that his brother, Jim, a mere sixteen-year-old, has been arrested for horse stealing and sent to Pentridge also. Ned is nineteen. Kate remarks:         

This collection of stories put me off from the first page. In the opening paragraph there is ‘an exuberant kelpie bounding’. The second paragraph outdoes that, presenting seagulls as ‘wheeling and screaming’, in search of ‘a reeking fish head’. We already know that ‘the life was lonely, but it was peaceful’. Clichés enlivened by irony or just some simple surprise of context proves useful tools in the hands of a good writer. But Julie Lewis, on the evidence of Double Exposure, is not a good writer and cliches are offered up to us without any apology. Much of the problem seems to be that she overdoes adjectives and adverbs:

She felt for a pulse. Feeble. She gingerly touched the stubbly cheek It was bruised and there was a gash on the forehead. His clothes, seaman’s wear, were soaked. She studied the unconscious form. He was fairly young, about thirty, she thought. Looked a battler. She smiled ruefully and gently lifted the lock of hair that had fallen across his brow. It was matted with blood. (‘Flotsam’, p 2)

This novel raises more interesting questions about its author than about its characters and action.

I found Murray Bail’s novel Homesickness a work of brilliant and resonant artistry, which despite many unlikely incidents, succeeds in being thoroughly credible in all its parts. It is also a desolating book, a comedy, but a very black one.

None of the writers who emerged from the Australian bush has dealt as powerfully with its horror as Barbara Baynton, yet she is probably mainly known only for the two anthologised short stories, ‘Scrammy ’And’ and ‘Squeaker’s Mate’, the latter of which has been made into an excellent short film by David Baker.

Visitants marks the welcome return of Randolph Stow the novelist. Stow’s last novel, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, appeared in 1965, and since then this once prolific writer has been extraordinarily reticent.

The publication of Visitants, the promise of a sequel in the near future, and, coincidentally, his selection for the Patrick White Award for 1979, may point to a decisive break in the long silence which has puzzled and indeed dismayed his admirers.

On one of the early chaotic army days of World War II in France, I was combining the disagreeable tasks of eating and censoring letters home written by the men in my section.